Idk Why Everyone Thinks Blood Is The Shipping Aspect.  Heart Is Right There.  Karkat’s Only Requited

i love reading peoples takes on mspa reader’s classpect so i drew some various readers

Fancytiers! Kind of. I was mainly just trying to make the sillouhette’s more distinct, & add more apparent themes :P

i forgot to label some of them but I think u can still tell what they are! first unlabeled pic has the mage and the seer, & the last pic has the maid and the sylph

all the sprite^2 moon+aspect mashups as bases

I didn’t really do bases since there’s a lot of different sprite^2 outfits that can be created, but here are all the moon+aspect mashup signs!

on the page right after talking about lowly Pages and noble Lords, Caliborn does drop this line pretty clearly in support of keyword theory:

uu: WHEN I SAID "MEANT TO SERVE". SERVE MEANT MORE THAN ONE THING. YOU KNOW. LIKE KICK MY ASS??

it's, ironically, a very literalist permutation of keyword theory - in Calliope's paradigm a Page serves their aspect, while to Caliborn a Page merely serves, full stop - but it certainly seems to put a big roadblock in the way of the many interpretations theory of classpect.

but the fact that Alternia's entire society is built on this idea of pompous, regal Princes and servile Pages and Maids still feels quite explicit in its implications about Caliborn's perception of class, i.e. that he sees "class" in literal terms, as a synonym for "caste". I guess it's possible Calliope and Caliborn merely have different headcanon "keywords" for each caste, but it'd be hard to believe unless we had a case where they openly disagreed with each other on the interpretation of a class...

i guess it's also worth keeping in mind that Calliope and Caliborn's interpretative modes are still different: Calliope observes while Caliborn authors (the fact that this is sort of the inverse of what one would instinctively assume about the twins is worth thinking about). so when Calliope "observes" the Prince as a destroyer class, she's actually re-interpreting the vision of the Prince imposed on reality by Caliborn. as long as we're still tentatively comparing class and gender I'll be annoying and pull out the quote for the millionth time:

oUr view of hUman cUlture indirectly inflUenced alternia’s development, which in tUrn affected yoUrs [...] it’s all so very circUitoUs and arbitrary.

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.

*rubs my greasy little hands together* time to get my ip address banned through sharing possibly my most disturbing headcanon heheheh

For a while, I was thinking about the jades. Specifically how damn weird Hiveswap's lore about them is. From very young, they're condemned to the caverns to help raise grubs... But only certain, arbitrarily selected jades are picked to be cloistered? So that means there are other jades allowed to do whatever. And instead of joining the workforce like literally every other troll, SPECIFICALLY the cloistered jades are sent to be space nuns, hidden from everyone. It... Doesn't really add up if you think about the kind of place the Alternian Empire is. They're all about making as many warriors as possible, why bother with a tradition like that? Doesn't help anyone. Just seems hard to imagine Meenah coddamn Peixes tossing funds to a useless sisterhood, is all I'm saying.

So! Mothergrubs. There's the headcanon that they share an evolutionary root with trolls to explain how they can produce grubs, but what if we go one step further? Let's say the trolls are neotenies (an "adult" species that actually has another stage of life past the one they're in, like axolotls). Perhaps once upon a time, they could turn into mothergrubs naturally, but for whatever reason, they can't now.

Or so it'd seem.

Uhh yeah tired of the suspense: the cloistered jades are "special" because they actually might possess the rare gene that turns trolls into Mothergrubs. So the space sisterhood? It's actually some Bloodborne shit. Horrific cult antics that literally strip away all personhood, in all meanings of the word, turning them into nothing more than slurry-processors to be sent back, furthering the troll race. Possibly a fate worse than death to some.

Idk. Figure it makes sense the Empire would keep that under wraps from the jades, y'dig

Blocked blocked blocked blocked i hate this

but honestly that's a really really interesting perspective because I do agree that the mothergrub is a troll. Just a different type of troll (much like if you were to look at the life cycle of a fern) so I think you hit some interesting points especially with the de-trollization of the mothergrub into something to be revered but never considered a troll, an equal

also here is the lifecycle of a fern for funsies (where the mothergrub is essentially the diploid phase and normal trolls are the haploid

Active and Passive Aspects

So now that the whole notional and material idea has been established, that leaves the question, is there another axis to the whole thing? In other words, what separates, say, Mind from Light, or Void from Heart?

I pondered this question for quite a while before coming up with an answer I found satisfactory, and I’m still far from sure I’ve got it right. But I believe the answer might lie in a slightly different perspective on the dichotomy of Active and Passive.

Keep reading

Not an Enigma, and Certainly Not a Curse: the "Ultimate Self" in Hussie's Own Words

I've found myself, lately, in several conversations in a row where the other guy and myself weren't on the same page about what the Ultimate Self meant; and though I welcome the opportunity for discussion, explaining my position over and over again has cost me minutes of my screen life that I simply won't win back. So this post is a departure from my usual fare in that it's more for my own benefit than that of anybody else.

I've been over Davepeta's "superceding bodyless and timeless persona that crosses the boundaries of paradox space" enough already, so if you're interested in the Ultimate Self as it is in Homestuck, I recommend you read "Homestuck's Gnosticism: The Conflict", and then, if that piques your attention, you continue with the follow-up "The World/The Wheel". For the purposes of this post, though, I want to keep analysis, interpretation and hypothesising to a minimum. As the title indicates, this is the Ultimate Self not as I describe it, or as characters describe it, but - so to speak - straight from the horse's mouth.

In Andrew Hussie's commentary on Homestuck: Book 6, p. 312:

Oftentimes, when characters lose certain qualities that came to define them, there's this sense of liberation they seem to experience. They become a happier, more relieved, easier-going version of themselves. When Aradia ditches a defining quality we came to know her by (being dead), she becomes a much happier and self-actualized Aradia. Sollux also seems to be chilling out now that his defining properties (bifurcation, etc.) have been KO'd. He had a mouth full of gnarly teeth that gave him a wicked lisp (gone), eyes full of nasty laser beams (gone, along with his eyesight), and a brain full of doomsday visions and bipolar disorder (also gone—well, maybe not the bipolar thing, because that's probably not how that works, but whatever). You get more of this kind of thing in even higher degrees with some of the fusion stuff that happens later (Arquius, Davepeta), where characters become almost euphoric versions of themselves for having been completely liberated from certain self-limitations which previously defined them. The concept of an "ultimate self," which appears much later, probably has its roots way back to stuff like this, which got the ball rolling on the idea that a more complete or fulfilled self is one that becomes free from mortal limitations, or the idiosyncrasies which comprise a specific instance of one version of yourself. Hence an ultimate self is an aggregate of someone's full potential. It's not just doing away with negative traits, but summing up all iterations of yourself, including ones without those traits, allowing you to move beyond them. Or maybe more accurately, to view them as insignificant in the grand totality of what a person really is.

Importantly, what Hussie does here is draw the conceptual line from the themes of Acts 1-5 to what are often interpreted by some as radically different, even left-field themes through Act 6. Think of this as an extension of one of Homestuck's meta-themes, where the comic undergoes a series of escalations that take simple conflicts to their logical extremes: we start the story worried about a Reckoning which might destroy the Earth, then end up with the more pressing concern that a Rapture is about to end reality as we know it. The Ultimate Self is the end result of the exact same kind of escalation; where the God Tiers are a method of becoming a better version of oneself by merging with one's "ideal" dream body, the Ultimate Self is the logical conclusion that one can become the best version by unifying with every body.

To draw my own conceptual line back to Homestuck: Book 5, page 409:

This connects to the basic question of whether to embrace the regimentation of a heroic path conveniently laid out for you (the expectation), or to reject it as the shallow and rigid confinement of personal destiny (the deviation). These issues are expressed through the fundamental language of platonic idealism: perfect ideas of things, and then specific, imperfect instances of those ideas, or varied permutations, evolutions, or hacks of those ideas through alchemy. The way Sburb "should" go is an ideal (expectation), but the disastrous, chaotic way it actually goes is an imperfect instance (deviation). An "idea" of a person, such as Rose, along with her regimented heroic quest for growth, and all the great things she might imagine herself to become if she followed it, is an ideal (expectation). The messy, flawed, yet more genuinely human individual she does become resulting from her errant choices and rejection of formalism, is an imperfect instance of an ideal (deviation). What's the bottom line here? This is a lot. I know it's a lot. Homestuck is, in fact, a lot.

I've added some of my own emphasis there again, but that whole extract is worth reading. The reason I bolded that part is because this "Platonic idealism" is something Hussie talks about a lot in his commentary, and I think that commentary is essential reading for anyone who wants to even get their foot in the door on this topic. Again, this is something I've blogged about extensively already, so there's more than just Hussie's word to take for it if you're really interested; but for the sake of this post, I'll finish off with, again, what Hussie himself has to say on the matter, all the way back in Homestuck: Book 1, page 123:

With things like Athenums and Perfectly Generic Objects locked and loaded, Sburb architecture seems to be circling widely around a game abstraction-based systemization of Platonic idealism. Homestuck deals with what I am going to roughly characterize as THEMES.

With homestuck being legal for 24 hours, I made aspect crowns or bracelets or something. These were fun

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.