So in your recent addition to the Jade discussion post talked about derse and prospit having inherently different cultures. We got a little bit of a look into that with the extended zodiac quiz, but would you mind giving us a bit more of an analysis?

The next Homestuck Explained is gonna be on the Dreaming World (at least one Hiveswap video coming before that, though) so in depth analysis of that will have to be later and in video form, but I actually talked about this p recently here.

I remember you said in one post that grimdark Rose (and even Rose just before she turns grimdark) is roleplaying fairly successfully as a witch, but do you have any thoughts on Jade acting like a seer at the very beginning of the story? Like we’re introduced to Jade as someone who has an ability to see into the future, but this is completely dropped as an attribute of her character later on, so I was wondering what you thought of how that coincides with her character development or anything

shizukateal:

revolutionaryduelist:

I don’t really think Jade is acting like a Seer at all. At least, I haven’t seen that referenced in the story so far. Roleplay is a way that players deviate from their native active/passive states, but it doesn’t seem to be the only way. Dreaming moons influence players to be more Active (in Derse’s case) or more Passive (in Prospit’s) on their own.

Jade *is* acting more Passive during that section of the story, but that’s explicitly due to her waking up early on Prospit, and Prospit’s Passive influence. I don’t really know that we need more of an explanation for her behavior there.

Similarly, I don’t really think Jade’s ability to see the future is dropped as an element of her character–it just stops being relevant as the timeline catches up to Jade and other characters start waking up.

Everything Jade does is, by Kanaya’s own admission, something Kanaya also does. So unless Seer roleplay is a thing all Space players default to early on (which I suppose is fairly possible–Skaia certainly qualifies as a divine influence), I don’t think that’s what’s up.

It’s important to note *why* I think Rose is roleplaying a Witch. It’s a byproduct of her interest in wizardry and an inability to really understand Mom’s true nature as a Rogue. She isn’t assigned the Witch roleplay from abstract, Skaian forces–she’s driven into it by her own confused admiration of her mom and desperate desire for power.

If Jade is roleplaying a Seer, I’d expect some similar impetus or drive or associated imagery from her. Along those lines, I think there’s *sort of* an argument Jade might be roleplaying a Page, though I kind of feel like Grandpa and Nanna’s relative absences mean there’s not a ton of ancestral influence from them. It’s hard to say.

ok, see… I support a lot your roleplay theory, but this is where I disagree.

Or rather, I think that both your roleplay theory and bladekindeyewear’s inversion theory are both valid interpretations of the same concept of the charactes acting in resistance/defiance of their role and should be applied on a case to case basis and can even sometimes interlope, like in Rose’s case. For example, I think “Aranea is roleplaying as a Thief” is more accurate than “Aranea is overbearing her Sylph role”, but I think Inversion is more accurate in this case. Yeah, Jade is acting more passively due to Skaia’s influence, but why is she so submited to said influence? Vriska, who is putting her to sleep every chance she gets for 13 years of her life to further her own agenda, so Jade’s attitude on life up until she can’t dream with Skaia is to just do what the clouds say, and once she’s forcefully taken out of that position she starts acting more actively, as represented by her actually confronting karkat’s bullshit instead of just blocking him The difference between Jade and Kanaya is that the latter has a normal sleeping schedule and a passive alignment in her class, so she can enact her role with more balance.

Also, I don’t get why you say there’s no imagery associated with Jade as a seer when everyone up to act 4 is calling her a Psychic, has 2 pages were she shows off both her 8-ball and cue ball and later makes a pair of goggles that let her see everything. Not to mention the entire segment of her letter to PM and the cable she left for The Mayor.

My basic standpoint is that WP has said inversion theory isn’t canon, so I don’t have much reason to regard it as an influence in the story. I think Jade is submitted to Prospit’s influence because she dreams a lot on Prospit.

Prospit and Derse are two distinct cultures. They have their own sorts of identities that can influence dreamers on their own. I don’t think you need extra justification to explain why someone is influenced by a place that they grow up in–that happens as a matter of course.

And that’s what Prospit and Derse are to their respective dreamers–provided they’ve woken up. Jade wakes up early, as does Kanaya, and as a consequence both grow up in two different worlds/places/environments simultaneously.

Their exposure to Prospit’s culture also encourages both to act Passively, but Kanaya suffers less for this as she’s already a Passive class. Tavros is another example–he spends the latter part of his game being incredibly passive, and also, it so happens, dreaming on Prospit.

We see from Jadesprite emerging from the Dream Bubbles with her sense of self-indulgent, helpless fatalism that Jade is extremely susceptible to this kind of environmental conditioning, which makes sense, because environments and places are part of what Space describes.

So I view her passivity as being more telling of her nature as a Space player than of inversion, on her part. As for the psychic stuff, I mean. I guess I’m just not all that inclined to regard “psychic” as synonymous with “prophet”.

A Prophet is a pretty specific archetypal image, and all of the classes access psychic power through the Aspects. Heck, the Zodiac’s -Bound designations link Aspect powers to Earthbound, implying Aspects in and of themselves are psychic in nature.

So sure Jade is psychic, but so is literally everyone in the cast, by Homestuck/Hiveswap’s own coding. I don’t think it’s impossible to convince me Jade is roleplaying a prophet here necessarily–I honestly am not confident I have a reading of her early character I’m 100% satisfied with, I feel like I’m missing stuff, and it could well be that.

But again, this implies literally all Space players–or at least all players who wake up early on their moons–will end up roleplaying Prophets. That’s possible, but it’s a legitimate question that I feel warrants searching for an answer to.
I am not convinced inversion is that answer. That’s about where I am.

Hello! I read your theory on Roleplay in classpects, and I have to say that I love it and it is a great theory! Using that, as well as the imagery that you pointed out (black = passive, white = active) I want to raise a question about Knights being active as well. I know your arguments for them being passive, but I do not think that this was brought up before. I was rewatching some flashes due to nostalgia, and in [S]Flip and [S]Attempt rare and highly dangerous 5x SHOWDOWN COMBO, (12)

crisesofsanity:

Hey, Duelist! It’s Powerhouse, here to hoot at you from another platform.

Here are my two cents: in the WOG quoted, Hussie presents the idea that Vriska’s situation is a more egregious version of Karkat’s.

As a Prospit dreamer, did Karkat struggle because he was actually passive in nature, but had a very active self image as a leader and conqueror?
Was Vriska an even more extreme case of misplaced active behavior from a Prospit dreamer?

(Aside: this is a bit of a strange point to make, considering that Vriska generally appears very far from passive… but maybe that’s the point, to help us grasp that there is something passive about Vriska’s nature that most people miss on first read. I wonder what that could be?)

Asides aside, knowing that Thief is active, the description of Vriska as a more extremely misplaced Karkat could suggest that Knight is active too– and it might even give us some extra information about the relative placement of Knight and Thief on the active side of the scale (i.e, that Thief might be more active than Knight).

Hussie does stick to weasel words and hedging techniques in this WOG, for instance phrasing these points as questions, but interpretations that rely on Hussie deliberately trying to mislead the audience of this post (through lies of omission or otherwise) can quickly lead us into a destructive cycle of doubt. If even one idea raised here can’t be taken at face value, there is no way to be sure that the others can: it makes sense to me to stick to the face value and try to glean meaning from that.

It’s also probably worth pulling back a bit and reading the entirety of the quoted paragraph.

revolutionaryduelist:

Terezi and Karkat, one of which could have been roleplaying a Knight, while the other was a Knight, were linked with the colour white – although in Flip it was only the glasses for Terezi (and wings for Vriska). What are your thoughts on that? (22)

Thanks for the ask! And for the insight. This might well be a solid point in favor of reading Knights as Active.

Keep reading

Being from Derse means you are from a culture of offense and aggression.
Being from Prospit means the opposite. You could argue that these are
qualities that either rub off on the dreamers, or they are designated as
those dreamers in the first place because of those qualities. You could
take the view that these are innate tendencies to overcome, as seemed
to be the case for Jade and Rose. Or maybe sometimes they are tendencies
that are resisted, and need to be understood and embraced.

What Hussie seems to be getting at here is that moons are somehow indicative of innate tendencies in players that can exist outside of their class’s “intended” goals– tendencies towards being active or passive independent of whichever one the player’s class is. So as the Prospit-dreaming Vriska struggles to ignore her innate passivity, the Derse-dreaming Meenah may be convinced to resist her innate activity and only return to it once she’s had some kind of epiphany.

(Feel free to repeat that in your head with Karkat and Dave.)

The question then becomes, in cases where you don’t know what someone’s class is supposed to mean, how are you supposed to tease apart their moon tendencies from their class tendencies… and whether they’re supposed to resist their moon or embrace it?

I think the starting point here is the idea that your moon indicates the culture that you “come from”. If the moon indicates one thing, shouldn’t the class indicate another?

Heya! I hadn’t realized I already followed you, I’m pleasantly surprised.
This got a bit long so my response is under the cut.

I do think moon and class indicate different things entirely, and that a player’s Class is the biggest sign of what active/passive state they’re healthiest/happiest/most comfortable in. Essentially, it’s their “true self”–a set of instincts they can’t really change about themselves.

I read the way Hussie describes the moons fairly literally, then. It’s less that they’re indicators of some Secret Tendencies of the players–though they can be that, more on Vriska and Karkat in a minute–and more that they’re environmental influencers. They pull a sort of “gravitational weight” on their Players when those Players dream on them, subtly tugging one way or another.

This also sort of suggests why moons might affect some players more than others. The amount a player spends actually dreaming on the moon might well matter! Rose, Jade and Dave all spent a lot of time awake on their respective moons, and exhibited strong Moon influences as a result.

Hussie describes Karkat as being alienated from his own more Passive nature, and Karkat actually barely dreams on Prospit at all. That said, since the only thing we can tell for sure from this section is that Thief is probably more Active than Knight, I don’t necessarily agree that this suggests Knights are Active.
On the contrary, I think it’s likelier it suggests the opposite.

Hussie describes how Rose and Dave start off their sessions very Active here and talks about how Rose’s god tiering leads her to embracing a more Passive role. Similarly, he suggests that Karkat’s self-image is overly Active, implying he’d be better off adopting a relatively more passive role.

Which he does. Since Hussie doesn’t mention it, it kind of gets lost in the weeds that Dave and Karkat’s arc progression pretty much mirrors Roses’, since both of them grow more passive further into the meteor journey.

If future developments suggest that it’s healthier for Dave and Karkat to take up more Active roles in the future, then that’ll change stuff for me, but I think it’s fairly clear that Dave and Karkat get happier and more comfortable the more they focus on their relationship with each other, as opposed to on their own self-images and the responsibilities they bring.

It is possible the Knights are Active and just meant to be Somewhat Less Active, like Vriska. I just don’t think this tract of text tells us either way.
While we’re talking about her, though, I do think we learn what it means for Vriska to embrace her Prospitian nature, too.

It looks like (Vriska), basically. She’s happiest focusing on herself–and she needs the focus to figure out that mess–but she spends a lot of her narrative either focusing on empowering others, or considering the existential needs of all of the hypothetical beings in causality above her own.

This ultimately holds Vriska back in terms of personal development, even if it makes her effective at adventuring. (Vriska) becomes more passive behavior-wise, relative to the intense action that mindset brings about, but she is more focused on her own benefit and her own feelings, which is a genuinely healthier place for her to be.

Essentially, she stops trying to be Mindfang and starts trying to be herself.
As a result, she’s able to form a genuine connection with Terezi as an equal, and symbolically gain enlightenment.