Hey, love your work! I've just started reading through it and a lot of the classes describe your relationship w your aspect. Is there a reason why you recommended figuring out your class first before aspect if class speaks so heavily to your aspect?
Howdy hey! So to me, Class is essentially the role you play and Aspect is the medium you use to affect the world. Class is a lot more personal and harder to nail down, to decide which archetype speaks to you the most.
Aspect sort of augments that, heightens certain facets of yourself. Both are important to know, but choosing Aspect first is sort of like picking your tool out of a box before knowing what your job is.
Most people seem to have an easier time going from Class to Aspect, but a couple found the opposite easier. It’s not a hard rule, but a guideline.
love your classpect theories!! im still mulling over mine atm, but im having a lot of fun classpecting various blorbos lmao.
do you have any thoughts about sorta self-contradictory titles? heir of blood, for instance, sounds like itd be hard to reconcile using your definitions. what dya think an heir of blood would be like?
I don’t find Heir of Blood to be contradictory? That to me parses as someone who’s life is directed by the many tethers between them and others. It sounds to me immediately as a deeply fraught existence. Someone who has no choice but to be tangled up in all those red threads until they can’t get free. what made Karkat a frankly mind-bogglingly good knight of blood was he had full utility of blood, he could reach out and grab the tethers and drag his cavalcade of shithive friends to where they were needed. its the nature of the utility of the Knight that made him so damn good at what he did.
(sidebar, i’m of the opinion that Karkat Vantas is the best leader in whomstve, that he’s the punctuation point on the running joke about leadership. but that’s a different story.)
in contrast to knight of blood, an heir of blood has zero grasp of the aspect. it’s not a tool to be used like a knight’s aspect, it’s just the will of the aspect dragging the heir around. so to me an heir of blood is going to be this sort of gravity well of connections.
i conceptualize blood as a viscous, thick pool, one that is so heavy it takes effort to stand up in it, to keep on your feet. the heir is not going to keep on their feet. they’re going to have to hold their breath.
hello! huge fan of your hs works--your fic actually got me into hs in the first place, so when i saw this blog i clicked so fast i made my laptop almost shut down skjdfhs ANYWAY i read your classpects and i must say your interpretations are absolutely godtier (to pardon the pun)!!!!!! i especially love your heart vs mind -- i think the pervading theories are that heart players are more emotional while mind is more cerebral, but your interpretation of identity vs interpretation is really clever!
huh are those the normal theories? that seems strange to me. like Dirk is a highly emotional person for sure but tends to keep a lid on that as much as he can (the way he suppresses his extreme discomfort at roxy’s drunken flirting immediately comes to mind) and nepeta is passionate, but she is not especially emotive? meulin seems the outlier there to me and even that is performance of a kind.
also like over half of latula’s dialogue is her talking in depth about her emotions sooooooooo
you're really not wrong about the self-doxxing thing, huh? I was reading through stuff like 'maybe, maybe' but when I hit the right one I had to look away from the screen like 'damnit, stop calling me out'. anyway, hello from another heart player! (a mage, as I've sorted out)
indeed I was not! trust me Prince and Heart were both some of the last write-ups I did because it is slightly uncomfortable to doxx myself like that. glad it helped you nail down yours tho!
1) how does it feel to be so right about everything, especially the aspects? :P
2) where would you draw the line between the rogue and the knight? in both your descriptions you have the aspect being wielded as a weapon where the rogue/knight can really effectively help others, but not their self. what’s the distinction (other than guarding vs distributing)?
3) i see what you’re saying about a bard’s relationship to the narrative, but what about their aspect? is that secondary or even irrelevant? is a bard’s aspect arbitrary or is it more like a method, with the aspect acting as a class because the bard class is such a blank slate?
thanks in advance if you choose to answer these, i’m really curious about your opinions!
Well I spent literally months working on this and iterating so it feels really good! LMAO to me like the moment I went “okay I think…… calliope is wrong about Prince being active that seems wrong” and then “wait is anything she says correct” and then throwing all of her theorycraft out, like that truly opened up the possibility space for what the fuck classpect could actually mean. I had a lot of fun! Glad you dig my interpretation!
AH SO at some point I do intend to do a supplementary post that examines some of the similarities between the classes and aspects. Some are easy to group up, and Rogue/Knight/Maid are what I like to call the Tired Classes. They are so fucking exhausted and their jobs are so rooted in team cohesion, I think they are very easy to look at as a group. And when I was diagnosing a few friends who had the Tired vibe, those are the ones I would offer them and explain.
To me, the delineation between our Tired folks is:
Knight: I don’t have a personal relationship with my aspect really, it’s a tool that I use, I wouldn’t think of it as ‘alive’ in any way, also I’m sad. Main tank. Maid: I give and I give and I give but I want something that my aspect specifically makes it difficult for me to have. My aspect is inside of me. Main healer. Rogue: I am here to help but if you forget to say thank you, I am gonna remember it forever. My aspect is outside of me. Off/Second healer.
Is that helpful at all?
I mean I think of aspect as the medium/tool a person uses. So does it matter for the Bard what their aspect is? Sure, if you want to know what they use to do their bullshit. But it doesn’t factor much into how they are doing their bullshit, if that makes sense. If you have a villain in an RPG, does it matter if he’s a fire mage or an ice mage? Mechanically, sure, but to The Story, probably not.
@slimequest: not the anon but the traditional interpretation is that prince is a class that inverts its aspect, which is why dirk has such a tight lid on his “heart”
sorry you said ‘invert’ and i immediately broke out into hives
also wait a fuck, keeps a tight lid? who are we talking about? the boy who built Jane a protector bunny and the SECOND it was activated messaged her to check she was okay? and then joked and jibbed with her about teaching her the ironic arts? or the guy who weathered an intensely uncomfortable series of romantic advances from roxy before still reassuring her that “I already have enough to do with you, and I like it just fine”? Or the dork who earnestly tried to get Calliope to share her friend-fiction with him and was bummed when she said no? or Dirk Fucking Strider, who fell in love with a guileful boy living scared in a room and sent a steel avatar of himself to protect him so he could explore the hellmurder island he was stuck on?
that dirk strider?!
sigh. when are people going to understand the key to understanding all the alpha kids is knowing that every one of them is a liar.
LOVE these breakdowns, such a refreshing take on things that had been somewhat "set in stone" by the past fandom per calliope. i've finally gotten close to actually figuring out my own, space is definitely my aspect but i'm torn between maid and heir. any insight on how they would work with space specifically?
HEY BUDDY GOOD TO SEE YOU.
A Maid of Space, so one who is burdened by Space. As they tend to seek out something that feels impossible due to their aspect, and the big limitation of Space is that you’re really constrained to a very rigid domain and tend to struggle with a specific part of Living In A Society, I’d say you’d be a Maid is there is a thing about modern society that is pressing down particularly hard on you or is difficult for you to come to terms with. For Jade it was being a narrative toy constantly being shoved back in the box which is a little amorphous for us, but for Porrim it was sexism and the role impressed on her by her caste, and Kanaya it was her struggle with quadromanticentrism (oh my god fuck me for typing that). Now we all live in A Society of course, but the arc of the Maid that if they’re successful, they will get to the other side and reach some sort of peace. So, if you’re a Maid, you may feel a boot on your back but have hope you’ll get free of it.
An Heir of Space is going to be the exemplar of the Space aspect, so the tactile reality of things. Space is about being locked inside a specific possibility range and having great control over that domain but zero beyond it. And the power curve of an Heir peaks early and stays constant. So I would posit an Heir of Space would feel more trapped than many other classpect combinations. The boundaries of possibility would feel like the edges of the universe. There is nothing beyond. They would be draped in a feeling of stagnation, of having seen it all already, and be like intensely world-weary even in their twenties. To which my advice would be to be better at reaching out to friends who do still have hope and who seem to be flourishing, to try and understand where that comes from inside them and try to emulate it. Fake it until you make it.
But that requires the step of actually reaching out and not letting yourself be convinced you’re a burden. Which is hard but is a struggle worth having.
Worth noting that a Maid’s source of their aspect comes from within and is under a lot of their control. An Heir also has a very strong personal connection to their aspect, but its impersonal and entirely not under their control. They are under control of their aspect.
Hiya, loved reading through your analysis', just curious if you were planning on covering specific classpects as well. Lots of love ❤ -Anon
I mean I’m doing it for followers and mutuals when they ask (or people who drop me a kofi tbh) but I don’t have plans to outline every one, no. And I’m very unlikely to do it for anyone using anon, sorry to say.
I really enjoy your take on the classpect system and how you define the classes especially, but I had a question on Heart in relation to the Knight and Page classes. When describing the way that knights can use their aspect and the ways pages interact with it, you said it wasn't inside of them but something they can wield or lead. I was wondering how that looks with the heart aspect, which is entirely your personhood??? I would love to hear your take please!
Well, would you not think that a Prince of Heart is also using personhood? A Prince gains power from fealty to their aspect. To be kind of tawdry and cliche, it’s as if being True To Your Heart gives you more power in a way that leads to incredible limit breaks.
In comparison to a Prince of Heart, I think the Knight of Heart is not really up for talking about Personal Stuff or trying to sort through their shit. They start out with a really strong sense of their Self; it’s something else that is their barrier.
(Worth nothing, both Knight and Prince are Tanks in my reading.)
Knights kind of feel like the “Hey I just work here” class. The actual functions of what they do with their Aspect, that’s really easy. Karkat was always good at Blood, Dave was always good at Time, it was their Other Issues that tripped them up. (Being queer and troll queer/cullbait respectively.) If you’re a Knight of Heart, I think you’re journey of growing up is easier than others, but complicated by Something Else. Knights are super queer to me, so someone who figures out super early they’re trans but then has to contend with the new expectations of gender they weren’t socialized with, that feels to me like a very KoH arc.
Now a Page of Heart lmao feels like the Disney Movie Protagonist to me. The one who learns in the end “you have all these cool abilities but the power came from inside you all along.” It’s incredibly twee. Thought I will say, the guileful nature of the Page paired with the romantic nature of Heart is very funny to me. I think a Page of Heart would be an absolute heartbreaker, like would make Jake English seem like a fucking nun in comparison.
I also think a Page of Heart might have a “oh no my true love was hurt so I accidentally burned down a village, whoopsie daisy” moment.
Sup, someone dropped me a tip and asked for more thoughts on the Rogue Of Breath classpect. Sure thing!
We already have one Rogue of Breath, but as we all know, the majority of the Dancestors are used primarily as jokes, which makes it a little hard to use them as a basis for analysis. My main goal was to just try to keep things consistent. Rufioh does not tell us as much about Rogues as Roxy does, but I don’t want to just discard stuff because it makes the task more difficult, obviously.
So, Rogue of Breath would be one who distributes freedom to their team. The big takeaway I had from trying to close-read Rufioh Nitram was that he was often an outlet for other’s people’s freedom and exploration but he himself didn’t always get a lot out of the relationships, and was himself rather flighty. (lmao? eh)
Thus you may think of a RoB as someone who helps the members of their team break loose from something that is confining them. Or, break is not the word… Break is the Hope word, not the Breath word. Breath lets a person slip sinuously out of the bounds that hold them. So a RoB would help their allies do that, to slip the leash of their restraints as it were.
But I think it would be like guiding someone out of a Labyrinth that you were then required to go back in. A Rogue of Breath would do the work, guide each of their friends out of the confinement, but feel like their own escape was being put off and off, and it would make them jaded. Which becomes difficult when they want a break, or for someone to free them for once, but they’re the only one who knows the way.
For a Rogue of Breath, I would suggest they explain their frustrations to a capable friend they have to see if someone can’t share the load a bit.
I got recommended your blog for classpecting stuff and gods I think you have one of the most coherent guides I've ever seen that isn't so tightly bound to what's been "considered canon".
Yeah to me there’s different type of canon. Like, I keep coming back to Calliope’s theorycrafting in Act 6 because in some ways I think that’s what established a lot of the framework that makes classpect just…….. less functional. Calliope canonically believes all that stuff, but Calliope also is working on limited information and is extrapolating. She is the first person in the comic to try and give the classes these specific translations and they aren’t commented on by anyone else. There’s no corroboration. And she is the metatextual avatar for fan speculation and fan creation. I rag on her theorycraft a lot but lemme be clear: I adore Calliope.
To me, the reason I focus on character’s actions is because that’s a better indicator of what their classpect is. What do they do with it? What do they say about it (which informs their view of it)? That’s the meat of the topic to me. But I treat everyone in whomstve as an unreliable narrator, especially in act 6 where Everyone Is Lying Oh My God Y'all.
Just because you asked, Jaboody. I attempted to repeat my Alpha Kids TED talk. Starting with Jane, then Roxy, then Dirk, then Jake.
Thesis: The Alphas are liars, they lie to you the reader, they lie to each other, they lie to themselves, and if you take them at their word you will literally miss The Point.
I cannot fucking believe I forgot to mention in the Jake Section that RIGHT BEFORE the janejake friendzone convo, RIGHT BEFORE, when jake is talking to roxy, he literally fucking slips up and refers to jane’s feelings as “unrequited” he literally says it
i love jake english, that lying bitch, i love him to fucking death
Someone asked me what I mean about the Alphas being liars. Coincidentally I did basically an extemporaneous TED Talk on the topic a while ago. There are a few details I would rephrase (my meta about Okay What Is BGD Really changes a lot) but broadly speaking, this is a primer on how The Alphas Are Liars.
Catch me here listening to Let’s Read Homestuck at work and laughing my ass off at Jane’s entire intro page but ESPECIALLY the “luckily, she’s not the type to hold a grudge.” like oh my god l m a o.
@anonezumi I got into it pretty late but I always assumed homestuck, but especially sburb in particular, was meant to be hard to understand. tell me you understand what “circumstantial simultaneity” is. tell me to my face..
(tumblr keeps eating my direct reply to the post, sorry)
but yes? “circumstantial simultaneity” happens a lot of stories that involve time travel, Hussie just gives it a pretentious name. its just a common narrative tool used in a lot of non-linear stories to make things easier for the audience to understand. the events are not happening at the same time chronologically, but they are grouped together for the audience in such a way that makes it easier to understand. like, imagine for a moment that Cascade was told to you piecemeal across like 100 panels interspersed through Acts 5.1 and 5.2 instead of the way it was. it would become incomprehensible.
i’m genuinely not trying to Gotcha here, I just don’t…. actually find Homestuck that difficult to understand as an archival reader. I have many reasons to side-eye Hussie, but the one thing I will always give credit for is the pace of the storytelling and the way they slowly teach the reader the Language of the story before testing that knowledge. That part if truly very masterfully done, in my opinion, and I’ve talked a lot in the past how [S] Jade: Enter is essentially your midterm exam on “hey are you understanding this story” before your final exam at [S] Cascade.
so about Pages, because two people asked wherehence comes my Thing about Pages secretly being the most powerful class.
let me give you what was my personal epiphany about how Jake Fucking English was never a “slow burn” as a power player.
So do you remember back in Act 6, how Jake spends the entirety of 6.1 thru Synch-Unite just trying to talk to Dirk? He wakes up in the morning and wants to get ahold of Dirk, is waylaid at every turn, and complains to everyone who will listen that he just fucking wants to talk to Dirk goddammit. It’s his primary motivation for the entire pre-entry sequence.
And then Jake gets bonked on the head and proceeds to have a dream about Dirk talking to him. He proceeds to dream about Dirk talking to him for 31 pages before Aranea finally interrupts. THIRTY. ONE. PAGES. It’s one of the longest logs in Homestuck by page count and word count. And its all a memory of Jake’s birthday, when he got to talk to Dirk, and Dirk was nice to him and complimented him and told him a story and indulged him.
This isn’t a coincidence. This is Jake, fed up with not being able to talk to the boy he likes, finally just having a Hope-fueled tantrum and dreaming about the one thing he wants for thousands of words. It’s unfettered desire and an aspect that’s sympathetic to its Page. Everyone mistakes them for lower-level players with big endgame potential because they don’t realize Pages don’t really choose to do shit, they just get what they want. (compare this to Tavros and his Breath-y desire to just have fun with the Game of the game and how everyone bends to enable this for him, even vriska under pressure from kanaya)
ppl be like “oh jake you used the combined power of hope and heart to make a copy of the boy you like in your brain to protect and guide you” but also “oh pages are a slow burn” bitch pls
anyway i love pages and i love jake english, hope you all have a smashingly good day
How much influence does each part have on the aspect (talismans, “you may be” and the main paragraph)?
Like personally I felt the most called out on reading about heart, but the other pieces didn’t click as much? The talismans of blood were very on the dot for me and the “you may be” section for hope was verbatim something I’ve thought about lol (also I think??? Im an heir if that helps) (thank you!!)
The talismans and the “you may be” bits are the least important and are meant to help you if you’re super torn between two Aspects, basically. if you don’t vibe with them but do vibe with the overall write-up, that’s totally okay.
I really like reading all of your analyses. Not even from a "i want to figure out my own classpect way" but just like. Yeah i like reading it all, pls post more whenever you want to on anything, i am reading it and nodding. You dont have to respond to this, i just want you to know you have a captive audience
hahah thank you for saying so! projects like this are strange, like, they’re a bunch of superfluous work, so knowing someone gets a kick out of it is nice.
Hi! A while back you mentioned Knight/Maid/Rogue as “The Tired Classes”, which I thought was very fun! I was wondering if there are any other groupings that you have? No need to elaborate on them or anything, I’m just curious :’)
yeah i still plan to do a post about the similar classes and aspects. i just think i’m getting a cold????? 8C but it’ll happen as soon as i can work up the gumption and tarnation and such to do it.
hi!! this question is more concerning of sburb itself rather than classpect sorry bout that! but what do you think are the roles of each class in a session? do classes have to specifically do something in a session or does it just depend? like for example a knight supposedly exists in a session because of a lack in that aspect and such, or a prince existing because their role is to destroy the abundance of an aspect in that session. thanks for reading that long ass question :')
“a knight supposedly exists in a session because of a lack in that aspect”
Is this someone else’s theory craft because I have never heard it before. Also I literally don’t agree with the Prince as a “destroyer” at all and don’t think these sessions had a surplus of hope or rage or heart (respectively)
I guess my answer is “nah” which is admittedly boring. To be clear, I both don’t think whomstve was That Deep and I also don’t think Hussie put a lot of effort into making the classpects balanced and consistent in the first place, which is part of why I sat down to make this work.
The only cross session role thing is Space players gotta do frogs and Knights are supposed to help them. If you’re Knight of Space, you’re pulling double duty lmao.
Beyond that, if you personally find interesting coincidences like that to explore, that’s cool but I don’t think they’re intentional.
