rabbits only flop over like that if they feel completely safe btw
to elaborate: bunnies are prey animals and almost never have their guard down– even when they’re resting they’ll usually have their back legs in a position that allows them to quickly run away. if they’re jumping around it means they’re extremely happy!! and if they flop down w/o a care that means they feel very very comfortable and safe to the point of not having to worry about their surroundings. ^__^
This is just the happiest video IMO.
“PLAY! FUN! Happy! Play?” *looks at dog* “No, no play? Naps? Okay. Naps.” *flop*
friendly reminder that you are allowed to write selfishly. Your writing is allowed to be self-indulgent. You can have self-insert characters. Your stories can be pure wish-fulfillment.
Sometimes we get so caught up in wanting to please the theoretical reader that we forget our writing is first and foremost for us. It’s our art, our self-expression, and we do it for our passion and our joy.
Use other voices and perspectives to grow your own perspective and bring more to your writing. But you don’t owe it to anyone to create art for them, the way they want it.
As we all know, we face an upcoming postal vote on marriage equality. Due to the sheer anger and frustration of this unecessary beauracracy, many have urged those voting Yes to send their vote back packaged with glitter bombs or rainbow confetti in protest.
DO NOT DO THIS!!
Your vote will likely be destroyed and therefore not counted. And arguing that “glitter isnt dangerous” doesnt mean shit to people who just see a foreign substance detected and immeadiately assume the worst (Anthrax anyone??)
If you won’t take my word, at least take MP Claire O’Neil’s, who was asked:
PLEASE, do not fuck up this crutial vote for everyone by being stupid and getting your voice dismissed like this. Put stickers on the envelope, draw rainbows on it, if you must protest in this way be smart about it.
Even if you’re not Australian, you’d be doing us a solid to spread the word, since unfortunately a lot of younger voters still think this is a good idea when its literally the opposite.
Sooo I’m a bit late but I was inspired by @davekatweek first day prompt, “Before-Canon” to finally do something I’ve been wanting to for a long time, hoped you enjoyed!
Lesbians who say they’ll never date a girl that has touched a man. People that say bi girls will cheat because they’re bi. There’s so much biphobia not only with straight people, but in the gay community
my lesbian friends who told me they were “high-key disappointed” when i started dating a cishet boy. my ex girlfriend who asked me “wait weren’t you gay” and then when i explained i was bi went “um. ew lol”. the whole “gold star lesbian” bullshit. can we face the biphobia in the lgbt community instead of shoving it under the rug lol
The binary system of Aspects is wrong! Just completely unable to be true.
Why? Because Aspects aren’t one single thing that matches up neatly with one other singular Aspect. Parts of the Aspects will of course make neat little parallels, or opposites. But the WHOLE Aspect? No, not a chance.
Example: Void! (I love Void, you can’t help but love your own Aspect, I feel) Void is described as primarily the essence of Lack, but also of Obfuscation. It’s often paired with Light, and on some notes I agree! Part of Void is “Lack of Clarity/Knowledge” and part of Light is “Knowledge/Understanding”**. Nice and clear opposites!
But, and here’s where a lot of Classpect*** theories start to fall apart: Void is not described and cannot reasonably assumed to be “Lack of Fortune”. You can’t really just put “lack” in front of a word and make it – Tah Dah! – Void-y. Likewise, Light isn’t described as “the essence of being”. On these facets, the comparison makes no sense! So saying that “Light is just Not!Void” as an end all be all of the conversation is just…not true.
But you know what is the opposite of Void’s “nothing”? Space! and that’s something you never see mentioned: Space is sometimes an opposite, sometimes intermingled with Void!
This kind of component-based analysis of Aspects make so so so much more comprehensive, it’s such a better tool to describe Aspects (or just in general).
And it makes for so many really interesting comparisons! Light and Rage have a few stark similarities! Hope and Void do too, in some ways! Time and Doom. Blood and Time. Space and Life. Breath and Heart. Heart and Time. There’s lots of similar or “opposite” facets of these Aspects, and they are usually lost if you’re only concerned about “yeah, but whats the nega-Breath? What’s the anti-Mind? What’s the bizarro-Hope?”
* There’s two theories, this one and the one I’m railing against lol ** I see Light as more of “Interpretation” as a core, and “Fortune” as a semi-related concept. *** Probably could have changed this to “classpect theorists” meh
It’s not only the opposites between aspects but the similarities that are missed with the Aspect Duality system. Space is related to Life via frog breeding. Space is opposed by Hope via their female/male and successful/failed sexuality, respectively. Void is opposed by both Light and Space, as described by OP – and also that the symbol of Void consists of the “voids” within the Space symbol (I’m p sure this was confirmed by Hussie, but I can’t find a source) – yet Light and Space don’t seem to have much of anything in common of either opposites or similarities. Life and Breath are also the same symbol, turned sideways, and Doom and Time both have the gear motif in their symbols in addition to their general themes of death and inevitability.
Unfortunately, it’s also difficult to isolate the influence of the Aspects from the individual characters. Space is female sexuality through frog breeding, Rosemary, and Porrim’s red flings – basically the only successful flush relationships in the entire comic – but then again the Maryams are both Virgo, and Jade hasn’t had a successful relationship yet. Life and Breath seem related through their perseverance and ability to keep moving forward, but then again so are Jane and John. Same with Heart and Time, due to Dirk and Dave. And hell, same with Void and Light as opposites, due to Roxy and Rose.
There are some Aspects that work well in opposing pairs. Space and Time, obviously, and even more so since that’s one of the pairs Hussie started with (the other being Light and Breath). (<– Rachel also says inversion isn’t a thing at that link.) I also think that Heart and Mind are solid opposites, despite seriously disagreeing with the way that most of the fandom jumped to the emotion vs logic, duh!!! conclusion and rarely looks further.
But a few pairs doesn’t prove the existence of the entire system.
If you guys don’t mind me chiming in, I have a bit of a counterpoint. I basically agree that there are all sorts of resonances between the Aspects, and that the focus on the established binaries tends to make people miss them. I think this is unfortunate because we definitely lose a lot of depth that way.
However, the pairs themselves are still real. I would not describe them as opposites, but rather as specifically dichotomous or, better yet, complementary, as Tex Talks describes them.
This is because I don’t think that, for example, Void lacking a connotation of misfortune (an idea I’d argue against anyway) means that Void does not present an existential counterpoint to Light. The symmetries don’t have to be perfectly exact to paint a compelling picture in the broad strokes.
i DO say u can arrange aspects in contrasting or dichotomous pairs. however, i DON’T think that has an impact into how acting against one’s class manifests.
And in the quote you linked to from her, there’s an interesting little tidbit of information.
Andrew said that he started with Light and Breath, and then Time and Space, as the things you need for creation. Light and Breath being the more metaphysical concepts (especially influenced by Western canon/Christian thought, given that that’s deeply fused to our culture), Time and Space being the more quantifiable ones.
Which actually suggests more strongly than anything that there are indeed Aspect pairs, given the source Hussie was drawing on. I’ll be posting an essay on this on Monday so I’m not gonna go into much depth here, but I’m talking about the Gnostic concept of Aeons.
Gnosticism is pretty much a conglomerate of obscure Christian mystic and alternative spiritual practices, and it is definitely part of the canon softowl references, since it’s where Abraxas and Yaldabaoth get their names and theres all sorts of other references to it in the story.
The Gnostic gist is that, n the “Nothing” before Creation, the One True God/Source of Light and Knowledge emanates a series of Idea-Gods known as “Aeons”. These Aeons were created in pairs, and were meant to create reality by working together “in harmony”.
So what you’ve got is beings of God-like power, bonded in pairs, who together create all of reality, yet exist entirely as Ideas rather than existing as concrete, physical entities. And Ideas are essentially what the Aspects are–conveyed as they are entirely through symbols, color and thought rather than specific language or concrete physicality.
As with Yin-Yang’s applicability to the Active/Passive spectrum and Classes, the Gnostic concept of Aeons seems to be the closest analogue to Homestuck I’ve seen yet, so I think it’s worth bringing up here. Understanding the Aspects as akin to Gods also sort of helps me imagine how they might be understood to have “Wills” of any sort, as Calliope implies.
As with the last one, hope this helps or that you found it interesting!
I’m realising at how I can barely afford any food with the amount of money i have in my bank account and that i will have to pay like £700 for rent and a deposit for my student residence. On top of that I have just learned that the fucking royal mail lost an important package of keys to my estate agents from last year so now they will probably have to change the locks and charge me for it. I get student finance but despite the fact i’ve done everything right they haven’t received my declaration form so while i’m sending that again who knows when i’m actually getting paid while i try to survive on savings and get a job. I’m not here to ask for free money but I do have a commissions post here it’s not much but maybe you have an oc or you’ve thought about your land stuff or something i don’t know. Thanks for reading this and I never thought I’d have to rely on my commissions so I really hope not to have to for long.
aS is cool as heck and made my sprite, as well as the sprite for my planet! I highly suggest checking his stuff out if you have the cash!
Just wanted to chime in for a second about this question:
Can a player appear entirely active even if they are in a passive class? How closely does active/passive relate to the player’s actions? How much did Rose’s status as a Derse dreamer affect the activity/passivity of her class? How good is Hussie’s storytelling, actually? What else might the readers be wrong about?
Because as it happens, Hussie’s actually talked about it. I usually don’t do word of god stuff, but this particular quote is handy in exemplifying how Hussie might think about the Active/Passive dichotomy.
First of all, not really. BKEW’s system is the most popular by a wide margin. Although that might be partially due to the fact that he serves as a very well-known figurehead. Theorists who think similarly to him will stumble onto his pages very easily and probably end up adopting the whole system, or something similar to it. Alternate systems, on the other hand, usually share some common theories with each other but can differ widely in the specifics based on the reader’s personal interpretations.
Also, just the fact that BKEW is so popular means that any novice reader trying to get into classpect will probably see his theories first and form their own theories based on BKEW’s system. Most of the theories I see use class/aspect concepts very similar to BKEW’s own, even if they end up at different conclusions.
Deviation from BKEW’s system is most apparent in Aspect Pairs or Aspect Duality. (I really need to fix those tags eventually.) Everyone knows BKEW’s aspect system:
LIGHT – VOID
SPACE – TIME
HEART – MIND
LIFE – DOOM
HOPE – RAGE
BREATH – BLOOD
and the next most common system is probably what I call the What Pumpkin system, named after the graphic that they had on their site and due to the fact that this aspect presentation tends to appear mostly in official Homestuck media:
BREATH – LIGHT
TIME – SPACE
MIND – HEART
LIFE – VOID
HOPE – DOOM
BLOOD – RAGE
And then there are aspect systems that differ entirely from these two. I can’t describe them all here, but I do recommend going through my Aspect Pairs/Duality tags linked above to see the ones I’ve collected so far. Those posts almost always describe each aspect, so you can compare aspect definitions from there too.
As for classes,
(This is off the top of my head so I’m sure I’ve missed a few, but I think I got the most popular ones and haven’t been too badly biased by my own theories)
Then the classes PRINCE, BARD, ROGUE, and THIEF are usually accepted as given by Calliope in-comic.
*
in my experience the theorists who suggest the Seer is active are going entirely based on in-comic evidence and have not seen the word-of-Huss that confirms the Seer is passive. (Which is really interesting to me. Can a player appear entirely active even if they are in a passive class? How closely does active/passive relate to the player’s actions? How much did Rose’s status as a Derse dreamer affect the activity/passivity of her class? How good is Hussie’s storytelling, actually? What else might the readers be wrong about?
You could also look to the passive/active nature of the classes in making some retroactive sense of the Derse/Prospit dreamer duality. Passive/active classes are also a pretty vague thing, and don’t resolve so easily into simple dualities like defensive/offensive and such. Those are the guidelines for understanding them, but there is clearly a lot of flexibility within that system. They seem to suggest tendencies rather than absolute capabilities. Like there isn’t a rule that says a passive class could never use an offensive technique. The system is meant to be very flexible, and in the story, classes suggest a little more about a hero’s path and role in the greater quest than what their battle capabilities are.
But if we’re saying active/passive literally translates to offensive/defensive for the sake of this topic, then Derse would be very active and Prospit would be very passive. Derse’s job is to attack. Prospit’s is to defend. This seems to carry over to the roles of the dreamers too. Dave and Rose turned out to be very active players. Dave time traveling all over the place, making a fortune on stocks and such. Rose went on her crazy solo mission to break the game and fight Jack. Jade and John had more passive roles through most of that, players who were “acted upon” by other players and circumstances. John was always being led around by trolls this way and that, drifting around wherever the wind took him. Jade was especially passive for a lot of the story, spending a lot of time falling asleep (or being put to sleep) at key moments. It wasn’t until she reached god tier as a Witch (said to be a highly active class) that she became extremely active, making lots of stuff happen, rounding up planets and all that. Rose may have been a similar case, being excessively active as a Derse dreamer, but then flipping over to a passive role upon reaching god tier as a passive class.
Being from Derse means you are from a culture of offense and aggression. Being from Prospit means the opposite. You could argue that these are qualities that either rub off on the dreamers, or they are designated as those dreamers in the first place because of those qualities. You could take the view that these are innate tendencies to overcome, as seemed to be the case for Jade and Rose. Or maybe sometimes they are tendencies that are resisted, and need to be understood and embraced. As a Prospit dreamer, did Karkat struggle because he was actually passive in nature, but had a very active self image as a leader and conqueror? Was Vriska an even more extreme case of misplaced active behavior from a Prospit dreamer? These are yet more things to consider when looking at everything contributing to the hero story of an individual in this game.
So yes, a Passive player can behave Actively, and vice versa. It’s also worth noting that Calliope’s description of Active/Passive references another existential dichotomy concerned with behavior sometimes called “active” and “passive”–the Yin-Yang.
Full disclosure: I’ve written about the implications of Yin-Yang for understanding the Active/Passive spectrum previously. While confident, I’m not married to the idea that I’m right about each pair or verb. But I do think the Yin-Yang connection itself is pretty much inarguable, and popularizing it would go a long way to improving fandom understanding of Active/Passive as a system.
hope this helps, or that you at least find it interesting!
PS: While I’m here, I feel It’s worth noting how Hussie casts doubt on the nature of Knights, leaving it pretty ambiguous as to whether the class itself is active or passive.
@revolutionaryduelist
I know your birthday was forever ago but i just got out of a convention and finished up these horribly awkward lads for ya! Thank you for putting so much thought into our beloved dumb webcomic
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA THE LITTLE BOW ON MINIHOOF GOD THIS IS SO CUTE THANK YOU
Flying through Storytelling 