2022-02-26 10:05:52 ¶ ●

when Doc Scratch says his policy is not to lie, he’s speaking as an author; that’s Hussie’s policy. Homestuck doesn’t lie to the reader - every line of the text should be taken as meaningful - and “lies of omission” don’t count because an omission of information can be just as meaningful to the reader, or be filled in at a more pertinent time. an omission can also be used to mislead; which is a totally different thing to lying.

a lot of characters in Homestuck are reading the comic along with you; one common way for the comic to mislead the reader is for it to have a character come to an incorrect conclusion based on the same inconclusive information you’ve been given. in essence it offers you a theory for what might be happening in lieu of explaining itself fully (this a recurring theme in extratextual commentary, too; Andrew doesn’t lie, but frequently offers information that “could” be true). so part of the game of figuring out when you’re being misled is being able to identify when a character is being misled.

all of this is basically to say that Calliope’s “exposition” about classes and gender are not gospel truth, because Calliope isn’t a character who “knows” things, she’s a character who reads Homestuck and makes observations on it, and these observations are tinted by her personal biases. this isn’t to say that Calliope is a deliberate liar - like every character in Homestuck she was raised in a very particular reality - and it isn’t an attempt to justify postcanonically breaking the “rules” established by the comic; Calliope’s bias is something baked into her dialogue and intrinsically tied to many of the themes of her character and the comic at large.

Calliope betrays this bias as soon as she gets on the topic of “active classes” and “passive classes”; active classes “exploit […] to benefit themselves”, while passive classes allow their aspect to benefit others. this is not impartial wording; it’s informed directly by the fact that she contrasts herself, the ultimate ‘passive’ hero, with her brother, the ultimate 'active’ villain. her use of +/- for passive/active is unintuitive to most people because it’s something she made up! in her paradigm, passive classes are 'positive’ and active classes are 'negative’, because again, that is how things are in her life. as a cherub she’s trained to see things in these kinds of good/bad dichotomies; and she never makes a point of being impartial to begin with! when Roxy describes her active counterpart as “like the asshole class”, all Calliope has to say is that “if that reference to yoUr cUltUre provides a sUitable comparison, then absolUtely.”

the same scrutiny should be applied when Calliope genders certain classes; which, first and foremost, should be compared to Caliborn’s similar habit of gendering things. THEY’RE ALL MEN. BECAUSE I SAY THEY ARE. AND I WANT THEM TO BE. i’ve talked about this a million times so i’ll keep it to the synopsis: the idea of cherubs having “genders” on top of their blood-related alignments is a total fabrication of the forces controlling the Homestuck narrative. outside of the comic, Calliope is eventually able to recognise that her “ideas aboUt gender were entirely inflUenced by [her] time watching earth.”

> CALLIOPE: i sUppose i only thoUght of myself as a girl because my, Um…
> CALLIOPE: my brother took mascUlinity qUite serioUsly.

everything Calliope espouses about gender up until this point should be read through this lens; again, in the same way Calliope is biased toward thinking classes similar to hers are 'good’ classes, she is biased toward thinking things her brother likes are 'masculine’ things, and that therefore the things she likes are 'feminine’. when she thinks of the kind of person who plays a “destroyer class”, her combination cherub/troll/human upbringing has her think exclusively of a male.

and again, this isn’t to say the gender biases to certain classes are all in Calliope’s head or that she deliberately invented them. to bring it back to the initial point, Calliope isn’t omniscient; she’s just a member of the audience. so when she makes observations on the way the class system works, that’s exactly what they are; they aren’t objective truths, but they aren’t lies, they’re observations. when Calliope says thieves and rogues lean female, what she’s really doing is commenting on patterns she sees in the characters she knows; indeed, among the thieves and rogues we know, they are mostly female; and the bards and princes we know are in fact exclusively male. so inasmuch as classes are titles or traits used to form connections between the characters in Homestuck, Calliope’s commentary on them is for the most part correct! but it shouldn’t be taken as objective fact about the intrinsic, real properties of the classes themselves.