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Jade the Seer

Rose the Witch
[snip, click to read more]
Know - Mage - Seer
Change - Witch - Heir
If Rose inverted along the active/passive designation and the class purpose dichotomy, along with her aspect…
It’d make her akin to a Witch of Void! :)

Jade the Seer

(Art source: Track art for Pilot Light by kiippu)

Reposting a related ask in rebloggable form. Anonymous asked:

Out of random curiosity, would you say that the Space/Time players are capable of “ghosting” anything? And if so, what? It would be really freaky if a Space player just go Time powers just because. [snip]

Space and Time players can indeed ghost their inversions, even if it’s less in terms of raw power and more that of inclination.

In fact, we’ve seen it.

Witches are supposed to be powerful active classes, but toward the beginning, Jade was extremely passive. She used the knowledge Skaia granted her of the future, past, and present to advise her friends, conducting them from the sidelines (and “sleeping away half their session”) rather than moving with a confidence that she’d have the courage to make direct, substantial differences. You could see her visible insecurity about this with Jadesprite, later on.

And what happens to be the inversion of a Witch of Space?

Why, a Seer of Time.

Interesting, no? :)

From a Q/A session with Andrew about Prospit/Derse dreamers that ventured into active and passive classes:

Jade was especially passive for a lot of the story, spending a lot of time falling asleep (or being put to sleep) at key moments. It wasn’t until she reached god tier as a Witch (said to be a highly active class) that she became extremely active, making lots of stuff happen, rounding up planets and all that. Rose may have been a similar case, being excessively active as a Derse dreamer, but then flipping over to a passive role upon reaching god tier as a passive class.

I find it fascinating how Andrew distracted us from this so well. Here, we had a girl who was so adept with the visions in her dreams that she could redirect a present meant for her birthday to receive it at one years earlier, without batting an eye about it. Who was cleverly coquettish with her extratemporal knowledge to share just the amounts needed to redirect others, keeping the big picture a well-understood secret between herself and Skaia.

She was masterful with regards to Time. Her will combined with Skaia’s to nearly self-generate and self-inspire plans to her advantage out of nowhere. Serious stuff!

And then, "all of the sudden":

GG: that reminds me, i was thinking of implementing a system to keep some of these confusing conversations simple and linear
GA: Does It By Any Chance Have To Do With Passwords
GG: yeah! i guess someone told you?
GA: Yes You
GA: You Delivered News Of The System By Demanding A Password From Me
GG: aaaaa you see??????
GG: you nearly just gave me the idea for the plan in the first place paradoxically from my own future self!!!
GG: i just find that kind of thing annoying for some reason, it doesnt feel right…
GG: i would rather ideas came from the place they actually came from
GA: Thats A Reasonable Attitude

Whoa, what happened? Where'd this come from?

GG: i wonder if we will ever be able to start a conversation without having a ridiculous argument about the password system?
CG: IF YOU WOULD DROP THE PASSWORD SYSTEM AND LET FUTURE ME TALK TO YOU, HE MIGHT BE ABLE TO GIVE YOU AN ANSWER.

Jade is now telling Karkat to shove his atemporal communication up his nook. How did she move from being comfortably immersed in metatemporal information loops to writing them off as undesirable, like her temporally-challenged Space player peer?

TG: i guess im sorta used to it by now i dont think of hours going by the same way anymore
TG: i mean
TG: they are my hours but not everyone elses theyre kind of like private hours all to myself
TG: while everyone else is sort of in slow motion stuck in the thick of the alpha
GG: hmmmm…
GG: i dont know if i get that but ok!
TG: well yeah
TG: my thing is time yours is space
TG: pretty different things
TG: you GET things about space i dont

Kanaya and Calliope had been dreaming awake on Prospit for just as much of their lives as Jade. In Calliope’s case, she actually dreamt more! So why was Jade the only one to precisely see and rig up these complicated time loops? In the early days she was able to use a Memory modus with perfect accuracy. Are we really supposed to believe that she was so immersed in dream-images of her own day-to-day life, so much better at merely remembering shadows of what she saw compared to Kanaya et al, that she had flawless success every time she used a memory modus? The clouds present information in disorganized snippets, she couldn’t possibly have correlated it all with her moment to moment life that well! And are we supposed to buy that all said imprinted understanding suddenly vanished the instant her dreamself bit the dust?

You suddenly understand jack shit.
Where are you? What just happened?

You consult your reminders to get your bearings on what to do next.
But you can’t remember what they mean at all. You have a feeling these are all useless now.

(Note that the Seer is the understanding class.)

She never got any “sense” about the trolls, who initially hadn’t shown up in the clouds… but who also existed in a temporally independent realm. She never had a sense about Bec, either, who she’d also not seen in the clouds for the longest time… but as a First Guardian, he also represents the epitome of Space, Time’s opposite. Were the clouds really ALL that had to do with her “senses”, how she sometimes said she didn’t know how she knew, she just knew that she knew??

That used to be our default assumption… but in light of her incredible ability to innately sense, retain, and conduct events through Time compared to her fellow Prospit dreamers, if Seer abilities had been contributing to what she could sense and correlate from moment to moment, it would make quite a bit more sense! Don’t you think?

A Seer would support her allies in battle not with her weapons, but her vision. She would sift through dross of her comrades’ poor tactical inclinations and examine the grim consequences. A Seer would not charge into the fray headlong but direct it as a conductor with a baton. She would have the sight to eschew the obvious gambits, and find the path to victory disguised cleverly as setback, or even imminent defeat.

We ascribed it to the loss of her dreamself when it happened, but we should have seen how jarring it was. That it meant something more. Especially how she instantly became so much bossier, in her very first conversations after waking up. (Click for examples, and how her ‘Grimbark’ mode is basically this Witchy state in overdrive.) As it turns out, it meshed perfectly with her transition from acting through others to acting herself. Passive understanding to Active manipulation. Andrew hid her inversion well!

So, just how radically opposed was she to her old state of being, once she came into her role?

EB: so what is the future like?
EB: or uh, the 3x future…
EB: do we win???
TG: oh you know
TG: noirs outta control
TG: rose is crazy jades crazier and youre
TG: well youre you

Rose is “crazy”, who was busy inverting into the opposite of her role, temporarily becoming something she wasn’t meant to be.

Jade is “crazier”, who was un-inverting from the state in which Dave had known her all her life, realizing her true potential as something completely different!

And her old self was truly irreconcilable with the new:

JADE: AUGH!
JADE: that is SO SELFISH!!!
JADE: i cant believe this
JADE: how can you say these things, dont you remember anything that the queen told us?
JADE: that we would eventually build a new world and make a future together with our friends?
JADE: dont you remember being excited about finding out what that meant?
JADESPRITE: yes
JADESPRITE: but it was just a story
JADESPRITE: it was never going to come true
JADE: yes it will!!!
JADE: some of us, the ones who still have hope, are fighting for that RIGHT NOW
GG: i mean, i understand why she is upset
GG: but she is completely inconsolable, and wont listen to reason about anything!
GG: and i guess i could deal with that but…
GG: the frustrating thing is that shes actually me :(
GG: i really dont think i would act like that
GG: but im trying to be strong about all that so we can keep moving forward
GG: and if i can then why cant she?

Jade’s dreamself was still inverted, still acted like a Seer of Time. Which, also… was why the power of the Green Sun caused her pain, while God-Tier Jade wields it effortlessly! Though this has disturbing implications for Lord English… <– (click please)

Her old and new selves weren’t irreconcilable forever, though. As Karkat pointed out, Jadesprite represented not just an opposite, but a reflection of all the personality traits and flaws Jade didn’t like about herself, couldn’t accept… Jade even made a comment along the lines of how she wouldn’t want to go God-Tier if it meant merging with her! But just like how Quest Bed ascension merges the dream, 'imaginary’ self with its reality counterpart, the act of merging active Jade and passive, inverse Jadesprite – an act of acceptance of her flaws, finding balance between her role and its shadow – was what was truly necessary for her to find true power for the sake of her friends and everyone else.

Oh, and here’s a nice little addition a friend contributed:

theworstpersonintheworld:

After her alchemy binge and a couple awful conversations with trolls, Jade sets out to contribute to her teammates’ efforts by developing her own ability as a Witch of Space. Not knowing what exactly that entails, her first instinct is to go around viewing her teammates’ physical locations.
This isn’t Witch behavior at all! She’s acting too much like a Seer, meaning she hasn’t yet recovered from her class inversion. So as unofficial Seer of Time (note the red goggles!) what does she actually end up looking at?
Dead people.
Which brings us to the question of why she inverted in the first place. We’ve always known about Dave’s collection of preserved dead things, and later Aradia explicitly pointed out that dealing with the Time aspect means confronting death:
AA: alpha dave still has a long way to go
AA: hes still not at ease with his mortality
AA: but people like us have to be!
And what had Jade already told John about her own mortality, hundreds of pages earlier?
GG: its nothing that secret or personal or anything….
GG: it is just something kind of sad and weird for you to see
EB: what is it?
GG: it is my dead dream self
GG: it has been there for years, i always knew i would die but i did not realize it would go like this….

And don’t forget, she was punished specifically when she tried to See Dave, the Time player!

Remember back when the Seer of Light and the Witch of Space were first announced in Nanna’s journal, and people thought Rose was the Witch and Jade was the Seer?

Jade exhibited every last feature one would expect of a Seer of Time. If she wasn’t inverted, then all Seers of Time must be redundant and useless! She went against her role, entrusting the future to and through others when she was supposed to take action herself, and in the process inadvertently created the same enemy she was trying to abjure, bunnyways. She was trying to lead everyone around playing the flute, when she was really meant to play the bass-line.

(EDIT 5: Added more evidence and the follow-up link, as well the link for Jadesprite and LE’s agony.)
(EDIT 6, on 2014.09.28: Added a quote and link to Andrew’s active/passive Prospit/Derse Q&A, a link to examples of witchy Jade being 'bossy’ to fit her role, and a few brief notes on how she found 'balance’ by accepting and merging with her flaws, finding balance between her role and its shadow.)

I just can’t believe he planned something like this for so long!

NEXT: To see who will invert next and why, read this series of posts: (1) (2) (3)! Jane Crocker is very dangerous…

2012-10-10