Homestuck Classpects (or Titles, whatever you prefer)

Woot, another mage! @ADigitalMagician

Also, i like the idea of classpecting other characters, so I'd vote yes? I kinda like the idea of Vimes as a knight of mind.

 

honestly i think it'd be great here, but im sure there's enough people classpecting other fandoms that it would fill another thread pretty easily! either way i'll definitely read it ^u^.

i've recently been stuck on thinking of other characters with wind powers in other shows (e.g. raimundo from XS, Aang from Avatar) actually fit the breath aspect pretty well in terms of personality. i think wind focused characters are all written pretty similarly haha. i wonder why?

 

Possibly because of typical wind symbolism? It generally represents freedom or change.

I think being a leader or part of a counter-cultural movement (or the leader of a counter-cultural movement) might be part of the characterization pattern? A lot of the ones I can think of fit that

 

It's because we're a breath of fresh air.


#gloriouspuns, #B)

 

@Re Allyssa ok, so my midterm is going to start in just a little bit and I'm on mobile, but wow. Knight and Witch, Heir and Page. Why have I not considered this before? No, but seriously, this is so obvious, WHY have I not considered this before? everything clicks into place just perfectly instead of being forced and I have to give up my alliterative inversion, but this is SO much better!

I am very excited about this now and want to talk about it more after class, but basically: headcanon wholeheartedly accepted!

 

The active-passive thing being a continuum actually makes a lot more sense than it just being a dichotomy. After all, Calliope did refer to the Thief class as being the Rogue's "far more active counterpart" (emphasis mine), which seems to imply a continuum to me.

I'm a big fan of continuums in this kinda context, though (in fact, yesterday I actually wound up mapping most of the Homestuck cast's D&D-type alignments, according to my personal interp, on a cartesian plane...), so I'm probably biased towards that.

And now I wanna make an alignment sperging thread. :P

 

I am back (for a little while before the next class). And I could not stop thinking about how much nicer the Witch/Knight, Heir/Page thing is the whole time. Because it is really nice. Wow, it's good. And I am bad at communicating intuitive things, whoops. But it feels like I've been trying to fit two magnets together matching them up at similar poles--which could be done, but required some force--and then you came over and just flipped one of the magnets and they snapped together perfectly. And considering that I'm so adamant about active/passive being self vs other directed/focussed, I don't know how I fell for Knights being active (in the class sense) because they're active (in the usual sense). I mean, one thing that most people agree on is Knights having this whole self-esteem thing because they put so much weight on other people's judgements and care about what people think of them. It's not like our Knights are the only ones to have self-esteem issues in the comic (it's difficult to find someone in Homestuck who doesn't have self-esteem issues), but their issues tend to come in a particular and very identifiable flavor. And if we're going with one verb descriptions, Witch/Knight as manipulate/exploit and Heir/Page as influence/inspire just works so well. I am very pleased with this and now I need to reexamine how I'm interpreting aspects in this new light.

Edit: And one reason that I liked but was always leaning towards the iffy side with inversion was because the Heir/Mage inversion just did. not. make sense to me. "But hey," I went, "it's not like you're putting all that much weight on it anyways." But now it feels much more on target and yeah, I'm definitely going to start taking that into consideration more.

Oh, and some of the things people are mentioning here (especially the "these are supposedly opposites, but they're not really opposites" stuff) are reminding me of this theory that's been knocking around in my head for a little while. It's mostly playing of of bladkindeyewear's aspect circle thing (with a few minor revisions) and I was wondering if anyone would be interested? I haven't really talked it out with anyone, so I'm not sure that it would be well explained, but it's a pretty idea in my opinion.

(also, @Valerie thank you! and psychology's kind of like divination... right?
and @ingloriousHeist I'm feeling Knight of Void-y for your fantroll's ancestor, Rogue might work too)

 

Id be interested in hearing that.

 

Ok, so Heir as "influence" just makes me think John is doubling down on that a bit since Breath is tied to Leadership (Rufioh led the lost weeaboos and the summoner led a revolution, Tavros is harder to connect to this), and both influencing people and being easily influenced (Nitrams have literal mind control (of animals, but still), John+Tavros was influenced+manipulated by Vriska a lot, John tends to adopt other people's speech quirks, Rufioh let Horuss steamroll him into a relationship)

I find it interesting because Rose is sort of like that too. Gathering, amassing and sharing information is a trait in both Seers and Light players (Vriska isn't as good at the sharing part, but she's a Thief). I kind of have a theory that focusing too much on Seer as Knower, rather than Seer as Learner, is a mistake Terezi and Kankri have in common

Basically they assume they know everything they need to, and don't really look for more information/other possibilities. Terezi did this during murderstuck, she assumed Vriska was the (only) killer, and didn't notice contradicting evidence. Kankri does it every time he opens his mouth, and is unlikely to stop

My main problem with Inversion theory is that it removes these types of complexities, ad potential for contradiction, within the classpects. The way I see it, it's entirely possible that a different Seer of Light could be focused more towards Knowing, Teaching, Guiding, or Luck, Fortune, and would therefore have a completely different approach than Rose's "literally tear the world apart in search of Answers", but that doesn't mean either of them are doing things that aren't "what a Seer of Light would do"

EDIT: The last part was intended as an example, this is probably true for other canon classpects as well, I just went with Rose because I've seen her used a "proof of inversion theory"
(also I'm starting to suspect you meant "influence" as in "influence their aspect" not other people)

 

Every test I do pins me as a Page of Heart, and I don't disagree with that.

 

@overpants-anon Yeah, I actually do think the Beta kids tend towards being more straightforward archetypes since they were our introductory characters. Certainly John and Rose, who you could interpret as an Influencer of Influence and a Knower of Knowledge, perhaps Jade to a certain extent too since the creation part of Space is aided by her power to change as a Witch. This is one reason I dislike sticking to single-word descriptions. To me, classes and aspects are more like a basic structure that can be taken in a lot of different directions and emphasize a lot of different facets of themselves. They're a matrix, not a single point in space. It's why I don't try to pare descriptions down to a single sentence, because in doing so you just loose so much information and restrict yourself to a concept that's so narrow it isn't going to work half the time.

I'm with you on a fatal flaw in Seers seeming to be that they assume they already know everything they need to instead of continuing to search for new knowledge. I guess the "ultimate goal" of a Seer might be to know everything there is to know about their aspect, but assuming that you've ever actually reached that point seems like a huge mistake to me (and, frankly, it seems like a silly goal in the first place). And having that be your only goal is definite folly. It's a bit of an attitude that "everything in my library is true and nothing outside of it is valid," which is very restricting.

If you want to, I'd love to hear more about why you think inversion would remove complexity. Admittedly, I am not certain of how the fandom at large tends to interpret inversion theory, so how I think of it may be different than how most people define it (I have this tendency to grab the parts I like of any specific theory and reconstruct my own version of it, leaving the rest of the original behind in the dust). However, I am almost completely certain that Hussie didn't have it in mind in writing his characters (though I suppose he might take it into account occasionally now, since he does play on the kind of collective consciousness of the fandom a fair bit), so I'm definitely not trying to say it's canon or anything, just a lens I like. But I would say that a big point is that Rose is doing what a Seer of Light would do. Assuming that inversion was an actual thing that happened with her, it's not like she became a Witch of Void. She's still a Seer of Light, it's just that she's countering that part of herself so much that her actions/powers imitate those of a Witch of Void. I do think Hussie was playing with the concept of Void as the opposite to Light though.

(and yeah, I'd say mostly influencing their aspect. but that also comes with influencing their aspect in others. and there's also kind of, like, a sphere of influence? out in the world. Like how Equius, uh, influences(?) the things around him into Void? see this is why I don't like one word descriptions. the canon Heirs do tend to be easily influenced though... as far as we've seen in the limited presentations of them)

 

Re: Tavros being harder to connect to leadership: Remember that Tavros is the Page of Breath, meaning he has the potential but it takes a lot of work to fulfill it. A lot of the troll arcs are about not living up to their potential, but it's especially resonant with Tavros being the Page.

 

@Re Allyssa You're right in you're second assumption. Maybe I didn't word it very well.

To clarify: I have seen other people theorize that the inverse of Mage would be Heir. I'd just taken a stance of "well, doesn't make much sense to me, but I get alliterative titles, so alright." Taking your idea into account, then yes, the inverse of Mage would be Knight and this makes more sense to me.

 

That's the part I disagree with. I don't think her actions imitate those of a Witch of Void, I think they imitate those of a Seer of Light. I agree that you could see her dark magic as being related to Void, since they're from the Horrorterrors, but I don't think that says anything about her actions

I mean, if we look at what she did, then first she broke the rules of the game and started dabbling in dangerous magics to learn as much as possible as quickly as possible, a Seer of Light acting as a Seeker/Learner of Information, no conflict there. Then she went in search of revenge, which is harder to define as a definitive part of the classpect, but, Terezi did that too

So either we have to assume that Seers can and do seek revenge sometimes, or we assume that Terezi also inverted, or at least came close to it. And that's where the theory usually start moving into nope territory for me. Basically, the way some theorists does it (certainly what I've seen from BKE), is that any time a character doesn't perfectly line up with their interpretation of the classpects/does things that resemble opposite classpect is "OMG Inversion!"

And then you get dumbass ideas like "every time a Breath player gets angry, they're acting like a Blood player" (not a direct quote, but I've seen claims that John throwing tantrums, or Tavros standing up to Vriska is "inversion")

I just think it makes more sence to assume either that not everything a character/person does is a reflection of their classpect, or to expand your interpretation of the classpect to include contradictory actions

 

I feel like I may not be communicating the concept I'm trying to convey very well, because I agree with basically everything you just said. Yep, I still think she's a Seer of Light. Yes, I still think that her goals were those of a Seer of Light, both the information seeking and revenge. I do find it frustrating that people will immediately claim inversion for things that can be just as easily be attributed to individual differences. And I do think that interpretations of Classpect should encompass actions that seem contradictory... which is one reason the concept of inversion appeals to me (also because it is pretty).

See, when I'm saying imitate, I'm not saying her actions actually are those of a Witch of Void. There's still the same underlying process, she's still Rose and still a Seer of Light (so her actions aren't even imitating those of a Seer of Light because they literally still are those of a Seer of Light). What I'm trying to get at is that the output of that process seems like something a Witch of Void would do. So if you were only able to see her for that short time, you would probably look at her and think "oh, Witch of Void" instead of "oh, Seer of Light under these very specific circumstances." In the larger context you can still tell she's a Seer of Light and what she's trying to accomplish still very much fits that part of her, but for that time you could, based on a cursory look, assume she was something else. I suppose you could see it as a bit of a Classpect horseshoe theory? Where under the pressure of certain circumstances, people may react in a way that ends up going against what is typically expected of them. I think it may be a useful thing to consider in thinking about Classpect in general because it does seem like it would be something that happens to people under pressure and not a very healthy thing to maintain for long, so it could be indicative of the kinds of coping mechanisms certain types of people use under stress (which is really relevant to anyone playing sburb). And I think seeing it that way allows us to look at people doing things we don't expect and instead of dismissing it as a fluke because it doesn't fit the purest form of whatever Classpect, we can see it as part of a larger and more complex whole (that still doesn't account for the individual differences people bring to the table).

I'm not trying to say this way is right and your way is wrong, especially since I'm not fully convinced on inversion myself. But it feels like we're talking about different ways of using or interpreting that theory to begin with, which doesn't lend itself to discussion very well.

 

Personally, I'm a bit iffy on the idea that classpect determines pretty much everything about a person. Homestuck is definitely a pretty fatalistic story because Paradox Space Is God And Says You Must Do The Thing, but if the ret-John thing is any indication, free will is still possible in the Homestuck 'verse. Having your classpect determine everything about your actions, as a lot of these theories seem to imply, seems...well, it doesn't fit, IMO, since there's obviously more to the characters than simply Class Trait + Aspect Trait.

That, and even with basic personality traits, things change! Take Damara, for instance. If Jade and Feferi are any indication, Witches tend to be cheerful and friendly, and while that's implied to have applied to Damara at one point (though from the sounds of things she was also always more introverted than Jade and Fef), it's something that changed entirely. But that doesn't mean she somehow stopped being a Witch.

I think classpects seem to be based more on inherent/potential traits, rather than on what someone does with them. And I also think they're pretty immutable--no matter what Rose's actions are, she'll always be a Seer of Light, for instance. It's sort of like hair color...like, I can dye my hair any color I want, but it's still gonna grow in brown, simply because I'm a natural brunette. I think classpect is more like that.

Sorry if none of this made sense, but yeah.