A thought occurs regarding Xefros’s Rage alignment. Could it be possible that Dammek’s behavior(general paranoia and a desire for destruction of authority/anarchy) is a result of Xefros’s Page of Rage status? Could it be that his desire to protect Xefros is so powerful, and that he is so saturated in Rage, that it has made him unstable and destructive?

magpiebridge:

revolutionaryduelist:

magpiebridge:

I’m really… not a fan of this idea for two reasons. One, it’s making some really uncomfortable suggestions that someone who has been coded as a victim in a number of ways is, at heart, responsible for/complicit in the behavior and choices of the person who is mistreating them.

Two, yet again it’s treating Rage players as automatically ‘bad’ or ‘negative’ or ‘destructive’. Neither of these things are, I think, true or helpful assumptions, and they’re assumptions I see bandied about a lot within the fandom, in regards to both victims of assorted horrific mistreatment and Rage players, in ways that tend to try to pivot the axis around until the people making terrible choices and doing terrible things are absolved of all responsibility for their behavior.

I think this tendency is one of the reasons I disagree so strongly with certain reads of the Page role, that imply they unknowingly (or knowingly) encourage all of this mistreatment to “benefit” themselves.

This is an important point, that I agree with. I’m sorry if it’s seemed otherwise.
I’m happy Xefros is a Rage player precisely because it’s such a positive depiction of the Aspect in Act 1. Xefros makes Joey feel by turns confused, frustrated, and protectively furious in the span of a couple of hours, causing her to champion on his behalf.

And I don’t think Xefros CAUSES Dammek to be overly aggressive and controlling of him. That’s ultimately Dammek’s choice, and a fuck up on his end. But I’m just not interested in this “Dammek’s mean to Xefros because he’s BAD and CRUEL and A BAD PERSON” narrative. It’s just not very interesting?

You can be interested in characters that are bad people. It’s fine. And taking the time to understand their nuances leads to a better understanding of the text, and of the character’s dynamics.

Here’s the thing about Pages: I regard their tendency to end up in abusive relationships as one of the like…potential dangers of the Class. This isn’t to say it’s their fault, any more than it’s Maids faults that they end up conscripted to their Aspect, or other seemingly Class-related challenges.

See, Pages are simply friendly and likable, and that’s kind of their superpower. They’re incredibly good at getting people to like them in some way, and so want to protect or empower them. But they can’t really control the people that get invested in them, and what someone else thinks is best isn’t always right for you.

Part of a Pages’ arc is about coming to face their reality and, in some cases, the imposed roles and identities others enforced on them. They reach their full potential when they come to be aware and honest about their true feelings and desires, and assert themselves bravely. That’s the basic Page arc, as far as I can tell.

So I consider them active not because they manipulate people into abusing them or w.e, but because their fundamental story is about attracting the protective and sometimes dangerous wills of others to their lives and learning how to stand up for their own.

But this toxic behavior always seems to be rooted in a genuine care for the Page. Vriska was cruel and awful to Tavros, yes. It’s also inarguable that she perceived herself as trying to help Tavros, and that the desire to make him stronger drove her behavior to some extent. She says so herself.

Dirk was outright in LOVE with Jake, and wasn’t a FRACTION as cold feeling towards him as people commonly think. All of the actual conflict and abuse came from AR/Hal, who was in an unimaginably toxic situation himself and was p much also abusing Dirk.

And Jake DID contribute significantly to his actual romantic problems with Dirk. Jake decides to lie to Jane (Roxy had told him explicitly Jane had feelings for him TWICE before that conversation) and decides to believe her when she lies about liking him. All of this because he had already chosen Dirk.

Despite this, and despite KNOWING that his jokes about sexuality and Dirk being a girl probably hurt Dirk’s feelings/made Dirk think he was straight early in life (which turns out to be a major part of why Dirk is so tense and uncomfortable while they’re dating), he doesn’t talk to Dirk about it, because that would require conflict or admitting he did something wrong, and Jake is kind of a coward about that stuff!

He’s non-confrontational to a fault, so Jake deals with problems by denying they exist or, at his worst, indulging escapism and outright running away from them. It’s exactly what Grandpa did to Joey and Jude, and the same potential for toxic behavior shows up in Jake, though he learns to grow out of it through his friends.

This is a HUGE THEME in Homestuck! Pretty much EVERY character has some potential for toxic/abusive behavior, and it’s only by connecting to each other and understanding the world though friendships that they rise above those inherent personal weaknesses.

And it doesn’t mean Jake deserved his abuse but, once again:
Dirk didn’t abuse him. So their actual relationship was troubled because of AR’s influence, AND more sensible ways they were both fucking up. This is Jake’s side.

What I’m saying is, there’s room here to both understand Dammek as someone who is toxic to Xefros and understand him as having warm and even positive feelings about Xefros. Dammek might genuinely not realize anything is wrong, because he is a Prospit dreamer and Xefros’ whole problem is being unable to see Dammek’s treatment as a problem, let alone communicate it. (Denial is a recurring motif for Pages, btw.)

None of this is necessarily what’s going on. And even if it is, Dammek could turn out to be considerably judgmental and critical of Xefros. All of this nuance might be true and Dammek would still be an asshole.

Because people are nuanced, and assholery and abuse are behaviors regular people might come to engage in in all sorts of ambiguous ways. And Xefros and Dammek are both shaped by a society literally designed to make them as self-destructive and hateful as possible.

I have noooo idea how Dammek’s character actually works, or how the story is going to handle them. All I’m saying is there’s room for nuance here, and I’m interested in exploring it.

I think I would disagree that the toxic behavior/abuse is necessarily rooted in any desire for the Page’s wellbeing, at all. With Dirk and Jake? Maybe. I don’t have any opinion on them, beyond agreeing that AR was pulling a lot of the strings there. With Dammek and Xefros? We haven’t seen Dammek’s side of the story yet at all, to know what he actually thinks or feels, beyond sounding very very much like Vriska from the outside. But with Vriska and Tavros? She wasn’t looking out for him, regardless of what she said. She had little to no ‘warm’ or ‘positive’ feelings about him–she was a manipulative bully, who saw him as a toy to play with, and to discard when she got bored with him. She was the kind of person who would rather break a toy she wasn’t interested in, anymore, than let someone else handle it. Her excuses were shallower than a coat of paint… she can’t have been completely out of touch with reality enough to believe that forcing him to jump off a cliff and break his back would somehow make him stronger. It was a child’s petty act of aggression against someone who defied her will. She goes on to assault and mistreat him in more ways than one, repeatedly, in ways that demonstrably worsen his health and well-being, and the excuses she tosses out are primarily to keep him compliant/too discouraged to resist and to keep other people off her back. She presents the same kind of excuses any time anyone challenges her on her bad behavior.

I agree completely that reducing characters who do bad things to ‘oh, they did it because they’re Bad and Evil and Terrible’ is reductionist and unhelpful thinking. But I think that painting characters and people who do bad things with the brush of ‘oh, well they meant well all along because they said so, so it must be true’ is also a rather damaging thing to imply, speaking from the standpoint of a survivor. People are nuanced and complex creatures. Relationships are also nuanced and complex–even relationships that turn toxic and absolutely harmful to one or both parties. Being able to say ‘this behavior, this mindset, this habitual treatment was abusive and unhealthy’ is still a helpful statement. A lot of abusers will swear themselves hoarse that everything they’re doing is for the benefit of their victim. They may even have convinced themselves it’s true. ‘This person said they were doing ___ for my own good, but they were lying’ can absolutely be a true statement. It doesn’t matter whether that person was lying to themselves, lying to the victim, or just lying to hear themselves lie. And it doesn’t mean that the character can’t be explored, or discussed, or empathized with, or rehabilitated to grow into someone healthier.

My read on Pages is still that Knights are active and Pages are passive, primarily because I see them both as quite near the center of the active-passive scale, and I think that a lot of their journey is about traveling to the side they ‘belong’ on. Knights start out constantly worried about what other people think of them, always trying to put others first in a very ineffective way while thinking of themselves very poorly, but in the end, I think they function more successfully and happily when they learn to focus more of that energy on themselves. It gives them the boost to actually extend that protection to others as well, as a secondary effect. Pages start out rather self-absorbed and oblivious, in many ways, but have the potential to learn to consider other people, and empower other people. That empowerment can end up spilling back over to give them some secondary protection, as well. I think a very strong trait of both Knights and Pages is endurance/persistence in the face of obstacles, though.

Mostly, I don’t like the idea of associating Pages with that abuse as a key tendency or danger of their class. They’re hardly the only characters we see subjected to blatant on-screen (or implied off-screen) long-term, deliberate, and patterned abuse. At various points in their lives and in different iterations: Dave, a Knight. Damara, a Witch. Mituna, an Heir. Gamzee, a Bard. Terezi, a Seer, and more. All of these characters are subjected to clear and recognizable abuse, in one form or another. It doesn’t make abuse a key risk of their classes… it might just mean that Hussie has a habit of writing about abuse dynamics, frequently in ways that get little to no satisfying resolution.

It seems we’re at fundamentally different readings of the comic in some ways, which is entirely fair. I don’t have much to say about your reading of Vriska, except that I agree wholeheartedly with this statement:

“A lot of abusers will swear themselves hoarse that everything they’re doing is for the benefit of their victim. They may even have convinced themselves it’s true. ‘This person said they were doing ___ for my own good, but they were lying’ can absolutely be a true statement. It doesn’t matter whether that person was lying to themselves, lying to the victim, or just lying to hear themselves lie.”

Vriska is unambiguously an abuser. As is AR, as is Eridan, as is Gamzee, as is Equius–all to different degrees of severity and shaped by contextual nuance.
Tavros is fully in his rights to regard her words as lies–because the things she told him about himself were outright untrue, as were the things she said about herself.

revolutionaryduelist:

Maybe to some extent. I do think Dammek is in an unhealthy state of mind, for sure. We won’t be able to say for sure where he’s involved until Hauntswitch lets us get into his head, though, I think.

Her excuses were shallower than a coat of paint… she can’t have been completely out of touch with reality enough to believe that forcing him to jump off a cliff and break his back would somehow make him stronger.

That said, I don’t think this is true, and I don’t think it logically follows from believing Tavros has a right to regard her as a liar/abuser. More, I think it’s canonical in the text that Vriska is indeed that self-deluded.

She’s a thirteen year old girl that was raised in a fascist society built on racist in-fighting that systematically deludes its children. Vriska is a traumatized kid who dissasociates from her true feelings from birth in order to feed a giant spider? Her entire relationship with Tavros was based on her copying Mindfang, a Sylph, and she constantly tries to mimic a Sylph’s behavior by attempting to make Tavros stronger.

And yes, that level of disassociation and desensitized brutality makes her a monster to Tavros, and pretty much everyone for most of her life. A good half of the Beta trolls are kind of fucking monsters, because they were raised by a fascist society.

That was literally the deal the Alphas made with Echidna, who is literally The Mother Of Monsters. The new Trolls are powerful enough to win, but at the cost of becoming a kind of monster, making their game that much harder to win ideologically/philosophically–they can barely even understand it.

Vriska’s entire problem as a person pretty much boils down to being UNABLE to actually introspect and honestly understand herself! Look what happens when (Vriska) is made to think about how she truly comes off and pulls away from her imagined responsibilities!

Meanwhile, Still Pretty Toxic Retcon Vriska is imagining herself as Responsible and Selfless the entire way to LE. She tears into (Vriska) for being selfish explicitly, in the text! That dissociative tension between Vriska’s true self and her mental self-image is part of the text, as far as my reading goes.

RE: Pages and Knights, I think that’s the most compelling reading for Active Knights and Passive pages i’ve seen yet. I am genuinely unsure if the narrative actually goes that way, and I’m interested in finding out, so it’s cool to feel uncertain about that again.

I think I still disagree, though. I think the nuance is that I perceive Passive/Active behavior as intrinsic to these classes, and as mostly complicated by their self-image.

Dave seems to behave very Actively in that he’s take-charge and exploiting Time during the Beta session, but he’s also roleplaying a Prince and not having a good time. He seems to be a lot happier when he invites/allows it, choosing not to deal in Time Travel himself.

And he’s still focused on others for most of that time–he either falls apart psychologically with no outlet for his tension with Bro pre-retcon or finds better self-understanding by entering a relationship with Karkat.

Also, I don’t like what passive Page implies about Tavros. His last plot beat then becomes “he hands Vriska and army and fulfills his character arc by…becoming aware enough of her and others’ needs and being helpful!” which just doesn’t work for me. The “he ideologically slam dunks her and never thinks about her again” angle just feels more satisfying to me, so long as the canon ambiguity is still extended to us.

also, I do think all the classes have toxic/abusive relationships. It seems to me there’s different recurring patterns and struggles going on for each class, not just Pages, and I think all of them are meaningfully and satisfyingly resolved. So I don’t agree with the “Homestuck doesn’t deliver” angle either.

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

I just wanted to drop by and say that first of all, I love your theories and analyses. They’re so good and I cry daily about them. Secondly I wanted to express my… I guess dissatisfaction with the lack of fan analyses about John and Dave’s friendship, in particular from John’s POV. They are basically the only proclaimed pair of best friends whose relationship didn’t waver during the course of the whole comic, and I just wish people talked more about their influence on each other!

Ok so first of all I have to say that the idea that Dirk and Jake’s relationship seriously wavered on any level but the superficial “are we officially dating” one is, imo, inaccurate. The boys are in love, they love each other and are best friends and this is true across the board for the Alphas.

Thanks a lot for your message though, and I’ve been meaning to say something about John and Dave’s relationship for a while now so sure, I’ve got a bit to say for you.

predictably as hell this got really long, so meet me under the cut.

But to talk about them, I’m going to have to talk about a different pair of friends who grow up together, first. One underexplored element of Homestuck that I’ve always found interesting is how Classpect seems to reflect, to a degree, how characters take influence from their societies.

I’ve written plenty about Jake and Jane in this regard, but I think John is maybe my favorite example for how nuanced it is.

A great example of what I’m talking about is Equius and Vriska’s contrasting relationships with the Hemospectrum. Namely, Equius, the Void player, values it greatly, while Vriska, a Light player, regards it as a bunch of bullshit.

What Vriska DOES put value in is how it affects circumstance–how it makes people see Tavros, how it makes people see her, the very real burdens of responsibility and societal expectation it puts on everyone. THAT’S real.
THAT matters to her.

But the ideology itself is a bunch of baloney, and Vriska picks up on that almost instinctually. Now let’s take stock of what the Hemospectrum is in the story.
It is, simultaneously:

1) A source of STRENGTH, at least for Equius.

2) Inherently irrelevant and unimportant to anything about any of the characters except how it makes society treat them.

3) Explicitly a lie.

4) Most importantly for our purposes: Entirely physical.

True to Homestucks’ Gnostic roots, unlike true ideas that the characters reason out over the course of the story, information that is unimportant, irrelevant, and built upon markers of physical identity is inherently coded with Void, as the aspect of all things false, unfortunate, unimportant and untrue. The world of the physical Yaldabaoth creates in Gnosticism is coded not just as the world of lies and physicality, but also as the world of Darkness. Hence the link.

For Homestuck, this means that that sort of information has a source. It can be traced on a timeline, just like any other objects in the story, because information like the Hemospectrum amounts to what is essentially a bad meme.

For the Hemospectrum, that source is Equius, who first inherits that incredibly unimportant information from his society and then becomes nothing when he succumbs to its influence, allowing Gamzee to kill him.

Now here’s the kicker: Eventually, Equius (along with Gamzee) becomes the source of the Hemospectrum himself, becoming part of Lord English and so explaining how LE got the idea to impose such a complicated system in the first place.

In essence, once he becomes part of LE, the hemospectrum itself is Equius’ most lasting legacy on the plot, a time loop to rival Gamzee’s RIDICULOUS proliferation of clown-themed horror across the cosmos. Equius has truly become Void in this regard, a potent undercurrent for Heirs.

Now let’s talk about Dave finally.

So like while it’s true that John and Dave’s friendship is mostly wholesome as fuck and really sturdy, I’m going to complicate that narrative a bit on both extremes.

One of the things I’ve always found appealing about Dave is how intensely devoted he is to his friends growing up–which makes sense when you consider how unhappy he says he was in his home life.

If Dave has a penchant for rapping ad nauseum and talking to his friends even after they leave to humorous extremes early on, well–that has at least something to do with the fact that he’s using them as an escape from his nightmarish childhood.

This devotion is more than just him being very giving and caring–he’s invested in all of the other betas emotionally, and it matters to them how they feel about him. Maybe none moreso than John, even years and lots of chilling out later.

And it plays into Davesprite’s lost sense of self in a big way. When John rejects him in favor of “Real Dave”, Davesprite is genuinely hurt and angry, and John continues to aggravate those feelings of displacement during the 3 year journey on the ship. John’s perception of him MATTERS to Dave.

And a lot of what made Dave’s childhood awful was his internalization of heroism as linked to not just Bro’s weird hypermasculine bullshit, but also explicitly to heterosexuality.

Dave compares himself unfavorably to John as a hero, and knowing what we know about him now, it’s pretty reasonable to put Dave’s struggles with his attractions to men at the root of it.

And given how similar Jade and John are and his obvious romantic interest in Jade, I’ve always read him as being just as interested in John–just closeted and repressed about it.

Which means that all of those gay jokes he and John partook in had an effect on Dave far beyond what they had on John, which I think is really interesting.
Also interesting, though, is how John reveals he parsed all of those things growing up:

As jokes. See, John also inherits a lot of his culture’s toxic ideology, like Equius does. But unlike Equius, John doesn’t inherit it as information to value and define himself by.

Breath is the aspect of detachment and levity, and fittingly, John inherits these toxic masculinity-enforcing cultural memes as a series of jokes! Stuff he says, but doesn’t think about. Stuff not particularly worth “taking seriously”.

So his relationship to masculinity is a lot less fraught and intense–partly because he fits the mold more neatly than Dave, but also partly because he simply didn’t actually believe the stuff he was saying.

Here, John is a depiction of the straight dude who makes shitty jokes and claims to be “just kidding”, except that John actually IS just kidding, and so he doesn’t really force the issue or focus on it.

That doesn’t mean that toxic masculinity hasn’t had an effect on him–he still struggles with cultural shifts to a degree. But I like that Homestuck allows for different levels of impact of these cultural memes across individuals. This stuff doesn’t affect everyone equally, and it doesn’t affect everyone quite the same way.

On top of that, it’s a good example of the fact that even a genuinely good person who doesn’t believe this stuff can have a negative effect on people they care about by transmitting these cultural cues. Because it’s the memes themselves that are toxic.

man I don’t think you can really say bro is brainwashed but gamzee’s just evil when you can argue that gamzee’s also possessed by cal. they even have really similar relationships to how he’s formed, ie part of their souls exist inside lil cal already. which is probably a good explanation for how lil cal is able to brainwash them when he doesn’t brainwash, like, dave, who is around him his whole childhood. idk, I just think gamzee’s more complicated than “evil ass hole”

As it happens, Gamzee has a line I never gave much weight to before noticing Bro’s SAW interest that I’m more inclined to take seriously now, that suggests Gamzee and Bro’s relationship to Cal WAS intrinsically different:

But even if Bro is kind of a noble captor figure holding Cal back, I still wouldn’t think it excuses any of what he put Dave through. He’s still an awful dude.

As for Gamzee, here’s the main problem with reading him as “just” brainwashed.

Gamzee doesn’t require Lil Cal’s presence to go evil. In fact, Gamzee doesn’t seem to require ANYTHING to turn evil.
But even if like, Doc Scratch ALWAYS teleports Lil Cal into Gamzee’s presence to trigger his personality shift, I don’t think it would matter.
The weight of the sheer SCALE of Gamzee’s devotion cements his place as an ultimately willing accomplice/acolyte to Caliborn’s Dark Carnival.

And it kind of makes Gamzee fucking terrifying and a fantastic villain.

I’ll explain my reasoning here.

We know for a fact that Gamzee snaps and kills all his friends in at least one Doomed timeline. This is the source for half the code used in the creation of Doc Scratch. There’s no implication that Lil Cal is involved here at all.

But again, let’s assume Lil Cal was here again. It doesn’t matter.

Because there is canonically, explicitly, no timeline in the history of Gamzee where Gamzee ever, ever, EVER chooses to rebel. Gamzee Makara simply does not ever choose his friends over Lord English. In any timeline. Ever.
How do I know?

Lets talk about Ghosts for a minute. The fandom has historically kind of taken these guys for granted, and loose fandom consensus is that they aren’t coherent/who has what ghosts is arbitrary. This is incorrect!

Pretty much everybody in the Bubbles that should have alt!ghosts does, including Meenah and Aranea, the two characters who’s alt!ghosts are typically presumed “Missing”.

This is important. The Ghosts kind of give us very low-key character development, and contextualize the characters for us. For example, Eridan is an absolute irredeemable bastard in the Alpha timeline. But in a God Tier iteration of themselves, Eridan and Feferi seemingly come to friendlier terms. In another, there’s suggestions Eridan makes up with Feferi and Sollux. In yet another, he seems to be Trans or exploring femininity at least.

The point is, there’s a certain fluidity to Eridan’s potential. Still terrible in the comic, but it’s important to remember that Eridan didn’t CHOOSE to be trapped in the meteor with Jack, or to be born to Alternia’s power system, or to be trapped in the Alpha Timeline.

It’s important to remember these things because in Homestuck, someone with power–Lord English–deliberately and willfully chose those things FOR him. Eridan’s lives are lived in response to that imposed power structure.
These factors don’t redeem him completely necessarily

But anyway, the fact that the rest of the cast have coherent quantum expressions means there are only three real exceptions–three characters who either don’t have any ghosts at all, or should have more ghosts than they do.

The first is Caliborn, who’s timeline has exactly one deviation from the Alpha–apparently caused by John’s retcon. This riddle’s solved easily enough:
Predomination doesn’t leave a ghost to appear in the bubbles at all.
When Calliope says she ate his soul, she means that literally.
Caliborn’s cheating in the Alpha Timeline is indeed the only reason Calliope exists in the bubbles at all.

(This, by the way, explains a lot about the relationship between Caliborn’s soul and Gamzee/Arquis’ in the Lord English. He predominated over them, too.)

The second is Vriska, who only has a single ghost in (Vriska). This is really weird, because we literally know for a fact she dies in more than one doomed timeline! As with the two Calliopes, I think this is down to John’s retcon doing some weird entanglement nonsense to Vriska’s quantum existence.
The point is: Where others have a palette of possibility, Vriska has two extremely polarized halves. Schrodinger’s Vriska.

Important to mention that just like Eridan, the structure of the Alpha Timeline that limits potential Vriskas is IMPOSED ONTO HER. Vriska didn’t want anything about the way she was raised or where she was born. She didn’t ask John and Terezi to retcon her into this bizarre state. Both Vriskas, like the rest of the cast, are rolling with the punches LE has seen fit to give.

Except for Gamzee.

Hussie literally tells us Gamzee never dies. His single non-Alpha Timeline death in [S] Game Over is retconned by John, and Hussie suggests it straight up doesn’t count. But that presents a problem.

There are thousands upon thousands of Doomed troll timelines. How is it that Gamzee specifically never ever EVER dies? Well, there’s only one real way that a Non-Time player can survive a Doomed timeline, that we know of:

Dream self merger. By going to sleep as the last player present in Sburb, the Doomed Rose from Davesprite’s timeline triggers a game mechanic that ends her timeline completely and merges her consciousness with that of Alpha Rose through their dreamselves.

If Gamzee survives his doomed timelines, this is the only possible way how.
And collapsing all of his potential instances into a single Alpha identity certainly sounds like the reduction of possibility commonly attributed to the Rage aspect.
But what that means is that to move on to the Alpha, every Doomed Gamzee must inevitably either snap and kill all the other trolls, or somehow outlast them.

And it means that if any Gamzee had EVER, in the entire spectrum of plausibility the Alpha timeline affords, EVER been inclined to rebel against LE–then we would know. Because somewhere out there, that at least Hussie could see, there would be a Ghost to show for it.

But there isn’t. Similar in this respect only to Caliborn, Gamzee simply has no alternate deviations because he doesn’t want them. He chooses the path that leads to Lord English freely and willingly, over and over and over again.

And like Caliborn…

Gamzee does this because he wants to.

Gamzee doesn’t BELIEVE he’s going to become his own God–he knows it for a fact. He sees it in Lil Cal’s mangled soul. And he embraces that truth wholeheartedly, throwing himself into the acolyte role from then onwards and presumably following instructions Doc Scratch gives him throughout Act 6.

Which we can talk about some other time. The point is: Gamzee chooses all this. Whether or not Lil Cal causes him to is beside the point, because there is not and never will be any timeline where Gamzee chooses to resist.

Gamzee is the ultimate in shitty cosmic nazi religious zealots, and devoted to the very power structure that causes every other character to suffer so. There are no mitigating factors for him as there are for everyone else but Caliborn.
At the end of the day, he’s evil.
Bad clown. Worst enemy.

Have you ever written an essay about vriska and (vriska) or are you planning to because your theories sound Amazing and id Love to read more about it!!!

I’ve touched on the differences between them a TEENY bit in my Class series, particularly (obviously) during the section on the Steal classes. I talk about Vriska a bit in the Create/Destroy essays, too, since her roleplaying a Sylph (and sucking HARD at it) is a huge part of her early arc.

But I haven’t written about Vriska and (Vriska) SPECIFICALLY, mostly because there’s no way for me to do it right now without delving into speculation at the end since, ya know, the story isn’t over. And doing so would tip my hand as this huge vrisrezi shipper also and I just don’t want to get people super worked up for the potential way I think the comic WILL go in case i turn out to be wrong, you know?

But I’m starting to think it’s worth making a short post on like, the symbolism and stuff surrounding the two. It’s really fucking transparent honestly so I dont think it’d take me a mammoth amount of text. Hopefully coming soon??? ™

What’s your ideas on Joey’s possible class? I think she’s a likely Maid of Light. I don’t have any screenshots, but I remember her saying she’s “not [dammek’s] maid” a few times, and also her saying that she’s not “made of time”. Also, her turning on the lights in her house and turning on the power in Dammek’s hive i think can be interpreted as her “creating Light”.

I agree. I have a few reasons to add “creating Light” as a reason for Joey, and I remember the Maid reference you’re talking about. It’s still SOMEWHAT possible she’s another class–I saw one reference to destruction, but she doesn’t feel like a Prince so I’m still leaning on Maid. But she’s definitely a Light player imo.

I need to get screenshots to make a whole post about it, but my classpect thoughts on the others are:

Xefros is absolutely a Page of Time. There were a fuckload of references to him as a Page already and at least one to Time, which are most of what I’ve got to compile.

Jude is PROBABLY a Seer of Doom. All of his knowledge ends up benefiting or acting through Joey, and she makes explicit reference to being impressed he actually *Knows* his stuff, with respect to all these threats and rogue conspirators he’s predicting. Of course, its still pretty early and there wasnt anything explicit there, so it’s still somewhat up in the air.

Dammek strikes me as a Thief of Breath. Not completely sure on the Thief part–all I have to go on is the fact that he’s so driven and the occasional references to him taking Xefros’ stuff. His passion for communism/non-ownership certainly sounds like “stealing” through “freedom/disattachment” to me for his own benefit, after all. So that’s my rationale there.

But SPECIFICALLY Dammek definitely seems like a Breath player, because he’s strongly referenced as having a talent for leadership and motivating/driving people–providing direction. The fact that Xefros’ classpect matches Aradia’s–Time doesn’t hurt, as Dammek’s analogue would Tavros, the Breath player.

On top of that, it sets up a somewhat interesting inverse dynamic to the relationship we saw between Vriska/Aradia/Tavros.
Where Homestuck’s cycle of revenge began with a Maid of Time getting revenge on a Thief of Light for the abuse of a Page of Breath, Hiveswap’s plot seems to begin with a Maid of Light beginning to heal the withered sense of importance of a Page of Time at the hands of a Thief of Breath.

Not entirely sure if this reading will hold up, of course. But The Dancestors demonstrated an affinity for this kind of karmic role switching, and Scratch seems to be managing the events of this story, to an extent–just as he managed the cycle of revenge. So it wouldn’t surprise me if it pans out.

I think the thing most people are concerned about is that dammek will become another vriska. she was never fully redeemed, her pre-retcon self being treated as a joke for not being egotistical and getting feelings once she matured a little. She (retcon vriska) was never developed, keeping and building upon the horrible, horrible character traits that were seen as good in the stories eyes, and i think people are scared that hussie and the wp team will fall into that trap again.

That’s certainly a reading a lot of people have, and I think they’re completely wrong.

(Vriska) wasn’t treated as a joke, Retcon Vriska was developed– in a totally different direction, not all character growth is positive–, and Homestuck isn’t over anyway.
As Andrew Hussie literally confirmed. Today. So I find the entire presumption that the story has said all there is to say about the two Vriskas kind of grating, honestly.

I hope that doesn’t come off as antagonistic towards you, though, anon! I understand the viewpoint and for all I know you’re just voicing the fandom’s thoughts.

But like. I’m not and never have been shy about thinking that the fandom has been really bad at reading Homestuck thus far, on multiple fronts. Which isn’t a slight on fandom! This thing has the density of the Bible–it makes sense that parsing it is going to take a lot of work, and it should ideally be a community effort.

But Retcon Vriska is set up as an analogue to fucking Lord English multiple times, explicitly and symbolically, and Terezi is currently en route to find her as we speak. This is a developing plotline, and it’s downright bizarre that the entire fandom has somehow endeavored to pretend otherwise.

gamzee is the one with zero alternates because he’s the one that kills people before the timeline dies

Yeah, I do think that’s the implication. I like it honestly because it renders Gamzee in a WAY darker light as a villain, and really contextualizes WHY he’s so irredeemable to an extent beyond that of Vriska, or even Eridan. There -can be- different versions of those two, ones who aren’t so committed to their personas and willful destruction.

Not so for Gamzee. Like Caliborn, he’s committed to the Alpha Timeline through and through.

creative-classpect:

Why there is only one version of Aranea

So on my patron server we were talking about a lack of Serket ghosts. There are pretty much 0 alternates, with only 1 Aranea and 2 Vriskas (both are plot relevant)

I chalked Vriska up to Meta Thief of Light. Like how she took up waaay too much time in canon and everyone sweeps it under the rug as Thief of Light. That’s a meta use of them, how they effect a story and narrative.

It’s like how Gamzee destroyed falshoods, pretense, lies, and harsh realities. He was able to do the impossible.
It was literally impossible for him to have the hammer of zillywho
It was literally impossible for him to get to Jane’s planet
Etc etc
His nature as a Bard of Rage is a force in the Meta, in the plot

Jujus are LITERALLY plot devices

So with all of that we (us being me and @dheavenlymango ) figured out that there are no alternates of Aranea for this same reason

Ghost alternates exist because they are irrelevant. They don’t matter. They are the epitome of Stopped Actually Mattering
Aranea has been in the dreambubbles waaaaay longer than everyone else
We think she got rid of her alternates. In a Meta attempt to matter, she tried healing her other selves, but they went from being ghosts to straight up not existing. She became the only one, thereby repairing her importance

But, with that came a cost. This One True Aranea was her long shot. By trying to become relevant and absorbing her alternates, she learned the only way to truly matter was to be alive. She scrapped together all her other selves (thereby having a memory so vast that she felt like she has been there forever) and puts all her eggs into one Importance Basket. With only one Aranea, all her alternates are taken away and thus, she gains the power of Singular Importance

But, even with all of this, importance only means anything if you are living. Ghosts are supposed to be inherently worthless

That’s why she wanted the Ring of Life so bad and went so far with her schemes

It wasn’t just One Aranea acting out
It was the entire concept of Aranea has a meta force on plot to actually, truly mater and leave an impact

She bet everything on black
All her cards we down
Every single version of her was leading up to this Alpha Aranea to matter enough and be important enough to save the day

This is an interesting concept, but I’m sorry to say it’s undercut by canon.
There are other Araneas in the bubbles.

They’re visible in ministrife:

But there’s also some in Meenah’s army in the page with Karkat:

Your explanation for Aranea is actually pretty close to how I’d describe Gamzee’s quantum existence, though. Seems to me he manages to live to the end of almost every timeline and then go to sleep, so he can merge with Alpha Gamzee’s dreamself, the same way Dream Rose does.

That would explain how he never dies in any timeline, and why he has no ghosts.

I think Aranea does something similar, but only through virtue of being “lucky” and “kind of boring”, meaning she’s probably likely to live to the end of her timeline by virtue of not getting involved in many fights. So she has fewer ghosts, and her alpha self had quite a lot of collected knowledge, but that’s about it.

Vriska’s an open question for me right now, but I like your description for her.

Anyway, just thought I’d chime in.

EXTREME LIVE-ACTION ROLEPLAY: Terezi, Xefros, and the mythology of Knighthood

Not enough of the fandom is interested in how Classpects may play into Hiveswap, I think. We’ve gotten lots of hints at the player’s potential Classpects, but there’s a lot of skepticism as to whether Classpects will even show up at all, given that the game doesn’t center around Sburb.

I’m here to argue that they’ll definitely feature in some way. And luckily for all of us, whether or not I’m right here will be incredibly easy to prove!

Our case study will be Xefros Tritoh. But before I explain how we’ll scrutinize Xefros to determine whether or not I’m full of shit, I’ll need to talk about three things:

1) Knights

2) Terezi

3) Roleplay.

Extreme Live-Action Roleplay

When I say “Roleplay”, I am referring specifically to the system I advanced in my series on Classes. But my description of it was scattered and focused, so here’s a quick wrap-up:

In Homestuck, when characters are particularly inspired by or moved to imitate rolemodels, that tends to show up in their mechanical behavior as Heroes. What’s more, such acts of imitation tend to come with references to the specific Mythological Archetypes that inform the Class of the Role-Model figure.

The Troll Ancestors are essentially our introduction to this concept, and there is no clearer example than Vriska. For all of Act 5, Vriska strives to emulate Mindfang in all things–and at the same time, Vriska is consistently depicted and referenced as a Fairy. You can see one such reference above.

As it turns out, Sylphs and Maids share the descriptor of Fairy.
Jane, Aranea, Aradia, Kanaya and Porrim are all referenced as Fairies in different ways, and share a number of visual references linking them to fairies.

So Maids and Sylphs are fairies, according to the Class system. But Vriska is a Thief, and attempting to live out the role of one. One important factor in the Roleplay system is that Roleplaying this way is often misguided and unhealthy, and that players are typically at their happiest and most powerful when playing to their innate strengths.

Compare Vriska’s attempts to make Tavros stronger to Aranea’s effort to do the same for Jake. Both end disastrously, but it’s hard to deny that Aranea had an easier time getting the job done.

We’ll talk about Knights (and Pages, by association) in a bit, but for those of you curious, here are the Archetypes for the other classes that have them:

Lord & Muse – Conductors

Seer & Mage – Prophets

Heir & Witch – Magicians

Knights and Pages, contrary to popular opinion, are best described as the “Serve” class.

As Caliborn suggests when speaking to Jake, to “Serve” has multiple meanings in the context of Class powers. Two of them are relevant to Terezi.

1.Shit son, you just got served.

-Urban Dictionary

The first thing Serve classes are prone to doing is Serving their enemies in brutal defeats.

The second–and nicely bringing us into a description of Neophyte Redglare, Terezi’s mythological idol–is the providing of Service.

Knights are prone towards helping others and serving others’ needs through the use of their Aspects. In Redglare’s case, that means that everything she does is at the behest of the Highbloods–even if she doesn’t agree with their ideology.

But perhaps most interesting for our reading of Terezi isn’t anything Knights do through their powerrs, but a different quirk of the Class. One of the Archetypes for the Knight/Page pair is the historical image of the Warrior, including Warrior Caste’s historical tendency to subscribe to a code of honor.

All the Knights we see in Homestuck adopt a code of honor of some sort, in that they hold themselves up to very high standards of behavior based on a persona they construct in their heads.

For Dave, this is the image of the cool dude. For Karkat, it’s the ruthless leader. For Latula, it’s the R4D G1RL act.

In all three of these cases, the Knights primarily use their personas to distance themselves from their emotions and force themselves into positions of responsibility, even if they’re uncomfortable with their own competence or don’t really want to carry out a particular duty.

Which is exactly what Terezi does when confronted with the need to kill Vriska!
Terezi buries her feelings about Vriska and decides that eliminating her is simply the professional way to resolve the problem–choosing to focus on performing her role as Redglare instead of thinking about her own feelings.

Terezi’s Redglare roleplay, however, might even go farther than the three true Knights–since it even includes a literal code for how to act as a Warrior, that she uses to determine when killing was acceptable.
This code of honor is, of course, Terezi’s idea of JUST1C3.

And once Gamzee manipulates Terezi into fully embracing her Redglare persona, Terezi is visually cast as an echo of another Knight–
[S] Seer: Ascend acting as an extended visual callback to Dave’s
[S] Dave: Ascend to the Highest Point of the Building.
Seer: Ascend even starts off with Dave’s symbol!

And the end result of this roleplaying is, of course, as disastrous for Terezi’s being as Vriska’s Mindfang roleplay is for her.

Passing judgment on Vriska leaves Terezi doubt-riddled and self-loathing for years because her true inclinations as a Seer were not to try and go to war for the sake of Justice, but rather to pry, inquire, and discover the truth about Vriska’s nature and feelings. That roleplay misled Terezi from her desires and needs in this respect shows how much of an impact it has in the narrative.

Hopefully this overview gave you an idea of the logic behind it, and if not hopefully looking at other examples I’ve written in the links above–such as
Rose as a Witch, Jane as an Heiress, or Dirk as a Knight–
will illustrate further.

Now. Let’s get to Xefros.

Xefros is interesting here primarily because of his interest in Butlering.
The Butler is the second Archetype that informs Knights and Pages, and it covers the Service connotation as well, but it also includes
last definition of the Serve verb:

To give. As a counterpoint to Thieves and Rogues–who Take–Knights have a tendency to give others their Aspect, or give others things through their Aspect. Much as a Butler offering a plate of food. Davesprite giving John a hammer with Time powers is a prime example.

And on top of being interested in one of the biggest symbols of a given Class in the comic, Xefros also comes with one free FLARP manual, it seems.
Flarp being the same book that marked the impact of Roleplay and Mythological Archetypes on Vriska and Terezi, this is relevant to me.

So my premise is simple. If the Classpect system has any weight in Hiveswap, odds are very good we’ll see Xefros display similarities with Knights in some way.

(I say Knights and not Pages because Pages seem to have a knack for inspiring those around them to do the serving, whereas Knights seem much more inclined to be serving others–and Xefros is definitely interested in doing the serving.)

But there is a catch here.

Apparently, becoming a Butler is Xefros’ ambition.
But that seems a bit odd, considering he’s also a rebel fighter.

So the question is: Is Xefros a Knight, or is this interest in serving (presumably the elite of Alternia?) going to prove to be unhealthy for him?
In other words: Is this an indication of Xefros’ true Classpect?
Or is it a case of Roleplay?

I think it could go either way at this point. Of course, it’s also possible I’m reading into stuff too much and there’s nothing here but coincidences–in which case, Xefros will exhibit nothing particularly related to Knights or Pages or possibly any Classpect stuff at all.

But to be honest, I doubt that. I am, however, very interested in testing this guess, and I hope you’ll all at least be interested in holding me up to scrutiny, too.

That’s all for now. Feel free to drop by on r/Hiveswap’s reddit and Discord if you’d like to ask questions about this, or just jam about Classpects or other cool stuff in general.

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Keep Rising.