soooo, with the new aspects descriptions and the traits they are focusing on and putting in the spotlight as major defining traits of those aspects, do you think you'll reconsider Joey as Life now instead of Light? (and Jude as Light instead?)
I hadn’t really gotten to Jude yet at all–he still seems like a Doom player, but now I’m more uncertain about all of them.
I have been reconsidering Joey as a Life player pretty heartily, actually, BUT…I think in the end, at least so far, it’s only left me more sure she’s a Light player.
But the reason why, I think, suggests some new infomation relevant to how the Classpect system works. I’m curious to know what you’ll think about it! And since I’m about to record this in video form and it’s pretty overwhelming and difficult to talk about, I think it’ll help to get my thoughts in order somewhat, so I think I’ll do some prep here.
You probably were thinking this already, but I think it deserves vocalisation; the point about trolls being forced into representing certain aspects by Alternian society definitely applies to classes as well.
Rustbloods are all forced to be maids and servants. Violets are all princes and royalty. Purplebloods are all bards and clowns.
It’s yet another layer laid upon Alternia by English and Scratch to ensure that the planet spawns the perfect SBURB session; if you guarantee that 1/12th of society are maids of time, 1/12th of society are pages of breath, etc. etc., you’re essentially guaranteeing that the society is going to produce a player of every aspect and a player of every class.
that last post has actually prompted something of a realisation in me.
humans are predator animals, whose reproductive strategy is to give birth to one to two babies at a time and dote on those babies and make them as strong and healthy individuals as possible.
trolls are the opposite of that. they donate their genetics en masse to one mother, who gives birth to perhaps thousands of children a day; they throw the babies at each other, they throw them at obstacles, they give them to animals and essentially make them raise themselves. it’s a brute force reproductive effort. it’s quantity over quality.
then you look at the way each species has been prepared for SBURB.
trolls have been carefully groomed for the roles. they’ve been trained for the game since day one; taught the skills required to build their houses, to interact with animal guides, to fight alien creatures. thousands of years of history have been perfectly fine tuned to allow for the arrival of twelve perfect fighting machines designed to blast through SBURB.
humans? there was no preparation. a guy just unearthed the game then released thousands of copies to people all across the world in one day.
it’s like the reproductive methods of their universe frogs are the exact opposite of their own species’ reproductive methods.
While I’m on the topic of Hiveswap and classpect, I wanna talk about Xefros as a rage player for a little while here.
I’ve always found the rage aspect fascinating, because on a certain level, like Gamzee himself, it’s always been intended to be a joke. When asked about the connections between Gamzee and the Rage aspect, Hussie had this to say;
It seems like Hussie was of the opinion that there would never really be a relevant rage player in Homestuck that wasn’t Gamzee. And within the comic, that held true!
But now Xefros? What’s up with that?
Well I think the connection between juggaloes and the rage aspect is actually really relevant to the aspect! Because what are juggaloes mainly interested in? Rock-inspired rap music. Which is exactly what Xefros is talented at.
Somehow* got my mind back onto the topic of the Gamblignants as original custodians and realised something that should have tipped me off way earlier.
The Serkets are associated with Grandpa Harley’s blue ladies through Jake English’s crush on spider girls on Aranea. But through Jake English, the blue ladies are also associated with…
…the Na’vi. From James Cameron’s Avatar. The less-than-subtle first contact movie where humans make a violent attempt to take the land of a race of blue people.
Somehow* got my mind back onto the topic of the Gamblignants as original custodians and realised something that should have tipped me off way earlier.
The Serkets are associated with Grandpa Harley’s blue ladies through Jake English’s crush on spider girls on Aranea. But through Jake English, the blue ladies are also associated with…
…the Na’vi. From James Cameron’s Avatar. The less-than-subtle first contact movie where humans make a violent attempt to take the land of a race of blue people.
To sum it up, the idea is that James Cameron’s Alien and Avatar are both movies that depict the same first contact event, but from different perspectives. In Alien, the humans are arrived and the aliens are portrayed as deadly, thoughtless murdering machines that need to be exterminated. In Avatar, they’re portrayed and sympathetic, and the encroaching humans are clearly depicted as the antagonists.
The reason I bring it up is because I think it’s relevant; while Jake’s commonly connected with Avatar, his fellow page, on the other hand…
…is interested mainly in breeding xenomorphs.
Jake’s named after the human character from Avatar and, as Grandpa Harley, is the image of the colonialist. Tavros, on the other hand, teams up with the aliens from Alien, and as a lowblood is obviously the oppressed in this scenario.
(Totally worth bringing up that a connection could be drawn between Tavros’ animal communion and the prominence of animal communion among Avatar’s Na’vi, too.)
Is this a page thing, or is it just a Jake/Tavros parallel thing? It could play into the literal interpretation of a page as a “page of a book”; two pages, two sides of a story. Their aspects could also play into it; Tavros is the breath hero, so he’s a freedom fighter, while Jake’s the hope hero so he fights, essentially, for westernism.
Okay, a bit late, but like I said, there was a reason I got back onto the topic of the extermination of the Gamblignants, and it’s to do with the Alternian enforcement of classes.
A lot of the classes that would be assigned to blood castes make easy sense. Rustblood maids because they’re a serving class. Purplebloods are bards for their performative wildcard nature. Princes are royalty, so that’s what violets are. Seers’ analysis is important for a class who act as assistants to the government (and seers as assistants to more combat-oriented classes is a concept that has been evoked within the comic itself).
Some of them are more symbolic. Heirs generally serve as the “Beta Male” class, so their being assigned to the caste that serve as lackeys to the top dogs of the land dweller race makes sense. Sylphs are a fitting role for jades for their nurturing and also mythical nature. Rogues might even make sense, given the heroic spin Homestuck applies to them, as the ones at the top of the lowblood group.
What really sticks out like a sore horn is the thief class. What reasonable society would implement a social class of criminals?
And in doing so we’re left with Vriska as what we can probably safely assume is the last member of the thief class.
That’s interesting, because it puts thief in a unique position shared with only Feferi’s witch class in that only one troll has the class. Which makes you wonder why!
A good place to start is probably that Meenah’s class was also thief, and we know at least a little bit about how she took over her session. The thief by nature is forceful and hard-headed, and really not a hero you want to have lying around in hoards.
Scorpio is also the sign of the Conqueror, which is a title that can be applied to Lord English himself since Caliborn took the path of the conqueror from Yaldabaoth. (One only needs to take a look through the cobalt sign class to see a bunch of grand titles akin to this one; Crusader, Champion, and the Victorious are just a few I found in the top half).
The problem with the thief class being thinned down to just one member, of course, is that the chance that a thief will be involved in the SGRUB session are reduced significantly from what they would be if there were a whole social caste of thieves. Which would explain exactly why, of course, Doc Scratch chose Vriska in particular to be his protoge (and perhaps the same reason that Kanaya was chosen too, considering the extreme rarity of her own caste/class).
Not only is Vriska’s sign title the Conqueror, the path Yaldabaoth gave to Caliborn, but the Derse-swayed Doom-bound cobalt sign is called the Martyr, which is the opposite path that Calliope took.
It’s interesting that an epithet associated with Lord English is connected to the Light aspect, given English’s nature as God-The-Sun, while Alt!Calliope’s epithet is attached to the Doom aspect because of her doomed state of being.
(I’m not gonna claim to be following religiously because classpect has never been my strong point or really a big interest of mine, but I see the angles you’re shooting from)
when I say that rustbloods pegs are all forced into the maid-shaped hole, I’m largely speaking in a transliteral sense. maids, defined literally in english, are servants; so rustbloods are literally maids, even when heroically they might be more like another class. the same could be said of the Gamblignant caste; while they all might have served varied and unique hero roles, individually, they were all literally thieves.
and as the guy who is ultimately pulling all the strings of the Alternian puppet, I think this sort of “your individual symbolic worth is meaningless, only your social class matters” attitude is the would that ultimately would get enforced onto their society.
All that being said, @revolutionaryduelist, I take your ‘both rustbloods and bronzebloods are knights to an extent’ and raise you: every Alternian, right up to at least the teal caste and quite possibly up to indigo, is a knight to an extent.
On the surface level, combat and servitude are basically the two pillars that hold up the Alternian empire; cavalreapers, archeradicators, threshecutioners are all, in essence, orders of knights who serve the Glorious Monarch. Legislacerators are knights who serve the Highbloods. Everybody on Alternia is a combat servant.
The knight’s sense of insecurity applies to every single Alternian too. What if my blood isn’t right? What if I’m sexually inferior? What if my inability to smell is taken as a cullable disability? The paranoia of inferiority common to knights is what drives the Alternian dystopia.
And following on from that, “an entire race groomed from the start by evil patriarchs to be perfect SGRUB players” is a pretty tidy parallel to “a kid from Texas groomed from the start by an evil patriarch to be a perfect SBURB player”. Bonus points that the evil patriarchs in both cases are headed by demon puppet Lil Cal.
It kind of all solidifies Karkat, as a knight, as the essential, archetypical Alternian teen, in the same way John is sort of the essential prototype American teen.
…actually, if you wanted to take it a step further, you could probably argue that Alternia is a planet of knights of time, specifically, given the whole planet’s association with the aspect (their First Guardian being called Scratch, their god being the god of time, their obsession with death, time weapons using the zodiac as a motif in their special effects… the list just goes on), but that’s probably a discussion for another thread.
It’s been extensively commented on already, but I feel it bears documenting on this blog regardless;
One of the goldbloods revealed on the other day’s troll call card, Folykl, is a Gemittarius, which is a void-bound sign. Folykl also has pitch black eyes, which is something we’ve seen before in a goldblood, when Sollux had the red and blue knocked out of him by Eridan’s magic.
(worth pointing out that it was his hope magic specifically, because the other goldblood, Kuprum, is a Gemnius, which are hope-bound)
Folykl’s void binding is relevant to their eye colour because void as an aspect represents the obfuscation or more importantly absence of the light aspect; an aspect represented by the sun. Sollux, too, is connected to the sun; his name literally means ‘sunlight’ in Latin, and his eyes are the colours of the two universes whose mass collapses to form the Green Sun. So when his eyes go pitch, that’s him losing the sunlight in his eyes, and it getting replaced with void.
(replaced with a void? replaced with voidlight? I don’t think there’s really proper vernacular for this topic)
The fact that Sollux also became blind when his eyes went like that - i.e. he literally lost the ability to perceive light - is just yet another, far more straightforward, connection to that theme.
The connection to Folykl’s role here is pretty easy to make; since they lack their own psionic “light”, they have to resort to leeching psionic energy off another guy. The implications of this, obviously, will be more clear when Hiveswap actually comes around. Does Folykl need to steal energy to stay alive, for example, or do they just need to steal energy to be able to use their own powers?
A lesser point for consideration: void players have a track record of being proficient in fistkind combat (i.e. no weapon); Sollux, a psionic, didn’t use a weapon because of his powers. Folykl is both gold and void-bound, so could “not having psionics at all” be considered an intersection of these two common traits?
a very straightforward reading of this is that black holes form singularities where all the dimensions of reality collapse down into one, so black holes are symbols of the unity and interconnectedness of both the space and time aspects.
but the space symbol isn’t just a black hole; it’s the spiral arms of a galaxy that forms around a supermassive black hole. so it could be said that the time aspect represents the all-consuming event horizon at the center of the black hole, while the space aspect is the galactic nursery that surrounds it; the destructive and creative sides of the coin, respectively.
this ‘creation in the wake of destruction’ concept is something that’s already prevalent within Homestuck; just like black holes, the Reckoning is a process by which the old is annihilated to make room for a new system entirely.
this adds some depth to Alt!Calliope’s role in the story, I think; it was often speculated, long before she ever even showed her face, that as the Muse of Space she would follow in the footsteps of Pickle Inspector and literally become reality. by turning herself into a black hole, Calliope does exactly what you’d expect of the ultimate passive hero by not becoming reality but facilitating the conditions needed for reality to exist.
The heart aspect is clearly connected with lions (the trolls’ heart player being Leo the lion, and the Prince of the aspect having the lion-headed God Yaldabaoth as a denizen), but I wonder if that means anything for any of the other aspects?
Maybe it’s lions for heart and dragons for mind?
The lion is the symbol of God, and is king of the land animals, while the dragon is the devil and the king of the skies. Nepeta is a lowblood who uses her physical strength instead of psychic powers, and Dirk is Homestuck’s resident manly dudebro machofighter, and Yaldabaoth is the God of the physical realm; meanwhile dragons are capable of a whole bunch of powers associated with psychics (laser eyes, telepathic communion) and Terezi was a master manipulator.
(of course, heart is the aspect of the soul, not the body, so part of a heart hero’s quest must be rejecting some of this focus on the physical aspect and becoming more spiritual; so I wonder what the equivalent of this is for mind heroes?)
The heart aspect is clearly connected with lions (the trolls’ heart player being Leo the lion, and the Prince of the aspect having the lion-headed God Yaldabaoth as a denizen), but I wonder if that means anything for any of the other aspects?
Maybe it’s lions for heart and dragons for mind?
The lion is the symbol of God, and is king of the land animals, while the dragon is the devil and the king of the skies. Nepeta is a lowblood who uses her physical strength instead of psychic powers, and Dirk is Homestuck’s resident manly dudebro machofighter, and Yaldabaoth is the God of the physical realm; meanwhile dragons are capable of a whole bunch of powers associated with psychics (laser eyes, telepathic communion) and Terezi was a master manipulator.
(of course, heart is the aspect of the soul, not the body, so part of a heart hero’s quest must be rejecting some of this focus on the physical aspect and becoming more spiritual; so I wonder what the equivalent of this is for mind heroes?)
I could also see it being another heart/hope thing; heart gets the lion while hope gets the eagle (another symbol of hope’s connection to the Western world?), king of the birds and the other half of the mythical Griffin, the most noble of all animals.
Which could offer another layer to the irony behind Lord English and horses? As the ultimate kingly amalgamation of the lion of heart and the angel of hope, just like the Griffin, horses might be considered his greatest enemy.
But maybe I’m reading too far into it; the heart/mind dichotomy makes more sense, I think.
