PLAYER Name: Ri Personal Journal:resplendentri E-mail: ricapshew@gmail.com AIM/MSN/etc: JoyBringer5002 (AIM)
CHARACTER Character Name: Kankri Vantas Canon: Homestuck Timeline: At which point in the canon were they taken from? If playing another character from the same canon, how will you deal with this?: Considering that we have no indication that guardians go to dream bubbles, and even if they did my Dave is taken from before he ever did, there’s no feasible way for them to have met in canon. Ergo, it wouldn’t be out of line to assume that they aren’t going to interact significantly in RC, either.
Personality: Kankri Vantas is a very independent boy. He feels the need to take care of himself and not accept help from anyone. In canon, this is a holdover from the Beforan ideal of “culling.” On Beforus, being off-spectrum would have meant that he was taken in by a troll of a higher caste and practically infantilized. His independence, therefore, comes from a need to individualize his identity, to make himself known.
In a similar vein, Kankri cannot stand being babied. On Beforus, being coddled would have been indicative of his adherence to the problematic nature of the hemospectrum. He reacts almost violently when Porrim does something as seemingly innocuous as move to wipe grubsauce from his face. His vocabulary and general attitude are almost snobbishly intelligent, a marker perhaps of his vehement desire to separate himself as an independent troll and one who does not need to be “culled”. He is quite smart, although he lacks anything resembling common sense. He writes long-winded diatribes for fun, and shares them with anyone who would stand still long enough to listen.
Part and parcel with his intelligence and independence is a haughtiness or self-righteousness that comes with such teenage hubris. He believes that he is the be-all end-all of any debate, and that anyone who argues with or disagrees with him needs to be debated until they relent and admit that they’re wrong. This self-righteous behaviour comes from the type of Tumblr user that he in canon is meant to make fun of, the Social Justice Warrior. On his pet subjects, he believes that he is simply the best there is. Not only is there a way to win an argument, but Kankri will find it by any means necessary. Usually, what actually happens is that his partner gets sick of his circuitous, rambling tl;dr and just walks away. This kind of behavior is what earned him the nickname “The Insufferable” in canon.
Going along with the Social Justice Warrior stereotype, Kankri is ultimately well-intentioned in his essays and diatribes. He wants to educate others on his own enlightened opinion, he is just oblivious as to how much he can come across as a sanctimonious asshole at times. He means well enough. It’s important to note that he is not a satire of the “die cis scum” SJW. His language and tone come across as ultimately respectful, overall, and indeed most of the reason why he is so long-winded and exhausting to talk to is because he goes so far not to step on anyone’s toes with his rambling. Another sign of his good intentions (and also a trademark of the type of SJW that he is meant to parody) are the trigger warnings that he uses and abuses. He warns not only for all potential triggers, but also many things that wouldn’t normally be considered triggering in the slightest. He makes up new, politically-correct terms to replace words he considers “pr96lematic,” in order to avoid being politically incorrect.
While he doesn’t intend to offend anyone, he ultimately has an ego himself, and it blinds him to how his Social Justice whiteknighting can be at least as problematic, if not moreso, than the behaviour of those he is trying to educate. This comes out in how he will ask his debate partner about their triggers in advance and make it clear that if they become triggered, he will stop and make every effort to accommodate them, but if the trigger in question is related to an important point of his debate, he won’t drop it entirely but will just make an effort to tiptoe around the subject and help them through the discussion. He has less empathy than he believes he does, which doesn’t, of course, make him a bad person. If anything, it just makes him a normal, flawed teenage boy. The problems arise because he believes himself to be much more than that. He is incredibly self-absorbed (again, like most teenagers, let alone teenage boys), and he believes that what he has to say is what is in everyone’s best interest.
It’s also important to bring attention to the fact that although they are biologically the same person, Kankri is not the same person as the Signless. Kankri is a socially impotent armchair crusader, essentially, which is excusable given that he is approximately 19 years old, 6 of which the players spent in an unwinnable session chasing their own tails. He tried to be the spiritual leader of his friends, but the major thing that he really lacks is genuine conviction. He could stand around pointing out all of the problems inherent in the system, but other than telling people what not to do or say, there was no real change he could affect. Signless, on the other hand, preserved some of his Seer powers post-Scratch, and he remembered slices of Beforus, which seemed like utopia in comparison to Alternia.
History: Like literally every other Sburb/Sgrub player in Homestuck, Kankri was a meteor baby. He was one of the first group of players of Sgrub, the pre-Scratch troll session. Very little is known about Beforus, the planet that was known in the post-Scratch universe as Alternia, but they had an interesting take on the idea of “culling”. On Alternia, as well as Beforus, those who were off-spectrum as well as lowbloods were culled. However, on Beforus, to be culled meant that you were taken under the guardianship of a highblood and tended to until the end of your shorter lifespan.
Kankri, being a mutantblood and making no real secret of it (he types in #FF0000, and wears a bright red sweater), would have also been taken in by this culture, which is one idea of where his prohibitively verbose social justice loquaciousness comes from. Being “culled” on Beforus, he would have been infantilized and looked down on as little more than a senseless child, no matter how old he really was. His social justice whiteknighting, therefore, can be read as a cry for attention.
Kankri was the Seer of Blood for his session of Sgrub, although it is implied that he never realized his full potential and, thus, never went god tier during the game. Seers, however, are a passive class, good at strategizing, and it has been speculated that the aspect of Blood could represent people or the populace, therefore making the realization of his power to be the ability to foresee how individuals would act in each of different opportunities, and guide situations to suit the best possible outcome.
He appointed himself the “spiritual leader” of the game, and attempted to spread his social justice doctrines among his fellow players and unite them under his philosophies. He also may have had an unrequited crush on the Pyrope of his session, Latula.
Eventually, the pre-Scratch trolls realized that theirs was a dead-end session, but they sat around and did nothing for three sweeps before making the decision to Scratch the session and start over. Since, they have been floating around in dreambubbles and watching the post-Scratch Alternia and its session unfold as it would. Kankri in particular appreciated the message of his post-Scratch incarnation, the Signless, but he found the means by which the Signless spread his message to be “pr96lematic” at best.
His typing quirk is to replace all “o”s with 9s and all “b”s with 6s, in obvious reference to the manacles that bound the Signless to the flogging jut, and also to the cancer symbol which was supposedly derived from said manacles by the devout followers of the Sufferer (much like Christians adopting the cross as their symbol). However, it’s unknown why this is his quirk. Perhaps there was more that he admired about his Post-Scratch incarnation than he lets on, or perhaps the Cancer symbol existed in the pre-Scratch universe in some form as well (although that is less likely, given that Aranea wears a Sufferer pendant and it is implicitly stated that she wears it out of admiration for the Signless’ teachings).
The first time that we meet Kankri is at the beginning of Act 6 Intermission 3. He is seen having cornered Karkat for presumably quite some time now, in the Derse/Prospit clusterfuck dreambubble section of the game. He talks so much that even the normally verbose Karkat has been struck dumb, although that may also have something to do with the mysterious pull that dancestors are implied to have over their post-Scratch counterparts (see: Kanaya being terrified of Porrim). Playing as Meenah (since it’s an interactive flash), you can eavesdrop on the “conversation” between Kankri and Karkat, which consists of reading a lot of bright red text.
There is also the option to “Be Kankri”, but when it is selected as Meenah, he brushes you off with the explanation that he is quite busy lecturing – debating with Karkat right now. If you go through the flash and “Be” Porrim, you can go back and actually talk to Kankri, prompting an argument between the two where Kankri gets quite sassy with her, poking at her concupiscent vacillations and essentially calling her the troll equivalent of a whore. Her concerns about female rights are brushed off in lieu of Kankri’s desire to focus on more “important” topics, which basically means topics that he is actually interested in.
Once again, the option to “Be Kankri” comes up, but once again he turns you away, this time with the suggestion that you try again with someone “a little radder”. This prompts the player to go “be” Latula, and then come back and talk to him. This time, his interaction is completely changed. He is not nearly as self-assured as he was when he was talking to Porrim or Meenah, and he seems totally off his game. This supports the idea that he might have had an unrequited crush on her that both his vow of chastity and her relationship with Mituna Captor prevented. When Latula requests to “Be Kankri,” he blusters and tries to argue for a moment, before finally relenting and letting player control switch to him.
At this point, the player can walk around as the red-sweatered little bitch, and may be tempted to see if it’s programmed so that you can throw him off of the Prospit towers. Such is, unfortunately, not the case, but you can go talk to Porrim again. Upon doing so, Kankri immediately launches into a self-righteous spiel about how rude it was for her to interrupt him while he was speaking with his “disciple”, and he becomes increasingly snippy with her. He outright explodes when she begins to mother him, snarling at her and wiping the grubsauce off of his face on his own because he’s a big boy and can do so.
After talking to Porrim, there’s little else to do with Kankri besides switch player control back to Meenah, after which Kankri becomes irrelevant to the rest of the flash. He appears very briefly in the other two “Meenahquest” flashes as well, although not even as a selectable character. He appears when Meenah is talking to Mituna, and both chides her for being insensitive to Mituna’s needs, but also tells Mituna that his need for a helmet carries unfortunate implications. He then later appears in order to chide Meenah (again), this time for being insensitive to Cronus’ humankin identity. However, it appears that he doesn’t necessarily believe Cronus either, as he makes a very backhanded statement about how terrible it would be if Cronus was lying about his identity to garner sympathy.
His appearance in Meenahquest3 is similarly limited, although he is mentioned at the end by Hussie wherein the joke is explained that he is a parody of terrible social justice bloggers, and that anyone who was asspained by his existence is exactly who he’s a parody of.
Strengths/Weaknesses: Kankri’s main strength lies in his ability to not just turn every discussion back to himself and his own experiences, or to seemingly ignore all social cues that the person in question doesn’t want to be there, but his ability to hold a lecture – sorry, “discussion” for hours without stopping. He also has a fairly extensive vocabulary at his fingertips, and not just comprised of words that he more than likely made up. He has the ability to sound incredibly mature and well-spoken, while also sounding like a sanctimonious douchecanoe. His main weakness is that he does not know when or, likely, how to shut up. Ever. In addition, given his lack of real action toward his pet causes, aside from telling others to check their privilege, he comes across as an impotent armchair crusader. In addition, he would like to think that he has the patience of a saint as one of his strengths, but the truth is that he has a rather short fuse when it comes to being coddled, as evidenced by how quickly he blew up at Porrim in Meenahquest1 when they were alone.
Abilities: High among his list of abilities is his ability to talk for hours on end, seemingly without needing to pause for any reason, including breathing. While it’s uncertain what his abilities as the Seer of Blood entail, from what we’ve seen from the other Seers (Terezi and Rose) the class is one primarily geared toward strategy and toward foreseeing (as the name Seer would imply) possible outcomes and alternate timelines. In addition, little is known about the Blood power, but looking at the actions of the other Blood player (Karkat) it can be surmised that it has to do with unity and kinship among the session players, which would explain why he was never able to go god tier or to really begin to realize his powers until after the scratch.
Relationships to Canon Characters: Signless: his post-scratch counterpart, while he approved of the Signless’ teachings, he approved less of his means of spreading them. Karkat: his dancestor, and also attempted “disciple” Cronus: one of the other Beforus trolls, Kankri is possibly one of the only ones who gives Cronus anything that could even resemble positive attention. While he defends Cronus’ right to identify however he chooses, he also castigates him for the disingenuous nature of lying about his identity for the sake of garnering sympathy. Aranea: While they have not been shown interacting face to face, from Aranea’s explanation/summary of Kankri it’s understood that she likely feels sorry for him to some degree. This would make sense, given that they both trend toward the loquacious, and understand that it can be frustrating to go ignored and unheard.
[Canon OC] Kankri Vantas | Homestuck | Reserved | 1/2
Name: Ri
Personal Journal:
E-mail: ricapshew@gmail.com
AIM/MSN/etc: JoyBringer5002 (AIM)
CHARACTER
Character Name: Kankri Vantas
Canon: Homestuck
Timeline: At which point in the canon were they taken from?
If playing another character from the same canon, how will you deal with this?: Considering that we have no indication that guardians go to dream bubbles, and even if they did my Dave is taken from before he ever did, there’s no feasible way for them to have met in canon. Ergo, it wouldn’t be out of line to assume that they aren’t going to interact significantly in RC, either.
Personality: Kankri Vantas is a very independent boy. He feels the need to take care of himself and not accept help from anyone. In canon, this is a holdover from the Beforan ideal of “culling.” On Beforus, being off-spectrum would have meant that he was taken in by a troll of a higher caste and practically infantilized. His independence, therefore, comes from a need to individualize his identity, to make himself known.
In a similar vein, Kankri cannot stand being babied. On Beforus, being coddled would have been indicative of his adherence to the problematic nature of the hemospectrum. He reacts almost violently when Porrim does something as seemingly innocuous as move to wipe grubsauce from his face. His vocabulary and general attitude are almost snobbishly intelligent, a marker perhaps of his vehement desire to separate himself as an independent troll and one who does not need to be “culled”. He is quite smart, although he lacks anything resembling common sense. He writes long-winded diatribes for fun, and shares them with anyone who would stand still long enough to listen.
Part and parcel with his intelligence and independence is a haughtiness or self-righteousness that comes with such teenage hubris. He believes that he is the be-all end-all of any debate, and that anyone who argues with or disagrees with him needs to be debated until they relent and admit that they’re wrong. This self-righteous behaviour comes from the type of Tumblr user that he in canon is meant to make fun of, the Social Justice Warrior. On his pet subjects, he believes that he is simply the best there is. Not only is there a way to win an argument, but Kankri will find it by any means necessary. Usually, what actually happens is that his partner gets sick of his circuitous, rambling tl;dr and just walks away. This kind of behavior is what earned him the nickname “The Insufferable” in canon.
Going along with the Social Justice Warrior stereotype, Kankri is ultimately well-intentioned in his essays and diatribes. He wants to educate others on his own enlightened opinion, he is just oblivious as to how much he can come across as a sanctimonious asshole at times. He means well enough. It’s important to note that he is not a satire of the “die cis scum” SJW. His language and tone come across as ultimately respectful, overall, and indeed most of the reason why he is so long-winded and exhausting to talk to is because he goes so far not to step on anyone’s toes with his rambling. Another sign of his good intentions (and also a trademark of the type of SJW that he is meant to parody) are the trigger warnings that he uses and abuses. He warns not only for all potential triggers, but also many things that wouldn’t normally be considered triggering in the slightest. He makes up new, politically-correct terms to replace words he considers “pr96lematic,” in order to avoid being politically incorrect.
While he doesn’t intend to offend anyone, he ultimately has an ego himself, and it blinds him to how his Social Justice whiteknighting can be at least as problematic, if not moreso, than the behaviour of those he is trying to educate. This comes out in how he will ask his debate partner about their triggers in advance and make it clear that if they become triggered, he will stop and make every effort to accommodate them, but if the trigger in question is related to an important point of his debate, he won’t drop it entirely but will just make an effort to tiptoe around the subject and help them through the discussion. He has less empathy than he believes he does, which doesn’t, of course, make him a bad person. If anything, it just makes him a normal, flawed teenage boy. The problems arise because he believes himself to be much more than that. He is incredibly self-absorbed (again, like most teenagers, let alone teenage boys), and he believes that what he has to say is what is in everyone’s best interest.
It’s also important to bring attention to the fact that although they are biologically the same person, Kankri is not the same person as the Signless. Kankri is a socially impotent armchair crusader, essentially, which is excusable given that he is approximately 19 years old, 6 of which the players spent in an unwinnable session chasing their own tails. He tried to be the spiritual leader of his friends, but the major thing that he really lacks is genuine conviction. He could stand around pointing out all of the problems inherent in the system, but other than telling people what not to do or say, there was no real change he could affect. Signless, on the other hand, preserved some of his Seer powers post-Scratch, and he remembered slices of Beforus, which seemed like utopia in comparison to Alternia.
History: Like literally every other Sburb/Sgrub player in Homestuck, Kankri was a meteor baby. He was one of the first group of players of Sgrub, the pre-Scratch troll session. Very little is known about Beforus, the planet that was known in the post-Scratch universe as Alternia, but they had an interesting take on the idea of “culling”. On Alternia, as well as Beforus, those who were off-spectrum as well as lowbloods were culled. However, on Beforus, to be culled meant that you were taken under the guardianship of a highblood and tended to until the end of your shorter lifespan.
Kankri, being a mutantblood and making no real secret of it (he types in #FF0000, and wears a bright red sweater), would have also been taken in by this culture, which is one idea of where his prohibitively verbose social justice loquaciousness comes from. Being “culled” on Beforus, he would have been infantilized and looked down on as little more than a senseless child, no matter how old he really was. His social justice whiteknighting, therefore, can be read as a cry for attention.
Kankri was the Seer of Blood for his session of Sgrub, although it is implied that he never realized his full potential and, thus, never went god tier during the game. Seers, however, are a passive class, good at strategizing, and it has been speculated that the aspect of Blood could represent people or the populace, therefore making the realization of his power to be the ability to foresee how individuals would act in each of different opportunities, and guide situations to suit the best possible outcome.
He appointed himself the “spiritual leader” of the game, and attempted to spread his social justice doctrines among his fellow players and unite them under his philosophies. He also may have had an unrequited crush on the Pyrope of his session, Latula.
Eventually, the pre-Scratch trolls realized that theirs was a dead-end session, but they sat around and did nothing for three sweeps before making the decision to Scratch the session and start over. Since, they have been floating around in dreambubbles and watching the post-Scratch Alternia and its session unfold as it would. Kankri in particular appreciated the message of his post-Scratch incarnation, the Signless, but he found the means by which the Signless spread his message to be “pr96lematic” at best.
His typing quirk is to replace all “o”s with 9s and all “b”s with 6s, in obvious reference to the manacles that bound the Signless to the flogging jut, and also to the cancer symbol which was supposedly derived from said manacles by the devout followers of the Sufferer (much like Christians adopting the cross as their symbol). However, it’s unknown why this is his quirk. Perhaps there was more that he admired about his Post-Scratch incarnation than he lets on, or perhaps the Cancer symbol existed in the pre-Scratch universe in some form as well (although that is less likely, given that Aranea wears a Sufferer pendant and it is implicitly stated that she wears it out of admiration for the Signless’ teachings).
The first time that we meet Kankri is at the beginning of Act 6 Intermission 3. He is seen having cornered Karkat for presumably quite some time now, in the Derse/Prospit clusterfuck dreambubble section of the game. He talks so much that even the normally verbose Karkat has been struck dumb, although that may also have something to do with the mysterious pull that dancestors are implied to have over their post-Scratch counterparts (see: Kanaya being terrified of Porrim). Playing as Meenah (since it’s an interactive flash), you can eavesdrop on the “conversation” between Kankri and Karkat, which consists of reading a lot of bright red text.
There is also the option to “Be Kankri”, but when it is selected as Meenah, he brushes you off with the explanation that he is quite busy lecturing – debating with Karkat right now. If you go through the flash and “Be” Porrim, you can go back and actually talk to Kankri, prompting an argument between the two where Kankri gets quite sassy with her, poking at her concupiscent vacillations and essentially calling her the troll equivalent of a whore. Her concerns about female rights are brushed off in lieu of Kankri’s desire to focus on more “important” topics, which basically means topics that he is actually interested in.
Once again, the option to “Be Kankri” comes up, but once again he turns you away, this time with the suggestion that you try again with someone “a little radder”. This prompts the player to go “be” Latula, and then come back and talk to him. This time, his interaction is completely changed. He is not nearly as self-assured as he was when he was talking to Porrim or Meenah, and he seems totally off his game. This supports the idea that he might have had an unrequited crush on her that both his vow of chastity and her relationship with Mituna Captor prevented. When Latula requests to “Be Kankri,” he blusters and tries to argue for a moment, before finally relenting and letting player control switch to him.
At this point, the player can walk around as the red-sweatered little bitch, and may be tempted to see if it’s programmed so that you can throw him off of the Prospit towers. Such is, unfortunately, not the case, but you can go talk to Porrim again. Upon doing so, Kankri immediately launches into a self-righteous spiel about how rude it was for her to interrupt him while he was speaking with his “disciple”, and he becomes increasingly snippy with her. He outright explodes when she begins to mother him, snarling at her and wiping the grubsauce off of his face on his own because he’s a big boy and can do so.
After talking to Porrim, there’s little else to do with Kankri besides switch player control back to Meenah, after which Kankri becomes irrelevant to the rest of the flash. He appears very briefly in the other two “Meenahquest” flashes as well, although not even as a selectable character. He appears when Meenah is talking to Mituna, and both chides her for being insensitive to Mituna’s needs, but also tells Mituna that his need for a helmet carries unfortunate implications. He then later appears in order to chide Meenah (again), this time for being insensitive to Cronus’ humankin identity. However, it appears that he doesn’t necessarily believe Cronus either, as he makes a very backhanded statement about how terrible it would be if Cronus was lying about his identity to garner sympathy.
His appearance in Meenahquest3 is similarly limited, although he is mentioned at the end by Hussie wherein the joke is explained that he is a parody of terrible social justice bloggers, and that anyone who was asspained by his existence is exactly who he’s a parody of.
Strengths/Weaknesses:
Kankri’s main strength lies in his ability to not just turn every discussion back to himself and his own experiences, or to seemingly ignore all social cues that the person in question doesn’t want to be there, but his ability to hold a lecture – sorry, “discussion” for hours without stopping. He also has a fairly extensive vocabulary at his fingertips, and not just comprised of words that he more than likely made up. He has the ability to sound incredibly mature and well-spoken, while also sounding like a sanctimonious douchecanoe. His main weakness is that he does not know when or, likely, how to shut up. Ever. In addition, given his lack of real action toward his pet causes, aside from telling others to check their privilege, he comes across as an impotent armchair crusader. In addition, he would like to think that he has the patience of a saint as one of his strengths, but the truth is that he has a rather short fuse when it comes to being coddled, as evidenced by how quickly he blew up at Porrim in Meenahquest1 when they were alone.
Abilities: High among his list of abilities is his ability to talk for hours on end, seemingly without needing to pause for any reason, including breathing. While it’s uncertain what his abilities as the Seer of Blood entail, from what we’ve seen from the other Seers (Terezi and Rose) the class is one primarily geared toward strategy and toward foreseeing (as the name Seer would imply) possible outcomes and alternate timelines. In addition, little is known about the Blood power, but looking at the actions of the other Blood player (Karkat) it can be surmised that it has to do with unity and kinship among the session players, which would explain why he was never able to go god tier or to really begin to realize his powers until after the scratch.
Relationships to Canon Characters:
Signless: his post-scratch counterpart, while he approved of the Signless’ teachings, he approved less of his means of spreading them.
Karkat: his dancestor, and also attempted “disciple”
Cronus: one of the other Beforus trolls, Kankri is possibly one of the only ones who gives Cronus anything that could even resemble positive attention. While he defends Cronus’ right to identify however he chooses, he also castigates him for the disingenuous nature of lying about his identity for the sake of garnering sympathy.
Aranea: While they have not been shown interacting face to face, from Aranea’s explanation/summary of Kankri it’s understood that she likely feels sorry for him to some degree. This would make sense, given that they both trend toward the loquacious, and understand that it can be frustrating to go ignored and unheard.