I don’t know if this has already been said but I just noticed that the Breath symbol
is pretty much the Life symbol turned on it’s side and squished around a bit
It can also be noted that these two aspects represent the basics of living, as well as correlate to Jane and John, the leaders of their respective sessions.
Aspect Icons Y/N?
So that this Tumblr doesn’t look TOO bare, I figured I’ll just put up a little prospective project I’ve just started!
They’re Homestuck aspect icons for Tumblr! And more spiffy than just copypasting the symbols on a blank background, yeah? :P
There’s no reason I chose Heart and Void first; I picked them at random. But if there’s an aspect you would like me to do, let me know and I will post as soon as I finish it! Otherwise I’ll just put all 12 icons together at the end. :>
…if I finish this, that is. See, I was planning on making icons for all 12 symbols, but is this something you guys would want? Or should I give up and move on to something else?
TODO
This is mostly a reminder to myself, but I summarized my notes a little bit.
Aspects I wanna write more about, preferably in the following order:
Heart and Mind. These are a huge fucking mess. I will not be able to explain them any time soon, so this post might be a little different. Send me all your ideas and we’ll talk.
Life and Doom. Life is about having a life: Pleasure is good and pain is bad, but even if painful things happen to you, you can walk it off so long as you’re still alive. Doom is about believing in the impossible: You know you can’t survive the shit you’re about to pull, but you believe you can get through it anyway, precisely because it’s impossible. The essence of Doom is paradoxes.
Hope and Rage. Hope is about believing things that make sense. Trust your mind, doubt your senses, conquer your body, and find the truth. Rage has it the other way around: Your body conquers your mind and your mind is lying to you. Rage is the uncontrollable.
Breath and Blood. Breath is the purity and innocence of the spirit, and its freedom to leave behind the illusory material world. Blood is the profanity of the body, which knows that life is pain and conflict but knows better than to yearn for something else.
Other stuff I may also cover:
- A master post about aspects and their symbols
- A more detailed recap of Space (Aristotle) and Time (Stoicism) now that I know what they are
- The critical decisions in the quests of Dave, Rose, John, Equius, and I guess some other people
- More rigorously defined class verb guesses
- A recap of what Gnosticism is and what Gnostics cared about
- Divinity stuff and why “god tier” is important
If you know something I don’t, throw it at me.
I keep thinking about the Rage aspect. I really want to know more about it! Gamzee is a terrible example, because of his sopor shenanigans and also the fact that he’s a Bard, the “wild card” class.
Most of what I’ve read theorizes that Rage is control over anger, which makes sense. But that seems like such a cool aspect!! Like, a Knight of Rage could go berserker status to weaponize their rage; a Seer of Rage would know just what to say or do to piss people off, making their foes unstable and reckless and thus easier to defeat; a Thief of Rage would absorb and steal enemy’s anger, which would both give the Thief more power (berserker status) and also take away their enemy’s urge to fight.
I JUST THINK IT’S SO COOL OKAY????
I don’t think Rage needs to be the “angry person” aspect. I mean, it can be, sure, but it can also mean that you know how to push peoples’ buttons and rile them up. I think it’s more of a “control over anger” than “anger itself.”
BUT THAT’S JUST ME.
Sheesh already some fucker’s offended by the update.
In this case it’s that most passive classes are exclusively female, and most active classes are male.
Passive classes are the ones that work in the back. On the sidelines. They make the plans so the more active classes have a guide for what to do.
The most obvious way to compare them is the Seer and Knight class. Seers make the plans and act as strategists to help the Knights do their job better.
A follow up would be to look at the Witch class. The Witch class is one of the more active classes so far as we can see, being able to take the forefront along side the Princes, Knights, Heirs, and the rest that I’m not remembering at the moment.
Bards are passive classes, allowing their aspect to work through them and either help the group or destroy it.
Muses and whatever it is that uu is (speculation says that he is a Lord of Time) are really new and so I’m not going into much about them in this rant.
Passive classes are just as important as the Active classes.
Homestuck Aspects: Heart
Heroes of Heart tend to do what they want regardless of how others feel about it.
Dirk is a very good example. His beta version wanted Dave to become stronger, so he “trained” Dave regardless of how Dave felt about it. He kept an apartment full of swords, forced Dave to stay on his toes through various ironic pranks, and (sometimes? often? regularly?) challenged Dave to rooftop swordfights where he would proceed to beat the shit out of Dave. Dave is probably traumatized by puppets for the rest of his life but there’s no denying that he is one of the martially strongest characters in Homestuck.
Dave would rather slow down the meteor and attempt to fight Jack Noir than meet his bro.
Dirk’s alpha version wanted Jake to become stronger, so he “trained” Jake regardless of how Jake felt about it. Dirk built a robot to stalk Jake through the jungle, keep him even more alert than he would already be on an island full of alien monsters, and then ambush and beat the shit out of Jake. Jake definitely didn’t want a robot that would regularly try to kill him, but Dirk insisted that it would be good for him.
(I am not addressing Dirk and Jake’s relationship because I think it has less to do with player aspects and more to do with (not-at-all-)simple teenage relationships, with Dirk’s AR added in for extra confusion. And if I did put blame on any player aspect it’d be Jake’s aspect for running away and talking at Erisolsprite, hoping for an easy way out, instead of talking to any of his human friends and facing his problem head-on.)
Note that Dirk was especially focused on doing the things his friends didn’t want him to do because Dirk is a Prince of Heart; he actively destroys their desires in favor of his own. Later he sacrifices his own desires by finally giving Jake up as a failed relationship and resigning himself to Trickster Mode.
Meulin matchmakes relationships she thinks would work well together, and apparently she’s very good at it. ((Unfortunately I don’t have much information about Meulin, and there is very little canon information about the Mage class at all.))
Nepeta does not force her teammates to her desires as actively as Dirk and Meulin do. This may correspond to her passive class, the Rogue, as opposed to the Prince and (theorized) the Mage. Unlike Meulin, she is content to watch and record relationships rather than create them. However, she still has a tendency to do whatever she wants and not listen to others. I think this is why she does not have much of an impact on the plot of Homestuck. She’s much more interested in shipping and roleplaying than in trolling the humans or any other inane idea that Karkat demands, and so that’s what she does. She does make exceptions for Equius, probably because of their close relationship, but even then she disobeys his orders to hide and follows him as he confronts Gamzee. This ultimately causes her death. Instead of observing that Gamzee is more powerful than her and running away to seek help, she immediately leaps out to avenge her moirail and is killed for it. OT<>
Oh, and Nepeta managed to get Karkat to roleplay with her. I take back what I said earlier; Nepeta is just as good at making people do what she wants as Dirk and Meulin are.
Edit: Some of the examples may be analyzed as an interaction of two player aspects rather than the influence of Heart alone. Jake went along with Dirk’s plans instead of protesting because he hoped it would turn out as well as Dirk said it would. Karkat roleplayed with Nepeta (badly and reluctantly) because he wants everyone to get along with each other (as a hero of Blood) and he knows that refusing to roleplay would only make Nepeta sad, as well as halt the entire conversation while Nepeta tried to make him roleplay. Lastly, Gamzee’s murder of Equius enraged Nepeta to the point where she felt she had no other options but to avenge her moirail.
mspaf is down so i'm posting my claspect thoughts here
imagine if sburb was an actual video game
page: exponential growth curve; starts out weak and useless at early levels but becomes extremely strong at high levels
mage: generic spellcaster????
knight: linear growth, uses weapons/armor based on his aspect
heir: opposite of page, having roughly a sqrt(x) growth curve; an early-game pokemon that has high stats for the early game and quickly evolves, story-wise risks being consumed by/submitting to his aspect, has slower growth and risks becoming useless after/during mid-game. edit: heirs may also be tanks or otherwise defensively oriented.
bard: joke character; relies on (de)buffs, luck-based moves, randomness, and other weird gimmicky things; if you have the right kind of bard or you’re skilled/lucky he can do massive damage
prince: glass cannon; for experienced/competitive players (or noobs who want to do a lot of damage and look cool and don’t care if their character doesnt have defensive skills); relies on teammates to protect him
maid: basically a tank only prettier
seer: gives information about the world rather than being a normal party member (sort of like goombario/goombella in paper mario)
sylph: healer or something
witch: spellcaster? npc that uses her aspect to transport you?
rouge: stealth-based character; other possibilities are that one buffs allies, steals aspect from enemy, gives own aspect to allies, applies stolen aspect to whole area?
thief: vampires that steal [aspect] instead of blood
