do you have an analysis where you talk about why you disagree with what canon has to say about classpects anywhere? i looked but tumble isn’t exactly the greatest at searching for stuff. i’m just curious to know what the issues are with what was said in canon
Sure. Though I don’t know if I’d say I “disagree with canon” so much as I think the more someone tries to give us a straight up, clean answer on it, they’re probably an unreliable source. My source is canon, but more holistically.
For me I think this started two places. First: I just….. don’t really buy the idea of Pages being the Slow Burn class. I never bought it, honestly? As soon as I figured out how Jake English manages people and their expectations of him to get what he wants, it threw into question the whole concept of the class. Because Jake is the second most emotionally intelligent character in HS after Karkat, but he uses it for himself rather selfishly instead of for a greater cause. When Jake subtly or subconsciously tries to bend the story to his will, he’s remarkably effective.
So, of course, I looked at Tavros. What does Tavros Nitram want? Well, he wants to have fun, to progress at his own pace, and to kind of do his own thing. I found it very interesting how the people around him sort of bent to what he wanted. No one stopped Tavros from dreaming on Prospit. He didn’t do anything to get those mechanical legs, which he textually wanted, other folks took care of that for him. No one really stopped Tavros from playing the game (both FLARP and SGRUB) the way he wanted to. Aradia enables his allegedly bad class choice, Karkat orders Vriska to save his life, and when Vriska wants to force Tavros to play her way, Kanaya interferes. It’s all very cohesive to me in a way that I genuinely do not know if the creator intended, but the pattern is absolutely there.
So, whoop, Pages Are A Slow Burn gets tossed into the garbage where it belongs.
The other one that really made me go “huh” is Calliope’s Active/Passive thing. From the moment I read it the first time, I was like “i’m…….. not sure that’s a thing” and on every subsequent reread and relisten, I became even more certain she’s just theorycrafting and its not borne out in the actual text. Which, frankly, fits into Calliope’s whole thing of being a proxy for fans, particularly their speculation. She outright says to Dirk she gets carried away with her theorizing.
Like… for me its the Prince thing. I flat out don’t think Princes are “The Most Active Class,” at all, full stop. The idea is kind of silly to me. Eridan wasn’t fucking Super Active, he just became extremely potent when he finally went off. And Dirk, similarly, is the king of Hurry Up And Wait. When shit pops off, he acts with incredible effectiveness, but the rest of the time he’s zoning the fuck out, white lying about how cool he is, and fishing.
Same with Seers on the opposite end. Am I meant to take seriously the idea that Rose Lalonde and Terezi fucking Pyrope are the most passive class, nah. No sell. I literally and actually think I could make a better argument that Witches are more passive than Seers.
And then I just… don’t agree with Calliope’s verbiage of the classes. Dirk was not a destroyer of heart/soul, his most dramatic and effective moments in the story are harnessing his aspect, and in the conversation where Calliope tells Roxy her verbiage, even she says its a little esoteric and hard to grasp.
Calliope’s trying to apply very firm wording and delineation to something that Terezi much earlier calls a “hyperflexible mythology.” That reading of classpect frankly bears out a lot more, imo.
Which just led me to the conclusion that: all the stuff Calliope says, its her opinion. What I am interested in is action. What do these people do, what do they think of their aspect, how does it manifest.
My conclusion was basically: fuck passive/active, this is all about your role in the narrative. Which, in my opinion, fits very well into the two ways HS is structured: as a video game (the vernacular, the commands, the literalization of abstractions like inventory and leveling up), and as a stage play (the acts, the curtains, the intermissions).
