For those who are unaware, the most prevalent class theory says that Knights and Pages “exploit” (with) their aspect in the same way that Thieves and Rogues “steal” (with) their aspect and Princes and Bards “destroy” (with) their aspect (although I know that there are some people who think that Heirs passively exploit).

This post is sort of two theories in one; First of all I have a few of arguments against Knights exploiting (with) their aspect, and secondly I also have some pieces of evidence that I think imply that all active classes could be said to “exploit” their aspect.

First let’s talk about the evidence for Knights exploiting their aspect and why I don’t agree with it.

There’s a bunch of evidence and interpretations of Karkat and Dave’s actions that people use to back up the “Knight’s exploit” theory, examples include Dave using timetravel in lot’s of different ways and Karkat “using” relationships.

The thing is though that these kind of interpretations are very subjective, and the fact that I can use the same source of info and come back with several different interpretations makes this evidence weaker.

For this reason in this post I’m only going to look at the dialogue between characters, because it’s less subjective and can be interpreted in fewer ways, making it stronger evidence.



The more solid evidence for Knights exploiting (with) their aspect comes from this page and this page. The relevant quotes are:

However Karkat doesn’t connect Dave exploiting time to the fact he is a Knight, and we never get any characters talking about Pages or Heirs exploiting either. This is important as it means that Dave exploiting could be linked to something other than his class verb. It could be linked purely to the fact he’s a time player, to his “destiny” of killing LE (and to the fact he lived with a time demon trapped inside a puppet for the first 13 years of his life), it could even just to do with the time constraints on his session, or, as I believe, it could be linked to the fact he is has active class.

Now let’s look at the Aradia quote. Here she directly links the fact Dave is the Knight of Time to the fact he exploits time.

I think a good way of analysing these lines is to look at how each theory interprets Aradia’s “warrior class which exploits the flow of time as a weapon” phrase:



My interpretation of Aradia’s words:

“the flow of time” —- The aspect of Time = the flow of time.

“exploits" —- The Knight is an active class.

“a powerful warrior class (…) as a weapon" —- The class “verb” of the Knight (and it’s counterpart) is something specifically rooted in combat or having a weapon, such as “equip”, “weaponize”, or “fight”.



The “Knights exploit” interpretation of Aradia’s words:

“the flow of time" —- The aspect of Time = the flow of time.



“exploits” —- Knights “exploit” their aspect in the same way that Thieves and Rogues “steal” or Princes and Bards “destroy”.



“a powerful warrior class (…) as a weapon” —- The Knight of Time doesn’t focus on using his powers for combat, but Aradia doesn’t know this.



The thing is that saying “Knights don’t focus on combat” requires us to assume that Aradia was mistaken (and more importantly requires us to do this based on the strength of our interpretation against the strength of hers), which is very unlikely considering that she has more information than we do.

Aradia has experienced being a sprite (we first hear of classpects from a sprite, and sprites in general are meant to be the player’s main source of information), has probably completed some weird puzzle shit (another source of info), has information from other timelines and overall has more information about the game than we ever will just by virtue of having played it.

Put another way: Aradia draws her conclusions about classpects from these sources, in the same way that we are trying to draw conclusions from the comic, but since Araia has far more information than we do, we should believe what she says before trying to build our own interpretations from other pieces of evidence.

“But what if AH deliberately wrote that as a red herring?” Well although Andrew often misleads us about what is going to happen, in this case we have this quote:

“Any chance you’ll be willing to give a listing of which classes are active/passive or is this something to be revealed fully later on?” AH: “This is exactly the sort of thing that gets nibbled away at as the story goes along. A little here, a little there, without giant info dumps. It makes no sense for me to say now. It’s much better for people to invent their own rules, roleplay with them and stuff, and then for their ideas to gradually get debunked by canon.”

This to me implies to me that we were just going to be up and told, over time, what each class and aspect is and does. The quote even suggests that most of the rules/theories that we came up with ourselves were generally going to be debunked.

(You could argue that he hasn’t really kept to this system (as the comic is mostly over and we don’t have an in comic description for each class and aspect) but that quote is from after the update with Aradia, so he probably was using that system of just telling us the truth over back then.)

”Why can’t Knights “exploit” *and* have a focus on combat?”

This is exactly what I’m saying, I’m just also saying that all other active classes exploit their aspect as well (and that Pages and Heirs don’t exploit their aspect).



All active classes “exploit”.

To begin with, let’s look at the very first definition of active and passive in the comic, specifically this page:

“active classes exploit their aspects” which on one level should be evidence enough for this theory.



Another thing to mention is that going back to this page Karkat specifically says:

Sorry if I’m looking at this incorrectly, but doesn’t this imply that Aradia exploited timetravel as well, just not as shamelessly?

Remember that Aradia has what is also thought to be an active class, and you could even interpret this line as meaning that Knights are more active than Maids, with exploiting more shamelessly = more active actions.

Finally on this page Calliope says:

Calliope doesn’t talk about exploitation here, but she does say that Bards (a passive class) destroy “as if by the will of the aspect”.

Is acting by the will of something a polar opposite to exploiting it? It isn’t a perfect opposite but I’d it’s quite close.

I could go into the semantics of this a bit more and talk about how active classes seem to go “against the grain” of their aspect while passive classes seem to work with their aspect and even obey it, but that’s moving on to more subjective grounds and this post is long enough as it is.



Please tell me what you think of this theory.