18/11/2017 19:00:21 ¶ ●

## The terror of innocence

Breath is an Aspect that perceives not its own shadow. Its heroes are blessed with ignorance, and so cursed with innocence. They have trouble taking things seriously, and can struggle when their simplistic perceptions of reality are challenged.

Tavros is probably the best example of this. Faced with the reality of his shattered spine and the endless harrasment of Vriska, he retreats into games and constructs an elaborate mental representation of his own self-confidence, that he can pretend it’s not really him facing down his problems. When the game escalates things to the point where that’s no longer enough, when Vriska tries to force him into performing deliberate murder, he retreats further, and spends much of his time in dreams. He sics Bequerel on Grandpa, and doesn’t consider until later that Grandpa might have had a reason to be near Jade’s house. As many have observed, it takes a lot to drive Tavros to confront what he doesn’t want to confront. Also noteworthy, when he finally does confront Vriska, he does so by mentally sorting her from the “good guy” bin into the “bad guy” bin, once again betraying a fairly simple understanding of the world.

But John, too, is bound by innocence. Few things shake him, few things undo his simplistic perception of reality. He soldiers on in the face of impossible odds, because “there is always hope for someone who has good friends to count on”. He ignores or represses his feelings in the face of his father’s death in favor of the fight at hand, and he is of course legendarily bad at picking up Dave’s hints about his and Karkat’s relationship in the ending.

Rufioh, the Rogue, seems less bound by his Aspect in this regard (similar to Roxy, this might be a trait of Rogues), and does half-heartedly confront Horuss about his relationship problems, albeit to little effect.

As a note, some have pre-emptively assigned Dammek the role of Thief of Breath. If this were true, then Dammek, with his atrocious housekeeping, precariously situated elevators, habitual ordering around of Xefros in spite of his supposed commitment to the class struggle, and countless half-finished projects, picked up, worked on and discarded on a whim without the force of will to finish what has been started, likely steals Tavros’ spot as the embodiment of this particular side of Breath.