Do you think there are certain aspects ir classes that are more predisposed to roleplay another title?

I suspect Rage, as the aspect of theater and acting/performance, might lend itself to a sort of versatility by way of being able to efficiently, if not effectively, play at many different roles. I touched on this heavily in my writing/videos on Gamzee.

By contrast, I suspect Hope might lend itself to an unusual intensity in roleplaying that makes its players less efficient/versatile, but more potent/effective. Eridan’s power boost when he starts roleplaying a Witch or Jake’s power boost coinciding with summoning Dirk as a Witch’s familiar-esque figure are both examples I’d use here.

Could you elaborate on the hope player sexuality filter you mentioned with Maxlol? I think I know where you’re going with that but I’m still curious.

every hope player we’ve seen across the board has had something to do with sexuality, and most are pretty, uh. horny. for lack of a better word.

Eridan and Cronus. Moving on…

There’s Jake’s x-rated fantasies about Aranea, as well as his admission that he’s harbored thoughts for all his friends–Roxy, Jane, and Dirk. And all of those friends had similar feelings for him.

Diemen’s got his phallic sausage jokes, and once he gets into you he tries to steal a kiss. Once Cirava Changes you/lets you get Changed, the Reader is rewarded with tons of followers interested in them romantically/asking if they’re single.

Elwurd and Maxlol are both transparently horny and quite intense about it-Maxlol even sublimates his horniness into a twisted desire for servitude, which notably vibes with the class I’m alleging for him.

That’s 7/7 hopebound, so far. i think we can call this a solid trend.

hello! first of all i want to tell u i really enjoy reading ur metas and analysis, i think its amazing how u contextualize some things and the entire story suddenly makes So Much sense. second, ive been wondering about hope and rage – im not sure i can word myself correctly, but hope is like an aspect that has ppl firmly believing in an ideal or belief. rage is its opposite, but both canon rage players (im not counting xefros bc were not sure about him yet – but im pretty sold on the (1/2)

stormsbourne:

revolutionaryduelist:

page of rage idea!) seem like avid followers of their own faith/religion/cult. in the true zodiac test, the questions that seemed to relate to hope and rage seemed to put them in a clear dichotomy as well – so ive just been meaning to ask u what do u think about this?? is the dichotomy about something other than faith/doubt?? (2/2)

The main thing is that the Rage players’ religion doesn’t actually require faith, at all, because it’s simply true. The Mirthful Messiahs worship Lord English/Caliborn, and, well…he exists. He’s right in view of all the ghosts and stuff, blowing them to smithereens.

I think the dichotomy involves a lot more than faith/doubt (coherence vs. contrivance, for one thing). But as far as the Rage players’ religions go, I don’t see much of a conflict, currently.

from what the canon classpect test indicates, it’s not so much “faith vs. doubt” as it is “loving truths vs hating lies.” hope players have an intrinsic need to believe in something, and their power comes from that intent belief, whether it’s jake’s beliefs that he can save his friends (masterpiece) or that dirk can help him (game over timeline), or eridan’s belief in “white science” ultimately giving him his abilities.

rage players, meanwhile, are hellbent on disproving lies and making sure everyone knows how full of shit they are. the most obvious canon for this is when gamzee loses his absolute shit about icp, because their version of juggalo-ing runs super counter to the truth he knows. it’s a gigantic lie and he fucking hates it. this is why caliborn/LE, through lil cal, is able to speak to him and influence him so readily: LE offers the absolute truth. he is already here. gamzee is already part of him. gamzee embraces that truth, but it’s not what gives him his power. what gives him his power is the hatred he has for what he sees as lies.

rage players, according to that test, bring doubt and confusion, but how that happens is because they are tearing down what the rest of the world may perceive as true because to them, it is flawed and not worth saving. both hope and rage involve commitment to an idea, but rage is about commitment to destroy what is false, and if doubt is sown along the way, the ends justify the means.

Yeah, I agree with this pretty much completely. Pretty useful nuance, too–I’d never verbalized the relationship between them quite this way. Thanks!

Angels might as well be servants of LE, representing the worst of the Aspect of Hope – blind devotion and forsaking others in the name of one’s ideals – Eridan’s hinted to be influenced by them. Could they represent the cult of LE? And aren’t they blind, like LE himself? Eyes seem to be significant in Gnostic tradition. – With due respect, A

aspiringwatcher:

revolutionaryduelist:

You might be right–though Jake being able to summon them makes it kind of murky, its not like they were presented in a very nice light then, either. I honestly don’t feel I have the angels “Figured Out”, and I’m not even quite sure I’m supposed to.
Jake’s arc is, after all, rather incomplete–his big showdown with Caliborn in the Masterpiece is still ahead of him.

Maybe we’ll learn more about angels in the future, or, frankly more likely at this point, i’m missing some gnostic myth or other source that contextualizes them really well. Hard to say.

Jake didn’t summon a single Angel during the Masterpiece – only during pre – Game Over sequence, when he was forcefully enlightened by Aranea and wasn’t in control of his powers as a Player of Hope.

Sure, but he’s still able to summon them. And I’d say Jake’s summoning of the angels is, if anything, informed by his relationship to Abraxas, not anything related to Yaldabaoth.

So I don’t really feel like I can really make a call one way or another, just yet.

Angels might as well be servants of LE, representing the worst of the Aspect of Hope – blind devotion and forsaking others in the name of one’s ideals – Eridan’s hinted to be influenced by them. Could they represent the cult of LE? And aren’t they blind, like LE himself? Eyes seem to be significant in Gnostic tradition. – With due respect, A

You might be right–though Jake being able to summon them makes it kind of murky, its not like they were presented in a very nice light then, either. I honestly don’t feel I have the angels “Figured Out”, and I’m not even quite sure I’m supposed to.
Jake’s arc is, after all, rather incomplete–his big showdown with Caliborn in the Masterpiece is still ahead of him.

Maybe we’ll learn more about angels in the future, or, frankly more likely at this point, i’m missing some gnostic myth or other source that contextualizes them really well. Hard to say.

Some old classpect thoughts

arrghus:

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?

well with that logic, everything could be defined by a lack of void, but I don’t really think thats what we’re supposed to get from it. Thee’s more to it than that, of course. And the reason the aspects tangle more than that is because every aspect is intrinsically related to every aspect in some way. For example, time and doom both deal with death, light and mind both deal with knowledge. that overlap creates situations where multiple aspects work together to create all the nuances of a concept

catchaloststar:

Counterpoint for the Hope/Rage part, though: lack of Hope is hopelessness, not anger. And lack of Rage is apathy, not hope. There’s a pretty clear destruction of Rage early in Act 5 when Eridan is talking to Gamzee. Several things are happening in that conversation, but the most obvious is Eridan’s sudden turnaround on Faygo. He goes from

CA: i dont havve a fuckin faygo you stupid fuck wwhy wwould i keep that disgusting shit on hand

To

What.

It’s just soda. Not great, but not that bad either. What’s the big deal?

We all need to settle down here.

To

FCA: i mean

FCA: its not evven that bad

FCA: its just soda but wwhatevver this isnt the point

If the destruction of Rage was equivalent to the creation of Hope, then that scene could have been presented in a way to make that connection more obvious – convincing Eridan that Faygo might actually taste good, for example. But (aside from Gamzee’s prattering on about miracles) that conversation has nothing to do with Hope. Eridan isn’t given any hope that he might be able to talk to Karkat later (Gamzee clearly isn’t willing to interrupt Jack Noir), nor that Feferi might get back together with him (he resigns himself to the fact that Feferi cares more about Sollux than himself at the moment and that she’s right in doing so). And Eridan walks away from that conversation with neither positive nor negative opinions of Faygo.

Overall, Eridan does not sound like he gained any Hope from the destruction of his Rage.

TC: ArE YoU SuRe i cAn’t hElP A bRoThEr Up iNtO HiS MoThErFuCkIn cHiLl?

CA: i dont knoww

CA: it probably doesnt matter

CA: my feelins seem petty and meaninless noww

CA: she had better things to wworry about than my ovverwwrought bullshit

CA: like the dead guy wwho savved her

CA: so forget it thanks anywway

You could definitely argue that Hope and Rage, as positive and negative emotions respectively, are mutually exclusive. That’s reasonable. I just disagree that the absence of any one aspect defines the presence of any other aspect (except Void).

(I guess you could also argue that hopelessness is a negative emotion that falls under Rage’s domain? Or that Gamzee was really trying to create Hope by encouraging Eridan to believe in miracles, and it’s not classpect theory’s fault that Gamzee is a shitty Maid (or whatever) of Hope? I don’t agree with those, but I think they’d be interesting arguments to make.)

Oh yeah, that’s a pretty good point. Gotta say I’m inclined to say you’ve swayed me on this one–what would you say the destruction of an Aspect brings about, then? Equilibrium or total balance or Void in this case, as well? This is gonna keep me up tonight and i have a flight tomorrow rip me

#i guess i also interpret rage more literally #as anger and fervor and such #not so broadly as to include shame sadness etc #jake crying in a dersite prison isn’t rage

In the interest of clarifying my thoughts on Rage though, I think this lil bit dovetails nicely with this:

revolutionaryduelist:

i think that escaped my inital point somewhat but it’s far more interesting territory to discuss just how exactly every aspect relates to all the others, more than just its opposite

I agree completely, yeah. I figured Time and Space were standouts re: Void just because they describe physical dimensions, if that makes sense? Like. Destroying Space doesn’t really create Time, and in the Furthest Ring the absence of one means the other is also non-existent.

But if someone’s Hope is destroyed, it doesn’t typically result in “nothingness”–it results in negative emotions. Either fear, despair, sorrow, or Rage, or so on. All of that stuff is under Rage’s purview, and so it makes sense for me to say the absence of Hope is Rage to a degree, and vice versa.

Do you see what I mean by Time and Space not necessarily having that relationship? It seems different in a subtle way.

I guess you could also argue that hopelessness is a negative emotion that falls under Rage’s domain?

In that I would. When I consider the Aspects I always err towards the broadest interpretation possible. No other approach makes sense to me, because the Aspects by definition describe everything that reality could possibly be.

If we don’t ascribe negative emotions to Rage, then what Aspect claims them?

I don’t think Jake crying in a cell is Jake like, inverting into a Rage player or w.e, but I do think it’s telling that the things Jake strives hardest to avoid are all Rage things–the possibility of letting down his friends, or hurting someone’s feelings, or having people be mad at him, etc.

If you want a unifying thread for all those negative emotions, I would say that negative emotions tend to center us in the raw, definite mundanity of our own suffering, and have us stop considering alternate possibilities or ideas.

In other words, Rage is fundamentally linked to the mundane and the physical, and with the emotions that bring your emotional center into the physical plane as opposed to Hope, which centers itself primarily in the realm of ideas.