

by marathemara, based on a conversation with ohthewhomanity



Seers are the passive counterparts of Mages. Their job, according to everybody’s favorite omniscient narrator, is to examine possible futures and guide their fellow players toward the best one. But none of the Seers we’ve seen, except for Terezi very late in the game, have been any good with their powers. Rose dives too deep into her Void research, and Kankri is just a useless asshole. Even Terezi’s abilities only came after massive trauma. So what’s up with the Seers?

A possible answer came to us while watching Terezi: Remem8er. Maybe Seers as a class just have really consistent character arcs. Maybe they have to give up all desire to use their powers before they can really use their powers.

[There’s something kind of Taoist about this idea.]

Terezi has done this in both timelines we’ve seen. Early on, she can only see the immediate results of binary choices (like whether or not to kill Vriska), and thinks that’s all there is to her Mind powers and that it gives her the control she wants. In the old timeline, it takes years of abuse by Aranea and Gamzee, plus the shocks of Game Over and maybe even John’s reluctance to help afterward, for Terezi to realize that the only person whose decisions she really has power over is her own. Only then is she able to see the whole history of her involvement in the Game and give John instructions that affect her past behavior so that Vriska lives and life is better for everyone.

In the new timeline, Terezi can’t shake the feeling that there’s something wrong with her. She knows the old her got over it somehow, and that’s how the old her saved everybody, and she wants to figure it out and be equally awesome. It’s not till she gives up on that, realizes that she’ll never know what’s wrong with her, and that even knowing won’t fix her, and most importantly, that that’s okay, that she is able to use her Mind powers to see what happened and maybe even how to move on.

The other Seers we know of also cling to the desire to use their powers to matter. Kankri Vantas, for example, is the Seer of Blood. His powers would allow him to understand the social connections between people, but for millennia he has clung to the idea that he already knows how society works, preaching bogus ideals of social justice while ignoring the problems that really matter. He has never once considered that if he were to back off even a little, and especially if he gave up his lecturing entirely and listened to what his teammates had to say, they would be more interested in hearing what he had to say and might even listen to him. As the Signless, he did have true visions of a better social order, and he did convince people to listen to him, but the greatest triumph of his ideals came after he gave up on making a difference. Before his death at the hands of Imperial torturers, he let out his anger at an unjust government and his frustration with a populace that just didn’t understand in the Vast Expletive, and that grand FUCK Y9U to the universe was what triggered the revolution in his name, allowing the the ideals he had discovered through his visions to actually have an effect on the real world.



The Sufferer gives up, and and thereby causes change. The “Insufferable” does not, and remains impotent. But here’s the really fascinating part: Seeing all this (as it were) allows us to get a better handle on what’s happened to Rose.

Rose’s story is full of angst and confusion about how her powers work. Early on, her desire to see things as a Seer leads her to use a magic cue ball, which leads her to play into the hands of Doc Scratch. The more she tries to use her powers, the more she ends up seeing exactly what Doc Scratch wants her to see, and the less benefit she’s able to bring to her session.



In the old timeline, realizing her mistakes sends Rose into a downward spiral of alcoholism and increasing dependence on Kanaya. It’s not till after her death, when she is brought to the New Alpha and prototyped in Roxy’s kernelsprite, that she lets go of her need to be relevant. She’s a sprite now, after all, and no longer the Alpha Rose. And almost as soon as she decides this, she’s prototyped together with Jaspersprite, and gains the vast knowledge of sprites from two sessions and the lack of restraint that comes with being part cat. She’s given up on needing to know everything and manipulate events, and now she knows more than everything and can use it to manipulate events. Jasprosesprite^2 goes a little overboard in this regard, but is eventually talked down by the much cooler-headed Davepetasprite^2. By the start of the Omegapause, she’s mostly given up on planning for the future, and if her character arc is consistent with the rest of the Seers so far, this will give her an advantage in preparing for the upcoming battle royale.

In the new timeline, Vriska prevented Rose from becoming an alcoholic, so Rose was able to think much more clear-headedly about her place in the world and decide she’d finally figured out her Seer powers. But as far as we know, thinking you understand your Seer powers is a sign you’ve got them all wrong. New Rose’s conception of herself and her universe is thrown for a loop by the creation of Rosesprite and the wild antics of Jasprosesprite^2, and the last time we saw her, she was busy coming to terms with the fact that her life no longer made any sense.

New Alpha Terezi gained control of her Seer powers after realizing that she didn’t need to know everything, and that it was okay that her life didn’t make sense. Hopefully, New Alpha Rose is on her way to the same realization; and hopefully, it will help her see (pun intended) herself and her friends through whatever comes next.