Specific Classpect: Page of Heart

someone dropped me a ko-fi and asked for more thoughts on the idea of a Page of Heart, and I wasn’t sure I had anything until it hit me out of the blue.

so the thing about Pages is that they get people to serve them without knowing that’s what’s happening. with Tavros, his goal was to have fun and to fly around, even when what he wanted to do was not strategic to the overall team plan. (Breath players don’t super care about the overall objective of the game, after all.) Aradia, Kanaya, and Vriska all contributed to this.

With Jake, his whole thing is being a liar who doesn’t want to do anything to upset anyone buuuut also wants to get the things he wants. He manipulates all his friends, wins the English Sweepstakes, and is ‘served’ by everyone until it all goes to hell.

So what about a Page of Heart? I think a Page of Heart would be someone who just so happens to encourage the people around them to aid them in their personal journey, who help them with their self-iteration and evolution. Page’s power curve is very steady and gets super high without many people noticing, so I think a Page of Heart in a narrative would have a really strong character arc, nothing but the hits, to the point the people around them feel stagnant.

The Page’s guilt is relevant here of course. A Page of Heart probably knows full well that their growth is at the hands of the people around them, but may not feel… equipped to turn around and give that same effort. They may be plagued with that feeling that they are demanding too much “emotional labor” from their friends. (Let’s allow it to be tacit that the entire concept of applying emotional labor to non-professional context is busted. I know, and I hope you know this too.)

A PoH needs to learn how to give back, or to at least see clearly if they are taking advantage of people and temper that. But Heart players already have trouble wondering if they are duplicitous, so being a Page as well? Oof. It’s hard to ask them to “be real” with folks.

Hope this is interesting!