dahniwitchoflight:

…his coming blindness. Meulin, as the other canon Mage, suffered loss (of hearing) because of heart, and though it was stated she had constant failures of her own regarding matespritships, she was known for helping others into long-lasting flushed relationships. (2/2)”

I used the word Suffer for Mages initially to try to bring both sides together, because the word suffer has two meanings, one thats negative and one thats more neutral, but both meaning “to directly experience or allow a thing to happen”

But instead people only focused on the negatives and went “so, Mages have bad thing happen?”

but all Mages do is directly and personally experience what their aspect has to offer, in both its bad AND GOOD forms.

They comprehend where their aspect is good and necessary, and where it is not good and unnecessary, they gain personal experienced knowledge of their aspect by living through the good and the bad and the everything of what their aspect has to offer.

And even then, depending on the Mage, they may experience very different things about their aspect, maybe some Mages only experience bad, or a mix of good and bad, or only experience good things.

The thing that draws them together though is they each have their own personal unique experience and knowledge of their aspect, so even between mages of the same aspect, the knowledge they’ve experienced and gained on it could be vastly different from each other. 

So its not that Mages simply suffer from their aspect, im officially retiring that term cuz it wasnt used like i intended it to be lol, I’m going back to simply “Mages Experience their Aspect”

dahniwitchoflight:

I view that as incredibly unfair to be honest, but most of all, its just against the whole point and story of homestuck and human nature as a whole.

first because since classpect is so inherently tied to a persons nature and identity in homestuck, having a “bad” classpect dooms you to a life of evilhood because that must mean you are a bad person, because only bad people would get bad classpects right?

when throughout the whole story of homestuck, it tries to push the moral of being a villain or a hero is a choice to be made, you arent evil, you choose to be evil. not something inherent to any person.

Caliborn wasn’t born messed up by his cherubic childhood anymore than Calliope was, he made the willfull choice to murder his sister in a way that was unnatural even for cherubs and gleefully accepted all of his consequences.

second is homestuck and sburb in its nature pushes huge symbolic moral judgements on the actions of specifically god tier characters with heavy consequences, the just/heroic perma death system. where if you fail that moral judgement you die permanently. thats a heavy judgement, theres a lot riding on whether or not you are “good” or “bad” when you die.

and hussie cared enough about this death system and therefore what it meant that he went out of his way to explain it in minute detail to people who didnt understand when Jade got her just death. 

then all of this means that if some classpects are inherently bad, and only bad people get them, then some people are inherently worth less then others because they were always doomed to die a just death anyways right?

its like, the more you look at it, the more having an unfair system in place just breaks apart and sets up an awful system where some people are just born having more value than others and leaves us with a horrible moral that i believe was never homestucks moral

because that line of thought was explicitly the villains common line of thought throughout the entirety of homestuck and why Vriska was such a great and tragic character, because she had every possibility in every inch of her to be a good person, the potential in her was desperate to shine through and make the right choice and she consistently failed due to this ingrained train of thought and the personal, willfull, fully conscious choices she made to be villainous over heroic nearly every single time. because of that ingrained idea that some people are worth more than others.

and for the flashy powers themselves, just because the nature of your powers is different, doesnt mean they arent equally powerful. If they were meant to all do the same things they wouldnt even have class distinctions in the first place. 

and then after everything it ties into the idea that sburb has a will or a concious and directly controls the universe and make choices on the fly to punish people as if it could make its own choices

when in reality sburb is a programming disc and the universe their timelines and their alpha timelines are a frog. a frog that was specifically bred to be a certain way and contain certain genes that would activate in a certain way once it became a universe. reality was pretedermined and the timeloops setup from the moment the kids universe took its first breath. 

and the story ends with them shaping their own reality to live in, making their own frog and taking the reigns into their own hands and making stuff happen, heck the whole story has always been about personal agency and how important it is that you exist and make your own choices

so i just cant see such a fundamental part of the homestuck multiverse just, going against that. especially because they did not end up escaping everything after the end, they just took the multiiverse into their own hands and reshaped it with their own wills

so any theory that says x class or y aspect is inherently positive/negative in such a such a way is false to me just on principle

dahniwitchoflight:

and like, its really not that hard to see the classpect system as neutral

just because are only two (TWO!) examples of Rage players from one session of universe in the entire multiverse that happened to both be alpha timeline sanctioned to serve a dark lord villain because the plotline of homestuck says so doesnt mean Rage as an aspect altogether needs to be thrown out the window

Homestuck the story is not the be-all end-all of the Homestuck Multiverse™. We know this because more sessions exist in canon than the ones we have directly witnessed, and because Hiveswap exists, which also doesn’t need to have a playable SBURB component to expand on the system itself through any sort of insight or dialogue or anything at all. 

we’ve seen probably exactly 0.02% of Rage as an aspect’s direct influence on reality, there’s plenty we haven’t seen. Same goes for Bards and for Princes and Doom and whatever else class or aspect has unfair negativity attached to it, like Mages because my poor word choice of suffering, or that Knight theory that they kill their session just by existing (which has never stopped being dumb for me)

Dirk alone is proof of this concept between himself as Dirk and his other versions of himself like AR and Bro. 

even then, there is so much we can glean about Rage in canon that have nothing to do with Gamzee or Kurloz. Hope is Rage’s opposite. Anything that IS Hope, IS NOT Rage. and the same goes for the other around too. Anything that IS Rage, IS NOT Hope, it cannot be, or else they wouldn’t be opposite fundamental forces of reality. and we have 3 Hope players to triangulate between, so its not hard to see patterns and similarities between them that logic states, if they are a pattern across Hope players, they would not be a pattern in Rage players. This is entirely the reason why we have so many character examples of varied, different, classpects. So we can triangulate their meaning from across the board

so many thoughts, I should really just write out a huge post about Class and Aspect fandom stereotypes and how to break them while staying 100% canon

dahniwitchoflight:

classpects are like mirrors, they reflect the person they are for

in their greatest highest moments, they should reflect your self aspirations, the kind of person you always wanted to be just doing your thing and being happy. not perfect you or flawless you, just 100% fundamentally the most you-est you to ever you a you at your happiest and healthiest natural state. 

its the version of you thats the best happiest healthiest you that you can picture being

in their everyday forms i think they should reflect a personal struggle, but not in the sense of some lesson some weird god figure deigned to give them for no other reason then their own whims, but again, as a personal reflective tool

you are going to have flaws, things you do wrong, you’ll make certain kinds of mistakes depending on who you are, and classpect should reflect this as well

A Hope player can have faith that things will turn out all right, or they can be utterly delusional about the nature of reality and not know up from down

A Rage player can have a healthy skepticism towards shady things, a healthy anger when wronged, a healthy fear of dangerous things, and they can also reject everything entirely to self-isolate and live in paranoia for the rest of their days.

They key is balance, finding a healthy balance, learning to see yourself in positive ways and learning to use your natural talents in positive ways. Seeing the worth and value in yourself and in what you can do, no matter what that thing you do is. 

and also don’t forget that Class has a part in it as well, and naturally changes the way you normally interact with an Aspect and reflects moreso the personal challenge of a person than the Aspect does

Prince’s common challenge is to learn how to not get caught up in their aspect’s wave of destruction as they wield it to Destroy. How to not let the horse that theyre riding go off the reigns and run them off a cliff basically. and each Prince in Homestuck failed or succeeded in that challenge in different ways

Kurloz failed to stop his “Rage” from destroying himself and the things he loved. His intense nightmare filled with anger and fear that made him deafen Meulin. His inability to open up or have faith in other possibilities than the one he knew leading him to follow LE and lead their friend group to doom and how that ultimately got him nowhere/dead. If he had suceeded his challenge, he would have known the correct place to aim his anger, his fear and his criticism, he might have tried to put faith in other possibilities, or at least questioned his beliefs about LE and the mirthful messiahs. But he was too far into Rage to care. 

Eridan failed to stop his Hope from destroying himself much in a similar vein to Kurloz. He was convinced of something that wasn’t real and wouldn’t let go of the delusion, that he and Feferi could join Bec Noir and be on his side while everyone else died. His inability to critically examine his own delusion, to escape his own tunnel vision of Hope-y granduer led to his inevitable downfall at Kanaya’s hand. It was only later as Erisolsprite that he gained a new decidedly non Hopey pessimistic perspective on things that he had a chance to critically examine his own behaviours. Even if as Erisolsprite together they went too far off the other side of the deepend. 

Lastly Dirk struggled with his class alot. He held his own self up to such a high degree that on some level he wanted to make all his friends just like him, because that was easier than trying to understand their differences. He was pushy, wanted to train others to be like him, heck he made an AutoResponder that would talk to his friends for him so he wouldn’t have to. He lived alone all his life and knew exactly three living people (caliborn doesn’t count as healthy interaction) and you’re telling me this created such a desperate need for someone to answer his calls for him, cuz he was soo busy, yeah naw. Using his own Heart to Destroy Other’s Heart, quite literally in a bunch of places too. As a Heart player you are innately intune with your own self, that it can obscure your view of others if you’re not careful, but especially a destruction class as well. 

But Dirk managed to get over that, he managed to reign himself in, overcome his challenge and learn when he needed to have genuine conversations with people and when to recognize that everyone is their own self and he shouldn’t push them to be otherwise. If he had failed that challenge, well, we know what happens. He becomes Bro. A grown man who’s absolute refusal and incapability to be genuine or have genuine emotions towards even the child he was raising for thirteen years and his constant pressure to turn said child into a carbon copy of himself messed up said child so much that he got straight up PTSD from it. Literally all of Dirk’s own natural worst traits reaching their full fruition. 

and Dirk might not have actually been able to come to that conclusion on his own if he hadn’t literally had his own Heart staring him in the face all those years. It’s one thing to see yourself from the inside perspective like we all do, its quite another to see it from an outside perspective like everyone else does. Especially one that was already in such an unhealthy situation that of course it was gonna showcase his own negative traits back at him full-force. 

but yeah I find Class a more significant factor in a person’s personal kind of struggle, the Aspect moreso represents what they are having the struggle with. 

but either way, it’s always classpect is the tool we should use as personal reflection about ourselves in order to define and learn from our own lessons. Not as some “higher lesson” given by some incomprehensible not-even-sure-if-it-exists figure who decides they know you better than you know you. 

someone else telling you something is wayyy different than you learning a thing by yourself and I think its important to make a distinction there. You should NOT learn to be the kind of person someone else wants you to be, you should learn to be the kind of person that you want to be.