APPLICATION FOR entranceway
Name: Kristen
LJ: mouthofbrass
E-Mail: kristen[at]spectrumvoid.net
IM: MadMadPhineas
Character Name: Karkat Vantas
Series: Homestuck
Timeline: After his second conversation with John
Canon Resource Link: I DO TWO THINGS AND TWO THINGS ONLY
Character Background:
Karkat was born in a lab from the ectoplasmic paradox goop of himself and/or eleven other trolls who would eventually become his "friends" and fellow players in the game SGRUB. He was then shot into space on a meteor, passed through an interdimensional portal, crashlanded on his homeplanet of Alternia, and was adopted by a giant bipedal crab thing that gets annoyed easily. After that, he lives in his hive more or less unhappily (because he's not a happy guy) for approximately thirteen earth years. The fun part of this is that, later on, it would be him who was responsible for the "births" of himself and the rest of his friends out of ectoplasmic paradox goop. He is his own paradox clone.
No it doesn't make sense, shut up.
There isn't much else to say about Karkat pre-Homestuck except that he likes terrible romance movies and romcoms, and considers himself rather knowledgeable on the subject of troll romance. He enjoys discussing the subject with his "friends" (in Alternian, "friend" and "enemy" are the same word) when the opportunity arises. And when he's not just being a huge dick to all of them. More prominently, he's very ambitious and wants to be the leader of something when he's older. He's pretty much decided that this is his ~*~destiny~*~.
And as it turns out, he's actually kind of right. When Sollux wrangles him into playing SGRUB, Karkat confiscates the title of "Leader of the Red Team" from Terezi. It basically turns out to mean nothing, because once everyone is in the game, they turn out to be one team, not two. What does Karkat do when they all figure this out? Well he just declares himself the leader of everyone, of course. And apparently by that time, he's proven himself and earned enough respect from the other trolls for them to allow it, or (and probably more likely) the others just don't care at all anymore.
Karkat gets a virus that Sollux programmed and, in a fit of being himself, Karkat implements the virus. This accomplishes two things: it makes his computer explode, crushing his lusus under the resulting rubble, and it (supposedly) unleashes a curse that causes all the other trolls' lusus...es...to die as well. Whether or not this is actually the reason all of them die is up for debate, but Karkat is more than willing to blame himself for it. He's pretty good at that.
After this and a couple other misadventures, the trolls all start playing SGRUB. Karkat is the first troll into the medium, with Terezi as his server player. She immediately fucks up his hive and puts his toilet outside on a nearby rock. Real helpful. Thanks, Terezi.
Shortly after this, he runs into Jack Noir and forms an alliance with him to exile the Black Queen, thus making it easier for the trolls to win the game. Of course, before they come to this agreement, Jack stabs Karkat, revealing his blood to be a candy red color, a mutation that he's very secretive about and frankly kind of ashamed of. In troll society, one's social position is based on blood color. Some of the trolls don't seem to pay much attention to it, but others are pretty damn into the idea of rank and how blue (or purple) their blood is. Karkat is the only troll who doesn't type in his blood color (he types in gray instead) and he goes out of his way not to reveal what it is.
One by one, the trolls enter the medium. Karkat, as the first client player in, is set up to be server to the last troll, Sollux. Unfortunately, Feferi's lusus releases the vast glub, killing all trolls in the universe. So Sollux gets into the game, he's just dead when he gets there.
Whoops.
Karkat is visibly distraught at this (he even cries oh noes!), blaming himself for Sollux's death. Jack smacks him around a bit, which gets no response, but then Feferi brings Sollux back with a kiss, which grosses Karkat out but averts that crisis handily.
Many off-screen hijinks, level-ups, and arguments with his past and future selves and the other trolls later, the trolls defeat the black king and are ready to claim their prize when something called "The Scratch" occurs. This brings a demon that can manipulate time and space into their session from another and the trolls are forced to flee to the Veil (a ring of meteors circling Skaia) and hide there, waiting to be killed.
Karkat, who hadn't slept for weeks up to that point, falls asleep immediately upon their arrival in the Veil. It's at this point that his dreamself finally wakes up on Prospit (his is the last to wake up, I believe), only to immediately be killed by the demon who got into their session. Before his dreamself dies, Karkat realizes that the demon is the other session's version of Jack Noir, just much, much more powerful than the Jack he knows, and at first he feels pretty betrayed, having formed something of a friendship with his own Jack.
When he wakes up later, after floating around in dream bubbles created by the elder gods lurking in the space between sessions (which, by the way, freaks him out so much that he resolves to never sleep again, ever, and he orders the other trolls to do the same), Karkat investigates the human kids whose session the demon came from. Using the chat program Trollian, he can see any point in each of the kids' lives up to a certain point in the future. He watches John grow up, realizing that John is also a SGRUB (SBURB for the human version) player, and that he's basically the leader of the humans' session. He's the human Karkat, in other words, except a lot happier, and reaping the benefits of the trolls' doomed game session on the planet they created.
That's right. Earth was created by trolls playing SGRUB.
Believing John and Jade to be directly responsible for the position the trolls are in now (basically, waiting to die in the Veil) due to the botched kernelsprite prototyping that made the kids' Jack Noir so powerful (and for which Vriska was responsible, that bitch), Karkat comes up with the genius plan to troll them as revenge.
Yeah.
GENIUS.
He gets a few of the others to play along, but most of them aren't up for it. Either way, Karkat starts to troll the John human near the end of his visible timeline and somehow locks himself into trolling John backward through time. So everytime they speak, from Karkat's point of view, John knows less and less about their conversations, the game, and so on. Being the stubborn ass he is (and having witnessed that their conversations would play out this way), Karkat keeps going in this manner. For John, this takes place over quite a long time, but for Karkat it happens in the space of about six hours.
He talks to the other kids, too, in a less backward fashion. He warns Dave to step off in his flirting with Terezi (and likewise, tells John to stop flirting with Vriska), and he's an utter dickhead to Jade in most of their conversations.
It's around the point of his second conversation with John, when John reaches the God Tier, that Karkat is coming from.
Abilites/Special Powers: After making it through as much of the game as the trolls could, Karkat's damn strong. His weapon of choice is a pimped out sickle, which he uses to constantly devestate sorry motherfuckers.
Like the other trolls, he's got his sylladex, but I'm not even going to attempt to figure out how this would work in reality. I'm not actually sure what his fetch modus is, because by the canon point he's taken from, he's swapped with Sollux, but it's never indicated what Sollux's modus was before the swap. So suffice to say that Karkat carries his shit around on captchalogue cards and that it's probably a huge pain in the ass to retrieve anything from them, regardless of his fetch modus.
In SGRUB, Karkat was the Knight of Blood in the Land of Pulse and Haze, but what that really means hasn't been revealed yet. It's probably to do with the fact that he has mutant blood, which, while annoying to him and interesting to the reader, affords him no special abilities whatsoever. So it's probably just the game laughing at him.
Third-Person Sample:
It wasn't that Karkat WANTED to die a painful death at the hands of Harley's lusus-based abomination. Granted, it would probably be pretty quick, like the death of his dreamself on Prospit, but it still wouldn't be PLEASANT, and he had other damn things to do with himself.
Not that he'd yet figured out what those "other things" WERE. That wasn't the point. The point was that as much as he didn't want to hide in the Veil until he died, he also didn't want to be dragged around to different worlds without his consent.
Staring at the massive hive across the lawn from him, clutching his sickle in one hand, he was decidedly not scared of what he was going to have to face here. If anything, he was pissed right the fuck off. He'd never given any order to leave the meteor, and even if some of the others thought his leadership was a joke, the reality was that it wasn't.
A joke. It wasn't a joke. Not it wasn't leadership.
This couldn't be Aradia's "throw everyone through some weird time portal to who knows where" doing again. Aradia was dead...er.
To tell the truth, he wasn't even sure if a ghost in a sprite in a robot was alive or dead.
And he didn't give a shit.
What he gave a shit about was finding someone to intimidate and/or beat answers out of so he could back to his grand mission to torment the John human with many, many more "FUCK YOU"s. If he had to search every single room in that ri-goddamn-diculous hive to do it, then so be it.
First-Person Sample:
OKAY, YOU SEE WHAT IS GOING ON HERE? YOU SEE HOW I AM SUDDENLY NOT IN A FALLING DOWN LAB ON A METEOR AT THE ASS END OF NO WHERE, AND HOW I AM SUDDENLY IN A HIVE FILLED WITH HUMANS?
CAN YOU SEE WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS FUCKING PICTURE?
AND THAT IS NOT AN INVITATION FOR YOU TO REMIND ME OF HOW BLIND YOU ARE, TEREZI, IF YOU'RE HERE, BECAUSE I KNOW YOU CAN TELL THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE VEIL AND THIS GI-FUCKING-GANTIC HIVE. FOR YOU, IT IS LIKE A FUCKING IMPRESSIONIST PAINTING, GRANDLY TITLED: "THINGS TO PISS KARKAT OFF, BECAUSE THE UNIVERSE HATES HIM AND WILL NOT LET HIM ENJOY HIS FINAL HOURS BEFORE BEING KILLED BY SOMEONE ELSE'S FUCK UP IN MOTHERFUCKING PEACE."
DAMN IT, SOMEONE ANSWER ME!