On Life, Light And HIC

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

Can we get a cross aspect master post?

The dualspects have been completed! Here’s a list, along with the still in-progress Trispects and quadrispects!

Breath + Mind = Thought

Doom + Heart = Fate

Void + Light = Chance

Void + Life = Death

Hope + Heart = Dreams

Rage + Heart = Zeal (monochromerose)

Heart + Blood = Bond

Time + Space = All

Rage + Breath = Storm

Life + Time = Growth

Mind + Heart = Will

Hope + Void = Faith

Time + Heart = Love

Blood + Doom = Strife (thanks quarktrinity!)

Space + Heart = Core

Breath + Time = Sand

Time + Doom = Chains

Hope + Doom = Fear

Void + Heart = Drive

Time + Mind = Past

Blood + Space = Links

Breath + Light = Cloud

Light + Space = Star (megaderpypotato)

Breath + Space = Force

Space + Void = Hole (megaderpypotato)

Rage + Doom = End

Void + Mind = Hush

Life + Doom = Rot (megaderpypotato)

Breath + Hope = Flight (megaderpypotato)

Breath + Blood = Point

Rage + Mind = Angst

Rage + Blood = War

Hope + Life = Joy

Rage + Life = Pain

Void + Blood = Loss

Life + Breath = Peace

Life + Space = World

Light + Doom = Dark

Rage + Time = Cold

Heart + Life = Cheer

Hope + Time = Soon

Light + Blood = Chrome

Rage + Space = Art

Heart + Breath = Air

Heart + Light = Blithe (megaderpypotato)

Life + Blood = Root

Mind + Light = Truth (megaderpypotato)

Mind + Blood = Trust (megaderpypotato)

Mind + Hope = Creed (megaderpypotato)

Mind + Doom = Bane (monochromerose)

Void + Time = Warp

Void + Breath = Choke (megaderpypotato)

Void + Rage = Calm (megaderpypotato)

Doom + Breath = Rale

Doom + Void = Rift

Mind + Space = Search

Time + Blood = Plan

Life + Mind = Soul

Hope + Space = Forge

Light + Hope = Sun

Rage + Hope = Cult

Rage + Light = Burn (megaderpypotato)

Blood + Hope = Pact (anon)

Life + Light = Ra (monochromerose)

Doom + Space = Work (caelholdt)

Time + Light = Lore (anon)

Some Trispects too!

Life + Time + Mind = Birth

Void + Rage + Doom = Null

Heart + Hope + Life = Bliss

Breath + Time + Light = Tide

Time + Space + Heart = Need

Rage + Time + Breath = Hail

Rage + Mind + Void = Crux

Void + Rage + Doom = Threat (megaderpypotato)

Time + Space + Breath = Path

Hope + Rage + Heart = Flame

Void + Rage + Light = Nyx (monochromerose)

Doom + Mind + Rage = Poine (monochromerose)

Life + Rage + Time = Shirk

Life + Void + Doom = Dry

Light + Space + Void = Moon

Space + Time + Life = Bang

Time + Doom + Breath = Rack

Space + Doom + Rage = Pit

Time + Void + Mind = Mad

Breath + Doom + Rage = Scream

Breath + Rage + Mind = Pent

Blood + Time + Mind = Fade

Heart + Rage + Blood = Hate

Void + Time + Heart = Scorn

Heart + Blood + Hope = Care (asrielmememurr413)

Life + Hope + Light = Ray (asrielmemeurr413)

Time + Doom + Life = Wear (asrielmemeurr413)

Blood + Heart + Space = Wed

Void + Heart + Rage = Blank

Mind + Rage + Hope = Pun

Rage + Time + Heart = String

Light + Life + Rage = Spark

Space + Time + Mind = Have

Mind + Heart + Life = Ghost

Heart + Rage + Doom = Blind (possessed-keyboard)

Hope + Mind + Life = Myth (possessed-keyboard)

Light + Space + Hope = Wish

Rage + Heart + Time = Knell

Void + Blood + Mind = Grief

Mind + Blood + Doom = Court

Light + Mind + Blood = Eye

Life + Breath + Rage = Strength

Void + Blood + Heart = Numb (monochromerose… sorta)

Breath + Hope + Light = Rise

And the Quadrispects!

Breath + Light + Rage + Time = Fog (possessed-keyboard)

Rage + Life + Void + Blood = Woe (monochromerose)

Light + Breath + Rage + Void = Blot (monochromerose)

Void + Life + Doom + Space = Styx (megaderpypotato)

Void + Mind + Rage + Doom = Lethe (monochromerose)

Breath + Light + Time + Space = Rapt (megaderpypotato)

Blood + Life + Space + Doom = Mars

Mind + Light + Blood + Doom = Wyrd

Hope + Light + Void + Rage = Song

Hope + Void + Heart + Life = Drain

Blood + Void + Space + Mind = Flay

Void + Life + Space + Light = Dust

Light + Blood + Space + Doom = Couatl

Heart + Hope + Time + Breath = Pluck

Rage + Mind + Light + Time = Brain

Void + Blood + Space + Heart = Sex

Light + Void + Heart + Mind = Being

Blood + Mind + Doom + Rage = Tron

Blood + Space + Time + Void = Loom

Light + Breath + Space + Void = Sky

Mind + Heart + Breath + Blood = Self

Breath + Time + Blood + Doom = Free (megaderpypotato)

Void + Rage + Mind + Doom = Blues (megaderpypotato)

Breath + Light + Blood + Time = Rules

Breath + Void + Heart + Life = Drone

Void + Doom + Space + Rage = Yamm

Light + Time + Heart + Life = Care

Heart Player Weapons

Actual Weapons

Heart players in Canon (Nepeta, Dirk, (kinda Bro?)) tend to use sharp weapons, weapons used to pierce and cut and tear. I’ll get more into this when talking about themes, but the use of these sharp weapons is very interesting due to phrases like “those words pierced my heart, my very soul” and other such phrases, which I think is fun.

Other weapons that might be appropriate would be Piercing weapons (like needles or lances), again because of their references to certain phrases, Weapons related to those who use their souls to further their goals, I.e. staff weapons due to their relation to monks (people that use their souls to strengthen themselves), candles due to their relation to mediums (people that channel souls), and books, specifically religious books due to their relation to priests (people that use these books to help strengthen their soul).

I suppose you could also use weapons with relation to romance (like chocolate boxes and stuff shaped like hearts, or maybe a bow that shoots heart shaped arrows).

Weapon Themes

A common theme in heart player weapons is of course having romance/love/valentines heart related weapons. While not shown in Canon, it’s like…. Obvious????? I mean, heart players are generally associated with shipping (Nepeta and Meulin are the most obvious, but Dirk has all the romance problems with Jake) and like, why wouldn’t that be reflected in their weaponry?

Anyway, moving on.

Another theme is related to emotions, and phrases involving the heart. Broken hearts might be related in like, the usage of broken weapons, or, non breaking weapons like Dirk’s katana representing his supposedly unbreakable heart (both of which break in Canon funny enough). Or piercing weapons like when something cuts deep enough to touch your soul or someone’s words pierce through your carefully constructed emotional shield.

Heart players are all about that stuff.

Finally is weapons and the soul.

I don’t know much about various themes of the soul in heart weaponry, other than the fact that various interpretations of the soul from various cultures (i.e. the Ba from Egyptian culture or the spirit in more western cultures, possibly even ghosts and stuff like that if you can logically connect the two)

Think about it, having a weapon that summons all the ghosts of failed marriages past, or splitting a foe into all the separate parts of their soul with one sword strike; heart players can incorporate various ways of messing with their foes metaphysical presence with their weapons.

~Weapons Master Blu

Can you pls elaborate on those tags about the Derse kids feeling more like siblings than the Prospit kids?

I mean

hang on. /flips down mic. TED Talk Time.

*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

The Lands kind of stick out as an anomaly in Homestuck’s cosmology. They’re not constant, like Skaia and the Veil are; they’re not evolved through prototyping like imps and carapacians; they’re not drawn from mythology like the Denizens; and they’re not made from Thoughtstuff like Prospit and Derse. On a cursory glance they seem to be the one example of something being created ex nihilo in paradox space, a realm that is supposed to contain “essentially nothing new”. So naturally, figuring out the genesis of the Lands would be a great stride toward unlocking Homestuck as a whole.

Obviously the logical first assumption is that the Lands are generated from the players themselves somehow; grinding metal for the swordsman, industrial pipeworks for the pipe smoker’s heir; and this makes perfect sense for as long as we see Sburb as a game whose goal is to guide players into adulthood. But that’s only one side of the coin; every aspect of the game, from frog breeding to prototyping, should also serve the game’s other primary purpose, which is as reality’s method of reproduction. So the question “why are the Lands the way they are” is just as important as the “what are they” question.

My first hypothesis was that if every one of the Lands in the Medium has its own breed of frog, then this could be a means of introducing genetic diversity to the Genesis Frog; a frog with lava-resistant genes, for example, might make a very different to a frog with genes from the Land of Dew and Glass. But I realise now that we don’t even need to introduce this new idea; the grist hoards in the center of each planet already act as a unique genetic code for each session’s Frog.

And since the grist essentially acts as the “essence” of each planet - oil grist for an oil world, chalk grist for a chalk world - we can also view the grist as the “essence” of its associated Hero. This is more pronounced in the trolls’ grist, with Tavros’ grists being brown-orange and Vriska and Gamzee having blue and purple respectively in [S] Make her pay. (We also observe here that Karkat has green grist, but you can make of that what you will.)

And I think this sheds some further light on how the Ultimate Alchemy ties into the alchemy of the self; the process of creating a universe involves the very alchemical components that make up a person. Using one’s inner essence to create an entire world could also be seen as a way of making the internal, external?

So the genesis of a new universe is the contribution of several individuals’ essences to be mixed in one central subterranean hub… i.e. exactly how troll reproduction works, indicating that the jadeblood is suited to the role of frog breeder even moreso than may have originally been thought.

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.

Thinking back on the idea that sprites represent the Platonic “geists” of their associated heroes, when we consider that both Roxy and Calliope contain “Nepeta-ness”, it starts to look a lot like the theory put forth in Plato’s Symposium that humans, having been created with two heads and then split into two, search for a romantic partner who literally completes them; Roxy and Calliope both contain different parts of Nepeta, and they attract each other because these different aspects of Nepeta-ness want to join together into a whole Nepeta.

Which makes complete sense in Homestuck, because that’s exactly what the cherubs are: “two-headed” beings who split in two upon reaching maturity, and spend their lives seeking out a mate who matches their missing half!

100% correct

Honestly Heir of Blood is practically every generic anime man protagonist that exists godtier cause the main character delevopmental structure is just creating various bonds or being destined to have these bonds from the beginning for some grand quest the protagonist has eother inherited by virtue of being main character or some kind of prophecy accordingly

Discuss

offensive vs defensive

my mage of life friend mentioned something off handedly that i had never noticed before, and i’m pretty sure it puts a hole in the “but passive classes fight stuff!” rebuttal i usually get when talking about -/+ classes.

they DO fight… just not using their powers!

how does john egbert attack?

with a hammer!

but what happens when HE’S attacked?

he uses breath! or rather, he’s supplied with breath. you get the idea though.

when compared against vriska, an active class, john primarily uses his powers for defense.

while vriska’s specibus itself depends on her using her powers primarily for offense!

like everything involving the passive/active dichotomy, this will be based on inclination/preference rather than an absolute rule. and there are definitely things that go against these guidelines, like roxy mostly using her void powers during [s] collide and rose continuing to use her wands after god tiering (though they’re echidna’s quills, so they might be different? i’m pretty sure they channel light though?). but it mostly holds up i think.