Masculine (Yang) And Feminine (Yin) And The Distinction

Hey. You've mentioned in occations Hope's connection with sexuality, and I am, sort of very puzzled about it. Can you explain why?

Sex Appeal, Charm, Attraction, idolization, they all seem to be part of Hope. For Jake, it was a constant sexualization by those around him, while Eridan and Cronus' pursuit or concupiscent relationships tend to paint them in a bad light. There's more to it and it's not the only Aspect that could be considered to have ties, but there's like, Some Stuff.

Hiveswap seems to double down on this. Diemen is constantly referencing phallic imagery, Kuprum and Lanque are both... Pretty intense and blatant about it. Elwurd uses her charms on Joey and brings the reader for a fake date to make her ex jealous and ends up hooking with another Troll in one of her routes. Chahut, Daraya and Cirava don't seem to have that much, but Cirava does have the idolization and attracting large groups of people that led to people turning on them due to their fame, and Daraya goes against the Status Quo, which in her particular case is not wanting to be sent to a cloister- Her archetype is that of a rebellious teen, punky, rebelling against society, and the very kinda religious 'christian school' vibe the Jades have, so that kinda tracks.

Chahut doesn't seem have much in regards to that explicitly though she flirts HARD with Daraya. However, her very name is also a reference- The Maenad were women followers of Dionysus, defined by frenzied and orgiastic rites.

So yeah there seems to be... Some Connection.

you are not alone but im curious to hear your view of how they're intertwined

a Seer of Light who can read the future and a Thief of Light who can steal "luck" are fundamentally interacting with the same force, "fortune"; one just happens to be a fortune teller while the other is a fortune stealer. and that's not just wordplay, the two meanings of fortune are literally the same! being "lucky" is just the name someone like Vriska gives to the idea of having a "good fortune"; literally just having a positive destiny or fate, which a Seer of Light would be able to read.

the synonymity of fate and luck are evident in the language we use to describe them; moira (as in moirallegience) and kismet (as kismesissitude) both mean "fate" but also "allotment" or "portion", to be lucky, or to be someone who steals fortunes, literally just means to take the good allotment for yourself and leave the people around you with the bad ones. this should be particular obvious in Homestuck, where possibilities are represented by branching timelines; if you're lucky, that just means the alpha timeline is the one where you got the best fortune, and if you're a fortune teller that means you can read these "fortuitous outcomes" into the future. this is only driven home by Aranea's plan, which does not involve "luck" or "knowledge" as we tend to think of them but rather the very literal twisting of fortune to make one timeline more fortuitous than the others.

Reminder that the God tier outfits’s accent/shoe colors are not defined by their aspects’ color pallete, they vary for each character and depends either on their own color motifs, or on their teammates.

Also lemme zoom in for the sake of clarity

Cut content

The following content was cut from the essay DOOM for purposes of thematic consistency (that is, it didn’t add much to the reader’s understanding of the Doom Aspect’s symbolism) but is preserved here for posterity.

Mental illness

It takes a certain kind of person to bear up under all this pressure. Sollux’s visions, at one point likened to a chronic pain condition, leave him fatalistic and irritable, with a temperament that can change from calm to angry, from proud to self-recriminating, in an instant. Accordingly, the narration dubs him bipolar. This is precisely backwards. While Sollux’s fatalism is reminiscent of depression, the key characteristic of depression is listlessness, a lack of feeling and motivation, and Sollux is anything but unmotivated. Similarly, though mania (and the less well known hypomania) can take many forms, it is most commonly associated with a feeling of euphoric joy, another trait largely absent from Sollux’s emotional makeup.

More importantly, bipolar mood swings are measured in days, not instants. Because of this, it is actually impossible for a story that packs nearly all of its action into discrete segments of no more than 24 hours to convey the full experience of bipolarity in any meaningful way. Ultimately, Homestuck is a work designed to challenge both reader and author, and with that challenge unfortunately comes the possibility of failure.

Mituna continues this theme of authorial challenge. Like most of the dancestors, he is presented first as a joke, a mockery of the psychologically disabled, the full weight of his story and sacrifice only reluctantly hinted at by Aranea after the fact. He is part of the Hussnasty Hell (medium link), a complex, artistically lofty experiment that by design can be very difficult to properly digest after enduring the bitter, unpleasant first bite.

I was fiddling with that Calliope post for a few days in my drafts, but combined with what I've been repeating recently about "Caliborn's paradigm" I wonder if the point of classpect is to be interpreted?

obviously the aspects are symbols for fundamental concepts, and the point of a fundamental concept is whittling it down into something more real via interpretation (which is something we see in the comic, with Vriska thinking of Light as luck versus Rose thinking of fortune more in terms of fate)...

I suppose it could be argued that classes are the interpretations of the aspects, i.e. a Seer of Light inherently interprets "Light" differently to how a Thief of Light interprets it, but I think there's a level of fundamentality to a class as well. they represent fictional archetypes moreso than RPG classes (RPG classes themselves tend to represent archetypes of folkloric hero, but Sburb's classes take that a step or two further and, as such, a step or two more abstract); it's something I've only lightly touched upon before, but essentially, like the aspects, the classes are ideas that are open to interpretation by their very nature; while the platonically ideal concept of a "Prince" does exist out there, each individual Prince from each individual story is a totally different iteration, a different "interpretation" of the idea of a Prince.

I guess this is roundaboutly similar to the popular existing theory that each class is defined by a kind of keyword; the Prince and Bard are "destroyers", but it's up to interpretation what exactly that entails (as Calliope puts it, a destroyer of x is "one who destroys x, or caUses destrUction throUgh x"). in the same vein, Thieves and Rogues are "stealers", and so on; one major discipline of classpecting seems to be the scholarship of figuring out what the "keyword" is for every class pair.

but even that I find to be a bit too specific. because while Calliope certainly might interpret a Prince as a destroyer based on her observations of various Princes, in Caliborn's paradigm Prince is likely to mean something completely different. to Caliborn, there are "LOWLY PAGE[S]" and Lords whose "NOBILITY IS MANIFEST". he interprets classes as their literal meanings, the way Dirk thinks of a Prince as someone who "rule[s] over [their aspect] in a pompous, regal manner"; a way of thinking made manifest in the position of Princes in relation to Maids and Pages in Alternian society. because of course the opposite side of the "Homestuck characters are the audience" coin is that "Homestuck characters are the author". in the same way Calliope's interpretations of the classes are "true" because they line up with observable fact, Caliborn's interpretation of the classes is made true when he gains control over the narrative and is able to skew the reader's very ability to observe the facts. in Caliborn's own words, "IF I BELIEVE HARD ENOUGH [...] THEN THAT FACT BECOMES ABSOLUTELY INDISPUTABLE AS A PERMANENT MAN REALITY."

Breath and Blood: Hands in Spirit and Flesh

(p. 6094)

John’s retcon arm event toward the end of Homestuck is often compared to MS Paint Adventures’ recurring “retrieve arms” gag, but it also forms part of a repeating pattern surrounding John Egbert and the concept of ghostly hands.

Out of sympathy for John’s perceived lack of arms, you pick up the CAKE for him and put it on his BED.

Page 6 is an oft-talked about example of this phenomenon, largely because it doesn’t seem to really have any place in the rest of the story. Despite frequent claims that the fourth wall is being broken, the “YOU as READER” character essentially does not interact with the story ever again after this.

Notice the cyan-and-blue colour scheme the cake takes on while being carried by the “reader’s” hand.

You make a LEFT HANDED REMOTE GHOST GAUNTLET to complete the pair.

An uncannily similar concept crops up over a thousand pages later with the ghost gauntlets, which John alchemises from slime left over by Nannasprite. This explains their colour scheme, but it’s important still to take note of the similarities to John’s iconic god tier colour scheme that appears a whole lot later, as well as to the colour scheme of the cake picked up back on page 6.

Also take note of this line used to describe the ghost gauntlets’ power:

The GHOST GAUNTLET appears to have a considerably higher lift capacity than your own puny arms.

This is because all of these ‘ghostly arms’ around John are actually manifestations of his powers as a Hero of Breath, if not literally - though we know alchemised items often do literally channel a player’s internal powers - then symbolically.

The Breath aspect is one of freedom and separation from that which binds. In the heavily Gnostic context of Homestuck, this especially relates to the soul breaking free from the chains of the flesh. As such, the Breath aspect is one that connects heavily to the spirit. Consider the biblical story in which God breathes live into the clay Adam through his mouth (which also ties into John’s role as the a creator father figure, and the association between ghosts and fatherhood).

When the comic says that the ghostly arms John uses as an extension of his physical form are stronger than his flesh arms, this is a comment on his powers as the Hero of Breath and that his soul will always be stronger than his body.

(p. 2303)

Compare this to the Blood aspect’s association with hands. Jack’s offered “blood pact” with Karkat on page 2303 is often considered a precursor to the Blood symbol, and importantly takes place in the joining of two hands. The Blood aspect is not concerned with separating the spirit hand from the hand of flesh, but rather by making the flesh stronger through bonds.

Take note of another phenomenon that frequently befalls Jack Noir; almost every iteration of him loses one of his physical arms. This is another occurrence often connected to the “retrieve arms” gag, but we can also contrast it with the ghostly “removal” of one of John’s arms.

Vriska’s connection to this phenomenon could be read in two ways. It acts as a symbol of her connection to the Blood aspect when she antagonises Tavros, a Hero of Breath; but it also connects her with a “blood fued” shared with her “blood” ancestor Mindfang as well as Jack Noir himself.

Classpect powers and skill

So I was thinking about god-tier abilities in Homestuck, and it struck me that rather a lot of the so-called “classpect powers” showcased in hs are either A: a more “supernatural” expression of something the person in question had already been doing prior, or, rarely, B: a direct response to a previously established problem. And in aggregate, these feel like they point toward a fairly particular conception of classpect abilities, that of skills that are learned (or levelups gained in a special ability, if we want to get video gamey with it).

Let’s use John as an example. As the predominant early viewpoint character, his growth is fairly well detailed. As he enters his Land and starts properly growing, he goes from using the Breeze to send objects across his Land using the Parcel Pyxis network, to subconsciously summoning the Breeze to save himself from a fire, to subconsciously having the Breeze emanate in massive quantities from his very body to put out the planet-spanning Green Tragedy, to finally as a god-tier (and with some valuable advice from Vriska) taking full control of the Breeze and using it as a tool and weapon. All of these fall into the A category, but John also has two solid B category abilities, the ability to resist detection via scent, and the ability to turn into wind to protect himself against attacks. And both those abilities are perfect for protection against Bec Noir, who tracked John down via his scent and stabbed him in the chest shortly before John god-tiered, at which point he immediately gained the first of these abilities (he showcased the second when fighting Noir in the Furthest Ring later).

Keep reading

And another one. This one’s a doozy, and a double feature! The first is what I’m calling Genesis, Light || Space && Time. The second is my first 4-way fusion, Light || Space && Time || Void. It’s reminiscent of the Green Sun, and for good reason…

Thanks to anon and @deadlox890. 

And actually, thinking about what to name these gave me an idea…stay tuned, folks. 

this is gonna sound stupid but Doc Scratch is a dirk splinter?

yep!

Vriska Serket, whose lusus constantly demands she feed it, received Cetus as a denizen, a monster known for eating every single fish on the Land of Light and Rain.

More obviously the number 8 is homophonic with the word ‘ate’ (and also takes the shape of the infinity, related to the ouroborous symbol depicting a snake eating itself), and in Homestuck’s symbology the sun - the symbol of the light aspect - is something that is meant to be ‘eaten’ by black holes.