To start with, let me be clear that I have a ton of admiration and respect for people like BKEW and Dahni. Writing like theirs nourished teen me’s love for Homestuck for years, and I quite literally wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t spent years devouring all of it. I understood Homestuck through inversion theory terms for a long ass time, and had a lot of fun with it! So this isn’t me trying to dunk on anyone or “”debunk”” anyone’s approach to fanon-building, or whatever.

I’m only interested in attaining a better understanding of the text of Homestuck itself, and I think “Inversion Theory” ultimately holds us back from doing so right now. That said, Inversion Theory is an overly broad term that leads to a lot of confusion. So let’s break it down into Aspect and Class inversion.

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Aspect Inversion: 

This has canonical backing, in that Calliope says that in players resistant to their true calling or corrupted by outside forces, player abilities might manifest in defiance of one’s Aspect. So I’ve always loosely agreed with this part.

 That said, I’ve never been sure that Aspect “switches” always happen across complementary Aspects. I’ve been harboring the suspicion that any player sufficiently stressed could manifest their powers as any other Aspect, depending on the circumstances and influences at play.

I now have reason to think this is true, given Xefros’ weird focus on Time and Time-Travel while being linked to the traditionally Time-linked Rustblood Caste. I’m not sure if this is canonical yet (excited to find out in Act 2), but indications so far point to the idea that each Caste strongly encourages/outright pushes characters into particular patterns of thought. 

Which means Xefros–who is a Rage player–is experiencing some of the detrimental effects usually associated with Inversion, along with a LOT of references to thinking in terms of Time,, as opposed to Hope. 

I’ve picked up on a few cues suggesting something similar is going on with Dammek and Breath–the Aspect associated with bronzebloods. So for the most part, I just feel that Aspect “inversion” as a concept might be limiting our understanding. But that’s just a guess for now, and it seems to me most of the transitions in Homestuck DO qualify as Inversion, in that they involve the opposite Aspect heavily.

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Class Inversion: 

My problems with Class inversion are more intense. For one thing, inversion models p much always cast Pages as Passive and Knights as Active, which I think I’ve made clear I don’t buy at all. So my ability to engage with the system is mostly broken from the outset.

For another, where I’m uncertain and curious about Aspects, I’m absolutely sure the idea of Class inversion limits our reading of the text. 

It’s biggest problem is that it narrows characters down into game mechanic templates that restrict what they can do and how they can act in ways that don’t seem super logical to me. A Maid who has “inverted” must always be a Bard,
for example. 

This discounts a lot of instances of quite similar, also unhealthy behavior that manifests outside the expected model, and misses a lot of the mechanical weight that Homestuck gives to any given characters’ stated interests, ambitions, and self-images.

Homestuck is a deeply Jungian work–his ideas are paralleled in Circumstantial Simultaneity, A bunch of Gnostic motifs, and in the case of the Classes, Archetypes. Jung believed Archetypes were patterns of behavior that arose from the collective unconcious–such as, perhaps, the act of theft, or of destruction.

Those patterns of behavior would then be contextualized by culture into more specific symbols. A thief might look like a burlap sack in one culture, and like a guy in a suit in another. But both would engage in the same behavior pattern–one associated with taking from others to benefit oneself.
(Jung didn’t literally write about a Thief archetype, though. At least, not that I’ve found so far. This is just an example!)

The Classes are heroic Roles–their parts in the narrative as characters in a story. But Homestuck is a narrative where fantasy falls in love with itself, where characters have deeply impactful interests that move and shape them, just like ours do to us.

So when Vriska tries to live out her Mindfang fantasy, and rope Tavros along as her Summoner…

It’s not a coincidence that she dresses up as a fairy, and thinks in terms of a Sylph’s key verb–or close enough to it if you go with Create, same difference. And hey, doesn’t Vriska spend this arc insisting she only wants to make Tavros stronger? Get him to take charge and be powerful? Why, that almost sounds like…

What Aranea does effortlessly, by virtue of being a Sylph.

This is legitimate, compelling nuance that is lost under Inversion theory. 
And I can pull it out for close to every character. Dirk, AR, and Terezi’s fixations on being Knights, Roxy’s early flirtations with prophecy, Jake’s occasional references to wizardry, etc. 

There’s a LOT of depth here, is what I’m saying, and in my view, the system is way more flexible and well-executed than what we’ve understood up until now. Even if inversion theory were literally canon (and its not, wp people debunked it YEARS ago.) I don’t think I’d want to trade it for what I see in the system now, personally.