A while ago now, I posted some theorycrafting about Material and Notional Aspects, as well as Active and Passive ones. I’ve since further refined and developed these ideas, and with the help of revolutionaryduelist I’ve assembled them into a proper Theory Post.
enjoy
This stuff has gotten more and more interesting the more I’ve thought about it, and it still kinda feels like we’re just scratching the surface. I can’t wait to see what else Hiveswap might have to say about Aspects!
I’m probably going to eventually, but writing and producing scripts that detailed is actually a pretty serious and time-consuming challenge, and I have a lot of other projects I’m working on right now that I consider just as if not more interesting right now.
Besides, it’s so much work that I’d have to feel like producing it presents a substantial leap in how much better said concepts are presented, both from a production standpoint AND a content standpoint.
I’ve been getting frustrated because in many ways I find the way we currently discuss both Aspects and Classes kind of overly cumbersome and technical–I struggle using it as the characterization TOOL I actually think of it as because I tie myself in knots just figuring out how to put it to words.
Figuring out how to discuss it more efficiently and evocatively is part of the work I’m doing, and it’s real work that takes me time and effort to consider even if that work isn’t immediately apparent to you guys–it’s not something I want to rush.
Luckily, I am considering some avenues that I actually do think have the potential to provide such a seismic shift, and it’s something I’m experimenting with as I explore these Classpect videos I’m already doing.
A lot of my patrons and people who hang in my circles on Discord are already somewhat aware of this stuff, but it’s really difficult to constantly try to package it all into posts when
A) A lot of the polish and depth you’re picking up comes about as a result of my willingness to talk about and explore this stuff in pretty experimental ways that don’t lend themselves easily to concise, clear text posts and
B) the conversation around them is constantly evolving and hypothetical in and of itself.
So the tl;dr is: Working on it. We’ll get to it eventually, maybe even sooner than I think, but there’s other stuff to work on right now. Stay tuned, and keep rising 😉
So now that the whole notional and material idea has been established, that leaves the question, is there another axis to the whole thing? In other words, what separates, say, Mind from Light, or Void from Heart?
I pondered this question for quite a while before coming up with an answer I found satisfactory, and I’m still far from sure I’ve got it right. But I believe the answer might lie in a slightly different perspective on the dichotomy of Active and Passive.
I think I’m starting to find this pretty damn compelling, at least with Time and Space in particular. It makes my head hurt to think about, though. Classpects are so…so….so complicated if this is true. God.
When Vriska Serket was young, far younger than her still very young age when we first encounter her, she faced a choice of monumental proportions, at an age so young many would not ascribe her any agency, any responsibility for her actions. Perhaps we might even call it a Choice, for it is similar in nature to the ultimatums presented by the Denizens.
The Choice was this: A: Start killing people, innocent or not, on an enormous, serial killer kind of scale. Dye your hands in blood for all futures to come. B: Die before you’ve ever had a chance to live.
The Vriska we encounter chose A. Obviously she did. If she hadn’t, we would never have met her because she would be dead. This is the reponsibility of Vriska Serket, that to even exist in the story, she had to be a person who chose A.
And that makes her evil. I mean that in a sense that to choose and to continue to choose your own life over that of countless innocent strangers is a horrible (albeit somewhat understandable) decision, but I also mean it in the sense that Vriska herself perceives and understands herself as a bad person.
She makes excuses for herself, certainly. She justifies her actions using troll morality, tries to pretend she doesn’t care, clings to arbitrary standards of “fairness”. None of it works, of course. Aranea makes that much clear, in that key conversation of hers with Terezi. It never works.
And with her repeated failures to find absolution, with guilt gnawing at her every step of the way, here is Vriska’s grand mistake, that she desires to be Good, more than she desires to be Well.
In this world I would be surprised to hear of anyone who does not know the consequences of prioritizing accomplishment over health.
A take on Vriska that actually mostly aligns with my own! Pretty rare.
I can’t resist the urge to mention that I see Vriska’s self-imposed selflessness as being the major identifying trait she borrows from Mindfang.
Thieves being an Active class with innately selfish tendencies and Sylphs being a Passive class with the opposite, I think the Mindfang persona itself is the major corrupting influence on Vriska’s psyche.
I’ve talked to Arrghus about this before I think, I just wanted to mention it here because not only do I think this reading is fairly accurate, I also think it’s grounded in the very mechanics of Classpects. And honestly I just think that’s hella neat, I’m never over it.
One idea that recurs fairly prominently in Homestuck’s Gnostic roots is the duality of the material and the notional, the World of Matter and the World of Ideas. And with the advent of the Extended Zodiac, one idea that took root in my mind was the possibility that this duality extended to the Aspects themselves.
I don’t have solid evidence for this yet, but I do have a lot of anecdotes, below the cut. Regardless of whether it’s truly canon, though, I do think it’s a potentially useful and interesting way of thinking about the Aspects and Homestuck itself.
This is pretty interesting to me. I tend to consider Aspects as simultaneously notional and material, but the idea that they might have a bias one way or another has a lot of potential for fleshing out how we understand them in relation to each other, I think.
One of many ideas I’m not entirely committed to, but consider as I look through the text and consider the ways it might be evolving now.
There are many things that cloud the minds of Homestuck’s protagonists. Many things they lean on, that they draw strength from, that they consider a positive influence in their lives, but that nevertheless serve to distract them and poison their hearts and minds. For John, it is innocence. For Karkat, it is the warrior ethos. And for Terezi, it is justice.
Justice drives many of Terezi’s actions and her understanding of the world. It’s how she justifies helping Vriska feed countless to her giant spider lusus during flarp, it’s how she justifies siccing Scratch on Vriska when flarp goes too far, it’s how she describes the nature of doomed timelines and those doomed individuals who originate in them. It’s the language she uses when psyching herself up to personally kill Vriska once and for all.
Justice, to Terezi, is about violence. Retributive violence, a punishment for evil action. It is a way to understand and interact with the world she inherited from Alternia, and it is riddled with the influence of that awful place, with its utter disregard for life, dignity, or any form of mercy. It is a means of justifying murder.
Justice, to Terezi, is a drug, and it is one she only manages to shake once she kills Vriska and finds that in the face of such enormous action its effects as a palliative are lacking. She relapses, of course, wrapping herself in the blindfolded visage of justice when seeking violent revenge on Gamzee, but this no longer brings her strength against his inexplicable juggalo pro-wrestling skills and begins a sequence shortly leading to her death in the Game Over.
Ultimately, Terezi chooses to shed justice entirely, choosing to use John to resurrect Vriska and, critically, to disrupt her initial pretend game of justice during her introduction, symbolically (and, to an extent, actually) freeing her from its curse.
The other big reference to justice that comes to mind: Aimless Renegade immediately prior to blowing some shit up and trying to kill people that end up being his friends.
I think I’m inclined to agree with seeing it as a corruptive influence. I should go through the text and see if it’s bad in every circumstance it shows up in, or if it’s toxic for Terezi in particular as linked to her Knight roleplay.
Either way, really solid point. I dig it!
Rose Lalonde killed an ogre armed with nothing but a pair of ordinary knitting needles pretty much immediately after entering the game. Rose Lalonde found the secrets of the Green Sun and of the Scratch, forming the foundations for the kids’ entire plans in Act 5. Rose Lalonde found love on a battlefield and her hands have wielded both darkness and light and turned them into deadly weapons. Rose Lalonde, trapped with her friends in the middle of literal nowhere with a demon dog hot on their heels, nevertheless found a way to not only escape, but to journey to a new, wondrous land. Rose Lalonde knows more about the setting than maybe anyone else, and the tome of her collective knowledge inspired Calliope, arguably the most important character in Homestuck, to believe in the potential of reality.
Rose Lalonde is utterly fucking dwarfed by Terezi Pyrope, the girl who can sunder time by asking a question, who can know with absolute certainty the immediate outcome of a difficult decision. Terezi Pyrope, the girl so dangerous, Lord English sent his right hand Makara on making sure she was kept off balance through mind games and caliginy. Terezi Pyrope, who is so wise in the ways of the world that she can understand and manipulate people so well she’s repeatedly stated as the superior of Vriska, who is literally a telepath. Terezi Pyrope, who fights alongside gods and not only matches them in prowess but outclasses some of them (Dirk had some serious trouble in that fight). Terezi Pyrope, trapped and surrounded by dead friends in an offshoot reality in the middle of temporal nowhere, who found a way to turn game over into an easy victory by writing words on a scarf. Terezi Pyrope, who absorbed all the memories of Paradox Space and knew the world for what it truly was. Terezi Pyrope, the true protagonist of Homestuck.
And then there’s Kankri I guess? Yeah, he’s kinda useless, trapped in his own head and incapable of seeing and wielding his true potential. His alt-self led a revolution, which went surprisingly well up until it completely failed because the odds were stacked against him in a truly preposterous fashion. Not his fault really.
So the Time Aspect connects a lot to death. That’s a fairly widespread notion. Specifically, Time connects to death to a large extent because the Alpha timeline is an incredibly brutal construct, hurting both those who follow it and those who choose to deviate from it. But the Alpha timeline is a construct of Lord English.
https://medium.com/@RoseOfNobility/apotheosis-and-creation-myth-2257d7bf5854 (scroll down a fair bit)
So Lord English, the Lord of Time, has redefined the Aspect of Time to suit his needs. Huh. Has Calliope, his equal and opposite, perhaps done something similar?
Now, I don’t have much evidence of my theory, I’m not even sure evidence is all that possible to accrue for such a thing, but, well, in the Gnostic origins that Homestuck draws upon, the physical matter of the world is often disparaged, seen as the flawed design of Yaldabaoth, devoid of meaning. We see this reflected in the Aspects, Void, the Aspect of irrelevance, confers great physical ability on its heroes, as does Rage, the Aspect of misery and meaninglessness.
Yet Space, the most physical Aspect of them all, is heavily associated with art and beauty? Beautiful clothes, fascinating sciences, even the Vast Croak, described as the most wondruous thing of all. Clearly, then, the physical world is not entirely lost. It can be filled with meaning, with glory. It has potential, even in a story so heavily centered on the internet and the exploration of ideas.
Certainly, Calliope loves the world. Certainly, she loves to draw its inhabitants, to speculate upon its mechanics. Certainly, she dresses herself in the trappings of its peoples, and speaks endlessly of their glories. Certainly, she acts to inspire the alphas to love the world with her in her communications with them.
Certainly, the last command of her alternate self was to partake of reality, to enjoy the fruits of hers and everyone’s labor. To “have fun”.
Certainly, Calliope in her symbolic sense embodies the audience, with their arts and their theories and their cosplays. Certainly, the story of Homestuck, without its audience, would be a lesser, stranger thing, not to mention mostly unwritten, given how much Hussie inspiration Hussie has at times implied he takes from his audience.
There is an outline here, in the certainties. An outline of a theory. A suggestion of Calliope’s grand influence on the story, of the way she shapes reality every bit as fundamentally as Lord English, and not merely by shaping him through his hatred of her.
But that theory is not yet certain, and I do not know precisely what form it would take, were it to become such.
Presented with perhaps lacking context.
So I’ve been thinking about Hope as the strongest Aspect and how some people insist that surely it can’t bear that title alone because it and its counterpart Rage must be equal, among other things.
And I think I’ve hit on something interesting there. Because while Gamzee’s application of Rage is incredibly flexible (he can be almost anywhere at any time, have all the weird little odds and ends he wants, etc) it’s never very powerful. Like, one of his greatest feats in the story is owning a costume.
And yes, there’s the fight with the black king. But the key thing there, the thing I realized just now, is that the revelation that Gamzee was critical to that fight happened long after the fight was concluded. When Aradia talked about the fight, she mentions their weapons, her time-clones, and Vriska’s dice. Gamzee’s not there. This is the meta nature of Rage. Gamzee inserts himself into the fight only after it’s done, and tears up the narrative coherence of it in the process by kinda sorta contradicting Aradia’s account of it. Then he upsets his impending beatdown at Equius’ hands by playing to his weaknesses and kills Nepeta offscreen, before being unceremoniously papped down without actually changing his ways at all. This is the Rage of which Tex spoke, the ability to make stories “go wrong”, the power of “bullshit”.
In contrast, almost everything Jake does is heavily foreshadowed and shrouded in layer upon layer of myth and reference. His biggest actions are momentuous fullfilments of seeming hundreds of little seeds sown thousands of pages in advance. Here is where I contradict taz a little, because when Jake is powered up by Aranea? I don’t think he could have done anything in that position. I don’t think that at all. Hope is among other things the power of creativity, of “good storytelling”, and in accordance with the rules of “good storytelling” at such a momentuous occasion it can accomplish only what has been built up in advance. Jake is strong here because his strength has been built up, and he can make Brain Ghost Dirk (and only Brain Ghost Dirk) real specifically on account of Brain Ghost Dirk having been established in advance as a facet of Jake’s own nature and ability. And he can do so in part because, yes, that’s a Princess Bride reference, and mythological parallels are again “good storytelling”.
This is why, on a meta level, Hope is strong but somewhat inflexible, while Rage is weak but versatile.
This is how Eridan operates as well. His genocide complex, his fascination with magic, all of these things are set up well in advance. His emotional theatrics and dumb antics with the angels undercut this, “destroying” the foreshadowing as it were, but everything he does is set up in advance and returned to repeatedly before it happens. By contrast, Gamzee’s foreshadowing consists of what, stating that typing in all lowercase feels unnatural and mentioning that he wants to make Equius happy?
sexy-albino-beast replied to your audio post “arrghus: I made this for @revolutionaryduelist and they encouraged…”
Can we get the lyrics? Maybe it’s just my hearing impairment, but i can barely understand what he’s singing
They’re the lyrics to “Snake Eater” From Metal Gear Solid 3.
Here you go: https://genius.com/Cynthia-harrell-snake-eater-lyrics
Flying through Storytelling 