@revolutionaryduelist i totally get what you’re saying!
(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.
I think the Handmaid is kind of a prime example of this, because while she was a witch and acted like I suppose you could expect a witch to act, she was still called the Handmaid, and served as an example to the rustbloods of Alternia that they were all meant to maids too.
imo Caliborn’s attitude toward class kind of supports this. he reads them literally; to him, class is very literally about social class:
uu: BECAUSE AS A LOWLY PAGE. AND AS AN EVEN LOWLIER HUMAN. YOU ARE UTTERLY WORTHLESS.
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.
kind of comparable to Caliborn’s totally arbitrary attitude towards gender, I guess.