seer of heart vs knight of heart? kind of an odd pair of classes but im not sure which one i am, any help?
All told, I wouldnât consider Knight and Seer an odd pair to be agonizing over at all. Members of the two classes can act surprisingly similarly to each other, when it comes to their flaws. They tend to rashly overestimate their abilities or underestimate the obstacles facing them, often feel as if not being able to handle things entirely by themselves is a personal failure, and can often come across as smug assholes, not entirely undeservedly.
Luckily for the both of us, these classes arenât entirely composed of downsides, and the answers that the two classes are meant to give to the flaws above differ pretty drastically between the two. Letâs talk about them!
Knights are supposed to divorce their personal character from the things they doâ whether itâs fear, loneliness, wrath, brashness, or something else entirely, the way you act and feel does not deserve a say over what it is you ultimately achieve, or what it is that the hand of fate ultimately decides for you. Ideally, a Knight triumphs over their personal flaws and thrusts themselves into the path of danger and risk, the consequences be damned, because theyâre the only one who can. Assuming that you live a fairly normal life compared to Dave and Karkat, this probably involves less dodging past fireballs and knifing belligerent dragons than my phrasing perhaps implied and more opening up to people and taking risks with social implications.
Seers are liable to be tempted to follow suit, but their path is more fraught: their pride is less brashness than it is hubrisâ the (woefully mistaken) belief that one can stand against the gods. Again, following the rules of modern day life in the real world, switch out âgodsâ for the cold hard facts of reality, like the reality that the problems youâre facing arenât the kind of things that you can fix alone. If you find yourself desperately wanting to do everything on your own rather than involve anybody else, and remembering times in the past when you did that exact thing and failed miserably, you probably fall on the Seer side of this distinction. Ideally, a Seer learns from these remembered mistakes and does not repeat them: she finally calls her accountant and asks for help pulling out of the floundering Vietnamese Jacuzzi market, or listens to her girlfriendâs increasingly transparent hints about getting a goddamn haircut.
The real challenge for you here is going to be assessing yourself frankly: Knights and Seers are both very good at convincing themselves that their problems arenât problems at all. A Knight tells themselves that theyâre not putting off something difficultâ how can you tell that apart from actually being someone who isnât putting off something difficult? A Seer tells themselves that the people giving them advice just donât know what theyâre talking aboutâ how can you tell that your perception isnât just filtered by your own stubbornness? These are questions that we all have to answer, in our quests to understand ourselves, even if most people donât get the chance to hear them formulated so explicitly.
Heeey, I was wondering if you wouldn't mind sharing your thoughts about our shared classpect, The seer of hope? ^^
Sure, but not before I make the obligatory âtwinsiesâ remark without which any answer on this title would be sorely remiss.
*poof*
Seer of Hope
Hope is the aspect of delusions and deduction. Those that it chooses as its champions are held hostage by the vagaries of their perception, their naturally rational sensibilities perplexed not by the wiring of their minds but rather the assumption that what they witness is, in fact, what is.
Seers are clever and competentâ not clever and competent enough to deal with the worst of the problems that face them, but too clever and competent to willingly follow the advice of others. Their stories are about becoming humble enough to actually apply external guidance in their personal affairs, and in doing so become clever and competent enough to understand that the best teachers are eternal students.
Speaking very broadly, you could say that the Hope aspect says that belief is power. That sounds really mystical and cool if you leave it at that, but if you want to get something meaningful out of it you have to unpack it a bit. The core insight of the Hope aspect is that you have to believe you can do something before you can actually do it. Belief isnât so much power as it is a power enabler. It doesnât end there, thoughâ simply believing that you can raise your arm doesnât mean that your arm is in the air. Thereâs another element to power; desire. In the belief system of Hope, belief is the means by which the human mind actually accesses both its ability and its willingness to perform physical acts.
What does that actually mean for a person, though? Assuming, as I always do, that people are initially pretty bad at their aspects, Hope players are generally confused about the relationship between belief, desire and ability. Do we believe in ourselves because we are competent, or are we competent only when we believe in ourselves? Do we just want to be competent, and tell ourselves we are so that we donât feel useless? These are the kinds of questions that reside at the core of any Hope playerâs decisions.
As Hope players, Seers of Hope tend to overestimate how effective their communication skills areâ part of this is assuming that others see things the same way that they do, and part of it is assuming that whatever they have said is âenoughâ for their audience to immediately grasp everything. Of course, assuming that other people know everything you do is a fast way to rack up some serious miscommunication problems. Sometimes, you just have to tell them stuff that you think is obvious, in a way that doesnât make them want to murder you.
Character traits that make this difficult include impatienceâ one of the many great traits that frequently coincide with hubris. This is problematic on several levels for a Seer of Hope in particular, and not just in the region of interpersonal relations and communications; deduction is often a process that takes time and thought, and a Seer of Hope can quickly give up on that and just stick to whatever their gut says is right, using their formidable intellect to come up with rationalizations for actions rather than true reasons. Taking people at face value and ignoring (or refusing to face) the possibility that theyâre wrong or lying is a frequent pitfall for this kind of character. Initiative is key when investigating the truth, and unfortunately initiative is often something that Hope players lack.
As I alluded to above with my comment about sticking to oneâs gut instincts, the intellectual laziness that Hope players tend to manifest is a symptom of a deeper issue-- we let our desires rule us instead of the other way around, resulting in erratic and inexplicable behaviour that doesnât accomplish much of anything. If you can force yourself to ask yourself why you make the choices you do and resist the temptations of a quicker or easier way to secure pleasure, youâve already achieved the basic skill needed to succeed as a Seer of Hope.
You can find my take on such a character here. A Seer of Doom basically attaches a lot of importance to the kind of things that the people around them flat out donât care about⌠but he or she canât deal with problems in that area without somehow enlisting the help of those very people. In a nutshell, they need to show others the supernatural. (For a fairly loose definition of âsupernatural.â Absurd is probably a better way of saying it, but then I wouldnât have been able to put that song into this answer.)
Can you talk more about "character color" and what that means when choosing a class?
Absolutely!
The âcolourâ of a verb basically consists of its connotations, extrapolated out into a set of character traits that you can then use to describe other verbs. As an example, take the verb âstealâ. Its denoted meaning is âto take (another personâs property) without permission or legal right and without intending to return it.â The connotations of steal include illegitimacy, cunning, stealth, subversion, envy and greed, getting away from the police, and figuring out clever ways to get what you want.
What listing all of these ideas gives us is a way to get the semantic identity of âstealââ the characteristics tied to the meaning of stealâ out of a large number of other potential actions. In other words, a âcolourâ (or âcolorâ, as the case may be). This plays a large part in the âhyperflexibilityâ of the class system, and (for example) allows Thieves to destroy as part of fulfilling their title, as long as itâs in the spirit of stealing. Verbs that will almost always take on the colour of steal in one way or another include âtrickâ, âescapeâ, âcheatâ and (to a lesser extent) âimproviseâ. Note that usually having the colour of one verb doesnât exclude any of these words from also naturally having the colour of another class verb-- âescapeâ also tends to fit the colours of âsacrificeâ and âdestroyâ, for example.
Hereâs a list of the seven class verbs that I think occur in Homestuck, with words that I figure best communicate their colour.
Destroy - violence, intensity, lack of limits, unfettered, heightened stakes, danger, recklessness, crossing boundaries, and breaking free from imprisonment.
Guide - teaching, curiosity, discovery, book smarts, nurture, authority, caution, petulance and indignation, academia, and personal pride.
Master - power, control, creation, the rule of law, advanced competence, forcing yourself to do things that youâd rather not do, and Exact Words.
Sacrifice - kindness, instinct, protection, loss, surrender, heroism, self-destruction, leaving things behind and loss of innocence.
Serve - labour, hardship, pressure, boldness, duty, aggression, anger, toughness, difficult training, taking the hard path, and standing your ground.
Steal - illegitimacy, cunning, stealth, subversion, envy and greed, getting away from opponents, and figuring out clever ways to get what you want.
Summon - negotiation, inner power, transformation, movement, personal ingenuity, secrecy, control, an otherworldly nature, and lofty ambitions.
This list is especially useful in situations that occur in either real life or settings that closely approximate real life, where actions like summoning, destruction and theft usually only occur in a relatively abstracted sense.
We can take the example of a detective who pours his whole life into trying to find the perpetrator of a crime, pushing away his lover and friends in the wake of the intensity of his desire to know; although the physical action itself is more akin to guidance or (perhaps) sacrifice, this list tells us that he codes more readily as an active destroyer, despite only really destroying one thing-- and metaphorically at that.
It also helps us explain the idea of warrior classes, which at a surface level is a concept that contradicts everything that Hussieâs said about the hyperflexibility of the class system and how it works on generalities rather than specifics. Knights are just the kind of person who put the colour of fighting into everything that they do, even thoroughly non-combative activities like trying to study-- so you can have a Knight who does very little actual fighting, such as Lars from Steven Universe or My Little Ponyâs Rainbow Dash. Conversely, Thieves are the kind of person who fight by injecting their combat with a tendency to avoid combat-- by leveraging unfair advantages and using external circumstances to prevent their opponents from making any meaningful headway against them, like through stealth or absurd mobility. And so forth.
I actually really like these titles for some reason.
Maid of Time / Seer of Time
Guide classes in general tend to be inquisitive characters who enjoy playing a role as the comprehensive authority on whatever it is that theyâre most interested in. They like finding things out just fine, but they just love actually knowing it inside and outâ and if itâs even possible, they love sharing this extensive understanding with others even more. Sometimes, they can come across as condescending douchebags.
Time players hold that everything that comes to pass is inevitable. Personal sorrows are unfortunate, but unavoidable, potholes in a road that constantly draws closer to its final conclusion. Partially as an effort to counteract this finite amount of time that they perceive, Time players are generally quite impatient and irreverent to the sentimental drivel of others, which they often regard as something of a failingâ especially in themselves.
Before she embarks on crazy shenanigans or dangerous quests, a Maid would do well to ask herself one major question: âHow am I going to get out of this alive?â As the active guide class, it is her duty to herself to foresee any possible points of personal destruction and then do whatever is in her power to avert them before they arriveâ and then think about saving everybody elseâs collective ass.
A Seer has to ask himself the same question, but writ largeâ he has to consider the assets and vulnerabilities of everybody on his team, and navigate them towards a group victory condition. Partially because of the larger numbers involved, a Seer often has to ask questions of others where a Maid wouldnât, but in return is afforded a more complete picture and more freedom in assisting others.
Both of these classes look odd when placed against the backdrop of death-linked Time; whatâs so fatalistic or Stoic about trying to avoid death? The answer is that rather than trying to dodge deaths entirely, these classes are interested in keeping them at bay for as long as possibleâ which, to believers in a deterministic universe, happens to be exactly up until the point where they were predestined to occur. A Maid of Time makes sure that everybody dies on schedule, when theyâre supposed to, while a Seer of Time gives people the information they need to ensure it themselves. Also they probably get people to do other stuff that they were predestined to do besides dying, and actually only rarely actually do help (directly or not) to lock someone into their fated demise, but who cares about that kind of stuff.
Psychologically, a Maid of Time is liable to succumb to feelings of hopelessness and cynicism regarding the time (or lack of it) that she has left. She may feel destined to fail, locked into the role of fateâs servile punching bag for all eternity, incapable of progressing. On the flip side is a Seer of Time, who will often have the opposite problemâ feeling that amidst these pointless, predeterminedly short bouts of suffering, somebody ought to seize the reins and try to free everybody. And that somebody might as well be the Seer himself, right? (cue another âoff the railsâ Seer event)
Both kinds of mindsets are fundamentally mistaken about the kind of reaction that Time players are meant to have to the belief that your free will at any given moment is largely an illusion of causality. Immature Maids of Time mope and despair and resign themselves to recklessly making explosions happen at potentially hazardous times, while immature Seers of Time seek to realise their self-aggrandising beliefs by trying to stop explosions in general. The thing to understand about being a Time player is that, actually, free will does exist, even if your choice has, in a sense, already been made. The thing about determinism is that it occurs orthogonally to any individual decision made by a person; they do not choose because fate said so, they chose because of self-generated reasonsâ one of which may very well have been âI think that fate says soâ!
A strong Maid of Time recognises that although she will one day die, it doesnât have to be due to her own despair-driven carelessness. She can devote effort to keeping herself safe, and give herself a little extra time to enjoy life in. On the other hand, a strong Seer of Time will understand that his efforts to defeat an implacable foe are little more than an emotional reaction (and an egotistical one at that) to being faced with an unsolvable riddle.
If it's not too much trouble, could I request seer of the void?
It is indeed not too much trouble! ^_^
Seer of Void
Seers, as previously stated, are what I consider the passive âguideâ class, capable of disseminating and acquiring information in equal measure. Void is an aspect that deals with subjective meaning; ideas that nobody else can properly understand, because they didnât come up with them.
The deal with Seers is that theyâre incredibly intelligent. Letâs put that on the table where everyone can see it. Their problems come about through hubris; thinking themselves better informed and more competent than their friends, they believe that they can, and indeed should, be able to solve their teamsâ problems by themselves. This is a flawed outlook for any Seer to have, one which promotes anti-Seer behavior such as hiding information and solo escapades.
A good Seer is able to put their intelligence towards leading others, providing plans and guidance instead of acting them out. Theyâve got to trust their friends to pull their own weight, avoid relying too much on any one source, and (above all) listen to their friendsâ thoughts and ideas.
Void has ideas that donât gel particularly well with Seers. For one thing, Void players are universally disposed towards believing that information is inherently subjective; what this boils down to is that you can interpret anything as meaning anything, and it would still (to the uncaring universe) be a valid interpretation. Our brains invent meaning, not God, and we can make whatever choices we want. On the other hand, this idea of subjective information also means that everyone is alone in matters pertaining to ethics and truth; we have to walk our own path, draw our own maps.Â
The title Seer of Void strikes me as much more confusing than Seer of Light; perhaps this is fitting, given the nature of Void. Seers share knowledge, but Void purports that sharing knowledge is impossible; a strange contradiction.
One way to look at it is that the Seer is able to understand and communicate things that nobody else couldâ they might be able to convey the color orange to a man who has been blind for all his life, or learn how to find individual molecules. Translated to superpowers, this ability to know-- and describe-- the unknowable can quickly become absurdly broken. I also imagine that a Seer of Void would have pretty baller deductive skills, quietly observing when their friends aren't telling them everything and somehow working out what that something is.
If there's one thing that a Seer of Void wouldn't be able to tell you, I suspect that it'd be blindingly obvious to anyone else.
Sorry this took a whileâ I find it hard to explain Rage. As it is, Iâm still not sure how comprehensible some of this will be.
Maid of Rage
The Maid of Rage basically parses as one who guides Rage, or causes guidance through Rage. Their calling as a Maid is to serve as a source of information, advice and aid; their arc as a Rage player revolves around gaining a Self-denying, almost Zen attitude to everything around them.
The Rage aspect starts with the premise that we are all incredibly confused. Not only do we lack the mental fortitude to assess anything with any degree of reliability, we are in fact completely misinformed about the nature of our own existences.
Where Hope speaks of solipsism and takes the view that the only thing you can take for granted is that your own mind exists, Rage tells us that our minds donât exist. Your ego, your conscious self, is literally nothing more than the invention of a cosmic subconscious. The stuff you want is a distorted reflection of what this cosmic subconscious wants; in fact, the stuff that everyone wants is a distorted reflection of the cosmic subconscious.
So, what does the cosmic subconscious want? According to Rage, it wants to live. It wants to be alive, and every single deluded shard of its beingâ you, your parents, your siblings, your pet dog, your potted fernâ wants exactly the same thing. Because of this, people call this cosmic subconscious the Will To Live.
Becoming a successful Rage player means staring into this dark reality and accepting your inherent non-realness. Hope says that believing in nonexistent things makes them slightly more real, and conversely Rage says that disbelieving a ârealâ thing makes it slightly more nonexistent. The ultimate goal? To eliminate your own wills and desires entirely, and in doing so escape all suffering.
Rage players are supposed to turn away from their desires, and by extension their minds, through abstinence and avoiding stuff that they want.
I think Iâll end the Rage stuff here, and press boldly on: to Maids!
In personality, Maids are generally perceptive, inquisitive and cheerful young women who have a passion for learning. They tend to resent what they perceive as attempts to control or exploit them, and like it even less when their friends are treated badly. If theyâre moved to fight, they tend to become walking beacons of disasterâ both for themselves and others.
When it comes to character development, Maids are supposed to use their skills to inform and guide people, including themselves. Not withholding information is key here. They play a bit of a support role, even among active classes, but they still consider their aspect a tool rather than another entity.
As an archetype preoccupied with walking their own path, even if it is a path that involves assisting others, it seems to me that a Maid of Rage would engage with all this subconscious stuff with much more control and direction than a Bard of the same aspect. Theyâd use instincts and desires to discover things, going with gut feelings when they feel stumped. I feel as if theyâd be excellent when it comes to dissecting the motivations of others, taking flowery proclamations of honor or what-have-you and pointing out that theyâre really just an expression of anger or lust.
"He killed my father!""Yeah, but youâre just pissed off cuz you know you canât do anything about it!"A Maid of Rage is interested in keeping it real. Theyâre well aware that we are ruled by our emotionsâ âMan can indeed do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wantsâ is a good quote hereâ and they can leverage this fact to their advantage. In the meantime, they are capable of rigorous self-control, and they might try to âhelpâ their friends act similarly.
Always eager to learn more about the world around him or herâ an ambition driven by a perspective that champions the existence of a force that assigns objective meaning to everything in all of creationâ a Seer of Light is, as a matter of both narrative necessity and psychological inclination, predisposed towards completing the twofold task of acquiring and dispensing raw information.
(They also like using big words.)
Seers tend to be the more academic members of their session, and this leads to a bit of a disconnect between what they think ought to happen and what actually does happen. Put less obtusely, itâs like taking a high school student who scores straight As in Physics and expecting them to be able to reverse engineer a plane.
And the Seer isnât always in the position of the high school student, either. For whatever reason, Seers like to think that all people need to do stuff is information; while this gives them ample motivation to provide guidance for their friends, it can lead to frustration when they discover that people can't do certain things when armed with information alone.
Particularly annoyed Seers begin to downplay the importance of their role as purveyors of knowledge. Cultivating an air of mystery and enigma, they try to pull things off by themselves, hiding from their friends their machinations where before they would've gladly explained, in great detail, every little nuance of their cunning plans.
The big challenge for a lot of Seers is learning that they don't need to be in control if they want things to go right; it's a matter of trust, of having the security needed to give their more actively inclined friends the knowledge they need to forge a path to victory. Trust is also important in gaining the information in the first place-- a Seer's journey is a journey of a million guides, and everyone has something that a Seer can use. Even if you have to read between the lines.
Anyway, enough about Seers. Let's talk about Light.
Light governs the realms of meaning. Money is, physically, little more than pieces of metal with special engravings and pieces of paper with fancy watermarks. Its value comes from the meaning attached to it. In the olden days, you could take a one dollar coin to your local bank and trade it in for exactly one dollar's worth of gold. The coin was, in essence, a promise that you'd always be able to get that dollar of gold, should you deign to.
Nowadays, even though banks don't use gold so much anymore, the promise is still strong. Nobody in this day and age questions the dollar; you know that you can trust people to give you your dollar's worth when you give them whatever they're charging. But someone who'd never heard of money (like a cat) would see no value in your dollar, because they wouldn't think that the shiny round thing could be used to do anything.
There's writing, and all information, that you can also look at in this way. Here, the projected meaning isn't a promise-- it's a message. These words that I'm writing would look like a bunch of useless black squiggles if you were a Zulu tribesman, or a cat. And if I suddenly started writing in Old French, you would be in the same position as the Zulu/cat. (Unless, against all odds, you happen to actually know some Old French.)
Luck, too, is rooted in this. What actually is luck? It's when something that a person perceives as "good" happens, for reasons beyond their own control. Stuff like randomly finding a twenty buck note on your way to school, or when you go all-in on a single roulette tile and somehow manage to win. This time, the projected meaning is neither promise nor message; it's a motive, attached to events that are really just random.
This whole idea of meaning gives Light players a lot of shit to mess around with, but it also lends itself to a somewhat paranoid viewpoint. (The concept of pronoia, which is the same as paranoia except you think that the conspiracies exist to help you, is equally likely to show up.) To a Light player, a coincidence is never just a coincidence. There is a deeper meaning in every single one of them. Some kind of hidden hand with a mission in mind.
While the debate about any "hidden hands" in real life may be inconclusive, works of fiction have always got their hidden hands, putting meaning in places where there once was nothing. I am, of course, referring to their authors. Any Light player who isn't doing something horribly wrong sees the world in terms of narrative; stuff happens for a reason, and a Seer of Light likes to find out what these reasons are.
A Seer of Light, as one who allows Light to be guided or invites guidance through Light, can consult things like coincidences and symbolism to learn stuff. They can have limited ability to leverage the narrative itself to discover things, although this is always at the whim of their author.
They work best when other people are around to augment and benefit from their information-gathering skills, providing and receiving guidance as required, and when they are able to put their fiercely analytic minds to moments of serendipity that border on the absurd.
