#god this got really long. whenever i think about these chess guys somethimg happens 2 me.

[sburban-living]

CARAPACIAN RAMBLE POST

What exactly ARE carapacians? On the surface, the answer is obvious - they're chess guys! Originating in Problem Sleuth + Jailbreak, Carapacians are simply designed, and their designs often amount to a stickman rectangle with a round head.

In SBURB, Carapacians play two vital roles - fighting the doomed battle between Prospit and Derse, and acting as the "Exile" to a specific SBURB player. Exiles function much like the suggestion boxes/reader commands of interactive comics. From a metatextual point of view, the Exiles fill the role of the reader in this aspect, rooting for and attempting to help the protagonists.

(Most of the characters in Homestuck reflect an aspect of the fandom - Caliborn reflecting the "hatedom", as an example. I won't get into it here, but Homestuck is ultimately a conversation between reader and author.)

They are unaffected by prototyping, save for when they posess one of the Royal's Artifacts - a Queen's Ring, or a King's Sceptre. This causes them to take on all the qualities of the beings prototyped, thus gaining incredible levels of power (depending on the power level of the beings prototyped of course) and changing their apperance. Interestingly, while these Artifacts are typically used by the King/Queen, Pawns can use these items too, as seen with PM. This is clearly a reference to the chess rule of "Queening", when a pawn, if moved to the very end of the board, can ascend to queenhood and completely turn the tide of battle.

These chess motifs are seen throughout the Carapacians, and I assume that it ties into their culture + biology as well! WV was once a "Warweary Villein", which suggests that Carapacians in the Medium live under a feudal system, further reflected by the Archagents (functionally, bishops, to continue the chess theme) and the high-ranking roles of the King and Queen. PM "rises" above her role as a pawn and mail carrier to take on the role of queen, but casts it aside (along with the Ring) into the Forge, in order to complete the A2 humans' session.

On the subject of their biology, many people take "carapace", the main feature of their biology, to indicate "insect" or another form of arthopod. While that's extremely cool, their chess motifs and the fact that all Carapacians are cloned (and given a barcode of their genetic data) indicates that they are more like plastic dolls, toy chessets, if you will, which reflects the nature of their existence - to serve Prospit (and by extension, Skaia) /Derse in a predetermined war.

erm hehe i really love carapacians!! ^_^ let me know if you guys have any thoughts, i just wanted to ramble about a few things ive been thinking about