2021-09-06 3:59:23 ¶ ●

> @mmmmalo
> I mean the appeal of classpect for me was that it suddenly made the concept of symbolism click, that characters were interacting with objects that could represent concrete idea-categories… but maybe that sense of immediacy you describe is what made it feel so uniquely revelatory, even religous? Funny enough it was a growing sense the system’s mutability that made me give up on it and look for other interpretive lenses

> Or maybe, for the same reason you see people waiting for Ultimate Self stuff to be confirmed, it was that classpect gave symbolism a degree of authorial sanction, so that within the scope of classpect, the usual Maybe The Author Just Likes Blue Curtains fare is inadmissible…

> Well, less admissible at least

to me the absolute mutability of classpect is what gives it its appeal… the aspects are more like the unknowable image of the puzzle you’re trying to solve, rather than the pieces you use to solve it. when I say I dislike or disagree with a certain mainstream of classpect analysis, I mean this specific kind of analysis I’ve seen dominate the scene over the years that hinges on things like “Rose Lalonde will do these things and have this character trajectory because she is a Seer of Light” or “your character must live in this specific way if he is a Bard of Doom”. analysis that, like you say in your tags, has the opposite problem to Jack English denial; rather than refusing to accept that “patterns” can be considered “evidence”, it’s the insistence that something intended to be a pattern must be scientific evidence.

to use the blue curtains analogy, a lot of classpect to me seems like the equivalent of watching a character die in front of a blue curtain and then another character dying in a blue car, and coming to the conclusion that “blue things literally emit deadly radiation”. it’s this paradoxical mindset that tries to force logic onto a symbology to such an extent that its conclusions become intrinsically illogical.

or to use another comparison that pushes the farcical nature of this kind of analysis even further, it’s like the joke theory that wearing the pork pie hat is what causes Walter White to perform evil acts. Rose and Vriska do everything they do while wearing a Light aspect hat… so the hat must have a direct causal relationship with everything they do!