also, while thinking through my ask backlog, i did finally figure out something that's been bugging me for a while, and that's blood and breath's role in the narrative alignment. aka, does the aspect stand with or against the narrative a majority of the time? so, to revisit the almighty wheel:
the two most narratively-inclined aspects are time and space, but a majority of the time (haha. time), space players are going to be working against the forces of the story, and time players are going to be working with them, or at least in tandem with them. heart and light players are also inclined to work with the narrative (even more than time sometimes, honestly), and mind and void players are inclined to work against it in the same fashion.
and while this concept does tend to stem a lot more from hs:bc, the best way i can think to describe this is act 5 act 2, and jade and rose/ dave's differing approaches to escaping the scratch. rose and dave do more of what the narrative would "want" from them: they do something conventional (if you can call a reckless suicide mission conventional) they don't break any game rules, hell, they don't even think they're going to survive the ordeal. they're putting a hell of a lot of faith into the game mechanics. jade, on the other hand, says hell no to that, and basically breaks all the rules of the game by quite literally breaking through the narrative wall to escape her fate.
do notice how i didn't mention john! because he didn't have jackshit in terms of a plan, his ass just got saved by jade. he is very much a passive player for a lot of that story, actually. and this ties into my point, because in the way that space and time are the most narratively involved aspects, breath and blood are the most narratively uninvolved. and i've actually been struggling quite a lot with what that actually means, because my stance on blood and breath as the narratively uninclined aspects has been just that, that they're uninclined. ignorant, actually. but while that makes sense to a degree, as all the breath and blood characters of the story seem entirely ignorant to the narrative all all it involves, just saying they're narratively uninclined feels wrong to me.
like, okay. john doesn't give much of a damn about the narrative. and that tracks even through john's journeys into fucking around with the canon, as until the epilogues he doesn't understand the fact that there's a narrative to be concerned with at all, even with universe-altering retcon powers, and seems mostly entirely annoyed with the concept when he does find out about it. but he is still very much involved with the narrative, even just as much as the time and space players! because of all the characters that end up being most important, the blood and breath players are among them. john and karkat, quite obviously, but even tavros gets a fair amount of time in the spotlight (even if his role as an unfulfilled page gets him swept under the rug fairly quickly), especially compared to some of the other trolls (that aren't kanaya, karkat, terezi, and vriska, of course). and, like, karkat. karkat gets clowned on quite a bit by that said narrative, but he's still, like, fundamental to the story on a very large level. especially in the epilogues and hs:bc where, again, this concept stems from. it's just been driving me insane!
so, the concept i've kind of arrived at is that it's less about a scale of being involved with the narrative, like i originally thought. it's less like you're fading out of importance with your involvement in canon, it's more like their inclination to side on either side of that scale is fading more and more until you hit the middle. so blood and breath, in their own way, actually end up being very narratively important because they're complete wildcards. being utterly unaware of the concept that there ever could be a "narrative", let alone the fact that it's important, means they're not skewed in one direction. they can choose their own side, or hell, not choose one at all, and just end up doing their own thing for all eternity. and that unpredictableness is just what makes them actually so important in the first place, because they're not usually working for some big greater purpose, they're just... doing whatever they think is right, on their own smaller scales. to come back around to john, yeah he gets involved in narrative fuckery, but just because he wants to protect his friends. and that's just a very nice layer of bullshit on top of this bullshit cake i hadn't considered before. anyway ted talk over i think i need to be locked up before i lose my marbles any more over this
