18/02/2018 19:00:49 ¶ ●

## Active and Passive Aspects

So now that the whole notional and material idea has been established, that leaves the question, is there another axis to the whole thing? In other words, what separates, say, Mind from Light, or Void from Heart?

I pondered this question for quite a while before coming up with an answer I found satisfactory, and I’m still far from sure I’ve got it right. But I believe the answer might lie in a slightly different perspective on the dichotomy of Active and Passive.

Now, it is well establishled that the Classes can be divided into categories of Active and Passive, though what exactly that means is in some dispute. Personally, I subscribe to the notion put forth in OptimisticDuelist’s Force and Flow essays, which emphasizes that the Active classes operate primarily based on their own needs and desires, and the Passive classes operate primarily based on the needs and desires of others.

An idea that’s a bit less well established is the notion that the moons of Prospit and Derse themselves push their dreamers toward behavior that can be parsed in the Active/Passive duality, through the mechanics of cultural osmosis.

So we have the classes determining a basic leaning toward self-oriented or other-oriented behavior, and the moons shading that behavior, adding a nuance of cultural influence to that basic makeup. Where do the Aspects fit in then? Simply put, through breadth of domain.

Toward the west end of the wheel, the Aspects I have dubbed Passive operate on reality in a broad sense, with Hope seeking to explain the phenomena of the world, Doom representing the inevitability with which those phenomena eventually crash into you, Mind dealing heavily with a breadth of possibility and infinite potential timelines, Void concerning itself alternatively with an all-encompassing nothingness or with the physicality of reality, and Space being literally dubbed the Aspect of all physical locations in-comic. There is a further link here, perhaps, with the way alt-Calliope describes Space as an Aspect concerned heavily with passively waiting for the right moment, not to mention the fact that all Spacebound in Homestuck have dreamt on the Passive moon of Prospit, and the ultimate Passive Class of the Muse is assigned to a Spacebound.

In contrast, the Aspects on the east side of the wheel are much more heavily concerned with individuality. Life I have already deemed an Aspect concerned with the circumstances of one’s individual livelihood, Rage deals heavily with a personal perception of the True, Light has been described as an Aspect of ambition more times than I can count, Heart is literally the Aspect of who you are as a person, and Time… well, if Space is something that exists beyond where you are, then Time is something that happens to you. I’ve written before about how Timebound struggle with reclaiming themselves and their character arcs from the influence of Lord English, a deeply personal quest. There is also a contrast in the art produced by Spacebound and Timebound respectively, where the art of Space is beautiful and appealing in a more generic sense, the art of Time is highly individual and usually somewhat ugly, but in exchange possessing an aesthetic unique to itself. There is birth and death, where the birth Spacebound give rise to is that of someone else (usually a lot of someone elses inside a big frog) while the death Timebound struggle with is their own. And so on. And of course, all Timebound in Homestuck dream on the Active moon of Derse, and the ultimate Active Class of the Lord is borne by a Timebound.

As with the material/notional post, this is mostly a broad draft of the idea, with details to be more carefully examined later.