2017-12-04 0:59:25 ¶ ●

All that being said, @revolutionaryduelist, I take your ‘both rustbloods and bronzebloods are knights to an extent’ and raise you: every Alternian, right up to at least the teal caste and quite possibly up to indigo, is a knight to an extent.

On the surface level, combat and servitude are basically the two pillars that hold up the Alternian empire; cavalreapers, archeradicators, threshecutioners are all, in essence, orders of knights who serve the Glorious Monarch. Legislacerators are knights who serve the Highbloods. Everybody on Alternia is a combat servant.

The knight’s sense of insecurity applies to every single Alternian too. What if my blood isn’t right? What if I’m sexually inferior? What if my inability to smell is taken as a cullable disability? The paranoia of inferiority common to knights is what drives the Alternian dystopia.

And following on from that, “an entire race groomed from the start by evil patriarchs to be perfect SGRUB players” is a pretty tidy parallel to “a kid from Texas groomed from the start by an evil patriarch to be a perfect SBURB player”. Bonus points that the evil patriarchs in both cases are headed by demon puppet Lil Cal.

It kind of all solidifies Karkat, as a knight, as the essential, archetypical Alternian teen, in the same way John is sort of the essential prototype American teen.

…actually, if you wanted to take it a step further, you could probably argue that Alternia is a planet of knights of time, specifically, given the whole planet’s association with the aspect (their First Guardian being called Scratch, their god being the god of time, their obsession with death, time weapons using the zodiac as a motif in their special effects… the list just goes on), but that’s probably a discussion for another thread.