Tag: classpects

How does it feel to know that WP just made all of your classpect theorycrafting completely irrelevant with one fell swoop? That your bullshit is finally seen as what it is, bullshit?

? Are you on the same planet as me, anon? Classpecting just got like 20 times more interesting, not irrelevant. 

Curious to know what parts of what I’ve written about you think are debunked. The only thing particularly shaken up as far as I can tell was Xefros’ status as a Time player, and even that we’re already starting to figure out the reasons for. 

Or think we are, anyway! This is an evolving subject. I never claimed to have all the answers, just that I’ve been–and will continue to–keep working towards fandom’s ability to find them. Because it’s fun and interesting. 

Aaaalso most of my original writing has concerned Classes so far, not so much Aspects. And this validated the fandom’s longest standing thoughts about the Aspects as paired items, along with every pairing. So idk I can’t really figure out any angle you’re coming at this from as anything other than trying and failing to be kind of biting and mean-spirited?

dukeofriven:

revolutionaryduelist:

dukeofriven:

zilliumgrist:

zilliumgrist:

I’M GONNA FUCKING DIE HERE ARE ALL THEIR SIGNS

OK SO:

xefros is derse and a rage player

dammek is prospit and a blood player

zebede is prospit and a light player

daraya is prospit and a hope player

tyzias is prospit and a blood player

mallek is prospit and a time player

one of the twins (i think its barzum) is doom and derse

the other one is breath and derse

and trizza is derse and blood

And @revolutionaryduelist officially excuses himself, goes quietly into his room, and all the rest f us here for the next three hours is him storming around while swearing constantly and throwing shit. 

Nah! I’m confused, admittedly, but if anything I find that exciting. Whenever I end up confused with Homestuck it leads to the conclusion that things are way more interesting and complex than I initially thought. If I feel at all like I felt after Act 7, well–last time I felt that way worked out pretty well for me.

It’s really interesting with Xefros in particular because SO MUCH of his Act 1 stuff so heavily involved Time, so like…what’s up? 

Is this new Caste system flawed and prescriptive, like the Quadrants? 
I doubt that, or at least, I’m not eager to suggest this brand-new system is inaccurate or irrelevant. If true, that’ll probably become clear over the next Acts.

Assuming Xefros IS a Rage player is more interesting though, because
A) We’ve got our first unambiguosly good Hero of Rage, which I was hoping for to begin with.
B) Why the focus on Time, then? Given that Caste and Aspect were linked with the Sburb-playing Heroes from Homestuck, is that something being imposed on Xefros and obscuring his true nature, like the Knight role?
Can you force Aspects on people like Classes???

Even if it turns out even stuff like intrinsically linking Time and rapping, admiring a dude you think of as “a figure from History” and imagining elaborate scenarios where said figure uses Time travel to fight a bunch of different versions of himself is all not enough detail to tell us about a Hero’s Aspect, that would in and of itself be interesting. 

If nothing else, it’ll make it a lot easier to pinpoint how Homestuck/Hiveswap actually try to telegraph Aspect affinity. I’d take a chance at establishing a coherent logic over being right about this particular thing any day.

I’ll PROBABLY still do a classpect video on Xefros? I might even do it before Joey’s to put these questions at the forefront of any Classpect series.

Wow I needed to write all that out. Ok, back to work on videos–thanks @ everyone who sent me asks and sorry I didn’t answer more of them! The bottom line for now is that I find this all very interesting but I don’t think we have quite enough information to figure out how it all fits together.

That said I’m probably due for a quick replay of Act 1 to see if Xefros has any Rage references I missed. 

I’m of the low-key opinion that this more closely resembles Reductionist Buzzfeed Quizzes than anything else. Frankly your analysis of Xefros is built on textual evidence in Hivebent – this quiz doesn’t read anything like him. Your reading feels much more solid than this bit of marketing hype.

I’m flattered, but I’m also not about to go saying my analysis trumps official content, y’anno? If you don’t defer to the text–whatever bizzare form it comes in–it’s easy to get stuck in assuming you’re right. 

If it turns out I AM right and Xefros is a Time player, my guess is this caste system will indeed turn out to be flawed in text, much like the Troll quadrants did. I know we’re all excited, but it’s worth keeping in mind these are canonically castes assigned by a dystopian fascist power structure. 

That it’s not perfect at describing the people it sorts is a real possibility–it’s not like Xefros got to fill out so much as a buzzfeed quiz. 

Really though I don’t have a clue right now one way or another. All i’ve got are questions. Very interesting ones, though, at least for me. 

banavalope replied to your post “dahniwitchoflight replied to your post “luciotheheirofspace reblogged…”

Rage as an aspect at face value is hard to swallow but aspects are also given to players as challenges. Xefros is like the exact opposite of someone “rageful” but he’s in line with the description of someone that’s basically against authority and wants revolution. Otherwise he wouldn’t be in on it with Dammek, but if he really IS a rage player I think the implication would be his challenge is to meet this potential as someone more strongwilled and less fooled than he is

That’s quite possible. I tend not to think about the classpects as challenges to the players too much, mostly because it seems to me like at least in Homestuck, players were ALWAYS executing their classpects in some way or another–Jake was always serving himself Hope/through Hope, Gamzee was always destroying Rage (the beat where he calmed down Eridan, for example), so on.

So if Xefros IS a Rage player, I would’ve expected that to show up from the beginning. All of his Act 1 coding seems to heavily concern Time, but it’s quite possible I missed stuff (someone already reframed his excitedly crushing the soda can as a Rage thing, which I’m considering), and you’re right that there’s some ways he fits the profile.

My guess is the test is accurate, and Xefros is a Rage player. I’m just not sure what that means for the audience’s ability to deduce a characters’ classpect through canon clues. Hopefully revisiting Act 1 and later acts will make the logic that WP employs in writing Classpects a lot clearer to us, with so many characters in play. 

dukeofriven:

zilliumgrist:

zilliumgrist:

I’M GONNA FUCKING DIE HERE ARE ALL THEIR SIGNS

OK SO:

xefros is derse and a rage player

dammek is prospit and a blood player

zebede is prospit and a light player

daraya is prospit and a hope player

tyzias is prospit and a blood player

mallek is prospit and a time player

one of the twins (i think its barzum) is doom and derse

the other one is breath and derse

and trizza is derse and blood

And @revolutionaryduelist officially excuses himself, goes quietly into his room, and all the rest f us here for the next three hours is him storming around while swearing constantly and throwing shit. 

Nah! I’m confused, admittedly, but if anything I find that exciting. Whenever I end up confused with Homestuck it leads to the conclusion that things are way more interesting and complex than I initially thought. If I feel at all like I felt after Act 7, well–last time I felt that way worked out pretty well for me.

It’s really interesting with Xefros in particular because SO MUCH of his Act 1 stuff so heavily involved Time, so like…what’s up? 

Is this new Caste system flawed and prescriptive, like the Quadrants? 
I doubt that, or at least, I’m not eager to suggest this brand-new system is inaccurate or irrelevant. If true, that’ll probably become clear over the next Acts.

Assuming Xefros IS a Rage player is more interesting though, because
A) We’ve got our first unambiguosly good Hero of Rage, which I was hoping for to begin with.
B) Why the focus on Time, then? Given that Caste and Aspect were linked with the Sburb-playing Heroes from Homestuck, is that something being imposed on Xefros and obscuring his true nature, like the Knight role?
Can you force Aspects on people like Classes???

Even if it turns out even stuff like intrinsically linking Time and rapping, admiring a dude you think of as “a figure from History” and imagining elaborate scenarios where said figure uses Time travel to fight a bunch of different versions of himself is all not enough detail to tell us about a Hero’s Aspect, that would in and of itself be interesting. 

If nothing else, it’ll make it a lot easier to pinpoint how Homestuck/Hiveswap actually try to telegraph Aspect affinity. I’d take a chance at establishing a coherent logic over being right about this particular thing any day.

I’ll PROBABLY still do a classpect video on Xefros? I might even do it before Joey’s to put these questions at the forefront of any Classpect series.

Wow I needed to write all that out. Ok, back to work on videos–thanks @ everyone who sent me asks and sorry I didn’t answer more of them! The bottom line for now is that I find this all very interesting but I don’t think we have quite enough information to figure out how it all fits together.

That said I’m probably due for a quick replay of Act 1 to see if Xefros has any Rage references I missed. 

luciotheheirofspace reblogged your photo:whatpumpkin: You might have wondered about the…

Will you make a future video regarding some of it? I’ve literally watched all your videos in awe. XD

Definitely, especially since it’s a pretty hefty wrench thrown into the video I was GOING to make on Xefros, who seemed like an extremely clear-cut time player. If this is meant to be taken as canonical, it suggests that Classpects as applied to the trolls, at least, are way more complex than we first thought.

It’s awfully exciting to try to figure out! God I love homestuck. 

Hey! Really like yor work on the aspects. Made me rethink Pages entirely. I saw that you were wandering about the whole unifying mythology of Knights and Pages as surrounding Warriors and Lawgivers through the serve effect. But I thought a real neat way to tie it all together is with the “Protect and Serve” motto used in law enforcement organizations, which ties both Serve (and Protect, which also symbolizes those classes a lot) and the Law and Code of Honor parts :) . What do you think?

yep! I pretty much agree. I’ve been trying to figure out exactly how to parse the motifs of the classes in a comprehensible way, and the Protect and Serve motto reads really well with Knights and Pages. I’ve never seen canon reference it–the closest would be Dave’s repeated references to Obama, I’d say. But it’s definitely been taking up my thoughts as I consider how the classes all fit together thematically. Sweet catch!

Time and the Alpha

arrghus:

So here’s a thing about Time that I’ve been thinking about but I don’t know exactly how to put. Heroes of Time in Homestuck all exist fundemantelly entangled with the Alpha timeline, and in the case of the two ‘good guy’ heroes, Dave and Aradia, are positioned as a sort of caretakers for it, driven to maintain the existence of the alpha in order to protect their friends. And they do this in their own idiosyncratic ways, Dave threading together an intricate tapestry of careful loops and Aradia just kinda save-scumming whenever anything goes wrong. The way they interact with the Alpha says a lot about them as people, it is a key part of defining who they are, to the point that Time itself in many ways seems to be About the nature of the Alpha, a natural feature of reality.

But there’s hints the Alpha is synthetic, a construct of Lord English. OptimisticDuelist says it better than I do, but there’s precious little of his writings on the topic publicly available. https://medium.com/@RoseOfNobility/apotheosis-and-creation-myth-2257d7bf5854 will have to suffice for now.

So where does that leave us, vis-a-vis the fundamental nature of Time? What is the Aspect, exactly, absent the influence of this immortal demon? Is there an Aspect at all absent his power? Certainly, both Dave’s and Aradia’s arcs involve overcoming symbolic representations of LE and the Alpha, Dave by coming to terms with his abusive childhood, tightly linked to the presence of Lil Cal, who is actually Lord English, and Aradia perhaps more symbolically by overcoming her death and largely leaving the Alpha-defined story entirely thousands of pages before the rest of the main cast manages to. And, of course, Damara, more of a failed hero of Time, is in many ways defined by her allegiance to LE, and her desire to see him hurt her former friends, while Caliborn, well, I don’t think I need to explain how Caliborn relates to Lord English.

But, well, I’ve gotten a couple questions from people making, like, fan characters or defining themselves in terms of the Aspects (and where the line between those things goes I do not know nor particularly care) about what the nature of Time is, and, uh, this is part of why it’s tricky to answer. Lord English is a dominating influence upon the story of Homestuck, but in terms of Paradox Space as a whole, that vast, nebulous existence of countless other stories to tell using the same basic mechanics? In terms of the Classpect system as used separately from Homestuck itself, to label fictional characters or even yourself? I’m not entirely sure how to position Lord English and his themes and nature in relation to Tumblr user Anonymous asking me about what it means for them, specifically, to be a Seer of Time. Like, where do you go with that?

Maybe it’ll get clearer for me in time, I feel like it kinda did already just writing this.

Hey, chums!
This time, we take a look at the Hero Titles, also known as Classpects. 
Let me know what your Class and Aspect is in the comments, and say
whether Classpect videos on different characters sounds interesting to you! 

Also, an announcement. After December 1st, I’ll be changing the Patreon to charge per video post, rather than monthly. 

Thanks for everything, and as always,

Keep Rising.

[Patreon] [Hiveswap Discord]

Here’s a couple of resources that may be of interest to Classpect fans who haven’t heard about Jungian Archetypes or Carol S. Pearson’s system, in case you find it interesting:

http://www.uiltexas.org/files/capitalconference/Twelve_Character_Archetypes.pdf

http://www.carolspearson.com/about/the-12-archetype-system-a-model-for-discovering-your-archetypes/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jungian_archetypes

Someone told me to post this so here it is. Probably my best vocalization yet of the Roleplay mechanic I’ve been talking about, which ties the Ancestors into the Classes and makes the whole system a lot more flexible and comprehensible.

If nothing else I think it’s interesting to consider and discuss, so do let me know if you agree or disagree. Here’s some other examples of Class roleplay I’ve found time to write about:

Dirk, Terezi, Xefros -> Knight

Dave-> Prince

Jane-> Heir