lime-bloods:

Okay, a bit late, but like I said, there was a reason I got back onto the topic of the extermination of the Gamblignants, and it’s to do with the Alternian enforcement of classes.

A lot of the classes that would be assigned to blood castes make easy sense. Rustblood maids because they’re a serving class. Purplebloods are bards for their performative wildcard nature. Princes are royalty, so that’s what violets are. Seers’ analysis is important for a class who act as assistants to the government (and seers as assistants to more combat-oriented classes is a concept that has been evoked within the comic itself).

Some of them are more symbolic. Heirs generally serve as the “Beta Male” class, so their being assigned to the caste that serve as lackeys to the top dogs of the land dweller race makes sense. Sylphs are a fitting role for jades for their nurturing and also mythical nature. Rogues might even make sense, given the heroic spin Homestuck applies to them, as the ones at the top of the lowblood group.

What really sticks out like a sore horn is the thief class. What reasonable society would implement a social class of criminals?

Well we know Alternia had one! The Gambligants were a distinct social group who were allowed to exist as such for what we can only assume was some time before the Subjugglators got around to exterminating them.

And in doing so we’re left with Vriska as what we can probably safely assume is the last member of the thief class.

That’s interesting, because it puts thief in a unique position shared with only Feferi’s witch class in that only one troll has the class. Which makes you wonder why!

A good place to start is probably that Meenah’s class was also thief, and we know at least a little bit about how she took over her session. The thief by nature is forceful and hard-headed, and really not a hero you want to have lying around in hoards.

Scorpio is also the sign of the Conqueror, which is a title that can be applied to Lord English himself since Caliborn took the path of the conqueror from Yaldabaoth.

The problem with the thief class being thinned down to just one member, of course, is that the chance that a thief will be involved in the SGRUB session are reduced significantly from what they would be if there were a whole social caste of thieves. Which would explain exactly why, of course, Doc Scratch chose Vriska in particular to be his protoge (and perhaps the same reason that Kanaya was chosen too, considering the extreme rarity of her own caste/class).

I like this a lot overall, and I’m pretty curious if the Class enforcement really is this consistent.

One thing I’d like to mention is that it is my view that Rustbloods are forced into the role of a Knight as much as the role of the Maid. For that matter, the Knight role seems to be forced on Bronzebloods, too.

There’s a pretty strong association between Butlers/Serving and Knights and Pages, with Knights typically serving others and Pages being the recipients of service. Mindfang describes Redglare as a “civil servant”. John refers to Dave as “serving all the ladies”, and asks why he can’t have a Dave butler, too. 

Dirk and AR idolize Dave and strive to live up to the role of the Knight, and both are associated with Knights as a result. Grandpa remembers his Alpha friends, and Dirk specifically he recalls as a Knight, collecting suits of armor that evoke his memory. 

AR’s final sacrifice in the Masterpiece, he takes on as an act of service for the other Alphas–giving Dirk time to destroy Caliborn for good. After that, he spends eternity inside Lord English’s soul, living out his Knight fantasy, monkey’s paw style–he’s Lord English’s personal Butler.

Associations between pairs of Classes and corresponding symbolic Archetypes are all over Homestuck, and I think they help a lot in figuring out what’s going on. Xefros, for example, makes reference to Serving Dammek in Act 1, as associated with his Butler uniform.