I love him because out of all the iterations of Jack Noir in the world of Homestuck, Spades Slick is the most morally upstanding. Oh, he’s still a huge fucking murderer and a caustic asshat with no regard for life or really any social skills to speak of, who thinks himself the center of the universe and won’t hesitate to get rid of anyone who gets in his way… But he’s the only Jack who ever showed empathy for another person of his own volition.
Bec Noir’s love of Jade is artificial, forced onto him from the prototyping. Union Jack doesn’t have any agency of his own at all for the majority of the time. Spades Slick goes out of his way to do this.
I’ve always believed that the strongest way to convey a scene is not through self-explanatory or long winded dialogue, nor is it through looking at still establishing shots of things that aren’t moving. It’s having the context of a scene inform the meaning behind the actions taken by the characters.
To break that down a little more, it’s about A Person the Audience Knows who Does Something with Another Person We Know that Changes Something Between Them Forever
Spades Slick is a character we know to be crass, evil, mean, angry all the time, the kind of person who calls people he doesn’t like “coffin stuffers” and feels no remorse in killing them. Karkat we know is an asshole who’s full of himself and judgmental of everyone around him.
In this scene, we learned that Karkat has been hiding something about himself that he cannot change, but that fills him with shame and makes him feel like an enormous weirdo. He overcompensates for this enormous insecurity by being a pompous asshole. When Spades Slick initially meets him, he stabs Karkat in the gut, and Karkat doesn’t even care about the wound, he just worries that this chess guy is going to tattle on him and reveal his secret that he’s been tightly guarding for all his life.
Instead, Spades Slick decides to cut open the palm of his hand and let Karkat know that he’s in the exact same boat. We never see another Jack Noir willingly, and with sound mind, comfort a child ever again. This is the only time. And that has just colored my perception of Spades Slick forever, because while he is an enormous dickwheel, he’s also the only Noir who naturally has a soft side.
