The god of Light AND Wisdom? Certainly vibes with the “Light as Sophia” interpretation I’ve been going with. I think you’re onto something–I’ll have to go back and reread that text.
Sweet catch!
Fuck I had a realization
I was reminded last night that Calliope had referred to passive/active classes with a +/- designation– passive is +, active is -. I think this has been a kind of enduring fandom mystery, as to why she chose + for passive and – for active, rather than, say, the other way around? Or why use +/- for this concept at all??
But I was thinking about this question and it hit me like a fucking thunderstroke.
Batteries.
Batteries!!!!
A battery is composed of, and I am likely simplifying this greatly due to my limited understanding but stick with me here, an anode with a negative charge (-) and a cathode with a positive charge (+). The anode has an excess of electrons, which creates an imbalance in a system that really really wants to be balanced. The cathode has relatively few electrons, which makes it the perfect place for all those excess electrons in the anode to go so they can correct the imbalance. When the anode and the cathode are connected, the electrons flow from the anode to the cathode, creating a circuit– and that’s the magic that makes batteries work!
Active and passive classes are distinguished in a number of possible ways, but to my understanding, they can by and large be explained this way: active classes act, passive classes react. Active classes are the source from which most of the action flows, but passive classes facilitate and allow the action to be. In this way, they’re a lot like the anode and the cathode– one being the font of influence, the other being its conduit.
I would super love if dyed-in-the-wool classpect theorycrafters could tell me what they think of this idea, because I mostly just read and very rarely contribute to this sort of discussion. But I THINK I’m on to something here.
Huh, that makes sense.
Good observation. It kind of bashes the theory that active classes are inherently self-aggrandizing and all the actions are directed towards the self and that passive classes are directed toward others as support. Good job!
Well, that certainly wasn’t my intent. My hope was that it could be largely compatible with other passive/active theorizing I had been reading, including that one, but particularly with the Daoist reading– passive/+ as yin and active/- as yang– which was a major inspiration for this post and totally dovetails with the battery metaphor imo. (i am basically indirectly @’ing @revolutionaryduelist here so i may as well @ them directly– this idea came to me while reading up on their classpect writing.)
There’s a decent amount of wiggle room here, I think, so there’s no need to define these terms too strictly. I vastly prefer viewing these sorts of things cooperatively versus competitively. 😀
I’m inclined to agree with this completely. I think someone once told me something similar but I didn’t quite get it at the time, actually? But yeah this seems like it makes sense to me, thanks for bringing it up!
It doesn’t really conflict with the selfish/selfless readings for me, either.
Calliope says the active/passive dichotomy is complex and can mean many different things, and I regard the selfish/selfless thing as being indicative of a broad trend or a habitual default for the character, not a hard rule.
Another way to understand the division is that Active classes are simply more self-defined and self-focused, so their impacts on reality emerge much more from within themselves and their willingness to force reality into their ideal shape.
Passive classes tend to conform more to the status quo and tend to act to return stability to a disturbed/unbalanced system, so they’re more sensitive to the influences and nuances of the world around them.
It’s also worth noting that both the Selfish and Selfless extremes are just indicative of trends, in my view. A healthy example of any kind of player will ultimately just come to understand their own thought patterns and reach a balance that works for them & those around them, not just blindly revel in the satisfaction of their natural affinity.
This is worth clearing up for me since apparently I’ve given some the impression that, like, Jake being a selfish jerk to Dirk is perfectly ok because thats just his Class? So it’s worth clarifying that I just think it’s understandable, rooted in actual desire for Dirk and his company, and is a problem they can both work out over time.
This turned into talking about dirkjake again of course so im gonna stop here but bottom line is: good post op i dig this
Yeah I checked out of the anime pretty quickly. It’s possible those are more accurate! Like I said, I’d need to replay the games and finish the franchise to be sure my thoughts are the same as they are now, and I’m not really doin that anytime soon
that dave post where i literally said dave had feelings for jade and john concurrently, you mean?
I don’t know what you think you’re picking up on, but it’s pretty obvious you’ve made up your mind about me and are looking for evidence to prove your point, anon. Which is hilarious, since it’s what you’re accusing me of doing.
But for the sake of clarity, I’ll humor you. I’m guessing this is about Dave, in which case, I think the canon is pretty clear he’s bisexual and attracted to both male and female characters (Hell, I read Jake as likely nonbinary, and he takes note of him that way, so). I implied otherwise exactly nowhere, but feel free to point to whatever you found in favor of that point, and I’ll explain myself.
Also, again, I ship roxygen and johncalliroxy when i ship john at all. I mean. I think he could easily turn out to be greyace or bi because Homestuck is an evolving story, but as far as the canon curretly stands I consider him straight. I’ve said this before. So like, idk where you’re coming from here.
i guess not really? i’d never considered it, but i’d say any aspect player is going to be a pure version of their class because both class and aspect have their own motifs that interlink.
The Master classes are weird, so Lord is also a solid possibility. I went for Muse because Junko leads less by direct control than she does by inspiring and motivating others into adopting her ideology–a Lord commands through Orders, a Muse commands through Ideas or Inspiration. Neither one is to be underestimated, imo.
Higher castes live longer and tend to be more vicious. While lower castes have shorter lifespans (even without the drones hunting them) and are naturally attuend to become psychics.
Just because you want to force political correctness unto a race of violent space dominators and establish that racism is bad in our world doesn’t mean it’s a lie among the trolls.
1) Charming. Do you get invited to parties often when you open rebuttals to people’s points with “you fuckin dumb”?
2) All this, and yet, Beforus managed to handle the exact same physical differences with a system that didn’t necessitate genocide and slavery! Hm, how about that! It’s almost like the eerie bargain the Alpha trolls made that allowed Scratch onto Alternia had some sort of impact on their society. Interesting. Almost like…the racism and exploitation was a bad thing? Huh.
3) Before you even go there, no, Beforus is not as bad as Alternia in “a different way”. Alternia is explicitly presented as a fall from grace for Trollkind, and it’s brutal, and it’s awful, and it’s Lord English’s fault. Don’t make me dig up the screencaps just please go actually read Homestuck. Systems of exploitation are bad and unnecessary across the board–no physical differences justify exploitation and brutality. Period.
And another thing about the source of STRENGTH thing. I don’t think that’s right either. Equius is plenty strong in his own. The reason why him and every other Zahhak followed it (in relation to how the hemocaste was in each alternate universe) was because they are incredibly dependent on SYSTEMS. Everything has to be in their right place, everyone doing what they’re meant to do. If someone doesn’t fit in the system it confuses and flusters them.
Equius is physically strong because that’s a mutation endemic to his blood color, of which he seems to be a particularly exceptional example. He values the blood that marks him as someone physically strong quite similarly to how Caliborn values physical strength itself.
And he values the system that takes that physical trait of his and tells him he’s special for it, tells him he’s Above Others due to something he was born with, which is objectively. Not. True. There is nothing about Equius that makes him intrinsically better than anyone else–he just treats others that way because the system he so values conditions him into believing there is. Yes, of course he’s reliant on the system on which he predicates his entire self-worth.
“Confuses and flusters” him? Sure. And on Alternia, he would’ve acted on that confusion and fluster by exploiting, hurting, or reporting others to the authorities. He’s a Good Troll by alternian standards. This is how systems of oppression work. None of this does much to counteract my point, or…make Equius’ ideology more palatable? Is that what you’re trying to do here? It sounds unbelievable, but I’m not sure what else you could be going for.
It took him being killed, get his moirail killed, be revived as a sprite, getting combined with a horse AI, and finally reuniting with his moirail but he did change at the very, very end when it would even matter. Either way, the changed Equius is what was finally put into LE.
Yes, at which point the “changed Equius” was promptly devoured by Caliborn’s soul and integrated into LE like so many spare puppet parts. Caliborn predominated–that’s what he does. The other souls incorporated into LE are little more than amalgamations of interests and puppets for him. Equius has no blame or agency in this–it’s simply a way he fulfills his Class role by “becoming” Void. Not reallyyy sure what this is supposed to tell me.
god i hope so, but who knows
Ok so first of all I have to say that the idea that Dirk and Jake’s relationship seriously wavered on any level but the superficial “are we officially dating” one is, imo, inaccurate. The boys are in love, they love each other and are best friends and this is true across the board for the Alphas.
Thanks a lot for your message though, and I’ve been meaning to say something about John and Dave’s relationship for a while now so sure, I’ve got a bit to say for you.
predictably as hell this got really long, so meet me under the cut.
But to talk about them, I’m going to have to talk about a different pair of friends who grow up together, first. One underexplored element of Homestuck that I’ve always found interesting is how Classpect seems to reflect, to a degree, how characters take influence from their societies.
I’ve written plenty about Jake and Jane in this regard, but I think John is maybe my favorite example for how nuanced it is.
A great example of what I’m talking about is Equius and Vriska’s contrasting relationships with the Hemospectrum. Namely, Equius, the Void player, values it greatly, while Vriska, a Light player, regards it as a bunch of bullshit.
What Vriska DOES put value in is how it affects circumstance–how it makes people see Tavros, how it makes people see her, the very real burdens of responsibility and societal expectation it puts on everyone. THAT’S real.
THAT matters to her.
But the ideology itself is a bunch of baloney, and Vriska picks up on that almost instinctually. Now let’s take stock of what the Hemospectrum is in the story.
It is, simultaneously:
1) A source of STRENGTH, at least for Equius.
2) Inherently irrelevant and unimportant to anything about any of the characters except how it makes society treat them.
3) Explicitly a lie.
4) Most importantly for our purposes: Entirely physical.
True to Homestucks’ Gnostic roots, unlike true ideas that the characters reason out over the course of the story, information that is unimportant, irrelevant, and built upon markers of physical identity is inherently coded with Void, as the aspect of all things false, unfortunate, unimportant and untrue. The world of the physical Yaldabaoth creates in Gnosticism is coded not just as the world of lies and physicality, but also as the world of Darkness. Hence the link.
For Homestuck, this means that that sort of information has a source. It can be traced on a timeline, just like any other objects in the story, because information like the Hemospectrum amounts to what is essentially a bad meme.
For the Hemospectrum, that source is Equius, who first inherits that incredibly unimportant information from his society and then becomes nothing when he succumbs to its influence, allowing Gamzee to kill him.
Now here’s the kicker: Eventually, Equius (along with Gamzee) becomes the source of the Hemospectrum himself, becoming part of Lord English and so explaining how LE got the idea to impose such a complicated system in the first place.
In essence, once he becomes part of LE, the hemospectrum itself is Equius’ most lasting legacy on the plot, a time loop to rival Gamzee’s RIDICULOUS proliferation of clown-themed horror across the cosmos. Equius has truly become Void in this regard, a potent undercurrent for Heirs.
Now let’s talk about Dave finally.
So like while it’s true that John and Dave’s friendship is mostly wholesome as fuck and really sturdy, I’m going to complicate that narrative a bit on both extremes.
One of the things I’ve always found appealing about Dave is how intensely devoted he is to his friends growing up–which makes sense when you consider how unhappy he says he was in his home life.
If Dave has a penchant for rapping ad nauseum and talking to his friends even after they leave to humorous extremes early on, well–that has at least something to do with the fact that he’s using them as an escape from his nightmarish childhood.
This devotion is more than just him being very giving and caring–he’s invested in all of the other betas emotionally, and it matters to them how they feel about him. Maybe none moreso than John, even years and lots of chilling out later.
And it plays into Davesprite’s lost sense of self in a big way. When John rejects him in favor of “Real Dave”, Davesprite is genuinely hurt and angry, and John continues to aggravate those feelings of displacement during the 3 year journey on the ship. John’s perception of him MATTERS to Dave.
And a lot of what made Dave’s childhood awful was his internalization of heroism as linked to not just Bro’s weird hypermasculine bullshit, but also explicitly to heterosexuality.
Dave compares himself unfavorably to John as a hero, and knowing what we know about him now, it’s pretty reasonable to put Dave’s struggles with his attractions to men at the root of it.
And given how similar Jade and John are and his obvious romantic interest in Jade, I’ve always read him as being just as interested in John–just closeted and repressed about it.
Which means that all of those gay jokes he and John partook in had an effect on Dave far beyond what they had on John, which I think is really interesting.
Also interesting, though, is how John reveals he parsed all of those things growing up:
As jokes. See, John also inherits a lot of his culture’s toxic ideology, like Equius does. But unlike Equius, John doesn’t inherit it as information to value and define himself by.
Breath is the aspect of detachment and levity, and fittingly, John inherits these toxic masculinity-enforcing cultural memes as a series of jokes! Stuff he says, but doesn’t think about. Stuff not particularly worth “taking seriously”.
So his relationship to masculinity is a lot less fraught and intense–partly because he fits the mold more neatly than Dave, but also partly because he simply didn’t actually believe the stuff he was saying.
Here, John is a depiction of the straight dude who makes shitty jokes and claims to be “just kidding”, except that John actually IS just kidding, and so he doesn’t really force the issue or focus on it.
That doesn’t mean that toxic masculinity hasn’t had an effect on him–he still struggles with cultural shifts to a degree. But I like that Homestuck allows for different levels of impact of these cultural memes across individuals. This stuff doesn’t affect everyone equally, and it doesn’t affect everyone quite the same way.
On top of that, it’s a good example of the fact that even a genuinely good person who doesn’t believe this stuff can have a negative effect on people they care about by transmitting these cultural cues. Because it’s the memes themselves that are toxic.
Flying through Storytelling 