Dirk Strider has a PR problem. Now, that’s not exactly his fault, in fact he oftentimes seems to bend over backwards to work his way around it, to soften his appearance to the reader as best he can, and generally behave in every regard as a well and proper through and through stand up gent. Nevertheless, it is so deceptively easy to miss that, so distractingly simple to latch onto any of a number of alternative possible interpretations of him.
Let’s get the obvious one out of the way first. Dirk Strider as a character is preceded by thousands of pages by his estranged twin brother, Dirk Strider, aka Bro, aka the dictionary definition of a broken household, who spends and has already spent so many scenes tormenting his adoptive/biological son Dave Strider, aka probably the most beloved character in Homestuck, that Dave’s entire character arc can arguably be summed up as gradually breaking free of the damage wrought by this thoroughly destructive character dynamic. Indeed, one of the highlights of Homestuck’s final stretch was watching Dave Strider explain in sufficient yet far from exhaustive detail to Dirk Strider the injustice wrought by Dirk Strider.
Let’s move ahead (or are we retreating). At the very beginning of Act 6, in arguably the first trace of Dirk Strider’s personality, we find two rabbits, gifted to Jane Crocker by her fellow alphas, Jake and Roxy; each perfectly emblematic of the other’s personality and connection to Jane in particular. Dirk’s gift, however, is withheld, in its place an ominous note that, whatever it is, it is not quite as inoffensive a thing as the other two.
Indeed, Dirk Strider himself is absent from much of the earlier pages of Act 6. When Jake attempts to contact him, he receives in his place the tragic figure, doomed to darkness and misfortune, Dirk Strider, aka Lil Hal, aka AR. Dirk Strider proceeds to antagonize Jake and, albeit but briefly, convinces both Jake and indeed the audience themselves into thinking he is actually Dirk Strider.
And so is Dirk Strider robbed first of his fame, then of his good reputation, and finally of his first impression by the structure of the narrative, as well as the malicious actions of his preceding hobgoblins, Dirk Strider and Dirk Strider. And all this before he is allowed to speak a single word in his defense. In the face of such forces, who could help but take a dim view of the man. It is a poor man indeed, to be Dirk Strider.
Tag: goodthoughtbestfriend
Commanding Aspects
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.
Some old classpect thoughts
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?
Musings on Hope and Rage (Part 2)
So. We left off affirming Hope’s connection to rationalizations, and how Hope players are able to use this to give themselves great power. My working theory right now is that Hope players find “evidence” to use as fuel for attacks and skills that I’ll call “claims” and “theories”– but they can also be confronted with “evidence” against their “claims”. This “debunks” their “claims”, perhaps permanently, and is also kind of demoralizing.
Like Kanaya being alive even after getting blasted through the stomach. That’s the kind of thing that makes you doubt your ability to Hope people to death, y’know?
I’m using this analogy of evidence and theories because there’s something about Eridan that a lot of people tend to gloss over when discussing Hope.
That thing is his obsession with SCIENCE.
At some point during his time in SGRUB, he decided that to really get ahead in life he needed to employ the most stringent magics of wwizardly science.
The fact that all of his scientific principles were objectively more shaky than a half-paralysed mountain goat about to get simultaneously devoured by a puma and crushed by an avalanche doesn’t matter. He decided that testable science was vastly preferable to arcane magic, and this has an interesting relationship to what I’ve already noticed– rationalizations and the quest for explanations.
Now we’ll take a brief interlude in order to discuss what I consider to be Hope’s antithesis.
I’m talking about Rage.
Zenosanalytic recently made an eloquent and highly sexy post that detailed his(her?) observations on Rage. In the interest of economy, I’ve decided that their points and views line up well enough with mine that you can read his post and come away with 70-75% of my understanding of Rage*.
One of the core points that zenosanalytic raised is that Rage deals with emotions and the animal part of people. I think it’s called the hindbrain or something, but my knowledge of neural anatomy might be a little dated/wildly incorrect. Point is, Rage is the opposite of logic and science. It is run by emotions and precious little else.
It also deals with fear and suffocation, so we can further say that it might act as anathema to the SPIRIT OF ADVENTURE!
You would love to travel around the world, toppling any SACRED URNS you encountered. You’d be tickled by the opportunity to defile HALLOWED TOMBS everywhere, raiding them of their treasures. And how you’d give your RIGHT LEG for a shot at desecrating THE SHIT out of some real life MYSTIC RUINS for their byzantine wares. Luckily for your limb, there is a dandy set of such ruins nearby, and you desecrate them quite frequently!
Anyway, that’s largely tangential. Hope as adventure is only ever really explored by Jake, although Eridan (as a Prince) did have adventures in destruction, and Cronus had his stupid “fantasy” about the evil wizard.
Back to Rage vs. Hope as Emotional Thinking vs. Rational Thinking: when you look at it, a lot of things that humans have done must look really dumb to animals. It’s like, “Let’s poke this mystery substance to see what happens!” Or, “Guys let’s go fight a vicious dragon so that we can have FUN ADVENTURES!”
Would an animal do that? Hell fucking no. Not for those reasons, anyway. I guess they could just be that stupid. But that’s a whole other aspect.
So we could further colour Rage vs. Hope as Animal vs. Human. Interestingly, here we can see their issues of belief reflected in real life, with animals believing in what happens on the surface but not trying to find explanations– much like Gamzee does!– while humans have managed to explain reality to the point that they can be very skeptical about things that do happen in front of their faces.
Rage sees objects as self-explanatory, but Hope sees explanations as the object. It’s not a cat, it’s a bunch of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and a few other elements mixed in such a way that it meows and is adorable! It’s not a bright glowy thing in the sky, it’s a ball of hydrogen and helium that causes nuclear fusion to keep itself burning!
(Also: Cronus sees himself as “humankin”. This is pretty interesting against this interpretation of Hope, especially when we see that the Alternian trolls were largely ruled by Rage.)
But there’s something that divorces Hope from Science, or at least the Science that is practiced today. Put simply, Hope players are complacent. They make something up, and since it matches every single data point they believe it. They’re accommodating when the evidence shifts, disregarding previous theories and adopting new ones– much like scientists– but when evidence doesn’t seem to change, they stick to their guns. They might be driven to seek explanations, but they aren’t driven to seek evidence.
One could make a connection between this outlook and many religions, despite how triggering it could be. I think that, while the connection exists, it’s more because religion is a kind of science– in terms of “I seek a reason”. There are probably a couple of religions that don’t seek reasons for humanity’s existence, but the vast majority of them give explicit reasons for why humanity exists. To worship gods, to seek enlightenment, to protect Earth… the list goes on. But, unlike Science, most religions don’t actively look for ways to debunk their own theories– just like Hope players. I don’t mean to offend or insult, but religions are a very human thing. It makes sense that Hope deals with it, and that Rage finds it stupid.
“But wait!” I hear you cry. “Gamzee is one of the only explicitly religious characters in the story! And the other Heroes of Rage are both religious as well!”
Well. Yeah.
But have you actually looked at their religion?
You can sum up their views in two two-word phrases: “MoThErFuCkInG mIrAcLeS” and “mirthful MESSIAHS”.
They don’t try to explain anything beyond saying “miracles” and “jujus”, they worship the two most terrible gods ever, they are goddamn juggalos and the entire thing is just a parody of a stupid Internet cult that revolves around drinking Faygo and watching ICP videos.
When you look at it, this religion is actually viciously pragmatic in its own right. Its worshippers recognize that you don’t necessarily need any explanation beyond “it’s fucking magic”, and so they’ve based it on absolutely concrete tenets like “thou shalt not piss off Caliborn to the point that he obliterates you from the timeline”.
So while the veracity of calling Gamzee’s beliefs a “religion” may be a matter of contention between philososcholars, it’s sufficiently divorced from Hope’s concept of a religion that we can consider it another opposite between them.
(In fact, it could be said that the bullshit about miracles is basically how cats and dogs see our technology, with all our water taps and refrigerators and computers and buses and planes. They don’t exactly think to themselves “Oh I get it there must be some piping system that gets water from a remote reservoir”. They don’t even think to themselves “Humans must put their tears into bottles which they then hide inside the sink”. They just think “Miracles”. Compare that to a scientist or the Pope getting abducted by aliens for a while. The scientist would be all like “so this must be some kind of relativistic anti-speed drive with the ability to blah blah blah blah science words”, and the bishop would be like “ah this must be a challenge from God blah blah blah blah Biblical verses”. They could be exactly correct, or seven thousand miles from the truth, but the point is that people come up with explanations, while animals literally cannot give two shits.)
Anyway. Hope as logic and humanity’s quest for meaning, versus Rage as emotions and the animalistic urges to survive. Does that look absolutely awesome? Mildly cool? Structurally sound?
…
And thus concludes my musing. Heed these words well. Heed… them… well.
Or I guess you can just forget about my overthinking and laugh at the fact that I might have jumped to what might be an absurd conclusion in an ironically Hope-like manner. OH WELL.
* The other 25-30% of my understanding of Rage comes from this dude. He’s an outstanding candidate for Rage’s philosopher right now, so take from that what you will.
1) why have i never seen this in, what, four goddamn years?
2) thank u @arrghus for making me see this, you’re a hero
I’m so glad you love davepetasprite and understand their character too oh my god. they were the first character I’ve seen who’s cannonly non binary and just do casual about it? and i love them so much so when i see people like you calling out people who are being misunderstanding dicks to them i get so happy
davesprite and davepeta are characters of particular interest to me because they explore a hs theme that i find pretty cool
ive seen a lot of people insist one or the other – that davepeta is their own character and not dave and nepeta at all, and that you cant gather any info about either of them from davepeta. then ive seen people say the opposite, that theyre basically just nepeta and dave taking turns at piloting a 3d holographic card in person form. then ive seen both factions insist the other one is completely wrong.
honestly i think it comes straight down the middle. i think davesprites arc is an exploration of the dichotomy between mind and heart. davesprite is a divergence from dave – we see very clearly how he reacts differently to things than dave (getting pissed off at john for being ungrateful while alpha dave tells john its nothing and not to worry about it right after), davesprite saying hes just a janky dave knockoff and not worthy of having friends or relationships of his own, and john very notably telling davesprite to fuck off and that he couldnt wait to meet up with the real dave when he got angry at him during his birthday.
davesprite underwent different experiences, different choices, and is different from dave in a measurable amount as a result. this is where you get people insisting that davesprite is his own character completely separate from dave. and while i agree in the same way that bro is not the same as dirk, grandpa harley is not the same as jake, kankri is not the same as the signless, etc, it doesnt mean that davesprite doesnt illuminate certain things about daves character and personality and how he would react to similar situations or his general thought process. (you see this get sort of lampshaded in this conversation, where davesprite says that he just noticed he likes to talk to himself, wonders if alpha dave also made that observation and concludes that nah, he had to be a bird for 3 years to come to it. meanwhile….alpha dave at about the exact same time has this monologue where hes come the same realization, sans birdness factor)
its the balance of nature vs nurture, and while davesprite comes swinging in heavily on the mind/nurture side of things (with some indications that its not a complete divergence) and this contributes to his lower self esteem and identity crisis, once he merges with nepeta (a heart player) a more balanced view of this is achieved. davesprite, through davepeta, gains an understanding that hes still technically connected to the greater platonic entity of dave just as much as the current alpha version of dave is and is just as important to the grander scheme of things, which was the main source of his inner turmoil.this is where you get a lot of complaints saying that the ultimate self resolution to davesprites character went completely against his previous conflict, and while i understand people who say this…. this isnt really taking into account the other things davepeta said about their existence. they still declared themselves a new person, with new pronouns, consciously decided not to act on nepetas former feelings for karkat, and decided to just live their new life as a new person, instead acting on former feelings for jade. (presumably because shes not in a relationship like karkat already is, and the former relationship was requited and just…more thematically tied with jade) while talking about how everyone is connected to a greater self, at the same time they still went ahead and distinguished themselves as a new entity separate from that. you could say it should have been executed better, but its still a balancing act between the two aspects.
anyway this was way longer than it should have been but in conclusion davepeta rules
Holy Shit
theenglishmanwithallthebananas:
theenglishmanwithallthebananas:
okAY so i was just thinking about homestuck cause im always thinking about homestuck and I think i just figured out the ultimate riddle.
let’s talk about the Choice:
It’s been long accepted that the Choice is largely related to facing your own mortality. Alt!Calliope chose to die, Caliborn chose to be immortal, Roxy and John chose to live, all the trolls chose to fight. but we all forgot one.
davesprite chose to fix the sword instead of himself.
listen. LISTEN.
The Choice isn’t about facing your own mortality, it’s about choosing between being useful and being a good person.
bringing this back because with hiveswap, we now also know pretty much every single ancestor got to be big and important at the price of being a really really shitty parent. or they could lead a simple life and be dead.
Oh yes, I like this quite a bit. More fuel for the fire:
Gamzee choosing to be important over his friends.
This entire exchange from (Vriska) about LE and, by implication, Vriska.
AR being isolated from his friends and incredibly important/powerful, and later Arquis going on about this incredibly specific and important impact he later realizes through the Masterpiece.
There’s also Dirk struggling with his own innate self-worth and morality so much he ends up not really doing much of anything himself. I think that case is interesting because, if you think about it, Dirk is at his most impactful and successful in a healthy way only when his powers are working together with Jake’s.
Which I think suggests something about Homestuck’s logic with regard to how to break out of the two extremes–it’s in working together that we get the best of both worlds and all that. Makes me hope the content we start getting through Viz really starts exploring the implications of fraymotifs and what characters are capable of together, to be honest.
Anyway this is great, sweet catch!
Fuck I had a realization
I was reminded last night that Calliope had referred to passive/active classes with a +/- designation– passive is +, active is -. I think this has been a kind of enduring fandom mystery, as to why she chose + for passive and – for active, rather than, say, the other way around? Or why use +/- for this concept at all??
But I was thinking about this question and it hit me like a fucking thunderstroke.
Batteries.
Batteries!!!!
A battery is composed of, and I am likely simplifying this greatly due to my limited understanding but stick with me here, an anode with a negative charge (-) and a cathode with a positive charge (+). The anode has an excess of electrons, which creates an imbalance in a system that really really wants to be balanced. The cathode has relatively few electrons, which makes it the perfect place for all those excess electrons in the anode to go so they can correct the imbalance. When the anode and the cathode are connected, the electrons flow from the anode to the cathode, creating a circuit– and that’s the magic that makes batteries work!
Active and passive classes are distinguished in a number of possible ways, but to my understanding, they can by and large be explained this way: active classes act, passive classes react. Active classes are the source from which most of the action flows, but passive classes facilitate and allow the action to be. In this way, they’re a lot like the anode and the cathode– one being the font of influence, the other being its conduit.
I would super love if dyed-in-the-wool classpect theorycrafters could tell me what they think of this idea, because I mostly just read and very rarely contribute to this sort of discussion. But I THINK I’m on to something here.
Huh, that makes sense.
Good observation. It kind of bashes the theory that active classes are inherently self-aggrandizing and all the actions are directed towards the self and that passive classes are directed toward others as support. Good job!
Well, that certainly wasn’t my intent. My hope was that it could be largely compatible with other passive/active theorizing I had been reading, including that one, but particularly with the Daoist reading– passive/+ as yin and active/- as yang– which was a major inspiration for this post and totally dovetails with the battery metaphor imo. (i am basically indirectly @’ing @revolutionaryduelist here so i may as well @ them directly– this idea came to me while reading up on their classpect writing.)
There’s a decent amount of wiggle room here, I think, so there’s no need to define these terms too strictly. I vastly prefer viewing these sorts of things cooperatively versus competitively. 😀
I’m inclined to agree with this completely. I think someone once told me something similar but I didn’t quite get it at the time, actually? But yeah this seems like it makes sense to me, thanks for bringing it up!
It doesn’t really conflict with the selfish/selfless readings for me, either.
Calliope says the active/passive dichotomy is complex and can mean many different things, and I regard the selfish/selfless thing as being indicative of a broad trend or a habitual default for the character, not a hard rule.
Another way to understand the division is that Active classes are simply more self-defined and self-focused, so their impacts on reality emerge much more from within themselves and their willingness to force reality into their ideal shape.
Passive classes tend to conform more to the status quo and tend to act to return stability to a disturbed/unbalanced system, so they’re more sensitive to the influences and nuances of the world around them.
It’s also worth noting that both the Selfish and Selfless extremes are just indicative of trends, in my view. A healthy example of any kind of player will ultimately just come to understand their own thought patterns and reach a balance that works for them & those around them, not just blindly revel in the satisfaction of their natural affinity.
This is worth clearing up for me since apparently I’ve given some the impression that, like, Jake being a selfish jerk to Dirk is perfectly ok because thats just his Class? So it’s worth clarifying that I just think it’s understandable, rooted in actual desire for Dirk and his company, and is a problem they can both work out over time.
This turned into talking about dirkjake again of course so im gonna stop here but bottom line is: good post op i dig this
hi! me and my friend have long considered Gamzee more as a plot device/deus ex machina than a character with an actual personality that makes logical sense. we were looking up Whistles (see MSPA wiki) and think that Gamzee is… apparently just a giant callback? A private joke? A character moved to the wrong universe, warped to fit the narrative? we’re going to get our hands on the actual book ASAP, but I figured if any blog could start meta discussion over it w/ owners, it was yours.
I will say that my friend @hussianphilosopher made some points about Gamzee I thought were compelling, and on my agenda is moving that little Tumblr post over to Medium with a few expanded sections on Gamzee and Damara.
I’ve known about Whistles, and yeah I agree that Gamzee is definitely a giant callback to that in many ways. But honestly I really don’t like the idea that any character in homestuck is just a plot device/makes no sense–Equius is an extended humanimals reference in a bunch of ways, but he’s still also a character who has depth and intrigue and a coherent personality, as Tex Talks breaks down excellently here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjZtB2i8vR0&t=50s&ab_channel=TexTalks
HOWEVER, If I were to accept that any character in Homestuck is contrived and nonsensical and exists only to be a joke, it would be Gamzee. It’s just that I believe that perception is intentional, and in itself part of his character arc. Tex Talks may help get across why I think so here, as well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4H7m23gkAe4&ab_channel=TexTalks
I honestly think it’s pretty fascinating how much Gamzee deliberately flattens himself, how much he *chooses* to be uncomplicated as a character, because he devotes himself to a single principle: serving/becoming Lord English. As revolutionaryduelist pointed out in their last post, he destroys all the offshoot timeline’s he’s in and chooses, over and over, to seek out LE instead of helping his ostensible friends.
I’ve never really bought the argument that Gamzee lacks motivation, even in Act 6. From, like, day ONE, we’re told that the most important thing in his life is his religion. His switch from interpreting it as a distant prophecy of future clown messiahs to meaning LE (and, by later implication, himself) is admittedly subtle at first, relying on recognizing that he was speaking to Doc Scratch in Cascade and that the Vast Honk is actually LE’s, but by mid Act 6, it’s not even subtle anymore. Like,while Gamzee is doing his antics, the Author himself literally tells us that Gamzee sees Caliborn as his god, and that he gave up all his other connections to serve him. The only missing piece of the puzzle, then, is why Gamzee called *himself* the mirthful messiah back in Horrorstuck–which is answered in Caliborn’s masterpiece: he experiences apotheosis with his own god by becoming part of LE. Which explains the Vast Honk in the first place. It’s great.
Note also that after Horrorstuck, Gamzee basically ends up having zero connections to anyone else–which were the bonds and desires that made him a more complex character originally. Tavros, the one person he arguably kind of cared about, is dead and mourned, and while Karkat’s morallegiance manages to snap him out of cruel Joker prankster rage mode, he ultimately chooses (as Hussie says) to abandon it for his LE-centric goals. He discards the bonds and thus his complexity, in other words, to serve an idea, a principle.
This is why the Whistles parallels make so much sense: like Whistles, Gamzee chose to devote his entire being to one entity, in this case Lord English. And his arbitrary, plot-device-like appearances in Act 6, while closely connected to the caprice inherent in Rage, as Tex points out, also make perfect sense in the context of him wanting to fulfill all the time loops that lead to Lord English. He becomes less of a character, less of a person, because *he wants to be.*
Honestly, the parallels between Caliborn and Gamzee are fascinating. They have the same hubristic sin: they’re willing to give everything else up to be exalted as a supcreme god, and don’t recognize the value of what they’re sacrificing. Only Caliborn does it as himself, and Gamzee, as a passive class, other-oriented character, does it entirely through submitting his agency to that of another. God, I love this comic sometimes.
In short, everything Gamzee does makes perfect sense when you consider what he wants and what he’s willing to give up for it. And that, while it makes him an increasingly simplistic character, also makes him a fascinating one.
On the unexpected appeal of Homestuck’s Gnosticism to an atheist
I wrote a thing about math, philosophy, Gnosticism, and… Homestuck?
Hi i love this essay more than life itself, i am so owned and am never escaping the gnostic stuff am I
On the unexpected appeal of Homestuck’s Gnosticism to an atheist
HIVESWAP CLASSPECT THEORYPOST
homestuck is known for its symmetry
so it wouldn’t be weird if
Joey – LIGHT PLAYER (active creator class i.e. MAID)
credit to sweet and precious @revolutionaryduelist
- her symbol is a star
- flashlight strifekind
- can read Alternian
- is a performance artist
- heals stuff (creator class confirmed)
Xefros – TIME PLAYER (passive exploiter class i.e. PAGE)
also credit to the wonderful, dear, sweet @revolutionaryduelist
- likes rapping
- has a lusus known for being slow
- time flavor text
- all rustblood characters in homestuck are time players
- gets pushed around
- has an idol
Jude – SPACE PLAYER (passive relocator class i.e. ROGUE)
- has a frickin space alien on his shirt
- may or may not have memorized star charts
- we don’t know much about him yet
- selfless like all canon rogues are (sacrificed his pigeons for Joey)
- literally relocated the marbles (good job btw)
Dammek – BREATH PLAYER (active destroyer class i.e. PRINCE)
- controls Xefros, destroying his dreams to be anything that’s not a butler
- really, Xef can’t go anywhere as long as he’s making him butler
- he’s leading a rebellion, so he has big dreams and motivation
- all canon bronzeblood trolls are breath players
- again, we don’t know much about him
- is an asshole like all canon princes
They could have the Aspects of the Beta kids but the Classes of the Alpha kids.
But what would it mean? What does this symbolize?
note: all classpect speculations for Jude and Dammek are vague and purely speculations. classpect posts for Xef and Joey can be found at @revolutionaryduelist‘s blog.
Ooooh this is the one concept that seems promising enough that I am pretty swayed to believe it. I have a different reading of Jude so far (writing a post about it because i haven’t been able to video edit yet actually) but I would be pretty dang happy if this turned out to be correct.
I’m gonna nitpick a little in that I don’t think Pages are Passive and don’t subscribe to the “Exploit” verb, and also I have to stick up for my boy Dirk who is not an asshole (any more than the other alphas, anyway) and catches too much flak for the stuff AR does.
But that’s just a matter of avoiding inconsistency in my own opinions so I don’t confuse people more than I already tend to. Love this post! 🙂
PS: Thanks for the mention!
Flying through Storytelling 