Yup! Sollux also immediately recognizes his Exile as an outside voice come to think of it, although he conflates it with another voice of the damned and rejects it’s direction intensely.
Sweet catch!
Tag: analysis asks
So now that you finished the Class essays (which I love BTW), what’s next on your to-do list. No rush or anything, you deserve some time to recuperate, I’m just wondering what’s your next objective
Immediately? Next week I’m uploading the next video on the Alchemy system, and my biggest priority is to get Part 2 out soon after that, and then the Medium video after that still so I can enter the next round of Patron-voted videos laying out the game mechanics in the Medium. Really excited to get to that next phase and EXTREMELY excited for the Alchemy videos to be out because I’ve been hyped about these for months now.
I want to write two metaposts at some point, one on Jane’s arc and one on Davekat and the Alpha Timeline. Unfortunately I have no time table on when I’ll get to either–my need for a sustainable income is getting pretty dire and I NEED a job, so I’m scaling way down on my writing efforts and have been ramping up my job search for a while. Even once I have one, the videos are gonna be my priority, so as bad as I want to I’m not sure I can justify a ton of essay writing in the near future.
And then of course, there’s Hiveswap and the Epilogue, which could drop at any time and add more stuff onto my plate. Once Hiveswap comes out, priority #1 will be to play through it and put out some videos introducing Hiveswap fans to Homestucks’ lore through whatever hooks the game presents. I could write about Grandpa as he relates to Jake already, but I’d like more textual grounding in Hiveswap before I do something like that, and a sense of what Hiveswap fans will care about and be interested in so I know how to pitch it better.
and who knows how the Epilogue could change what I want to write about in the near future.
The bottom line is my objective is everything. I have all the irons in the fire, and I’m juggling them as fast as my irl responsibilities allow me to.
Force and Flow — Know and Change – optimisticDuelist – Medium
Here’s the last one of this Classpect essay series! This is on the Know and Change pair, the quartet of classes closest to the Spectrum:
Mage and Seer & Heir and Witch
Coming soon will be:
- More Homestuck Explained videos, covering Homestuck’s core themes from beginning to end
- Writing about Jane Crocker, Davekat, the Alpha Timeline… .
- Hiveswap lore and analysis, linking the game to Hiveswap once it comes out and probably handing streams and such if all goes well!
- And more stuff as I think of it, too. Really, figuring out the Classpect system made me realize we’ve only scratched the surface of Homestuck (it keeps happening), and this is only the beginning of a new extreme.
If you can spare me a buck a month you can help me make all this content and, like, not die and stuff– and get your hands on it earlier, too! Higher reward tiers will let you invite friends to the Discord so they can access this stuff and talk about it, too!
Feel free to @ me, reblog or send me an ask with your thoughts on these first two essays. There may be some things I can’t answer as they will be answered in later posts, but I might use those as inspiration for what teasers to release from sections of the next two essays over the course of the week.
You can also feel free to talk to me in the Hiveswap Discord where I moderate and cry about Homestuck. I’m very interested in seeing how my thoughts stand up to scrutiny, so don’t be shy!
[Active/Passive Masterpost] [Destroy and Create] [Serve and Steal]
You want feedback? Sure.
Ok so the last time I reblogged one
of these I asked about Dancestors, and I’m about to bring them up again
because god damn do i think i can dancestor.I read the bit you wrote about how Heirs must claim Independence from the will of their aspect, and how Heirs control their aspect, and I thought about the Heri you didn’t mention. Mituna.
Was Mituna a successful or failed Heir? On one hand, Mituna DID change the doom of the alpha trolls, but he also succumbed to doom and burned himself out. I ended up attributing this to Captor duality shenangians, but while i was looking at the wiki page, i noticied something that threw me for a loop.
To quote from Aranea’s exposition, “
He
was gifted with vision twofold, and had strong prophetic insights
wherever a 8leak future was concerned. He had much to say when it came
to warning us a8out the path of doom and destruction we were all headed
for, 8ut no one took him very seriously.”His attempt at emulating one of the Knowledge classes cements, at least in my mind, your Classpect views as canon.
to sum up a longwinded spiel, yours are some good damn posts.
Oh shit you’re right! And that lines up perfectly considering Sollux is Mituna’s mythological forebear, too.
I had only detected one instance of a character picking up a Prophet’s mythological Role–Karkat, the only character besides the actual Prophets described as having issued a prophecy in the form of his shitty shipping grid, and who’s forebear is obviously the Signless, as prophety as it gets.
You just added another to my roster though, so thanks! That owns 😀
I’m sure mine aren’t exactly CANON in that I’m probably getting some stuff wrong/missing other stuff (like this), but I do think we’ve gotten significantly closer! I’m excited as hell. Thanks!
Force and Flow — Know and Change – optimisticDuelist – Medium
I have to say I don’t really understand why people think Heir is a passive class. When I think about it I always see it as active, for a few reasons. One is that no Heirs I’ve seen acted particularly passive(except in the process of failure). Also if I’m not imagining things, the connection between The Choice’s answer and the player’s passive/active alignment. I might be wrong, I just cannot think of Heirs as passive.
I’m not sure what you mean about the Choice and the player’s active/passive alignment? I never detected any difference there.
I read Heirs as passive for the same reason I do Knights, Sylphs, Seers, and so on: They’re more group-oriented and reactive to what others think than their Active counterparts.
John acted passively in success a good number of times. His first time using the Breeze was fundamentally in reaction to WV’s insistence. He takes direction from Rose and Vriska and Terezi at various points, following someone else’s direction for almost the entirety of his quest much like Rose and Dave (Jade is a notable inversion of this). And he exerts his power primarily for the benefit of Others even when he does use it actively. The list goes on.
However, I do hold that John acts actively pretty often, as part of my argument that Seers/Mages/Heirs/Witches are the most flexible classes who have the easiest time veering between Yin and Yang states, as I argued in my Change/Know essay.
your post on jade harley was very good! you should do something like that for john some time, too. if you want to anyway.
ahahahahah you are in luck my pal, my essay on the Change and Know classes is going public tonight and it mainly covers John on the Change side since I already covered Jade in that essay!
revolutionaryduelist said: Definitely the latter, I mean–I only picked up on the fairy god troll and gnome things because you messaged me! I’d be curious to know who you pair with Sylph/Maid and what the root of your disagreement is, if you find you have the time–but hopefully my reasoning will come into clearer focus with the next two essays :B
Thank You!! 😀
In answer to your question @revolutionaryduelist to be honest you’ve sold me on the Sylph/Maid pairing more than anyone else (Dahni, BKEW, etc) has. The root of my disagreement now is definitely more that I just can’t see Heirs and Witches being a pair?
Hmmm yeah, it looks to me like most of this is stuff I address in some way or another over the next two essays, so I’m going to play a bit coy with the caveat that I’m excited to hear what thoughts/critiques you have of those when they come out 😉
I do want to respond to some stuff, though:
I do want to clarify, I think the key verb for Heirs and Witches is “Change”, not “Manipulate”, which I’d regard as a more specific sub-verb that could fall under the Change label.
The Master/Servant dynamic you suggest is interesting, but it suggests Knights are Active to Page’s Passive, which I strongly disagree with now (I used to consider it true). I will say you’re closer than you think though, because according to wikipedia Pages were already considered Knights in Training anyway–a Squire is just a pretty well-trained Page, so you don’t need the middle step.
In fact, reconsidering Knights and Pages is where all this started. I’ve already written about them extensively in public, though I have a lot to add in the essay about them, but the gist is that I consider them the closest thing to a “Give” class, and thus the obvious counterpoint to Thieves/Rogues.
I think you’re onto something with the connection between Witches and Fairies in particular, btw–nothing I have super canonical evidence for outside of Jane, but suffice it to say I DO think there are ways classes thematically resonate with each other even if they’re not paired–just like many think Aspects do. It brings some interesting stuff to light, in my view.
As for the Unifying Myths, I currently only use Unifying Myths that are, in canon, tied to particular classes. IE: Ones that recur again and again related specifically to a pair of classes (instances of roleplay like Vriska’s also show up to muddy the waters elsewhere, but they are similarly resolved.), and which tell us interesting things about how both classes can be read.
Hence why I don’t list any for Prince/Bard and Rogue/Thief–I could probably hazard some guesses, but they don’t seem thematically or mechanically tied together by any notable trends I’d feel comfortable pointing to, other than the obvious key verbs we were given in the first place.
I also want to say that I struggled for the longest time with Heirs/Witches exactly because of this–I tossed some guesses, but hadn’t identified a Unifying Myth for them. I also struggled with the “Change” verb for a long time because it felt too broad to me, before I finally parsed it in a way that made sense along with “Know”.
If you think about it, all the classes Know things about their aspect or through their aspect, too. So whether you use Know or Understand, the Seer/Mage pair also seems sort of redundant. I think the relative broadness of these verbs is intentional, and is the reason why Eridan beat out Sollux in their little magic duel.
I don’t want to spoil the surprise as to how I think Change/Know work because I’m really proud of that essay in particular, but I owe a debt to a couple pals for pointing me in the right direction there, because I was honestly about to make these posts with a big old :shrug: for the Heir/Witch dynamic before I made the links that changed everything. That wasn’t a purposeful pun, I promise.
Also, I’ll let you know if you come off mean or something, but for now you’ve seemed entirely earnest and in good faith about this stuff, and I love having to question and shore up my views to make sure they actually do hold up under scrutiny! I appreciate the insight a lot and you’ve been great, no worries 🙂
Secondly how sure are you that calliope is a reliable source. She may be for the good of the kids, but she spent her time theorizing, and has admitted her theories were false, and holding back information, while simultaneously ignoring caliborn, who despite wanting to force himself to succeed, took a liking to Jake and revealed information about the page, claiming they are to serve, both serve their aspect, serve their allies, and to serve via ass kicking, and he had no quarrels with spoilers.
I’m pretty sure Caliborn’s information came from going back and reading through Calliope’s archives, if I remember right? He told Jake he did so in that conversation I believe, but I’ll have to check later.
I am completely certain Calliope is mostly reliable. She’s wrong about one thing–the Gender distributions–and those she draws from the pools of the session she has available. But Ying/Yang principles are posited to be a universal tenet of Homestuck’s reality (and many people believe our own reality too), so if Calliope is inclined to see the Class system that way, I think it’s very likely she’s right about it.
The other thing is that without being able to trust Calliope, Homestuck’s Class system really IS broken and incomprehensible. If you believe her, then suddenly it makes total sense and is absolutely fascinating and has practically limitless depth. From a writing perspective, why would Hussie go to the trouble to including all of that in logs if we were meant to completely dismiss her?
Basically I think Homestuck is a well-told story, so here where the information is delivered with care, time and attention and lines up perfectly with Homestuck’s wider themes and mechanics, I think it’s worth just taking the alien girl at her word.
Interesting theroy. But I have a few quarries about it. First off I was wondering why you placed pages as active and knights as passive. I personally see them as switch (going from active to passive and vice versa) with the Knight defending their persona and growing to take it off and protect their allies, and pages starting allowing themselves to be used by others and growing to allow themselves to actually take charge for themselves.
Well, that would be Spoilers™ so for the most part I’m gonna abstain from answering and say that you’ll know why I placed them where I did within the next couple weeks–looking like next week if the current votes are anything to go by.
But I will say I don’t think you’re too far off! The nature of the Active/Passive spectrum factors in here, and hopefully once you see the post you’ll know what I mean 😉
think Jake would ever try to get into a scrum with Dave?
Definitely yes and it would probably result in pretty bad conflict, but if Jake gets told about the Bro stuff then he won’t. It IS possible that given time/centuries Dave will eventually be comfortable with wrestling and roughousing, but I doubt he’d be interested in full-blown sparring like Jake and Dirk like to do. I do think sparring is an interest Karkat could pick up provided Dirk and Jake were encouraging and patient about it though!
ok thoughts on the overarching themes of gay love as a force for good and m/f love/straightness in general as a force of destruction in homestuck? like eridan’s killing spree prompted by his relationship or lack thereof with feferi, caliborn being the ultimate villain and also a stand in for awful straight men online, the meteor crew falling apart with toxic m/f relationships and love triangles but saved by davekat and vrisrezi and a bunch of other examples that wont fit in the ask
My thoughts are: It’s great and I love it, though I do think there are some circumstances where m/f is presented well (I do still ship Johnroxy and Johnrezi, but not to the exclusion of the obviously canon and thoroughly goddamn transcendent f/f pairings for both Roxy and Terezi. I’m not sure how exactly that’s going to work out–assuming John DOES end up dating anyone, it’s possible he won’t and he’ll be aroace and that would be cool too– but I have some guesses.)
Beyond what I wrote in my Lilith in Starlight post and what I want to write with regards to Davekat, though, I don’t have many thoughts worth putting to text yet. That’s mainly because I’m honestly not sure exactly how the nature of the Vrisrezi situation will resolve, and so I’m waiting for the epilogue before I draw any conclusions I feel are worth asserting there.
My honest hope there is that Terezi’s gay gay gay love will find a way to save/redeem Vriska, and possibly even save both (Terezi) and (Vriska) as well. But that is just a hope, and a guess at what I think is at least a plausibility. In the interest of being practical about where I devote my screaming about Homestuck, I’m waiting to see what direction Homestuck ultimately goes in before saying more about the romances, for that and other reasons.
So basically, for now my thoughts are contained in Lilith in Starlight. Eventually there’ll be stuff about Davekat if I can ever manage it, but now that I finished writing the best most important thing i’ve ever written and will be posting within today and tomorrow, I’m currently going to back off from writing meta for a while and focus on video editing and also, uh, you know–getting a job. Still a thing I have to do.
So I guess uh. Keep an eye out?
Flying through Storytelling 