by @marathemara

The Internet has a lot of different opinions about what Knights do. The most common ones that I’ve seen are “they use their Aspect as a sword,” “they use their Aspect as a shield,” and “they exploit their Aspect to benefit themselves and/or their friends”. To me, it seems a Knight does all three of these things, plus one more. They wield their Aspect as a weapon, and they protect themselves and their friends with it, but, in a fascinating twist of dramatic irony, their Aspect is also what they’re trying hardest to protect themselves from.

This is probably most obvious with Dave. As the Knight of Time, he becomes extremely skilled at time travel, using stable loop after stable loop to make himself fantastically wealthy and to protect Jade and her frogs from Bec Noir. But he’s terrified by the consequences of too much time travel, and really, too much Time. Death lurks around every corner, and the thing Dave is most afraid of, as he litters the dreambubbles of the Furthest Ring with dead copies of himself from doomed timelines, is dying. This realization creeps up on him slowly, helped along by Terezi’s graphic explanation of God Tier, and he finally recognizes it after he dies protecting Jade. After that, he swears off time travel, hiding within the flow of time from time’s effects, praying that the time will never come when he will have to wield Time again.

Karkat, the Knight of Blood, uses Blood–the connections between people–to attack and protect, but also to hide from interpersonal connnections. On the one hand, his ability to bring people together has persuaded all his teammates to work together, making them a force to be reckoned with within the Game, and earned respect from at least Terezi and Vriska. For most of the time we’ve known him, though, he’s been scared to make a deep personal connection with anyone, initially because if anyone knew about his literal blood color they’d be within their rights to kill him, and later out of fear that his friends will discover his insecurities.To keep himself safe from entanglements, and from his own feelings, he tries to manipulate other people’s relationships, drawing shipping grids to keep his embarrassing crushes on John and Terezi at arm’s length.

Our third Knight is a little harder to see through, since we don’t see very much of her, but this may be by her own design. Latula is the Knight of Mind, so she has the ability to manipulate people’s perceptions and decisions.The way she hides behind her red glasses and skater-girl r4d persona suggests that she’s afraid of people using decision against her by judging her negatively, so she defends herself using this persona to control how they see her.

Our three Knights’ Aspects are, for them, sword, shield, and ferocious dragon all at the same time. It would be lovely to see them slay the dragon and become more comfortable with who they are and what their responsibilities to other people are.

I think there’s hope.