Tag: classpects

Since I know you dig Vriska I ought to tell you I’m pretty sure the Class system like, textually backs up the way she was emulating Mindfang like…mechanically? I don’t want to bore you if you’re uninterested but the bottom line is Vriska is linked to fairies during Act 5 which is a motif exclusively associated with Sylphs and Maids outside of her (including Jane), and during that period she tries to emulate mechanically what Aranea is able to do effortlessly re: Pages

roxilalonde:

oh yeah, the parallels between vriska’s and aranea’s reaction to finding out their relations to mindfang are definitely solid. i also don’t think the Page’s god tier outfit being visually similar to peter pan’s is a coincidence, either; there’s a deliberate link between pages and youth, immaturity, and a struggle to realize themselves, making theirs the most arduous and lengthy of all the classpects’ journey of maturity. 

vriska’s is also a unique journey in terms of thieves; while the thief class sets up the player for a journey of learning to be altruistic instead of selfish, vriska has to go through the additional step of learning that she is a thief in the first place. she frames all of her self-centered choices as selfless ones, done either for the good of another person (tavros, john) or for the general group. she wants to paint herself as a sylph, working for the good of others, even though most of the time, her choices are rooted in altruism only insofar as that altruism can come back to benefit her. i.e., she wants to be a hero, but only so that she can ultimately profit from it.

this comes back in the Dream Bubbles, when she meets another thief and starts dating her. (vriska) is a demonstration of Vriska at her most ‘thief-y,’ totally absorbed in her own world and her own relationships, and willing to give up on altruism entirely. the problem is that although this is technically progress in the right direction, it’s not the thief’s ideal endpoint; ideally, she would come to terms with her own nature and start working towards genuine selflessness. this doesn’t happen, not in the least because she’s dead, and has a dearth of opportunities. 

aranea, on the other hand, is a sylph through and through. what she does is for the “good” of others, she’s just very bad at realizing what the good of others is; and she’s too utilitarian (mind-controlling people, killing others, desperately making a power grab) about it. aranea has a vision for the greater good of all people, but the brutal methods she’s willing to use to get to that vision damn both her and the attempt.

Oooooh damn I’ve been arguing for a while now that the Active/Passive distinction inherently includes Selfishness/Selflesnsess respectively but it didn’t occur to me to consider that part of the roleplaying mechanics I’ve been uncovering, that does say a lot about Vriska I think!

Interestingly it suggests Alpha Vriska hasn’t wholly moved on from her Mindfang mentality either since one of the ways she tears into (Vriska) is specifically noting that she thinks (Vriska)’s behavior is selfish.

Man I want the epilogue what the fuck is Terezi going to do about this mess 😦 i believe in her 

roxilalonde:

thederangedsolicitor:

roxilalonde:

i dont generally get into classpect but i think that while it’s good to remember that while hussie lines up some classpects to be “stronger” than others, with the witch and the lord having the most obvious control over their aspects, jade harley, “most powerful” player in her or any session, spent over half her journey either asleep or separated from anywhere her power could be utilized for the benefit of the group so moral of the story a classpect is really just what the author makes it

Realistically, every fight at god tier levels is resolved purely by Authoreal Intent.

There isn’t a Technically Stronger side anymore. There’s only the Narrative.

i mean, you’re right, but it’s the author’s job to set up a reasonable mechanic by which the reader can understand the battle’s outcome as causation, not just “they picked a side.” in a well-built world, the outcome of a conflict is decided by the mechanisms of the universe constructed by its narrator, not an arbitrary decision on behalf of the narrator. a thorough analysis of the universe, therefore, should be able to yield at least a basic outline of how conflicts between people of differing strengths would play out.

I think it does do that, for what it’s worth. I just don’t think Classpects are meant to measure differences in strength, but rather differences in kinds of gameplay styles. The more interesting stuff about Classpects isn’t about powersets anyway imo, but rather how they describe and foreshadow character’s journeys and struggles.

Pages are the only class other than the Masters really set up as “stronger” than others, and I don’t think that’s a description of raw power. It’s a bit more complicated. 

Anyway tl;dr in Homestuck conflicts ARE decided by the mechanisms of the universe the author set up, but the operative concept that guides Paradox Space is individual will, not the Classpect system as a prescribed power-sorting guide.

The Classpects exist in support of characterization, not to establish power scales, if I’m making any sense? 

how do you suppose the general idea of page having a lot of potential fits in with selfish serving? vriska says it several times, and aradia too alluded to tavros’s class (flarp) as having the most powerful abilities being available much later on. the page class seems like a special case since i think its the only one explicitly described with criteria other than the “allow/exploit/etc __” phrase, so what do you think of this? (wow that was a mess of words oops)

The way I see it, it makes a lot of sense: Pages are inherently Self-Serving, and that’s both an intense weakness and a great strength. 

Why? Because in Homestuck, reality is made not just of what you want, but of what you’re willing to make happen. Willpower and thought are tangible, powerful things in Homestuck–things that shape the communal reality that all the characters share on their adventure. 

So what if you had a natural talent to give yourself whatever you want? What if you had a natural talent to make other people WANT to give you whatever you want? Once Pages understand this potential in themselves and exploit it to it’s fullest potential, you get–well, you get Gods uniquely skilled at achieving exactly the outcome they want. So you get Jake summoning Brain Ghost Dirk, which should be impossible. You get Tavros managing to somehow organize an entire army out of extremely self-absorbed troll ghosts so he can finally show Vriska up, just by being nice and talking to them all one by one.

Ultimately, Homestuck posits that happiness/fulfillment/success, in reality, is made by knowing how to traverse the boundaries between what exists, what you want, and what the people around you want. Pages’ key verb, by design, gives them the shortest path to getting there. Other classes might use their ability to Make or Steal or Destroy to get what they want, but Pages have the luxury of simply Serving it to themselves–partly by making other people genuinely want to give it to them, or by using their Aspect to serve their own desires directly instead. 

This makes them powerful vectors for organizing wills into a single goal, ie: Powerful leaders or warriors under the right circumstances. 

The reason this is such a double-edged sword is twofold. For one thing, Pages being self-serving also makes them inclined to be cowardly and conflict avoidant, even when conflict is necessary. They’re also prone to put their own interest ahead of the group’s. For another, they can inspire people to want to help them, but those people are also their own people with their own predilections and ideas about what serving someone else means, which leads to unpredictable results. One need look no further than Vriska to see how that can go wrong. 

And it’s worth noting that being self-serving is something society by and large strongly discourages, especially if you’re going to be asking people for help in accomplishing whatever you want to get done! It’s seen as a pretty Bad thing to be. So Pages perhaps more than most classes tend to be conditioned against embracing their innate skills.

This is a true mess of words. Hope it makes any damn sense but feel free to send me another ask if it doesn’t! And thanks a ton!

Could you explain what you mean when you said Karkat “almost always exerts his impact by “Allowing” his aspect”? That seems… at odds with everything Karkat does, to be frank. (–passive pages anon)

If you haven’t read them already, I’ll say read my essays on Knight/Page as Butlers as well as the Steal/Serve essay, because I advance my arguments for Karkat there.

To “Allow” basically means to give permission or entitle X to act through you, “As if through the Will of the Aspect”. I describe it as the counterpart to “Exploit” in Class theory, which means “to make use of or harness”. 

Karkat’s Blood impact usually come without him being directly cognizant of it, as if Blood were acting through him. If you don’t have the time to read those essays and see what i mean send me another ask and I’ll answer you tomorrow, but I really think it’s kind of redundant effort all things considered. I’m happy to answer any questions or counterarguments you have for those essays, too. 

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

image

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.

your class analyses have been wonderful and incredibly helpful!! but do you know of any good aspect analysis out there?

Absolutely and hell yes. I don’t really feel the need to write about Aspects the way I did about Classes at all, because I think the fandom mostly has them figured out. I can add some little nuances or interesting tidbits with Aspects, but nothing I say there is going to be game changing I think.

There’s a lot of pretty great thinkers on the Aspect level, so here’s three recommendations:

I’ve gotta mention @bladekindeyewear , who in some not insignificant ways got me started in my interest in reading Homestuck analytically (along with @what-the-fuck-is-homestuck ‘s character analysis). I don’t buy into inversion theory and I think BKEW’s key verb for Knights and Pages is off, and obviously I think he’s got their Active/Passive designations reversed. Those would be my personal caveats.

But in terms of Aspect theory, his writing is on point! I’m particularly fond of his posts on the Breath/Blood dichotomy and his masterpost on Aspect Dualities, in particular his identification of physical symbols for each Aspect (I am particularly fond of the symbols for Hope :P).

I’d also recommend @dahniwitchoflight , who I haven’t read as much from but greatly enjoyed what I have read. In particular I’ve pretty much adopted  her view on Denizens until further word from the canon, because I like it and it meshes with what I already see in the system. Same quibbles as I have with BKEW re: Pages and Knights, some key verbs, and inversion theory stuff. 

Finally, definitely definitely check out Tex Talk’s videos on the Aspects, because they’re the best cases laid out yet for Homestuck’s like…unifying themes, and the writing on the Aspects themselves is completely transcendent and pushing the envelope in a big way. 

Those are my reccomendations! A lot of this stuff is kind of the foundation I work off when doing my own writing, too. Feel free to let me know what you think of any of them 🙂 

On a reread i noticed something that may be true about seers, based on a conversation betweent terezi and rose in act 4: they are more cognizant of their exiles. They both say that they hear them, rather than characters like john mistaking the commands for their own thoughts

Yup! Sollux also immediately recognizes his Exile as an outside voice come to think of it, although he conflates it with another voice of the damned and rejects it’s direction intensely. 

Sweet catch!

Force and Flow — Know and Change – optimisticDuelist – Medium

eromancer:

revolutionaryduelist:

Here’s the last one of this Classpect essay series! This is on the Know and Change pair, the quartet of classes closest to the Spectrum:

Mage and Seer & Heir and Witch 

Coming soon will be:

  • More Homestuck Explained videos, covering Homestuck’s core themes from beginning to end
  • Writing about Jane Crocker, Davekat, the Alpha Timeline… . 
  • Hiveswap lore and analysis, linking the game to Hiveswap once it comes out and probably handing streams and such if all goes well!
  • And more stuff as I think of it, too. Really, figuring out the Classpect system made me realize we’ve only scratched the surface of Homestuck (it keeps happening), and this is only the beginning of a new extreme.

If you can spare me a buck a month you can help me make all this content and, like, not die and stuff– and get your hands on it earlier, too! Higher reward tiers will let you invite friends to the Discord so they can access this stuff and talk about it, 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!

[Patreon] [Hiveswap Discord]

[Active/Passive Masterpost] [Destroy and Create] [Serve and Steal] 

You want feedback? Sure.

Ok so the last time I reblogged one
of these I asked about Dancestors, and I’m about to bring them up again
because god damn do i think i can dancestor.

I read the bit you wrote about how Heirs must claim Independence from the will of their aspect, and how Heirs control their aspect, and I thought about the Heri you didn’t mention. Mituna.

Was Mituna a successful or failed Heir? On one hand, Mituna DID change the doom of the alpha trolls, but he also succumbed to doom and burned himself out. I ended up attributing this to Captor duality shenangians, but while i was looking at the wiki page, i noticied something that threw me for a loop.

To quote from Aranea’s exposition, “
He
was gifted with vision twofold, and had strong prophetic insights
wherever a 8leak future was concerned. He had much to say when it came
to warning us a8out the path of doom and destruction we were all headed
for, 8ut no one took him very seriously.”

His attempt at emulating one of the Knowledge classes cements, at least in my mind, your Classpect views as canon.

to sum up a longwinded spiel, yours are some good damn posts.

Oh shit you’re right! And that lines up perfectly considering Sollux is Mituna’s mythological forebear, too. 

I had only detected one instance of a character picking up a Prophet’s mythological Role–Karkat, the only character besides the actual Prophets described as having issued a prophecy in the form of his shitty shipping grid, and who’s forebear is obviously the Signless, as prophety as it gets.

You just added another to my roster though, so thanks! That owns 😀

I’m sure mine aren’t exactly CANON in that I’m probably getting some stuff wrong/missing other stuff (like this), but I do think we’ve gotten significantly closer! I’m excited as hell. Thanks!

Force and Flow — Know and Change – optimisticDuelist – Medium

I have to say I don’t really understand why people think Heir is a passive class. When I think about it I always see it as active, for a few reasons. One is that no Heirs I’ve seen acted particularly passive(except in the process of failure). Also if I’m not imagining things, the connection between The Choice’s answer and the player’s passive/active alignment. I might be wrong, I just cannot think of Heirs as passive.

I’m not sure what you mean about the Choice and the player’s active/passive alignment? I never detected any difference there.

I read Heirs as passive for the same reason I do Knights, Sylphs, Seers, and so on: They’re more group-oriented and reactive to what others think than their Active counterparts. 

John acted passively in success a good number of times. His first time using the Breeze was fundamentally in reaction to WV’s insistence. He takes direction from Rose and Vriska and Terezi at various points, following someone else’s direction for almost the entirety of his quest much like Rose and Dave (Jade is a notable inversion of this). And he exerts his power primarily for the benefit of Others even when he does use it actively. The list goes on. 

However, I do hold that John acts actively pretty often, as part of my argument that Seers/Mages/Heirs/Witches are the most flexible classes who have the easiest time veering between Yin and Yang states, as I argued in my Change/Know essay.