BREATH: The aspect of freedom

Includes: John, Tavros, Rufioh, John Crocker, the Summoner

Breath players are the people who are most likely to be accused of “playing the game wrong.” They are here to wander around and see the sights, to come up with their own goals and quest, and if that happens to overlap with the actual objective of the party, that’s coincidental. They are the people who play big open world games for 450 hours without completing the main quest, too busy collecting cheese wheels or filling out the map or messing around in photo mode. They have entirely lost the plot if they even had it at any point.

Which is not to say they don’t do important things and are not driven. But their power comes in service to the self above all else. And the boon of Breath means they will rarely if ever bump into the boundaries of the game, never meet real resistance. They are not playing the game as intended, but they aren’t breaking anything, and so they meet no push-back. Like the wind, they can slip in and out of any space they want, and thus are kind of unstoppable. No cage or shackle can hold them down.

Of our Breath players, all of them are sort of checked out of the game. John is the first to godtier of his group and gets sassed by Karkat for never learning the more mundane rules of the game. He never needs to. Tavros is happy to play with everyone, but is motivated by his own desires, eschewing what he “should” be doing frequently. Rufioh and the Summoner both share freedom with those around them, but Rufioh has a very hard time maintaining connections.

Breath players can be formidable… but mostly they are doing their own thing. They have trouble staying on task and properly aiming their abilities. They may be easily mistaken as naive or not very bright, but truthfully they have made the decision not to give a fuck about what people around them think. The probability of them having ADHD is bananas through the roof.

Talismans: wind, impermanence, the unfettered, level 56 but still hasn’t done the level 12 quest, didn’t read the tutorials or the manual, not going to google the solution to this puzzle either, boredom.

You may be Breath if… you’ve ever completely on accidentally ghosted someone, and once you realized you felt so bad you let the ghosting lie and just chalked that friendship up as over. Whoops.

LIFE: The aspect of affluence

Includes: Jane, Feferi, Meenah, Nanna, the Condesce

Life players are coming in with the odds stacked in their favor. Rather than starting at square one, they probably have some things going for them that other people lack, be it material wealth or status. On the outset, Life is cutting them a little slack. However, this does not mean they have it easy by any means. When you start from a pedestal, you have further to fall and the impact hurts more.

The most important skill for a Life player to learn is empathy. They often have trouble relating to the people around them, and if they let that sit, they are going to wind up lonely and isolated and bitter about it. But putting in the work and effort to reach out and try to understand will benefit them enormously. It’s hard to do!

All of our Life players come from positions of dubious privilege. Feferi and Meenah are destined to be Empress and both have strong opinions about what that eventuality should mean. The Condesce revels in her position and even pumps people around her full of Life to keep them around, to keep them subject to her rule. And Jane is introduced as the Heiress Apparent and is the target of assassination attempts for her position.

That is part of their inheritance, the cushy starting parameters the Life players begin with. It comes with an even bigger caveat; they will chafe badly against the status quo. We Live In A Society, and that drives Life players in particular batty. They will often be pushing back against that status quo, but its much harder to fight a Concept than a specific thing. Life players will have big ideas, but struggle with the implementation.

Talismans: Royalty, obligations, end goals without clear paths, tending to investments, status symbols, picking the easiest class in character gen, the inability to relate and working to overcome that.

You might be Life if… you’ve ever listened to a friend vent about something in their life, then realized you can’t relate, then felt guilty you couldn’t relate, then had to realize that’s ridiculous to feel guilty about.

LIGHT: The aspect of relevance

Includes: Rose, Vriska, Aranea, Alpha Rose, Mindfang

In this dichotomous whirlwind of classification and assignment, a recurring touchstone is how each class and aspect views the system they are locked in. And to Light players, all the world is a stage, and their connection to everything should be seen in that lens. They see the spotlight and they want to control it, control the narrative. The currency they deal with is luck, certainly, but more specifically agency. They want to control who is relevant and when. They want to have the stage directions in their hands and a bullhorn to call them out. And a big red pen to revise them as needed.

As such, Light folks are dramatic. They are here to win in no uncertain terms and are driven by a lot of personal ambition. This does not mean they aren’t personable; in fact, Light people are almost exclusively extroverts who can and will happily talk someone’s ear off. They really enjoy leading a conversation and are happy to bring people along the dialogic hikes. Others may have trouble scaling the same mountain as they do.

Given their realm of influence and interest, Light players are often masters of hyperfixation. They have extremely thorough knowledge that they have put in a lot of effort to study and research. The amount they personally want to share varies, but they would be remiss not to make their expertise crystal clear for everyone around them.

It’s great to have a Light player around because they can be depended on for a certain amount of inertia and planning. When everyone in the party can’t decide where to go for lunch, the Light player is there with the concrete choice to save the day from everyone else’s indecision. Thank goodness.

All our Light players have direct influence over the Spotlight of the story. Rose prefers to remain in the shadows and hand other people their lines and cues; Dave himself complains that all she seems to do is send dudes on quests and he’s right. Aranea torpedoes the game session in her desperate grasp for power, when her good intentions seem to fall to the wayside in favor of her ego. The mechanism she uses, in fact, is essentially injecting Jake with an overdose of relevance that sends his game-breaking abilities into overdrive. Mindfang as well seems to summon and discard people as if they were mere characters in the play of her life she is directing, and her tenor of retelling her story is drenched in overdramatic Light bullshit as well. And Vriska is perhaps the most triumphant example of a Light player, as the Retcon operates by taking everyone’s agency and relevance in the story and redirecting them onto her. She is the platonic ideal of a Thief of Light.

And being successful in the realm of Light often means controlling it for others. In the context of Homestuck, Light seems to be a finite resource, a narrative zero-sum game. No wonder Light players are prone to min-maxing everything.

Talismans: The world as stage, books, writing, going on too many Wiki Walks, high grades, already did the reading, seeing the big picture but rarely the small picture of how people around them feel. Having that One Friend they trust to keep them from being jerks.

You may be Light if… you’ve ever considered starting a podcast.

TIME: The aspect of opportunity

Includes: Dave, Aradia, Caliborn, Damara, Alpha Dave, the Handmaid

Time players are destined to have a rough time. They start off dealt a bad hand and have to overcome that as well as everything else around them. They hit the ground running and never feel safe slowing down. But as the players who start the game with their eyes open, they sort of know the stakes of what they are doing right away, and thus are ready for the core of their power: windows of opportunity.

To work with Time is to be resigned to the Hurry-Up-And-Wait. There is nothing but critical hits or critical misses here, and the Time player is forced to have patience for the right time to act. Time is a demanding dance partner; but Time players have an inclination towards music, towards inexorable motion.

Aspect is a cruel maestro to all of the Time players. Dave is wracked with anxiety about the tempo he has to keep up with in the game, and only finally gets the chance to grow into himself when everything stops for three goddamn years. Aradia spends much of her time bored and waiting for everyone around her to catch up, and only becomes truly happy when she goes to a place where Time stops mattering. Damara is locked in a drawn out dying gasp of a session, and the Handmaid has so much Time she’s poisoned by it. And Caliborn arguably screws up his entire personal journey by skipping ahead, breaking the rules to accelerate events, and missing his opportunity grow by taking the opportunity for freedom instead.

It’s not an accident that all Time players feel relief when finally freed from its grasp. Their greatest struggling is everything is always going at the wrong speed, too slow or too fast with no middle ground. Predictably, Time players are going to be predisposed towards severe anxiety and the feeling they cannot relax. There is nothing they appreciate more than the ability to breathe, to slow down, to not have a deadline. They are in dire need of a vacation to unspool their wound-up nerves, to have a drink other than a Redbull, and to work on their personal projects a bit.

Talismans: Repetition, timing, music, schedule anxiety, midday naps with the timer set, staying up late to finally work on a project, arriving to any event first and having to wait for everyone else.

You may be Time if… you always know your personal schedule; you may choose to be artfully late or ten minutes early, but you always, always know when you’re supposed to show up.

BLOOD: the aspect of obligation

Includes: Karkat, Kankri, the Signless

The manifestation of Blood almost feels like a physical thing, as physical and solid as any aspect can be. It stains the hands and gets under the nails and leaves a copper taste in the air. For those who harness its power, it is a thousand tethers, all pulling with a collective force more inexorable than gravity. Every time a Blood player locks eyes with someone, there’s a ripple. Every time they depend on another person, there is a ripple. Every time they feel the weight of expectation on their shoulders, there is a ripple, and they know just how to turn all of it into a tidal wave. While other aspects may be looking through the rulebooks, examining the ones-and-zeroes, trying to learn how the world works, to the Blood player none of that shit matters because they know how to make people do what they want, and that’s not the kind of laws writ in a script, be it stageplay or code.

Blood is heavy. It only works if the player is subsumed in it. Love is hard to let go of, but hate is all too easy. And the thing about forgiveness is that its a favor, and Blood players know when they give it, the forgiven is now obligated to be better. Blood players are fucking terrible liars (except to themselves) and their greatest weakness is trying to handle a good liar. There is no greater villain than someone who cannot be trusted. But boy, will the Blood player make sure no one trusts that villain either.

Team Blood and Team Vantas is a circle, and all of them are so fucking tired. Kankri is arguably not very good as a Seer of Blood, but their main obsession is trying to examine the bonds that connect people and to diagnose the problems in them. The Signless was a more successful iteration of this, seeing not only the bonds that tie people together but seeing the potential of what they could be if everyone got their heads out of their collective chutes. Karkat, though, was a Knight of Blood and was such able to use his connections to everyone to keep them all from killing each other for an over 600 hour campaign. He knew exactly who needed to be riled up and who needed compassion, and dragged his team to victory entirely and completely in spite of themselves.

Being drenched in Blood is not easy. Compassion is an unusual sword to wield. Those who use it are hard to defeat.

Talismans: Soft power, defusing situations, having a temper with a looooong fuse, the Dad/Mom Friend, driving the car, needing to turn off their phone every once in a while to refill their stamina. Kind Is Not Nice.

You may be Blood if… you’ve ever told a friend something like “I think you know that’s a bad idea” and rather than getting mad, they sighed and agreed with you.

SPACE: the aspect of the concrete

Includes: Jade, Kanaya, Calliope, Porrim, Grandma English, the Dolorosa

Space is defined by a very specific duality: being adept and skilled at manipulation of the physical while being aggrieved and oppressed by something very not physical. It is the aspect that is practical if not rigorously objective. Theory is dumb, what can be done with hands is real. Why can’t everything be manipulated so easily?

Space players are going to be almost inevitably into a craft of some kind. Building things that can be touched is their greatest joy. They may try many different things, but will have a hobbyist or enthusiast’s level of skill in something. If not, they are still looking for that something so they can hone in on it. They prioritize their projects very highly, and out of everyone have the much trouble dealing with a lack of work-life balance. If there’s no time for their stuff, they will be very stressed.

The flipside is, of course, things that do not fall under their handicraft. Space players are not naive; they often know about the forces constraining them. They know we Live In A Society. But more than anything they… struggle with how to handle that, to either affect change or come to peace. From the outside its very interesting; people watch the Space player fix their car or build a machine or do a complicated bit of embroidery and cannot imagine how that’s done. But that’s the easy stuff! How do you learn to Live In A Society? That’s the hard part.

And frankly, having to deal with all that stuff is annoying at best and actively depressing at worse.

The duality is carried through each Space player. Porrim and Kanaya share a love of sewing, of creating things, of using tools, but struggle with genuinely very complicated feelings about their roles as Jade-bloods and with sexism and quadranted romance respectively. Jade is an effusive engineer and lover of physics, but doesn’t understand the forces that keep her isolated and lonely (as narrative law falls well outside the purview of Space). We can only assume from the Dolorosa’s incredibly cool outfit she shared the other Maryams’ love of textile craft, but her eternal struggle was with the role of the Jade-bloods and of adult trolls themselves. And poor Calliope wants to create, wants to share her creations, wants to nail down the objective language of Sburb, but is literally shackled to esoteric obligations.

All this to say, when something falls within the borders of a Space player’s influence, they are ready and raring to take direct, physical action. But if something is even a few inches beyond their domain, it’s impossible for them to touch. Limited extreme potency is the name of their game.

Talismans: Building things, collecting stuff, acing the homework but failing the test, an overflowing craft drawer, self-satisfaction, simmering frustration, smiling even though you want to slap someone silly.

You may be Space if… you’ve gotten obsessed with watching/reading the news, trying to understand some complicated current event, only to burn out and blacklist it on every site you use because you can’t deal with it and not being able to affect change makes you fucking batty.

DOOM: the aspect of inevitability

Includes: Sollux, Mituna, the Psiionic

Working with Doom feels like trying to slip a collar around a feral animal’s neck. Most likely result is getting grievously injured. But it has to be done. Those aligned to this aspect are resigned. They more than anyone see the code of the matrix and know precisely how fucked the situation is. 

As such, Doom is the nihilistic aspect. That one memetic image of “What is nihilism, the stereotype vs the reality” with the stereotype being a dour sad Nothing in life matters and the reality being a radical kid proclaiming Nothing in life matters!– this is the beating heart of Doom and the only two paths for its players. They are depressed with the inevitability of it all. They are also freed by the inevitably of it all because this is the secret: the Doom player knows exactly what is set in stone and exactly what is not, and thus know thoroughly what can be done and are ready to affect some fucking change up in here.

What is unique to Doom players is their comprehension of the mechanisms and structures around them. They know the rules of the Game (and very much see the constraints of the world in that gamified context) and thus can use those rules to tear victory out of the system. They are the rules lawyer, they are the Letter Not The Spirit, they are the political activist who files a lawsuit to get a bad law overturned. The rulebook is their blunt force instrument.

But make no mistake; the world sucks and we’re all doomed. Having this thorough understanding of things makes the Doom player very prone to depressive episodes. And when the laws cannot be broken, when they are bent and bent to their limits, the probability of those laws snapping violently back at the Doom player is high.

The Captors are our Doom players and all know this terribly well. Mituna was able to assist his party with understanding of inevitabilities and oncoming events until his aspect backfired on him so tremendously. The Psiionic has a similar tale, being a right hand to Troll Jesus himself until the inevitability of being strapped into a shitty ship got him, and the Empress’ own powers made his life dramatically worse. And Sollux as a Mage of Doom was rife with understanding of the Game, even helped create Sgrub himself, facilitating the downfall of his species and friends. As such, his struggle with that understanding as well as his own sense of self-importance was a pendulum.

It’s rough out here for the Doom players. But again: if nothing in life matters, then all that matters is what we do. Let that be a needed light in the darkness.

Talismans: The world as a game, exact words, night owls, coffee or other stimulants, arrogance, terrible impossible-to-foresee events, tragic backstories, speedrunning and completionism.

You may be Doom if… your ultimate struggle in life is knowing that change begins small, that you can make life better on a small scale, but the enormity of how fucked up the world is makes you just want to stay in bed.

MIND: the aspect of skepticism

Includes: Terezi, Latula, Redglare

On some level, Mind players think this entire venture is kind of silly. Do aspects matter? Do classes? No! This is the great secret of Mind: who cares if someone is really lucky or is really good at understanding time paradoxes or is a natural leader? That’s all table dressing stood on the lodestone of understanding. Nothing matters except the decisions we make and don’t make, and hang the rest.

Mind players really do not understand the domains of the other aspects and may even kind of feel all of them are superfluous. Their aspect, to them, feels like the grand unifying theory of the universe. They reach out their hands and they nudge things into motion, and there is a result. There is always a result, and no such thing as an idle action. The world is spinning! We all exert control on it! Things will move until they collide!

And that is the other hand of Mind. Karma and justice. The scales have to be balanced. It’s not a matter of morality or ethics. This is the way the world works, action and reaction! Consequences!

Mind is the black box of the self. Mind players either already know or learn fast that everyone’s understanding of the cosmos is dictated by their experiences. Philosophically speaking, do we all even live in the same universe at all? Or is it colored by that core of self, our filter of who we each are? You will never know what color red is, only what color you think it is.

If all of this sounds navel-gazey and irritating, then you’re not a Mind player. Mind folks have so much interiority, they can build a goddamn mansion in their head. How is all this not fascinating?

The Pyropes all share Mind, and are influenced by it accordingly, which is to say that none of them seems to be painted very broadly in their aspect. That’s the nature of Mind, it’s all variable! How Terezi sees Mind versus how Latula sees it versus how Redglare sees it, each is different. Redglare had everything stacked against her, and everything about her position on the board was that of a non-player, until she chose not to be. Latula as a Knight of Mind guards her aspect and guards with it, and thus isn’t super interested in even attempting to explain it to the people around her, but feels an innate, strong kinship (as well has a lot of interiority she doesn’t want to share with others). And Terezi. Terezi knows the people around her well enough to see the vortices all their decisions will make, but the Alpha Timeline means nothing to her. The real world is the one she’s standing in. And when the Game pulls the rug out from under her, in the eleventh hour, what she changes is herself. The universe branches from Terezi Pyrope’s feet.

Forget all the metaphors about playbooks and rules and what the world is. It exists in the Mind. 

Talismans: The balancing scales, the regression to the mean, picking yourself up and dusting off, a good pair of shoes is the most important part of any outfit. The universe is unfeeling but we are not.

You may be Mind if… you’ve ever mentioned Plato’s allegory of the cave in casual conversation.

VOID: the aspect of obsession

Includes: Roxy, Equius, Horuss, Mom Lalonde, Darkleer

Suppose there is a door. The door has a lock on it. There doesn’t seem to be a key to the lock anywhere. However, there is a window nearby someone could break in to bypass the door. Or if they knocked on the door, someone might answer. Or they can walk around the building to look for another not-locked door.

Or, if they are a Void player, there are going to break out one of those squishy mats to kneel on, break out their sturdiest hairpin, and they are going to get that fucking door open or they will never move again.

Void is the aspect for the addicted, the restrained, the people lost in the dark. All Void players begin with something clearly placed in their way, and on the other side is the entire possibility space. If they can just get past that main obstacle, they will not only be able to move on, but in the process they will have a skeleton key. Their hands is on the I/O switch and shit can change. Once they pull themselves with bloody nails from the bottom, everything after is smooth sailing.

But actually getting past that obstacle is… difficult. Borderline impossible. While other aspects are in conflict with external forces and systems, the Void player must overcome something inside themself. Their struggle is personal and small stakes, but it’s their life. It’s everything to them. But since others often cannot see the scope of the trouble, Void players can be bitter and passive aggressive, hiding their frustration with false smiles and politesse.

It’s testament to how perilous Void is, how many of its people are defined by the negative traits. Darkleer fails to fulfill his duty one time and it ruins his entire life, leaving him to obsess over it eternally. Horuss and Equius are both born into a greatly skewed view of class and their role in the world, and even when they repeatedly are shown evidence of their philosophy being broken, they are too obsessed with their status to move on. Roxy, though, is wracked with an obsession with not being important to anyone, with never being anyone’s favorite, with being resigned to emotional roles she doesn’t want. With tremendous effort and work, she pushes through to understanding her own power and becomes capable of truly phenomenal acts. 

That is the potential of Void. When the darkness itself is understood, everything can be found inside of it.

Talismans: Breaking glass, sharp tempers with unusual triggers, clinging to old comforts, whistling at night, nostalgia, hatereading your ex, easy bravado, hidden talents.

You may be Void if… if you’ve ever had a crying jag in the middle of doing a task, then gone back to the task as if nothing even happened.

HOPE: the aspect of imagination

Includes: Jake, Eridan, Cronus, Grandpa Harley, Dualscar

Hope is the force the world just cannot contain. While everyone else squabbles over plans and rules and spotlights and inevitability, Hope players are looking at the clouds and seeing their dreams. Everything around them feels soft and malleable, gilded in the yellow glow of excitement. They have big visions and while they don’t have a plan to bring that vision to reality, they just know its there, just beyond them, they just have to reach a little further. Hope is the thing with feathers.

But the world doesn’t want to answer. Rules, structures, laws, blah-di-blah, all of it is holding the Hope player back from their goals. It’s very hard not to take it personally. Everyone thinks the Hope folks have their heads in the clouds, that they’re ineffectual and easily distracted. Why can’t they understand? Can’t they see how wonderful everything could be, if the universe stopped dragging its fucking feet? We’re all teetering on the precipice of something new and exhilarating, if we could just get free!

And oh, it makes the Hope players want to tear at their hair and scream. It’s an agony, being so close to the thing you want, the thing that’ll make everything better. If their friends and allies just worked together, helped them reach a little further, knock a little harder, maybe the map would change. It’s so goddamn fucking close, how come no one else can see it? Stop obsessing over petty boring shit and look! Reach!

Hope is the thing with talons.

The longer the Hope player is denied, the more they press and strain against everything that holds them in place. They are fettered and can hear the creaking of the bindings, see where the cracks are forming. Anticipation is their constant companion and guile is their shadow.

At its manifestation, Hope breaks the system, bucks the narrative, and arrives like a natural disaster. Cronus and Dualscar both fail to reach that fission point, languishing in their failed dreams and growing increasingly bitter like the death of their ambitions is festering within them. Eridan’s desire to control his destiny, for relevance, for power after being ignored for so long, it snaps into place with a force that shatters the team and breaks the concrete reality that Kanaya is tending to, all in a near instance of pure disaster. And Jake, the most triumphant Hope player creates impossible things with careless words. When Aranea infuses him with his full potential, the game itself strains, and gold seeps through the cracks he’s made in the foundations until the whole timeline needs a reset.

Hope rattles and hums in the back of its players’ skulls, this constant whisper of what if, what if, what if, dogging their steps like an incredibly insistent voice of reason. Its impossible to tell if its the angel on their shoulder or the devil. Hope is hungry, and everything is just barely beyond their grasp. Just reach a little further.

Talismans: Screw The Rules, I Have God Mode, playing with cheat codes, comfort media, daydreaming, misdirection, hedonism, raw talent.

You may be Hope if… deep down you genuinely think you could fix, like, everything if the world made you king for a week. If you just had a chance, you could literally make everything better. It’s not even that complicated.

HEART: the aspect of identity

Includes: Dirk, Nepeta, Meulin, Bro Strider, the Disciple

While others step into the fray wielding tools like the flow of time or a lit stick of God Mode dynamite, the Heart player’s medium is their self. Which does admittedly sound a bit lackluster in comparison to the various possibilities. But it is romantic, is it not, to face your fear armed only with your self? To be reliant on no outside forces, no capricious willpowers, only your Heart?

Heart is something of the Occam’s Razor of the Aspects. It is the domain of self-exploration, self-iteration, and evolution. It’s a sword (or pair of claws) to be sharpened and learned thoroughly. Thus, Heart players have a particular knack for being whoever is needed in a given situation. They wear a lot of hats metaphorically speaking, and the self is very much a performance enacted based on the situation. To be clear: performance of identity does not mean that identity is fake. With every role the Heart player enacts, they are fully themselves. 

The concept of being fake or being a liar is one that haunts the Heart players often. They struggle with feeling duplicitous or even being a liar. A huge part of their journey of self-discovery is accepting themselves. No matter what Class a Heart player is, they will struggle with this basic truth. But that in of itself is wheting the blade; when they put in the work, they get better, they become more refined, they know themselves more and more. They can comprehend strange emotional bedrock that is difficult for others to grasp.

This also leads to being sort of obsessed with cerebralizing those emotional truths. Through charts or grids or theses or whatever medium is preferred, the Heart player is inclined to care a lot about relationships, emotions, romance, as if they can be quantified. It’s all on the same path of turning wisdom into hard intelligence.

As the Heart players go, all maintain this level of scholarship. The Leijons are all known for categorizing matters of the heart (small H), with Meulin and Nepeta both coming from a culture that believes strongly in emotional destiny, in a Right and Correction combination of romantic interests, and thus do their best to try and divine what those are for the people around them. Meulin perhaps reached a higher level of emotional wisdom through her following of the Signless, understanding the constraints of the quadrants, and wrote all the intelligence she could into the walls in hopes it would help someone someday. And Dirk similarly uses his self to try and help people, to be the person his friends need, even as he struggles with fitting the roles blocked out for him. There are some internal truths he cannot suppress, even when Roxy for instances wants him to. His conflict is one of knowing himself too well as much as not well enough.

Unified, Heart players are dramatic, eager to help, and wardens of the emotions of those around them. They know maybe more than most that everyone has an important job to do.

Talismans: Code-switching, many acquaintances but few truly close friends, secret keeping, a playlist for every mood, extreme acts of loyalty, self-deprecation, +50WPM but enjoying writing things out in longhand.

You may be Heart if… you genuinely have some kind of Tragic Backstory but it takes years of friendship levelling for anyone to unlock it. They don’t need to know, it’s not important, even if it made you into the person you are today.

RAGE: the aspect of impulse

Includes: Gamzee, Kurloz, the Highblood

At the core of the Rage player is the idea that something is wrong. There is something inherently fucked about the universe around them. And while that is not unique to Rage certainly as many other players struggle with a pervasive sense of wrongness, what sets the Rage player apart is their reaction to it. They are not here to seek answers, they are not here to try and fix it. The only solution in their eyes is smashing the system into glittering pieces.

They are fiery and empowered and aren’t worried about the small stuff. All the details and problems that other aspected people may struggle with— Rage players cut to the chase and ask, “Alright, how can I throw a wrench in the works? How can I throw a dozen wrenches into the works?” They want to see the machine come the fuck apart and are willing to do what it takes to get there.

That sort of drive is a powerful tool, and the unity between the aspect and the person tends to be more closely entwined. But on the flipside, Rage players can be a bit… Hollywood Anarchists. True Neutral people who know the Man is holding us all back and we’ll all be better if we throw society out and start another one, scorch that fuckin’ earth, baby. But… Rage doesn’t think ahead very well. It can follow immediate impulse and organize short term plans, but there’s not a ton of effort put into figuring out what’s next. What comes after you smash the system? Who’s going to do the work to build something new?

Not the Rage player, that’s for sure. This can cause them a lot of turbulence. When they cannot affect change, all that energy and inertia doesn’t have anywhere to go, and like built-up static, it will lance out and strike those around it. 

Think of Rage like a stone starting to roll down a hill. Once it gets going, it will not stop and the risk of collateral damage is high. The Highblood and his kin may have been devoted to a different belief system that would supplant the imperialism of the empire, but it was capricious (ha) and violent to anyone they deemed even too boring. Kurloz devoted himself to aiding Gamzee to bring about that perceived paradise as well, an indistinct concept of something Else, something Better. But Gamzee’s work was incoherent, indiscriminate, and functioned as a narrative device of pure acceleration. The paradise did not exist. It never would.

All this dourness to say: Rage is an aspect of immense potential, but its players have to work not to be led astray. Anger is a good tool and a powerful weapon. But pure retribution instead of rehabilitation leaves nothing but destruction. Be wary of bystanders. Don’t lose sight of real people in the pursuit of something different. Above all else: make sure that different world is a better world, not simple another hell.

Talismans: Breaking things to feel better, scream therapy, trolling people, mutual aid, arguing with people about what Real Punk is, compassion in the dark.

You may be Rage if… you’ve ever had an argument that, in hindsight, you realized prioritized The Cause over The People. It’s a rough one.