can’t help but wonder recently if Vriska’s “[e]ach class has a huge alpha8et of signs, so when someone shares yours, you know you have a lot in common” line is implicitly about aspect symbols? like in the same way a troll’s sign doesn’t actually determine who they are but can be used to draw two trolls into a shared destiny, she’s saying an aspect has no intrinsic meaning of its own but serves to draw lines between heroes who share that aspect. Aranea seems to imply something similar when she talks about Cronus’ destiny, which could be “passed on to his descendant, or if his descendant proved to be as much of a failure as he did, then perhaps on some other Hero of Hope.”
it feels particularly indicative that Vriska uses the word “class” as a synonym for caste here: each “class” has a “huge alpha8et of signs” in the same way each class has twelve aspect variations within it. this confusion of RPG class with social class is echoed later on in Caliborn’s literalism (LOWLY PAGE versus A LORD’S WORTHINESS [and] NOBILITY) - which seemingly went on to influence Alternian society (THEY’RE ALL MEN. BECAUSE I SAY THEY ARE.) - and was realised in an even more literal sense in the extended zodiac, which divides trolls into “sign classes” with “aspect sways”.
another obvious clue I only just picked up on; Aranea and Calliope use the exact same langauge to describe gender imbalances in the caste system (jadebloods are “an almost exclusively female caste”) and in the class system (some “lean more toward male assignment, while others are exclUsively male, and jUst as many are exclUsively female”), respectively. Aranea even says that Porrim “challenged [gender] roles wherever they existed in 8eforan society, as well as where she found them woven into our session, in […] class assignments”!
seemingly the message here being that we should view discussion of class roles - particularly but not exclusively gendered ones - with the same skepticism with which we approach gender and class roles on Alternia? and more broadly, this seems to be further suggestion that Calliope is guilty of the very same kind of biases that Caliborn is; she sees Sburb’s list of twelve classes and can’t help but compare it to the “classes” she was raised to be familiar with, be they classes of blood, or sex, or an intermingling of both. (taken in this context, even the idea that Sburb’s classes might sit on a spectrum from “most passive” to “most active” smacks of similarly arbitrary spectrums of “most psychic to least psychic” or “most female to most male” that we see in the hemospectrum!)