yet-another-classpecter:

revolutionaryduelist:

catchaloststar:

aeolianchemist:

I feel compelled to make a post in light of the release of the extended zodiac, and with it canon aspect information. I’ll keep it brief.

I will be quite honest and admit that I find the aspect descriptions underwhelming, shallow, and disappointing. They feel half-assed and lack depth. If that’s all we’re getting, I think I would have preferred they weren’t released. The several classpectors I’ve spoken to so far about this feel the same.

so, with that in mind,

I’m not going to revoke or revise any of the theories I have shared to account for this new “canon” intel. Because the shitty quiz personality given to each aspect doesn’t hold a candle to the more extensive, more thorough, more creative, more interesting ideas that we theorists have been creating, sharing, and discussing for years. If we were to sweep all those theories off the table to replace them with a dozen brief paragraphs just because those paragraphs came from Hussie himself, it would be an injustice to all the effort and time invested in those ideas by the amazingly brilliant and dedicated theorists in this community.

I suppose it is kind of interesting to get some confirmation that we had the right idea, in most cases. But some of those aspect descriptions were just…not well done? Many Heroes of Rage are understandably upset over what they were given. I’ve spoken to Heroes of Heart that were confused by what they were told.

Almost everyone I’ve talked to got the wrong aspect from that quiz, including myself. (Time?? Really???)

I’m not altogether that surprised by that latter statement. I will always stand by the opinion that quizzes are an unreliable method of determining any part of your classpect (or personality), so to get our first canon classpect information within a shitty personality quiz is twice as bad.

or that’s how I feel, anyway. I will continue to run this archive as I did before, with hardly any acknowledgement of the new canon shit. maybe I’ll draft or share some posts analysing these new ideas, but that will have to wait for a week or two until my classes are over for the semester.

what about you? do you agree/disagree? feel free to share your thoughts as well, I’d be interested to hear from more of the classpecting community.

-AC

I think there’s two issues in the extended zodiac quiz. One is the simple MC format that inherently prioritizes ease of use over accuracy. Frankly, this quiz’s main purpose is to advertise the video game and sell merch (as we approach the holiday season, ofc), and so it has to be generally accessible outside of the classpect community. And heck, the classpect community already has all the in-depth title finding stuff anyway, how do you compete against detailed theories of thousands and millions of words that have built up over several /years?/ Go there if you’re into that. If you already know your title, keep it. If you’re a casual fan, or a fan who’s taken every classpect quiz they can get their hands on and read every description they can find and still can’t decide their own title, this is pretty cool. Yeah there’s a lot of negativity, but outside of classpect there really are some posts cheering that they’ve finally figured out their real aspect, marveling (or complaining) that the test somehow managed to describe them perfectly, making new fantrolls with the new signs, and/or getting more excited about Homestuck than they have in years. Anyway, if every true scotsman knows that online quizzes are inherently bs and the only way to determine a classpect is to truly know yourself and decide for yourself in real life, then I don’t know how anyone expected more from this one. I’m not saying this makes the quiz good, or that its purpose is good, but it’s good enough for its purpose.

I think the real issue here is the newly “canon” aspect descriptions. Just like the quiz itself, they’re simplified waaay down from what we’ve been able to expect from the classpect community over the last few years. And I really do agree with @revolutionaryduelist that these aspect definitions are simplified for accessibility and are NOT comprehensive definitions. Light’s the big tipoff. Hussie himself has said in a formspring response that Light in a mythological title “translates” to Fortune, and that’s what we see and are told all through the comic in Vriska’s case. I’ve never been a fan of the Light-as-Knowledge theory, and I’ll admit that straight up. But that’s definitely the clearest case of the Light aspect in Sburb not lining up with the “aspect-bound” descriptions of the quiz.

I identify with the Mind aspect, but the quiz gave me Life. And when I looked at the quiz’s aspect definitions, Life was definitely the one that fit me best. I don’t think it gave me the “wrong” aspect – it actually made me realize that Mind’s “seek and implement the best option” is very similar to Life’s “create positive change (the change that /I/ think is positive).” I’m still thinking out how I want to address that, but I find it all very interesting.

Also I thought what it said about Doom and suffering was REALLY interesting for the Mage class. Sollux really does two things during the story: he breaks rules, and he gets killed by them. A lot of fan theories said that the Mage suffers their aspect. But if Sollux’s suffering can be attributed to his aspect, then maybe the Mage class is actually something else? (Then this starts meandering into an incomplete pet theory about Mages and Witches as +/- rule breakers, but I’ll spare you that particular monologue.)

Ultimately, I don’t actually think the quiz is /wrong/ in anything it says in its results (I’ve always considered my goal in classpect to be figuring out what Hussie intended, rather than finding a philosophically complete system – I guess I swing pretty Void in that way), and I also don’t think it’s complete either. There’s plenty of space to add additional parts and details about the aspects and how they affect a person.

(Unless something in the definitions is mutually exclusive with something in your own theory. I got my theory directly contradicted from “Light players seek Success at All Costs” to “Light players seek Knowledge at All Costs” and that kind of just comes with the territory when you’re theorycrafting in someone else’s work. Anyone who can’t deal with that on an emotional level probably shouldn’t be theorycrafting in the first place.)

Yeah I don’t believe these are meant to tell us DEFINITIVELY what each aspect is at all. It’s just a personality test that gives us some new nuggets of clear info and presents an entry-level guide to the subject for newbies. Hiveswap has a clearly more in-depth treatment of the Light aspect and Classpects in general imo.

I feel like the extended zodiac answered a lot of great questions we had about, say, Karkat’s blood and what determines your moon, but I agree, the aspect descriptions were really disappointing. TIME?! What was that?! My biggest problem was that it didn’t ever mention what the aspects stood for, which is, ya know, the whole point of having aspects. This is overall a really nice piece of canon, but that really let me down.

I mean just to be clear about my personal opinion, I think this section is great. But that’s because I think it’s real innovation is probably the Troll Caste system and the implications unearthed by Wakraya in its language. 

Xefros’ behavior as a Page of Rage and roleplay as a Knight, and his simultaneous interest in Time as an aspect, makes me feel like the depth of the system is more than intact. It’s better than ever, in a lot of ways. 

The Aspect descriptions are sparse. That’s fine, because they’re providing mostly new information, since they’re about the personalities of the Bound, not anything about the nature of the Aspect. 

Hell, we got the -Bound terminology, which recontextualizes everything about how we think about Aspects. It frames Aspect powers, explicitly, as based on Earthbound’s mythology, and Earthbound is all about kids slowly developing psychic powers, with narratives generally about reaching Enlightenment in some way. So psychic powers as a concept have been officially linked to Aspects. 

And the Aspect structure of the castes might be about to give us a window into how Alternia’s fascist sociology hurts it’s children systematically. That is unprecedented and really cool to me. 

I was surprised and pleased to find Dahni saw merit in the idea, so I guess you guys might find merit in it? Either way, everyone’s entitled to feel however they feel. I just didn’t feel great realizing I might be sounding critical of WP, since it’s not how I feel. I couldn’t be more excited, actually.