The power of the Page is to be served. It’s an ability that takes many forms, from the minor to the major, from the personal to the grandiose. It is Tavros getting Kanaya to keep Vriska off his back. It is Dirk giving Jake a sparring robot because he asked for it repeatedly. It is even more abstract things like Horuss deciding he suddenly can’t hear when Rufioh wants to break up, serving himself ignorance and Void in the face of the patently obvious.
For both our major Pages, however, the ultimate manifestation of this ability, however, takes a very specific form. As their power reaches its pitch, they call forth a great warrior, formed from the substance of their Aspect, to fight for their cause. For Jake, this takes the form of concentating his thoughts, imagination, and love, turning Brain Ghost Dirk from an informative if somewhat annoying hallucination into a god tier supersoldier completely devoted to Jake’s protection. For Tavros, it takes the form of cajoling and convincing a vast army of ghosts, creatures of pure spirit, into following his lead and fighting Lord English at risk of double death.
And I can’t help but draw a certain parallel between these events, and the Fate series with its Servant system. I mean, come on, they’re supersoldiers formed of magic, and they’re literally called Servants, there’s just a hint of a connection there. Hell, for added parallelism, Tavros calling forth his ghost army just so happens to happen in a desert, of all places.
Now, I’m not saying that this parallel is deliberate. I’d almost be surprised if it was. Deserts are a good place to show off armies, after all, what with all the flatness. But it’s still kind of a fun and interesting parallel.
Category: Uncategorized
How important are Seers in reality? I’ve gotten in discussions where many people agree that Seers are pretty much useless and powerless
Rose Lalonde killed an ogre armed with nothing but a pair of ordinary knitting needles pretty much immediately after entering the game. Rose Lalonde found the secrets of the Green Sun and of the Scratch, forming the foundations for the kids’ entire plans in Act 5. Rose Lalonde found love on a battlefield and her hands have wielded both darkness and light and turned them into deadly weapons. Rose Lalonde, trapped with her friends in the middle of literal nowhere with a demon dog hot on their heels, nevertheless found a way to not only escape, but to journey to a new, wondrous land. Rose Lalonde knows more about the setting than maybe anyone else, and the tome of her collective knowledge inspired Calliope, arguably the most important character in Homestuck, to believe in the potential of reality.
Rose Lalonde is utterly fucking dwarfed by Terezi Pyrope, the girl who can sunder time by asking a question, who can know with absolute certainty the immediate outcome of a difficult decision. Terezi Pyrope, the girl so dangerous, Lord English sent his right hand Makara on making sure she was kept off balance through mind games and caliginy. Terezi Pyrope, who is so wise in the ways of the world that she can understand and manipulate people so well she’s repeatedly stated as the superior of Vriska, who is literally a telepath. Terezi Pyrope, who fights alongside gods and not only matches them in prowess but outclasses some of them (Dirk had some serious trouble in that fight). Terezi Pyrope, trapped and surrounded by dead friends in an offshoot reality in the middle of temporal nowhere, who found a way to turn game over into an easy victory by writing words on a scarf. Terezi Pyrope, who absorbed all the memories of Paradox Space and knew the world for what it truly was. Terezi Pyrope, the true protagonist of Homestuck.
And then there’s Kankri I guess? Yeah, he’s kinda useless, trapped in his own head and incapable of seeing and wielding his true potential. His alt-self led a revolution, which went surprisingly well up until it completely failed because the odds were stacked against him in a truly preposterous fashion. Not his fault really.
I’m wondering what you think of Undertale. Also, what are your favorite ships? (Aside from DirkJake and Davekat. It’s already clear what you think of them.)
I adore Undertale, at this point it’s basically part of my personal like…cultural lineage of inspiration? I guess?
As for my favorite ships i mean…i dont blog about them as much but I really ship every endgame pairing in Homestuck. Callieroxy/Calliejaneroxy are both good, Javepeta is good, Vrisrezi and Rosemary are good…I love them all.
Idk I like Homestuck’s writing a lot so I think about the ships in the text a lot. That said I’m also a pretty laissez faire shipper so I can see the appeal in a lot of different ships. Off Homestuck my otps are probably Utena/Anthy from SKU and Gon/Killua from hunter x hunter.
Hey, chums!
This time, we take a look at the Hero Titles, also known as Classpects.
Let me know what your Class and Aspect is in the comments, and say
whether Classpect videos on different characters sounds interesting to you!
Also, an announcement. After December 1st, I’ll be changing the Patreon to charge per video post, rather than monthly.
Thanks for everything, and as always,
Keep Rising.
Here’s a couple of resources that may be of interest to Classpect fans who haven’t heard about Jungian Archetypes or Carol S. Pearson’s system, in case you find it interesting:
http://www.uiltexas.org/files/capitalconference/Twelve_Character_Archetypes.pdf
http://www.carolspearson.com/about/the-12-archetype-system-a-model-for-discovering-your-archetypes/
Dirk Strider vs narrative presentation
Dirk Strider has a PR problem. Now, that’s not exactly his fault, in fact he oftentimes seems to bend over backwards to work his way around it, to soften his appearance to the reader as best he can, and generally behave in every regard as a well and proper through and through stand up gent. Nevertheless, it is so deceptively easy to miss that, so distractingly simple to latch onto any of a number of alternative possible interpretations of him.
Let’s get the obvious one out of the way first. Dirk Strider as a character is preceded by thousands of pages by his estranged twin brother, Dirk Strider, aka Bro, aka the dictionary definition of a broken household, who spends and has already spent so many scenes tormenting his adoptive/biological son Dave Strider, aka probably the most beloved character in Homestuck, that Dave’s entire character arc can arguably be summed up as gradually breaking free of the damage wrought by this thoroughly destructive character dynamic. Indeed, one of the highlights of Homestuck’s final stretch was watching Dave Strider explain in sufficient yet far from exhaustive detail to Dirk Strider the injustice wrought by Dirk Strider.
Let’s move ahead (or are we retreating). At the very beginning of Act 6, in arguably the first trace of Dirk Strider’s personality, we find two rabbits, gifted to Jane Crocker by her fellow alphas, Jake and Roxy; each perfectly emblematic of the other’s personality and connection to Jane in particular. Dirk’s gift, however, is withheld, in its place an ominous note that, whatever it is, it is not quite as inoffensive a thing as the other two.
Indeed, Dirk Strider himself is absent from much of the earlier pages of Act 6. When Jake attempts to contact him, he receives in his place the tragic figure, doomed to darkness and misfortune, Dirk Strider, aka Lil Hal, aka AR. Dirk Strider proceeds to antagonize Jake and, albeit but briefly, convinces both Jake and indeed the audience themselves into thinking he is actually Dirk Strider.
And so is Dirk Strider robbed first of his fame, then of his good reputation, and finally of his first impression by the structure of the narrative, as well as the malicious actions of his preceding hobgoblins, Dirk Strider and Dirk Strider. And all this before he is allowed to speak a single word in his defense. In the face of such forces, who could help but take a dim view of the man. It is a poor man indeed, to be Dirk Strider.
Commanding Aspects
So the Time Aspect connects a lot to death. That’s a fairly widespread notion. Specifically, Time connects to death to a large extent because the Alpha timeline is an incredibly brutal construct, hurting both those who follow it and those who choose to deviate from it. But the Alpha timeline is a construct of Lord English.
https://medium.com/@RoseOfNobility/apotheosis-and-creation-myth-2257d7bf5854 (scroll down a fair bit)
So Lord English, the Lord of Time, has redefined the Aspect of Time to suit his needs. Huh. Has Calliope, his equal and opposite, perhaps done something similar?
Now, I don’t have much evidence of my theory, I’m not even sure evidence is all that possible to accrue for such a thing, but, well, in the Gnostic origins that Homestuck draws upon, the physical matter of the world is often disparaged, seen as the flawed design of Yaldabaoth, devoid of meaning. We see this reflected in the Aspects, Void, the Aspect of irrelevance, confers great physical ability on its heroes, as does Rage, the Aspect of misery and meaninglessness.
Yet Space, the most physical Aspect of them all, is heavily associated with art and beauty? Beautiful clothes, fascinating sciences, even the Vast Croak, described as the most wondruous thing of all. Clearly, then, the physical world is not entirely lost. It can be filled with meaning, with glory. It has potential, even in a story so heavily centered on the internet and the exploration of ideas.
Certainly, Calliope loves the world. Certainly, she loves to draw its inhabitants, to speculate upon its mechanics. Certainly, she dresses herself in the trappings of its peoples, and speaks endlessly of their glories. Certainly, she acts to inspire the alphas to love the world with her in her communications with them.
Certainly, the last command of her alternate self was to partake of reality, to enjoy the fruits of hers and everyone’s labor. To “have fun”.
Certainly, Calliope in her symbolic sense embodies the audience, with their arts and their theories and their cosplays. Certainly, the story of Homestuck, without its audience, would be a lesser, stranger thing, not to mention mostly unwritten, given how much Hussie inspiration Hussie has at times implied he takes from his audience.
There is an outline here, in the certainties. An outline of a theory. A suggestion of Calliope’s grand influence on the story, of the way she shapes reality every bit as fundamentally as Lord English, and not merely by shaping him through his hatred of her.
But that theory is not yet certain, and I do not know precisely what form it would take, were it to become such.
CUTTING EDGE JADE HARLEY META:
she named one of her consort ocs “yiffyiff”
thanks, that will be all
Some old classpect thoughts
Presented with perhaps lacking context.
So I’ve been thinking about Hope as the strongest Aspect and how some people insist that surely it can’t bear that title alone because it and its counterpart Rage must be equal, among other things.
And I think I’ve hit on something interesting there. Because while Gamzee’s application of Rage is incredibly flexible (he can be almost anywhere at any time, have all the weird little odds and ends he wants, etc) it’s never very powerful. Like, one of his greatest feats in the story is owning a costume.
And yes, there’s the fight with the black king. But the key thing there, the thing I realized just now, is that the revelation that Gamzee was critical to that fight happened long after the fight was concluded. When Aradia talked about the fight, she mentions their weapons, her time-clones, and Vriska’s dice. Gamzee’s not there. This is the meta nature of Rage. Gamzee inserts himself into the fight only after it’s done, and tears up the narrative coherence of it in the process by kinda sorta contradicting Aradia’s account of it. Then he upsets his impending beatdown at Equius’ hands by playing to his weaknesses and kills Nepeta offscreen, before being unceremoniously papped down without actually changing his ways at all. This is the Rage of which Tex spoke, the ability to make stories “go wrong”, the power of “bullshit”.
In contrast, almost everything Jake does is heavily foreshadowed and shrouded in layer upon layer of myth and reference. His biggest actions are momentuous fullfilments of seeming hundreds of little seeds sown thousands of pages in advance. Here is where I contradict taz a little, because when Jake is powered up by Aranea? I don’t think he could have done anything in that position. I don’t think that at all. Hope is among other things the power of creativity, of “good storytelling”, and in accordance with the rules of “good storytelling” at such a momentuous occasion it can accomplish only what has been built up in advance. Jake is strong here because his strength has been built up, and he can make Brain Ghost Dirk (and only Brain Ghost Dirk) real specifically on account of Brain Ghost Dirk having been established in advance as a facet of Jake’s own nature and ability. And he can do so in part because, yes, that’s a Princess Bride reference, and mythological parallels are again “good storytelling”.
This is why, on a meta level, Hope is strong but somewhat inflexible, while Rage is weak but versatile.
This is how Eridan operates as well. His genocide complex, his fascination with magic, all of these things are set up well in advance. His emotional theatrics and dumb antics with the angels undercut this, “destroying” the foreshadowing as it were, but everything he does is set up in advance and returned to repeatedly before it happens. By contrast, Gamzee’s foreshadowing consists of what, stating that typing in all lowercase feels unnatural and mentioning that he wants to make Equius happy?
i headcanon dave as a white cis guy because i find the journey of him going from perceiving himself as white/straight/cis and having all the internalized ignorant, privileged bullshit that comes with that crumble the fuck down when realizing hes not actually one of those things is the most satisfying version of dave to me. why? because i live in the whitest city in america and am surrounded by white people and their bullshit. when i was a baby and my family went on vacation to mexico to visit my grandparents soon after buying a house here, our xenophobic white neighbor went into our yard and broke one of our windows and our door gate in order to try to scare us into moving away because he didnt like that a spanish-speaking latino family moved next to him. with dave i like exploring how someone who grew up in this shit society that caters to white straight cis men can go through some kind of introspection and reject it. its vindictive and compelling to me personally, because of my personal experiences.
this is NOT a “dave is white and cis and this is why youre wrong if you dont agree” post – my point is ultimately everyone has different life experiences and finds different things compelling for a multitude of different reasons, some of which may not be obvious at first glance to you. so all these posts going around insisting that people who headcanon dave and dirk as white because of arbitrary reasons like “theyre stridercest shippers” (fucking yuck) or whatever the fuck bullshit are shortsighted as hell. next time you see a post that goes “all people who have inconsequential headcanon X are all HORRIBLE THING Y” when those two things dont even have anything to do with each other or “you have to headcanon Z thing or else youre fucking scum” just realize its a thinly veiled attempt to smear people because of 1.its an attempt to kick up drama because of fandom stagnation 2.its people trying to position themselves as morally superior to everyone else and pat themselves on the back over what is frankly some grade A stupid shit
Flying through Storytelling 