[OOC] Soul Campaign App (SPOILERTASTIC!)
[ CHARACTER INFORMATION ]
Name: Karkat Vantas, known online as carcinoGeneticist. In Sgrub, his title was Knight of Blood.
Age: Six Alternian solar sweeps, the equivalent of 13 Earth years
Gender: Male
Fandom: Homestuck
Timeline, canon updated on 9/21/11: Immediately after getting cut off mid-conversation with Jade. AKA the end of Act 5.
History: There's a character page for him on the wiki, but it's poorly worded and the information's pretty scattered so I'll give you the lowdown.
Under normal circumstances, troll eggs are laid by the thousands by the mother grub. After pupating, the little trolls undergo a series of rigorous trials. The lucky ones who survive the trials are then chosen by a lusus naturae, a guardian creature that bonds with them, and together they go above ground to design and move into the hive where they'll both live. What actually happened is that Karkat, using genetic samples taken from earlier in the trolls' timeline, created himself and his eleven other Zodiac friends in an ectobiology lab within Sgrub and then sent them all back in time to become the idiots you're about to let loose on Soul Campaign. Karkat was oblivious to all this until it actually happened, and it freaked him out so badly he doesn't much like to talk about it.
Time shenanigans aside, Karkat had a pretty standard larval upbringing. Troll adults are almost all offworld conquering the galaxy, so for the most part things on his home planet of Alternia are run by the nasty, brustish, short Darwinian children. Fighting is commonplace, battle training is expected, the games have serious consequences, and culling squads roam the land killing anyone they find unacceptable.
Everything changed the night Karkat and his friends started playing Sgrub. He was originally picked by Sollux to be one of the red team players, but he was enraged by the fact that he hadn't been chosen to lead and took the position from Terezi. She was peeved, but Karkat will be Karkat, and she decided it would be easier to let him have his way. After Sollux found out the game would ultimately lead to the downfall of Alternia and the deaths of every troll besides the twelve players, he tried to pull the plug, but Karkat wouldn't have any of it. Their argument escalated until Karkat, in a fit of anger, ran a particularly nasty curse virus Sollux had sent him earlier just to show off. The virus caused his computer to explode, killing his lusus. Following that, most of the trolls had their lusus die one after another in freak accidents. To add insult to injury, Karkat later realized he was going to have to work fast to get Sollux into the game before a terrible event killed him. He wasn't fast enough, and seconds after getting in, Sollux died anyway. Fortunately, he had an extra life, but Karkat was still pretty torn up about it at first.
It soon became obvious that instead of a red team session and a blue team session, the twelve of them were all playing the same game. Karkat was quick to take control of the entire thing and charged ahead, issuing frequent bossy memos and pushing everyone to pitch in and get some of the necessary objectives out of the way. The entire campaign only took a month. After the death of the final boss, they earned their reward -- the chance to create a whole new universe. They made ours. But before Karkat could open the door and lead the way into our universe, something stopped him. A major glitch in the system, ironically caused by the human cast in the universe they created, prevented the trolls from claiming their prize. They fled to a series of labs on a lone meteor to hide from a nearly unkillable demon that was slowly destroying the game session they were now trapped in.
( The rest of the history as of his new canon point: )
- 3-4 hours are wasted on exhaustively reviewing the trolls' own session. Karkat goes back over the events of the past month trying to figure out where they could have possibly gone so wrong. He comes up empty.
- Karkat, while talking to Past Kanaya online, turns around in time to see Current Kanaya chainsawing Tavros's legs off. He passes out.
- The shock causes his dreamself to wake up on Prospit. This lasts a whole ten seconds or so before the demon Bec Noir (in a form similar to Jack Noir, whom he recognizes and still kind of trusts) burns Dream Karkat alive.
- Still unconscious and now without a dreamself, he spends the rest of the hour listening to the gibbering wails of the tentacled horrorterrors beyond the Furthest Ring. On waking, his first order is that the other Prospit dreamers must stay awake no matter what.
- By this point the trolls have discovered the humans. He reviews John's timeline, which basically gives him access to his entire life so far and lets him see John's relation to the problem the trolls now face. Cultural misunderstandings abound, and he falls madly in hate.
- The infamous first conversation with John, from Karkat's perspective. His attempts to viciously hit on John go about as well as you can imagine, and Karkat is so confused and embarrassed that he decides to start trolling John backwards to avoid having to face the consequences of his own ignorance.
- Things get ambiguous here. Derse is destroyed, causing him to order the Derse dreamers to stay awake as well. Karkat spends time jumping back and back through John's timeline, delivering exposition and verbal abuse by turns and refusing to repeat himself when he goes back a little further and John doesn't remember the conversation that, from Karkat's perspective, just happened. It's especially hard because the further back he goes, the more he sees John as a friend... and the less John likes him.
- Karkat also takes time out of his busy schedule of trolling John to attack Jade. The trolls see her as the main problem because it's her dog that makes the demon unkillable, and all twelve of them give her hell at one time or another. This goes back YEARS from her perspective.
- Do you hate time shenanigans yet? I sure do.
- To a lesser extent he goes after Dave too, but that's more of a jealousy-fueled thing because of how much Terezi likes insufferably smug aliens with red text. Dave, of course, sees right through it and gives 0 fucks total.
- Jade is subjected to a chat with two Karkats at once and finally loses all patience with him and his future me/past me bullshit. She tells them both off and leaves in a huff, forcing him to consider what a terrible person he's being to a perfectly decent girl.
- Later, when Jade's forced to confront her annoying overemotional dreamself, Karkat displays his skills as an armchair psychiatrist, helping her come to terms with having such an awful doppelganger. He's perceptive and helpful, if weird, she realizes he's not so bad. He thinks the same of her and apologizes. Now with a new dynamic that works for both of them -- her not taking any more of his crap and him comfortably arguing with her anyway -- they begin work on a plan that might save them all.
- There's a lot for him to set in motion, and all of this planning eats up his time and attention. His team, aggravated and scared and motivated by various awful troll traits, is falling apart around him. Except for Aradia, who exploded and then secretly got better.
- Don't ask.
- Eridan goes on a murder spree and destroys the main chance the trolls had of surviving as a species. He also kills Kanaya and Feferi and ruins Sollux's eyes. It all happens in front of Karkat while he remains rooted to the spot.
- Karkat is given an ominous message from a mysterious character: don't turn your back on the body. Which... he totally DID, to read the fucking message on the computer screen. He then makes a desperate attempt to revive Kanaya and is not successful.
- Gamzee, who Karkat has been worried about for the past few hours and keeps mentioning, finally resurfaces. He's stark raving sober, he's snapped, and he's going to motherfucking kill everyone. Karkat, believing he'll be dead soon, makes a memo trying to warn everyone of the danger. He then gets in touch with John, honestly apologizing for being such a jerk and hoping John can succeed where he failed.
- Between them, elsewhere, Vriska and Gamzee take out Equius, Nepeta, and Tavros. Kanaya gets up and kills Eridan back. Also she's a vampire now.
- No, seriously, don't ask.
- Karkat takes a moment to get real with Jade as well. He apologizes and finally admits his guilt -- the trolling was impulsive and misguided, he didn't understand anywhere near as much as he thought he did, and also he's the reason the humans' universe is dying. He fucked up the
genetic sequence when they were building it. Our universe is very sick, and it's all his fault. He literally gave it cancer.
- Gamzee, meanwhile, uses his psychic highblood manipulation to orchestrate Vriska's death (using Terezi), and also to lure the surviving trolls (Karkat, Sollux, and Kanaya, for those of you keeping score) onto the roof.
- The plan all along was to gather and kill them. Karkat, however, stops the others from getting involved and takes on Gamzee himself. He leaps into the fray and... calms him down in the stupidest manner imaginable. There's a reason we as a group can't stop saying shooshpap.
- Moirails now, they hug. It is completely adorable.
- While checking the closest computer to get back in touch with the humans -- Vriska's, incidentally -- Karkat stumbles on her clumsy attempt to ask John on a date. John's pretty derpy about the whole thing and Karkat, feeling terrible, doesn't tell him she died. He pulls his usual humorless troll act, glossing over the Vriska business, and gives John the instructions to begin creating the dangerous game glitch that appears to be their only hope of survival.
- This all takes place in about ten hours, from Karkat's perspective.
Character Personality: Almost exclusively ornery, all the time. Karkat is snappish, antisocial, and fast with the personal remarks. He's also quick-witted and good at gathering information. He takes no small amount of pride in his ability to infodump, even though he sometimes acts as though it's a great burden to have to share what he knows. Even though his avalanches of words are almost always peppered with insults, his information is useful and he's usually okay with sharing. In fact, good luck shutting him up over certain sociological topics. He finds troll romance fascinating and can't get enough of godawful romantic movies and trying to school his friends on the finer points of the quadrants.
While we're on the subject of his interest in romance, it's worth noting that the topic changes his tone like no other. He will stop hurling abuse, often in mid-sentence, if he finds out someone has come to him about matters of the heart. After all, not only is it one of his great passions in life, on Alternia finding partners is literally a matter of life or death. He becomes interested, even genuinely supportive, and is willing to do whatever he can to get that person's love life sorted out. Bear in mind, though, all of his information comes from his species' concept of romance, which only uses a single quadrant to signify all of what we think of as healthy love. It's also worth noting that troll reproduction is vastly different from ours, and Karkat doesn't have any concept of sexual orientation or familial ties.
He is convinced that he was hatched to lead and sees himself as head troll in charge. He's no less irritable to his crew, however, and most of the other trolls laugh in his face over his ridiculous memos, which are made even funnier by the fact that they're done on a trans-timeline chat program that allows his past and future selves to weigh in and mock him until he gets pissed off and bans them. Or they get fed up with him and hit the ban button first. He's a mess. However, there's no denying that his constant angry general-style leadership pushed everyone to fight harder and scale their echeladders faster, thus bringing the campaign to a tidy finish in a short amount of time. All jokes and animosity aside, he knows how to push and what to say to get the most out of his group.
All of this irritable brashness is part of a defensive shell, as underneath the insults and bravado he's actually highly insecure. A significant portion of it comes from his blood color. Troll social status is decided entirely by the color of their blood; it starts with dark red on the bottom, then orange, yellow, and on up through the visible spectrum. Karkat is the only one of his kind whose blood is the bright red color we know so well. It's humiliating, it makes him an outcast, and he takes extra care to hide it. While most trolls wear their blood color in symbols on their shirts and type in that color text, Karkat uses grey for both, signifying his desire for anonymity. He blows off all questions about it, claiming it's a private matter. He also catches a lot of grief for having the tiniest nubbly little horns. He can roll with that one, but it just... doesn't help matters.
( Oh my god, character development! This much is also new as of the update. )
Still ornery, still a jackass, still cripplingly insecure. Some things will never change.
Since arriving in Death City, he's had a small amount of in-game development. Mainly it boils down to him learning that most people respond better when you don't approach them as a huge raving douchebag. Not that he's not still grumpy and won't attack at the slightest perceived insult, but he's starting to get used to the fact that to get what he wants from most of Death City's citizens, he has to ratchet back the nasty a little. Pick his battles. That sort of thing. Humans don't enjoy being called grubslurping shitpiles right off the bat, who knew. He's also more inclined now to take a human at their word or at least give them some benefit of the doubt, though that's more of a case-by-case thing. But he's learned that, in general, humans have a much different stance than what he's used to when it comes to arbitrary murder.
In canon, there's been quite a bit of information about the sort of person Karkat is since I first apped him. His morals and values are more in line with a human's than a troll's, which by their standards is considered weakness and -- surprise! -- likely to get him killed. Vriska of all people would know a killer instinct when she smells one, and she confides to John that Karkat just doesn't have it in him. He blusters and overcompensates and tries to give the impression of violence and badassetry, and to some extent he can back it up, but when it comes down to it he doesn't have the ability to take a life. At least not one that would matter. While he killed Sgrub enemies like ogres and imps, and even took down the boss of his world and the endgame monster without much hassle, he hasn't shown much inclination to solve his problems with violence when other options are available. The fact that he forced this to extend to the team -- stopping fights, preventing unnecessary deaths -- is unnatural to them, but because he's so pushy and annoying it was easier to let him have his way.
Character Abilities: As a troll, Karkat is a better fighter than your average 13-year-old and he's able to take a surprising amount of damage. For reference, he was stabbed repeatedly, at least three or four times on separate occasions, and it only pissed him off. The girl he likes also apparently beats the crap out of him a lot, though that's sort of a mutual thing. He gives as good as he gets.
While he doesn't have any actual metahuman abilities beyond being tough, there's a running joke in the fandom that Karkat's lowblood power is an encyclopedic understanding of his race's complicated system of romance. I plan to keep that, since it's not actually a power and encompasses a significant portion of his personality. Hope the mods don't mind. :V
Also, not that it comes up much, but since there's canon basis for the trolls having their own alphabet and spoken language, Karkat is bilingual.
Character Weaknesses: Karkat often works against himself more effectively than any enemy. If his rude personality and obvious defense mechanisms don't turn off a lot of potential meisters (and attract a lot of enemies!), his need to be the leader will. He pushes himself and his teammates too hard. Most of the trolls know better than to get too caught up and will laugh him off, but a passive meister can and probably will be pushed to the breaking point. For example, in canon, Karkat either didn't sleep or barely slept for the entire month the game was on. He was simply too busy issuing bossy memos and giving orders and fighting.
He's also incredibly evasive when it comes to people seeing his blood. Bright red is an unacceptable mutation -- something he could have been killed for on his home planet. He talks big about how blood status doesn't matter, but when it comes to his own he goes to great lengths to hide injuries and keep anyone from finding out.
His alien upbringing will probably work against him as well, to a lesser extent. He's not completely ignorant or unwilling to learn, and a lot of aspects of his world can be found in ours (such as cotton candy), but there are a few things that will trip him up. For instance, pails have a strong sexual connotation in his culture, and he'll be incredibly offended and call out some poor jerk who's just trying to mop the floor on their revolting deviance.
[ WEAPON ONLY SECTION ]
Why your character should be a Weapon: Karkat will absolutely HATE IT. He was hatched to lead the charge, give the orders, be in control. It goes against everything he is and wants to be. Going from being the big damn hero who won Sgrub to someone else's tool is going to be tough. While he is already pretty familiar with the strange troll disease known as teamwork, he's going to have to learn how to give the control to someone else. Hope you like weapons that tell their meister what to do.
What is your character's Weapon form?: He should probably be a sickle; that's his signature weapon in canon. But screw that, I want him to be a long handled overly ornate battleaxe. Like so, except with the Cancer zodiac symbol on the handle instead of that green diamond thing.
Abilities: If he ever manages to actually resonate with someone, Karkat will be able to transfer some of his anger to his meister, making their attacks stronger. It'd take someone with good emotional control to channel it properly and not just start flailing like an imbecile, though.
He can also throw up a soul shield, a round ridged carapacey-looking deal that doesn't last very long but can be difficult to shatter.
[ SOUL INFORMATION ]
Soul Description: Angry, romantic, insecure, intelligent, isolated, stubborn
Soul Appearance: Dirty pavement grey in color with his stubby horns on top. Yellow eyes, perpetual cranky expression. Two protrusions, one on each side, that strongly resemble thin arms ending in cartoonishly oversized crab claws.
[ NOTES ]
How trolls get their symbols is a long story I won't go into here, but in Homestuck canon the significance is actually backward -- people on earth assigned those twelve symbols to the constellations in a subconscious effort to honor their true creators.
Word of god suggests that Gamzee, with his ability to subtly manipulate the actions of others through fear (we see Terezi make one uncharacteristically stupid assumption after the other, ultimately leading to her killing Vriska, all thanks to Gamzee's influence), was responsible for a lot of Karkat's mistakes. It's the reason Karkat found excuses not to go looking for him while he was sobering up, and why he was unable to stop Eridan even though he was standing right there, and why he abandoned a recently-blinded Sollux and ran. Exactly how much of it was Gamzee's doing is up in the air, but Karkat believes all of these incidents were entirely his fault.
Name: Karkat Vantas, known online as carcinoGeneticist. In Sgrub, his title was Knight of Blood.
Age: Six Alternian solar sweeps, the equivalent of 13 Earth years
Gender: Male
Fandom: Homestuck
Timeline, canon updated on 9/21/11: Immediately after getting cut off mid-conversation with Jade. AKA the end of Act 5.
History: There's a character page for him on the wiki, but it's poorly worded and the information's pretty scattered so I'll give you the lowdown.
Under normal circumstances, troll eggs are laid by the thousands by the mother grub. After pupating, the little trolls undergo a series of rigorous trials. The lucky ones who survive the trials are then chosen by a lusus naturae, a guardian creature that bonds with them, and together they go above ground to design and move into the hive where they'll both live. What actually happened is that Karkat, using genetic samples taken from earlier in the trolls' timeline, created himself and his eleven other Zodiac friends in an ectobiology lab within Sgrub and then sent them all back in time to become the idiots you're about to let loose on Soul Campaign. Karkat was oblivious to all this until it actually happened, and it freaked him out so badly he doesn't much like to talk about it.
Time shenanigans aside, Karkat had a pretty standard larval upbringing. Troll adults are almost all offworld conquering the galaxy, so for the most part things on his home planet of Alternia are run by the nasty, brustish, short Darwinian children. Fighting is commonplace, battle training is expected, the games have serious consequences, and culling squads roam the land killing anyone they find unacceptable.
Everything changed the night Karkat and his friends started playing Sgrub. He was originally picked by Sollux to be one of the red team players, but he was enraged by the fact that he hadn't been chosen to lead and took the position from Terezi. She was peeved, but Karkat will be Karkat, and she decided it would be easier to let him have his way. After Sollux found out the game would ultimately lead to the downfall of Alternia and the deaths of every troll besides the twelve players, he tried to pull the plug, but Karkat wouldn't have any of it. Their argument escalated until Karkat, in a fit of anger, ran a particularly nasty curse virus Sollux had sent him earlier just to show off. The virus caused his computer to explode, killing his lusus. Following that, most of the trolls had their lusus die one after another in freak accidents. To add insult to injury, Karkat later realized he was going to have to work fast to get Sollux into the game before a terrible event killed him. He wasn't fast enough, and seconds after getting in, Sollux died anyway. Fortunately, he had an extra life, but Karkat was still pretty torn up about it at first.
It soon became obvious that instead of a red team session and a blue team session, the twelve of them were all playing the same game. Karkat was quick to take control of the entire thing and charged ahead, issuing frequent bossy memos and pushing everyone to pitch in and get some of the necessary objectives out of the way. The entire campaign only took a month. After the death of the final boss, they earned their reward -- the chance to create a whole new universe. They made ours. But before Karkat could open the door and lead the way into our universe, something stopped him. A major glitch in the system, ironically caused by the human cast in the universe they created, prevented the trolls from claiming their prize. They fled to a series of labs on a lone meteor to hide from a nearly unkillable demon that was slowly destroying the game session they were now trapped in.
( The rest of the history as of his new canon point: )
- 3-4 hours are wasted on exhaustively reviewing the trolls' own session. Karkat goes back over the events of the past month trying to figure out where they could have possibly gone so wrong. He comes up empty.
- Karkat, while talking to Past Kanaya online, turns around in time to see Current Kanaya chainsawing Tavros's legs off. He passes out.
- The shock causes his dreamself to wake up on Prospit. This lasts a whole ten seconds or so before the demon Bec Noir (in a form similar to Jack Noir, whom he recognizes and still kind of trusts) burns Dream Karkat alive.
- Still unconscious and now without a dreamself, he spends the rest of the hour listening to the gibbering wails of the tentacled horrorterrors beyond the Furthest Ring. On waking, his first order is that the other Prospit dreamers must stay awake no matter what.
- By this point the trolls have discovered the humans. He reviews John's timeline, which basically gives him access to his entire life so far and lets him see John's relation to the problem the trolls now face. Cultural misunderstandings abound, and he falls madly in hate.
- The infamous first conversation with John, from Karkat's perspective. His attempts to viciously hit on John go about as well as you can imagine, and Karkat is so confused and embarrassed that he decides to start trolling John backwards to avoid having to face the consequences of his own ignorance.
- Things get ambiguous here. Derse is destroyed, causing him to order the Derse dreamers to stay awake as well. Karkat spends time jumping back and back through John's timeline, delivering exposition and verbal abuse by turns and refusing to repeat himself when he goes back a little further and John doesn't remember the conversation that, from Karkat's perspective, just happened. It's especially hard because the further back he goes, the more he sees John as a friend... and the less John likes him.
- Karkat also takes time out of his busy schedule of trolling John to attack Jade. The trolls see her as the main problem because it's her dog that makes the demon unkillable, and all twelve of them give her hell at one time or another. This goes back YEARS from her perspective.
- Do you hate time shenanigans yet? I sure do.
- To a lesser extent he goes after Dave too, but that's more of a jealousy-fueled thing because of how much Terezi likes insufferably smug aliens with red text. Dave, of course, sees right through it and gives 0 fucks total.
- Jade is subjected to a chat with two Karkats at once and finally loses all patience with him and his future me/past me bullshit. She tells them both off and leaves in a huff, forcing him to consider what a terrible person he's being to a perfectly decent girl.
- Later, when Jade's forced to confront her annoying overemotional dreamself, Karkat displays his skills as an armchair psychiatrist, helping her come to terms with having such an awful doppelganger. He's perceptive and helpful, if weird, she realizes he's not so bad. He thinks the same of her and apologizes. Now with a new dynamic that works for both of them -- her not taking any more of his crap and him comfortably arguing with her anyway -- they begin work on a plan that might save them all.
- There's a lot for him to set in motion, and all of this planning eats up his time and attention. His team, aggravated and scared and motivated by various awful troll traits, is falling apart around him. Except for Aradia, who exploded and then secretly got better.
- Don't ask.
- Eridan goes on a murder spree and destroys the main chance the trolls had of surviving as a species. He also kills Kanaya and Feferi and ruins Sollux's eyes. It all happens in front of Karkat while he remains rooted to the spot.
- Karkat is given an ominous message from a mysterious character: don't turn your back on the body. Which... he totally DID, to read the fucking message on the computer screen. He then makes a desperate attempt to revive Kanaya and is not successful.
- Gamzee, who Karkat has been worried about for the past few hours and keeps mentioning, finally resurfaces. He's stark raving sober, he's snapped, and he's going to motherfucking kill everyone. Karkat, believing he'll be dead soon, makes a memo trying to warn everyone of the danger. He then gets in touch with John, honestly apologizing for being such a jerk and hoping John can succeed where he failed.
- Between them, elsewhere, Vriska and Gamzee take out Equius, Nepeta, and Tavros. Kanaya gets up and kills Eridan back. Also she's a vampire now.
- No, seriously, don't ask.
- Karkat takes a moment to get real with Jade as well. He apologizes and finally admits his guilt -- the trolling was impulsive and misguided, he didn't understand anywhere near as much as he thought he did, and also he's the reason the humans' universe is dying. He fucked up the
genetic sequence when they were building it. Our universe is very sick, and it's all his fault. He literally gave it cancer.
- Gamzee, meanwhile, uses his psychic highblood manipulation to orchestrate Vriska's death (using Terezi), and also to lure the surviving trolls (Karkat, Sollux, and Kanaya, for those of you keeping score) onto the roof.
- The plan all along was to gather and kill them. Karkat, however, stops the others from getting involved and takes on Gamzee himself. He leaps into the fray and... calms him down in the stupidest manner imaginable. There's a reason we as a group can't stop saying shooshpap.
- Moirails now, they hug. It is completely adorable.
- While checking the closest computer to get back in touch with the humans -- Vriska's, incidentally -- Karkat stumbles on her clumsy attempt to ask John on a date. John's pretty derpy about the whole thing and Karkat, feeling terrible, doesn't tell him she died. He pulls his usual humorless troll act, glossing over the Vriska business, and gives John the instructions to begin creating the dangerous game glitch that appears to be their only hope of survival.
- This all takes place in about ten hours, from Karkat's perspective.
Character Personality: Almost exclusively ornery, all the time. Karkat is snappish, antisocial, and fast with the personal remarks. He's also quick-witted and good at gathering information. He takes no small amount of pride in his ability to infodump, even though he sometimes acts as though it's a great burden to have to share what he knows. Even though his avalanches of words are almost always peppered with insults, his information is useful and he's usually okay with sharing. In fact, good luck shutting him up over certain sociological topics. He finds troll romance fascinating and can't get enough of godawful romantic movies and trying to school his friends on the finer points of the quadrants.
While we're on the subject of his interest in romance, it's worth noting that the topic changes his tone like no other. He will stop hurling abuse, often in mid-sentence, if he finds out someone has come to him about matters of the heart. After all, not only is it one of his great passions in life, on Alternia finding partners is literally a matter of life or death. He becomes interested, even genuinely supportive, and is willing to do whatever he can to get that person's love life sorted out. Bear in mind, though, all of his information comes from his species' concept of romance, which only uses a single quadrant to signify all of what we think of as healthy love. It's also worth noting that troll reproduction is vastly different from ours, and Karkat doesn't have any concept of sexual orientation or familial ties.
He is convinced that he was hatched to lead and sees himself as head troll in charge. He's no less irritable to his crew, however, and most of the other trolls laugh in his face over his ridiculous memos, which are made even funnier by the fact that they're done on a trans-timeline chat program that allows his past and future selves to weigh in and mock him until he gets pissed off and bans them. Or they get fed up with him and hit the ban button first. He's a mess. However, there's no denying that his constant angry general-style leadership pushed everyone to fight harder and scale their echeladders faster, thus bringing the campaign to a tidy finish in a short amount of time. All jokes and animosity aside, he knows how to push and what to say to get the most out of his group.
All of this irritable brashness is part of a defensive shell, as underneath the insults and bravado he's actually highly insecure. A significant portion of it comes from his blood color. Troll social status is decided entirely by the color of their blood; it starts with dark red on the bottom, then orange, yellow, and on up through the visible spectrum. Karkat is the only one of his kind whose blood is the bright red color we know so well. It's humiliating, it makes him an outcast, and he takes extra care to hide it. While most trolls wear their blood color in symbols on their shirts and type in that color text, Karkat uses grey for both, signifying his desire for anonymity. He blows off all questions about it, claiming it's a private matter. He also catches a lot of grief for having the tiniest nubbly little horns. He can roll with that one, but it just... doesn't help matters.
( Oh my god, character development! This much is also new as of the update. )
Still ornery, still a jackass, still cripplingly insecure. Some things will never change.
Since arriving in Death City, he's had a small amount of in-game development. Mainly it boils down to him learning that most people respond better when you don't approach them as a huge raving douchebag. Not that he's not still grumpy and won't attack at the slightest perceived insult, but he's starting to get used to the fact that to get what he wants from most of Death City's citizens, he has to ratchet back the nasty a little. Pick his battles. That sort of thing. Humans don't enjoy being called grubslurping shitpiles right off the bat, who knew. He's also more inclined now to take a human at their word or at least give them some benefit of the doubt, though that's more of a case-by-case thing. But he's learned that, in general, humans have a much different stance than what he's used to when it comes to arbitrary murder.
In canon, there's been quite a bit of information about the sort of person Karkat is since I first apped him. His morals and values are more in line with a human's than a troll's, which by their standards is considered weakness and -- surprise! -- likely to get him killed. Vriska of all people would know a killer instinct when she smells one, and she confides to John that Karkat just doesn't have it in him. He blusters and overcompensates and tries to give the impression of violence and badassetry, and to some extent he can back it up, but when it comes down to it he doesn't have the ability to take a life. At least not one that would matter. While he killed Sgrub enemies like ogres and imps, and even took down the boss of his world and the endgame monster without much hassle, he hasn't shown much inclination to solve his problems with violence when other options are available. The fact that he forced this to extend to the team -- stopping fights, preventing unnecessary deaths -- is unnatural to them, but because he's so pushy and annoying it was easier to let him have his way.
Character Abilities: As a troll, Karkat is a better fighter than your average 13-year-old and he's able to take a surprising amount of damage. For reference, he was stabbed repeatedly, at least three or four times on separate occasions, and it only pissed him off. The girl he likes also apparently beats the crap out of him a lot, though that's sort of a mutual thing. He gives as good as he gets.
While he doesn't have any actual metahuman abilities beyond being tough, there's a running joke in the fandom that Karkat's lowblood power is an encyclopedic understanding of his race's complicated system of romance. I plan to keep that, since it's not actually a power and encompasses a significant portion of his personality. Hope the mods don't mind. :V
Also, not that it comes up much, but since there's canon basis for the trolls having their own alphabet and spoken language, Karkat is bilingual.
Character Weaknesses: Karkat often works against himself more effectively than any enemy. If his rude personality and obvious defense mechanisms don't turn off a lot of potential meisters (and attract a lot of enemies!), his need to be the leader will. He pushes himself and his teammates too hard. Most of the trolls know better than to get too caught up and will laugh him off, but a passive meister can and probably will be pushed to the breaking point. For example, in canon, Karkat either didn't sleep or barely slept for the entire month the game was on. He was simply too busy issuing bossy memos and giving orders and fighting.
He's also incredibly evasive when it comes to people seeing his blood. Bright red is an unacceptable mutation -- something he could have been killed for on his home planet. He talks big about how blood status doesn't matter, but when it comes to his own he goes to great lengths to hide injuries and keep anyone from finding out.
His alien upbringing will probably work against him as well, to a lesser extent. He's not completely ignorant or unwilling to learn, and a lot of aspects of his world can be found in ours (such as cotton candy), but there are a few things that will trip him up. For instance, pails have a strong sexual connotation in his culture, and he'll be incredibly offended and call out some poor jerk who's just trying to mop the floor on their revolting deviance.
[ WEAPON ONLY SECTION ]
Why your character should be a Weapon: Karkat will absolutely HATE IT. He was hatched to lead the charge, give the orders, be in control. It goes against everything he is and wants to be. Going from being the big damn hero who won Sgrub to someone else's tool is going to be tough. While he is already pretty familiar with the strange troll disease known as teamwork, he's going to have to learn how to give the control to someone else. Hope you like weapons that tell their meister what to do.
What is your character's Weapon form?: He should probably be a sickle; that's his signature weapon in canon. But screw that, I want him to be a long handled overly ornate battleaxe. Like so, except with the Cancer zodiac symbol on the handle instead of that green diamond thing.
Abilities: If he ever manages to actually resonate with someone, Karkat will be able to transfer some of his anger to his meister, making their attacks stronger. It'd take someone with good emotional control to channel it properly and not just start flailing like an imbecile, though.
He can also throw up a soul shield, a round ridged carapacey-looking deal that doesn't last very long but can be difficult to shatter.
[ SOUL INFORMATION ]
Soul Description: Angry, romantic, insecure, intelligent, isolated, stubborn
Soul Appearance: Dirty pavement grey in color with his stubby horns on top. Yellow eyes, perpetual cranky expression. Two protrusions, one on each side, that strongly resemble thin arms ending in cartoonishly oversized crab claws.
[ NOTES ]
How trolls get their symbols is a long story I won't go into here, but in Homestuck canon the significance is actually backward -- people on earth assigned those twelve symbols to the constellations in a subconscious effort to honor their true creators.
Word of god suggests that Gamzee, with his ability to subtly manipulate the actions of others through fear (we see Terezi make one uncharacteristically stupid assumption after the other, ultimately leading to her killing Vriska, all thanks to Gamzee's influence), was responsible for a lot of Karkat's mistakes. It's the reason Karkat found excuses not to go looking for him while he was sobering up, and why he was unable to stop Eridan even though he was standing right there, and why he abandoned a recently-blinded Sollux and ran. Exactly how much of it was Gamzee's doing is up in the air, but Karkat believes all of these incidents were entirely his fault.