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?