ive already written a ridiculously long post on Jade. I’ve also covered Dave, John, Rose and others under the guise of classpects. When I do actual analysis content really focused on the betas it’ll probably be in video form as part of Homestuck Explained, where I eventually hope to cover everyone, as seen on the Homestuck Explained video map:
Tho there are things I want to cover eventually like Davekat, late-game Rose, and other stuff more specifically.
I can totally see that, and still think its a real possibility!
What tips the scales for me is the Archetypal background I typically associate with each Class. Prince is a Royalty class, which implies some kind of high/noble birth or status, and an internalized sense of superiority over others that the Royal must overcome to take control of his ego, and so his destructive power.
The Makaras and Amporas are the highest blooded members of the hemospectrum short of the Fuschias, and both Meenah and Feferi keep themselves rather seperate from the idea of actually being better than others due to their class–both of them renounce the title of Heiress and abandon the throne, one way or another.
The AR considers himself “above” his friends because he is a post-singularity AI, and often makes statements positioning himself as “above” their corporeality. So on.
Thief is an outlaw class, which implies being removed, outcast, or alienated from society and its rules. Nepeta and Vriska both consider the hemospectrum irrelevant, for example.
All Thieves and Rogues spend some amount of time either literally living outside mainstream society (Nepeta’s cave, Rufioh’s lost weaboos tribe, Meenah living on the moon) or thinking about living outside of it (Vriska’s fascination with Piracy).
The latter sounds a lot more like Dammek to me–living on the fringes of society in his own rebel network, a network that’s apparently robust enough to provide him with a shitload of loot and goods he wouldn’t otherwise have access to. Feels a lot more like Vriska’s hoard, gathered through roleplay exploits, than it does like Eridan’s born wealth and status.
Also Dammek is referenced using the “take” verb in Act 1, and I haven’t noticed him being linked to Royal verbs like “Destroy” or “Break” just yet. That said he is a noted revolutionary, and I’ve been thinking revolution/revolutionaries could be conceptually linked to the Royal classes for a while.
So I really do think its a possibility! I think it’ll become clearer as we figure out what makes Dammek tick. i want…more hiveswap
I’d say Light, I think? Spot on with the Lord, though.
Thing about Gwyn is that, like Caliborn, he’s also a take on the figure of the Demiurge. Yaldabaoth was somewhat of a Gnostic criticism of the Christian “angry, jealous” god, but he’s really just a version of the Patriarch Sun/Sky god.
There’s plenty of those in mythology, and Caliborn at least relates to several, it seems to me–the Egyptian god Ra, and the Greek patriarch Zeus, for starters.
Zeus is particularly interesting because the idea of the Demiurge originally surfaced in Greek philosophy, and Zeus himself was considered one such figure.
And Gwyn, with his lightning bolts and assorted pantheon, resembles Zeus more than any other fictional figure. Like all Demiurges, he’s a commander as much as a direct threat–he makes the world of Dark Souls what it is, even as he either exploits or degrades basically every single character in it.
A Lord to a T–in true Caliborn style.
(Not saying all Lords are necessarily evil or bad, btw. The Demiurge is just an interpretation of the archetype that emphasizes the Lord’s flaws and the consequences of their power, and stories that lean on the idea to explain why the world is so wrong obviously cast the Lord in a murky light.
Lots of people could point to stories of Lords who they consider positive figures, too–like ofc, the Lord God in Christianity. And that’s totally ok and just as valid–different stories will employ and interpret Archetypes in different ways, because archetypes themselves are just character patterns we recognize. They are absent of morality in and of themselves, I think.)
my current guess is that shes a witch of mind–the familiar being her viewers–but that could be roleplay or, frankly, just me/my friends reading too much into it because her text feels almost designed to be hard to classpect. there’s also some aspects of her personality that vibe with Sylph for me, so that could be her true class? idek.
she mostly seems to lack the keywords and motifs that usually make characters so clear, like diemen for example. Or maybe i’m just worse at picking out those motifs for some classes. can’t really tell.
the spotlight definitely seems to weigh heavily on her, and that could def be the influence of the Light aspect via the blue sign caste. I’m not quite sure there since again, i dont super have a read on her classpect.
but i’m guessing shes a Mind player just judging by the 3 motif and her concern with…i’ll say false appearances? Holding to a persona?
She changes the mspa reader right out the gate, forcing them to agree with her abusive philosophy to please her, and thats basically the choice at the heart of their dynamic throughout. so thats what i’m going off, insofar as i’m willing to speculate.
but to be honest, i’m not even sure these versions of the characters will necessarily line up with the versions in hiveswap. it seems incredibly likely to me that they will, which means i am inclined to consider these versions for class purposes, but ill feel a lot more confident one way or another after we get to know some more trolls this way.
Ardata feels too opaque to really say,
by design, I think.
maybe, where its relevant thematically like with Time on my Side, yeah. Main thing with music is i dont really know any music theory or anything so i would feel like im out of my depth even more than i usually do
1) The situation in the Void with LE, the Juju, and probably the beta kids
2) Terezi finding Vriska in the void, which will probably get resolved at the same time as that?
3) the alpha kids getting to leave the masterpiece stage somehow. probably johns retcon powers.
i have some pie in the sky guesses of what i hope the epilogue will involve besides that, but those seem to be the only 3 plot threads that really need to be fully resolved.
That said, I think it’s fairly likely there’ll be more, if only in the form of content teasing future content. Just a hunch, though.
Not really. Personally, I find the very idea that he did tiresome, because people only ever seem to use it to downplay the canon dirkjake built into it.
As things stand, there’s just no real reason to think so from a writing perspective. Like yeah, ok, unreliable narrators are a thing in Homestuck. But that logic doesn’t really work to just discredit whatever point a character makes that happens to be contentious.
There has to be an in-character or in-universe reason for a character’s perspective to be discredited, or it’s just bad writing. And I don’t really agree Homestuck is written badly! You might know this about me by now.
So focusing in on Caliborn.
Caliborn is quite aware of the Alpha Timeline, and the role he plays in it. He’s also pretty much the only character who actually likes the Alpha Timeline, and revels in his coming existence as Lord English.
He’s explicitly okay with and willing to endure whatever negative consequences are necessary to get him to that point, and he thinks he and his actions across his timeline make him the hottest shit ever to grace paradox space.
There’s no real reason to think he’d knowingly lie about events in the Alpha Timeline–especially the events that result in the creation of Lord English–because Caliborn is on record as thinking all of that is RAD AS FUCK! Including Jake beating him up, since its what leads to Lord English having his very name.
This comes through in the Masterpiece. Caliborn is noticeably excited to share these events with the audience, and ultimately pleased with the result of the event–he’s using it as a form of self-aggrandizement.
So if someone tells me they think Caliborn is lying about the Masterpiece, my immediate question is how–and why? And most importantly, what is there in the story to contradict or replace the Masterpiece, if we can’t accept it as part of the story?
As of right now, there isn’t anything. I wouldn’t be surprised, for example, if the Epilogue happens to cover the Masterpiece or part of the Masterpiece, and follows the Beta kid’s release from the Juju and/or the Alpha kids being picked up by John after the end.
We were viewing the Masterpiece from Caliborn’s perspective, so there could definitely be more to see after his particular role in the story is finished. I just don’t think that means Caliborn was lying, per se.
This is kinda unrelated but I’ve been thinking about it so here we go. This is basically the same as people dismissing Calliope’s exposition on the Classes–in that a critical source of exposition on a certain area of the comic, with no equivalent anywhere else in the text, goes disregarded because of some hazy claim of “unreliability.”
Remember how I said there has to be a textual reason for such a source to be disregarded on a particular point? Homestuck actually does do this with gendered classes, so it’s a good example of what I’m talking about.
Yeah, Calliope says classes are gendered–but Calliope is explicitly as susceptible to biological essentialism as anyone else in the cast, believing she’s incapable of red romance just as John believed he was incapable of black.
Think what you will of the message, but by the endgame Homestuck is loudly stating that both views are inaccurate. Calliope’s ignorance is contextualized in the text.
That she’d make certain assumptions about gender makes sense–especially if she’s working her understanding of the classes off the sample sizes in Homestuck itself–which she explicitly is, and which explicitly do have gender biases.
But that doesn’t inherently discredit every other statement she makes, especially since without the exposition she provides it becomes ridiculously harder to prove anything about Classes as a system. Almost as if the author included that text as a source of important exposition or something.
I thought your english was pretty much impeccable, I wouldn’t have picked up if you hadn’t said I think. And that’s a really great question. As it happens I decided to make this the subject of my next video completely coincidentally today. So I’m really pleased to hear someone out there was just…thinking about it already.
Here’s a preview, I guess.
Hope you like the next video 😉 I’m making a couple that sort of condense that article’s ideas into more compressed and evocative language.
That said, that essay was written way back during like, the Act 7 hype wave or so. It’s worth mentioning that the idea that LE made the Alpha Timeline is, in fact, not just a theory. It’s been decisively proven through Caliborn’s thematic link to his Denizen, Yaldabaoth.
I think reading Homestuck as a story designed by Lord English, an explicitly flawed work/world created by a flawed Demiurge figure, is basically Step 1 in having any sort of cohesive understanding of what it’s Going For on a thematic level.
I just wanted to say that I think there’s been evolution in that conversation since that essay, and if you enjoyed it you might find that stuff interesting, too.
ok lets see if i cant run through this real quick
We’ve gotta start with the fact that as the third Hope player, Jake is subject to a magical prophecy passed down from Cronus. All three Hope players roleplay Magicians at some point.
Eridan and Jake both use Hope to force an enormous amount of emotional labor out of a Life player. And both Eridan and Jake piss their respective Life players off so much they revoke a symbol of mutual friendship. Eridan does this by using willful ignorance to keep his belief in a legacy of destruction, and then selfishly choosing to destroy Hope to save his own skin.
Jake is more complicated. He actually foreshadows his own behavior when he tells John about his Grandma in his letter, back in Act 4. It’s telling that tells John he likes to be honest, because he’s anything but for the first half of Act 6.
Jake uses willful ignorance to get what he wants without having to be honest about it. In so doing, he ends up keeping secrets–not just from all his friends, but even from himself. Only the part of his brain that takes the form of Brain Ghost Dirk is fully honest about Jake’s true awareness of his surroundings.
Secrecy comes fairly naturally to a Witch. Jade’s plan in its entirety is shared with no one until the end, Damara is secretive and cryptic about her actions, the Batterwitch is noted for her secrets, Feferi doesn’t fill anyone in on the nature of her bargain with the Horrorterrors until after she’s already Dead…so on.
This seems to be an element of his Grandmother’s Jake emulates, but it doesn’t come naturally to him. He mentions that secrecy wears on him and leaves him feeling jaded, which is exactly how he ends up feeling about his relationship with Dirk.
Oh, and speaking of Dirk.
If you recall, I’ve argued that Witches all have a Familiar figure, and that the imagery follows most characters who commit hard enough to Witch roleplay.
The familiar always represents the Witch’s Aspect.
A short list would look like:
Jade: Becquerel (Space)
Damara: Lord English (Time)
Feferi, The Batterwitch: Gl’bolyb (Life)
Rose: The Horrorterrors (Void), Doc Scratch (Light)
The interesting thing is, the relationship between a Witch and her Familiar always seems to be described in terms of Service. Serve is the verb inherent to Knight/Page, with Knights often Serving for the benefit of others, and Pages often benefiting from the service of others.
It’s from Dirk that we get the best description of Witches’ Familiars, as he describes the relationship between Gl’bolyb and the Batterwitch.
And as it happens, it’s also an excellent description of the sum total of Jake’s experience of Dirk, himself. Which is fitting, because Dirk is also an intense roleplayer–one who roleplays a Knight.
Brain Ghost Dirk is the manifestation of Jake’s faith in Dirk as both his personal bodyguard and his secret weapon–a window into how Jake sees Dirk at his best. Here he parallels Bec saving Jade from the meteor or from imps. While Bec is powered by Space and Dirk by Hope, the image is of a devoted, hypercompetent protector.
Jake’s faith also has a hand in creating AR, however, and Hal becomes the interpretation of Familiars as foreboding and controlling figures. This Dirk most reflects Gl’bolyb imposing its will onto the Condesce’s desires, or Lord English imposing his onto Damara’s.
The Brobot under Hal’s control is even referenced as enigmatic, which definitely fits Jake’s perception of Dirk as generally hyper-mysterious, and AR as a cyber-omniscient puppetmaster responsible for Unite Synchronize.
ok so i totally failed at making that quick or short but that’s the loose gist of it. I could write a lot more but i really need to learn how to make these points concisely so i am hoping this is short and concise enough to get the point across.
let me know what you think!
Flying through Storytelling 