full @beforuszine piece! I love game over timeline and sassy bookish spidertroll so much…

What’s the deal with Mindfang being a Sylph when she seems to embody a thief in all her interactions? She steals the Dolorosa from Dualscar, she steals Dolorosa’s will, and she steals the spectators from Redglare’s influence. She seems to never even attempt to benefit anyone else? And if Mindfang is acting like a thief and Vriska is copying her, why would Vriska be roleplaying a fairy? Thanks!

When Aranea starts copying Mindfang, she acts like a Thief, too. The classes are basically just cultural ideals any individual can choose to live up to, and it’s implied that the older you get/the more you know yourself, the easier it is to blur roles or act out the roles you perform in a more adult, premeditated way.

Mindfang is a Sylph–we only know her through the writing she produces, shining light on herself and Alternia to Vriska’s (complicated) benefit. Vriska is inclined to elevate Mindfang in all the ways she perceives Mindfang as being unlike herself. Aranea’s inclined to do the same thing.

Running away from yourself is generally a bad idea, especially if its because you don’t like yourself and are trying to be someone else. That’s the problem both Aranea and Vriska run into with imitating Mindfang, and it suggests that roleplay has more to do with how an individual relates to the role model in their heads than anything particularly to do with the role model themselves.

That make any sense?

question, I’ve heard you mention how the alt. calliope timeline was the result of John’s retconning, but i don’t see how that could happen. I’m just curious on your thoughts on it

Aranea says as much on this page:

John getting the retcon powers and making [S] Game Over “Unhappen” certainly qualifies as an improbable glitch in causality. It’s essentially the same as a controllable Scratch, it’s just that John is doing it himself.

More to the point, no other source is given for Alt!Calliope’s existence in the comic. So occam’s razor suggests this is the understanding the comic wants us to have.

man I don’t think you can really say bro is brainwashed but gamzee’s just evil when you can argue that gamzee’s also possessed by cal. they even have really similar relationships to how he’s formed, ie part of their souls exist inside lil cal already. which is probably a good explanation for how lil cal is able to brainwash them when he doesn’t brainwash, like, dave, who is around him his whole childhood. idk, I just think gamzee’s more complicated than “evil ass hole”

As it happens, Gamzee has a line I never gave much weight to before noticing Bro’s SAW interest that I’m more inclined to take seriously now, that suggests Gamzee and Bro’s relationship to Cal WAS intrinsically different:

But even if Bro is kind of a noble captor figure holding Cal back, I still wouldn’t think it excuses any of what he put Dave through. He’s still an awful dude.

As for Gamzee, here’s the main problem with reading him as “just” brainwashed.

Gamzee doesn’t require Lil Cal’s presence to go evil. In fact, Gamzee doesn’t seem to require ANYTHING to turn evil.
But even if like, Doc Scratch ALWAYS teleports Lil Cal into Gamzee’s presence to trigger his personality shift, I don’t think it would matter.
The weight of the sheer SCALE of Gamzee’s devotion cements his place as an ultimately willing accomplice/acolyte to Caliborn’s Dark Carnival.

And it kind of makes Gamzee fucking terrifying and a fantastic villain.

I’ll explain my reasoning here.

We know for a fact that Gamzee snaps and kills all his friends in at least one Doomed timeline. This is the source for half the code used in the creation of Doc Scratch. There’s no implication that Lil Cal is involved here at all.

But again, let’s assume Lil Cal was here again. It doesn’t matter.

Because there is canonically, explicitly, no timeline in the history of Gamzee where Gamzee ever, ever, EVER chooses to rebel. Gamzee Makara simply does not ever choose his friends over Lord English. In any timeline. Ever.
How do I know?

Lets talk about Ghosts for a minute. The fandom has historically kind of taken these guys for granted, and loose fandom consensus is that they aren’t coherent/who has what ghosts is arbitrary. This is incorrect!

Pretty much everybody in the Bubbles that should have alt!ghosts does, including Meenah and Aranea, the two characters who’s alt!ghosts are typically presumed “Missing”.

This is important. The Ghosts kind of give us very low-key character development, and contextualize the characters for us. For example, Eridan is an absolute irredeemable bastard in the Alpha timeline. But in a God Tier iteration of themselves, Eridan and Feferi seemingly come to friendlier terms. In another, there’s suggestions Eridan makes up with Feferi and Sollux. In yet another, he seems to be Trans or exploring femininity at least.

The point is, there’s a certain fluidity to Eridan’s potential. Still terrible in the comic, but it’s important to remember that Eridan didn’t CHOOSE to be trapped in the meteor with Jack, or to be born to Alternia’s power system, or to be trapped in the Alpha Timeline.

It’s important to remember these things because in Homestuck, someone with power–Lord English–deliberately and willfully chose those things FOR him. Eridan’s lives are lived in response to that imposed power structure.
These factors don’t redeem him completely necessarily

But anyway, the fact that the rest of the cast have coherent quantum expressions means there are only three real exceptions–three characters who either don’t have any ghosts at all, or should have more ghosts than they do.

The first is Caliborn, who’s timeline has exactly one deviation from the Alpha–apparently caused by John’s retcon. This riddle’s solved easily enough:
Predomination doesn’t leave a ghost to appear in the bubbles at all.
When Calliope says she ate his soul, she means that literally.
Caliborn’s cheating in the Alpha Timeline is indeed the only reason Calliope exists in the bubbles at all.

(This, by the way, explains a lot about the relationship between Caliborn’s soul and Gamzee/Arquis’ in the Lord English. He predominated over them, too.)

The second is Vriska, who only has a single ghost in (Vriska). This is really weird, because we literally know for a fact she dies in more than one doomed timeline! As with the two Calliopes, I think this is down to John’s retcon doing some weird entanglement nonsense to Vriska’s quantum existence.
The point is: Where others have a palette of possibility, Vriska has two extremely polarized halves. Schrodinger’s Vriska.

Important to mention that just like Eridan, the structure of the Alpha Timeline that limits potential Vriskas is IMPOSED ONTO HER. Vriska didn’t want anything about the way she was raised or where she was born. She didn’t ask John and Terezi to retcon her into this bizarre state. Both Vriskas, like the rest of the cast, are rolling with the punches LE has seen fit to give.

Except for Gamzee.

Hussie literally tells us Gamzee never dies. His single non-Alpha Timeline death in [S] Game Over is retconned by John, and Hussie suggests it straight up doesn’t count. But that presents a problem.

There are thousands upon thousands of Doomed troll timelines. How is it that Gamzee specifically never ever EVER dies? Well, there’s only one real way that a Non-Time player can survive a Doomed timeline, that we know of:

Dream self merger. By going to sleep as the last player present in Sburb, the Doomed Rose from Davesprite’s timeline triggers a game mechanic that ends her timeline completely and merges her consciousness with that of Alpha Rose through their dreamselves.

If Gamzee survives his doomed timelines, this is the only possible way how.
And collapsing all of his potential instances into a single Alpha identity certainly sounds like the reduction of possibility commonly attributed to the Rage aspect.
But what that means is that to move on to the Alpha, every Doomed Gamzee must inevitably either snap and kill all the other trolls, or somehow outlast them.

And it means that if any Gamzee had EVER, in the entire spectrum of plausibility the Alpha timeline affords, EVER been inclined to rebel against LE–then we would know. Because somewhere out there, that at least Hussie could see, there would be a Ghost to show for it.

But there isn’t. Similar in this respect only to Caliborn, Gamzee simply has no alternate deviations because he doesn’t want them. He chooses the path that leads to Lord English freely and willingly, over and over and over again.

And like Caliborn…

Gamzee does this because he wants to.

Gamzee doesn’t BELIEVE he’s going to become his own God–he knows it for a fact. He sees it in Lil Cal’s mangled soul. And he embraces that truth wholeheartedly, throwing himself into the acolyte role from then onwards and presumably following instructions Doc Scratch gives him throughout Act 6.

Which we can talk about some other time. The point is: Gamzee chooses all this. Whether or not Lil Cal causes him to is beside the point, because there is not and never will be any timeline where Gamzee chooses to resist.

Gamzee is the ultimate in shitty cosmic nazi religious zealots, and devoted to the very power structure that causes every other character to suffer so. There are no mitigating factors for him as there are for everyone else but Caliborn.
At the end of the day, he’s evil.
Bad clown. Worst enemy.

creative-classpect:

Why there is only one version of Aranea

So on my patron server we were talking about a lack of Serket ghosts. There are pretty much 0 alternates, with only 1 Aranea and 2 Vriskas (both are plot relevant)

I chalked Vriska up to Meta Thief of Light. Like how she took up waaay too much time in canon and everyone sweeps it under the rug as Thief of Light. That’s a meta use of them, how they effect a story and narrative.

It’s like how Gamzee destroyed falshoods, pretense, lies, and harsh realities. He was able to do the impossible.
It was literally impossible for him to have the hammer of zillywho
It was literally impossible for him to get to Jane’s planet
Etc etc
His nature as a Bard of Rage is a force in the Meta, in the plot

Jujus are LITERALLY plot devices

So with all of that we (us being me and @dheavenlymango ) figured out that there are no alternates of Aranea for this same reason

Ghost alternates exist because they are irrelevant. They don’t matter. They are the epitome of Stopped Actually Mattering
Aranea has been in the dreambubbles waaaaay longer than everyone else
We think she got rid of her alternates. In a Meta attempt to matter, she tried healing her other selves, but they went from being ghosts to straight up not existing. She became the only one, thereby repairing her importance

But, with that came a cost. This One True Aranea was her long shot. By trying to become relevant and absorbing her alternates, she learned the only way to truly matter was to be alive. She scrapped together all her other selves (thereby having a memory so vast that she felt like she has been there forever) and puts all her eggs into one Importance Basket. With only one Aranea, all her alternates are taken away and thus, she gains the power of Singular Importance

But, even with all of this, importance only means anything if you are living. Ghosts are supposed to be inherently worthless

That’s why she wanted the Ring of Life so bad and went so far with her schemes

It wasn’t just One Aranea acting out
It was the entire concept of Aranea has a meta force on plot to actually, truly mater and leave an impact

She bet everything on black
All her cards we down
Every single version of her was leading up to this Alpha Aranea to matter enough and be important enough to save the day

This is an interesting concept, but I’m sorry to say it’s undercut by canon.
There are other Araneas in the bubbles.

They’re visible in ministrife:

But there’s also some in Meenah’s army in the page with Karkat:

Your explanation for Aranea is actually pretty close to how I’d describe Gamzee’s quantum existence, though. Seems to me he manages to live to the end of almost every timeline and then go to sleep, so he can merge with Alpha Gamzee’s dreamself, the same way Dream Rose does.

That would explain how he never dies in any timeline, and why he has no ghosts.

I think Aranea does something similar, but only through virtue of being “lucky” and “kind of boring”, meaning she’s probably likely to live to the end of her timeline by virtue of not getting involved in many fights. So she has fewer ghosts, and her alpha self had quite a lot of collected knowledge, but that’s about it.

Vriska’s an open question for me right now, but I like your description for her.

Anyway, just thought I’d chime in.

Obvi this bears further analysis but I’d suggest Grow/Repair -> Heal as a verb combo for those two classes and I think you already have this but Sylph seems to be active/selfish while Maid is passive/selfless, e.g. Kanaya healing herself versus Aradia repairing the timeline. 3/3

I’ve used Create for the longest time, but am finding myself leaning towards Make lately simply because it’s referenced much more in the comic and I think has some interesting wordplay with Maids specifically.

My tldr response is I don’t think Heal/repair accurately describes enough of what fairies do. I think both are ways their abilities might be described, but using make or create accounts for much more of all of the fairies’ behavior.

My immediate counterpoint is Aranea, who doesn’t really heal Jake at all. That seems very much like her flattering herself. She just makes him more important and relevant, and doing so enables Jake’s will more than her own in ways she didn’t expect.

I also don’t agree Sylphs are selfish and Maids are selfless. I laid out my argument for most of this with my Destroy/Create essay, so I’d be curious to how you’d respond to my points there.

Force and Flow — Destroy and Create – optimisticDuelist – Medium

revolutionaryduelist:

Here’s the first of the Class essays, where we go over the most intense Active/Passive dichotomy, putting these Classes on the furthest ends of the spectrum.

The Key Verbs for these classes are Destroy and Create, covering
Princes and Bards & Maids and Sylphs, respectively.

Quick disclaimer so I don’t get anyone’s hope’s up: This essay doesn’t include much discussion of Jane Crocker! Not because she isn’t relevant, but because I actually ended up writing this entire series because I needed to lay out my thoughts on Maids so I could get around to writing my essay about her.

I’ll be linking to my Jane post at the end of this essay once it’s up, and this essay is pretty much required reading for it! So I think it’s worth checking out if you’re interested in her anyway.

As for the rest, I just hope you enjoy. The other two essays are already written, and I’ll be posting them over the next two weeks!

They are available in their entireties for my Patrons, so if you can spare me a buck a month you can get these early if you decide you like them enough. Higher reward tiers will let you invite friends to the Discord so they can read them 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!

[Youtube] [Patreon] [Hiveswap Discord]

[Active/Passive Masterpost] [Steal and Serve] [Know and Change]

Keep Rising.

Just wanted to reblog this to mention that I made some heavy revisions and added a bunch more stuff, particularly making the Unifying Myth of Fairies far more compelling!

There’s also some talk about Vriska, and I made some edits and added some graphics that should make it much easier to understand how I think the Class Active/Passive spectrum works as a whole. Finally, I also included Jane’s one reference to being a Fairy (that I’ve found so far).

Special thanks to @ymawgat for sending me the questions that made me reevaluate a couple things in the canon and dig all this extra stuff up! This argument is both way more compelling and far easier to read now, I think, and I appreciate it.

I also wanted to note that thanks to my financial situation improving, I’ve been able to lower my Patreon goals substantially! At this point, I’ve got something like 630 followers, so if less than half of them considered sending me three bucks a month, I’d be able to bring out new insights about Homestuck as a full-time job.

You’d also join a Homestuck analysis community that has already proven exceptionally awesome 😉

Of course, I appreciate anyone’s attention and thoughts in response to my writing most of all! I just wanted to keep everyone updated on what the state of this project is.

Force and Flow — Destroy and Create – optimisticDuelist – Medium

So I read the two classpect posts that you’ve posted on medium, and while I don’t agree with all of your class system, the posts are undoubtedly really well written and highlighted things I hadn’t noticed before…. one thing I would like to point out however, is that “fairy-like” isn’t a very strong unifying myth with which to connect Maids and Sylphs, since Vriska (a Thief) references the motif/myth as much as any Maid and Sylph, if not more?

ymawgat:

@revolutionaryduelist

Ok, this is a pretty good reasoning of the motif, however there are still a couple of things I think you’ve missed:

1: Vriska’s motivation for dressing up as fairy is to fulfill the whole pupa pan story, and this is then connected to her GT outfit. She doesn’t do it in conscious reference to her ancestor at all, and I don’t think her admiration for Mindfang is ever verbally or image-ly linked to her fairy motifs? Also Vriska’s tinkerbell reference is also sort of present in WV’s dream, something that isn’t really connected to Tavros?

2: The references to people being fairies are connected to the troll god tier outfit, as is the fairy imagery (butterfly wings, fairy dust – which is connected to tinkerbell in [S]wake but continues to be present in the comic afterwards). The reason I think this is important is that the Maids and Sylphs who aren’t troll god tiers (Jane, Kanaya, Porrim?) are never called fairies, which sort of implies that the motif has more to do with the god tier accesories than it has to do Maids and Sylphs?

Ok, so:

1. You’re right! A lot of Vriska’s playing up the Fairy thing has to do with Tavros…but Vriska wants to win over Tavros because of Mindfang in the first place. And as far as I can tell, these dynamics are just as often presented through…for lack of a better term, narrative game mechanics, as they are through explicit text.

So here’s what I mean:

No, Mindfang isn’t Literally Called a Fairy. But Alpha Dave’s mythological status as a Knight is only ever mentioned once, in Dirk’s introduction, and Dirk’s quest to act like a Knight whilst trying to live up to Dave’s mythological image pervades every facet of his entire arc. It’s literally the source of his thematic victory, as I’ve written before. (My argument in favor of this view has only grown stronger since I constructed my Class spectrum argument, and it’ll show up some in Serve/Steal as well.)

As far as Mindfang is relevant to the narrative, she exists as a being Made of Light in Vriska’s eyes–her importance, agency and storytelling define her, and this a Light Vriska steals for herself, to make herself feel more important and capable.

For as long as Vriska is trying to live out Mindfang’s image specifically, and trying to recreate her relationship with the Summoner through herself and Tavros, she spends her time trying to act like a Sylph.

Think about what she’s doing with Tavros: She’s trying to get him to get stronger and more assertive, trying to increase his willpower, trying to get him to become more important.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s what Aranea successfully does effortlessly with Jake. Vriska tries (and is equally harmful in the process) but she isn’t playing to her strengths like Aranea is. This isn’t her forte or where she excels–it’s a role she’s playing out because it’s Important to her.

And that’s reflected in the mechanics of how she tries to handle the people around her, just as it does with Dirk and Hal.

This is also why I don’t think WV’s dream presents a conflict–being a Fairy is something important to Vriska because of Mindfang as much as because of Tavros, though the two are deeply interrelated.

There’s lots of other examples of this in the story, too–I’m fairly certain I’ve missed many even now, since Vriska as a fairy wasn’t on my radar until you sent this. Again, I’ll go over some in more detail as this series goes up.

2. The troll god tier thing is complicated somewhat by the fact that the only two trolls who god tier are…Aradia, a fairy class, and Vriska, who’s trying to fit into the fairy figure. I agree there’s some muddling of themes, but not as much as it seems like. This is because no God Tier trolls are described as fairies besides Aradia or Vriska, and Vriska drops the aesthetic completely after dying/getting punched by John.

It’s also worth noting that the forms of exposition for the classes aren’t always symmetrical–like I pointed out in my Jade essay, Witches’ powerful guardians aren’t literally called Familiars, but by all definitions that’s exactly what they are. The implication is built into the nature of the title Witch, while their complement classes have parallels built up through other means.

This, again, will hopefully become clearer soon.

So too it is with a Sylph. Maybe they aren’t literally called fairies as often, but I’d argue they don’t need to be, because a Sylph by definition is a species of Fairy. It’s also untrue that Kanaya is never referred to as a Fairy! She receives the title “Fairy God Troll” in reference to her being Rose’s Patron troll, although Doc Scratch later says this about it:

As she prepares to alchemize new items, she is contacted by her “fairy god troll”, a distinction which does not necessarily have anything to do with being a kid’s patron troll.

She’s the only troll to be described this way, with one exception:
Tavros in this pesterlog with Jade, where he’s described as a Fairy God Troll…and where he attempts to do the same thing Vriska is doing by inserting himself into Jade’s story, and even considers following Vriska’s ideology briefly and controlling Bec over Jade’s protests.

Tavros ultimately doesn’t end up being Jade’s patron troll–Karkat fills that role, and is not described as a Fairy. Kanaya is described as a Fairy God Troll and successfully lives out the role that implies, setting her apart in this regard.

Finally, Jane is complicated. Like Kanaya and Karkat, Jane’s entire arc is about struggling to find herself, and she spends a lot of time slotting herself into the role of an Heiress instead–something I think I’m likely to talk about in my essay about her now that I noticed it, ALSO thanks to you so thanks.

I do strongly feel that Jane fits the definition of being Made of her Aspect, however, and that informs a lot of my reading of her character. And also as a result of looking through stuff in answering you, I happened to note that Jane in fact DOES reference a fairy once here!

revolutionaryduelist:

Hey! So, this is a really good point (and is leading me to thinking about Vriska in some interesting new Lights…)

What I will point out is this: I looked it over, and pretty much every time Vriska is referenced as a fairy, it either directly concerns or surrounds a pivotal moment in her arc with Tavros specifically. After [S] Wake, Vriska is never referenced as a Fairy again.

Vriska also at least somewhat admired two Fairy figures–she thought Kanaya’s lusus was the coolest of all of them, and she literally crafted herself in the image of Mindfang–a Sylph of Light herself.
This is not the only instance of a character from one mythological role actively trying to fit into the context of another. I’ll be going into at least some others–but not all–in the next two posts.
One thing I’m noticing more and more now that I have the understanding I do is that the way these mythological motifs affect different classes is complicated, and that this system has kind of essentially infinite depth. There’s a lot in this story for us to reconsider and rediscover, and I’m very excited about sharing it with you guys.

Stay tuned 😉

PS: As I release these essays, I’ll begin tagging posts concerning these mythological figures with their tags instead of going for the more awkward Active/Passive setup. I just think it’ll be more elegant that way, though I might have to think up terms for Prince/Bard and Thief/Rogue, who don’t seem to get them (as far as I can tell right now) because they’re freebies from Calliope.

Ok, you’ll try it out with one of your less prized possessions just to prove how dumb it is. You never liked this hat much. It makes you look like a gnome and basically isn’t funny at all.

A Gnome is one of many fictional races sometimes described as fairies, and like Sylphs is a species of Elemental–in this case, an elemental of the Earth.

This is… Relevant to the arguments I was already making for Jane, to say the least. Thanks for leading me to this stuff :B