Homestuck classpect musings
Something I realized last night: the only reason Homestuck actually has a plot is because the characters involved are all forced to play using pre-built character sheets; if SBURB/SGRUB had a halfway decent character editor built in, then a party of 3-4 dedicated powergamers could easilly snap the game in half.
Put simply, it’s actually pretty obvious that not all classes and aspects are created equal (no matter what some might say on the matter), and some simply become so utterly gamebreaking once explored that it isn’t even funny. To just give two examples that use nothing but canon information: Seer of Time and Seer of Space.
In canon, Seers are shown to see things and foresee events governed by their aspect. Rose, Seer of Light, is able to know the exact most fortuitous path that the meteor group needs to take, no matter how insane or convoluted that path actually is, and Terezi, Seer of Mind, is able to foresee the results of people’s decisions, possibly to the point of knowing what you will do before you do, and might even have been able to read thoughts if she had God Tiered (as evidenced by her being able to see Brain Ghost Dirk, actually see him, despite being blind at the time).
Meanwhile, Time and Space are the only aspects shown to be mostly literal, albeit with some esoteric connotations, literally governing the fabric of space and time. All Time players are shown to have the ability to time travel (a trick which is outright weaponized by Dave), Aradia is shown to be able to actually stop time for an enemy, and Lord English uses time itself as a weapon, wielding stable timeline loops as both sword and shield. Meanwhile, on the Space side, Jade is able to freely manipulate the mass and volume of objects, able to make a planet small enough to fit in her hand without any change in density, and alternate future Caliope is able to all but rewrite reality, manipulating the physical world in a way which, due to timeline complications in the Farthest Ring, should be impossible.
Combining this knowledge, Seer of Time and Seer of Space get really, really broken. To start with the weaker ability: a Seer of Space would be able to see everything, anywhere, at that exact moment. They wouldn’t exactly be able to foresee things, time being explicitly out of their control, but they would have perfect knowledge of reality at any given moment, making them a mathematical demon. No matter where you ran, they could catch you. No matter where you hid, they could find you. No matter what precautions you took, the only way to get around a Seer of Space would be to exploit either time based shenanigans, or to wield Void powers (something which even the omniscient can’t get around).
Meanwhile, a Seer of Time would be ridiculously, abominably, unstopably insane, able to foresee any and all conequences of everything that might or must happen, along with knowledge of when things must happen for events to unfold. While they themselves might not have any time travel powers (or at least, being so weak with time travel that there’s no real reason to bother), they wouldn’t actually need them, because they already know what the future holds. To give one small example of how insanely broken a Seer of Time would be, they would be able to know the exact moment needed to set off a packet of explosives, the blast from which would cause air turbulence, which would interact with the weather patterns already in existance, which would cause a cascade of unlikely but perfectly timed events to create an EF5 tornado, which would conveniently touch down just before it’s time to fight the Black King.
And this is just parsing canon information; I’d shudder to imagine how some other classpects would be, if fandom speculation is correct. Heir of Hope, assuming that Heir means, “protected by, and responsible for,” and that Hope means, “possibilities, dreams, and that which might be,” would mean that an Heir of Hope would be protected by possibility itself, to the point of trancending luck; all which is and might be would bend over backwards to protect the Heir of Hope, to the point of surrealism. A Prince of Void, using canon info here, would parse as, “one who destroys, or destroys through, that which is hidden or does not exist,” and would mean that a Prince of Void would be able to simply destroy the nonexistance of anything, probably able to create things to a far greater degree than Roxy in canon, who merely steals their nonexistance rather than destroying it. A Lord of Blood, assuming Lord to mean, “one who holds command and dominion,” and Blood to mean, “unity, community, and fraternity,” would parse out as, “one who commands unity,” and that ads up to the literally perfect leader, able to command any disparate group into a single well-oiled machine.
Really, the only reason Homestuck has a plot at all is because the characters shown actually have some pretty shitty classes and aspects. Give me a Seer of Time, a Knight of Space, an Heir of Hope, and a Prince of Void, and the biggest danger would be them arguing with themselves.
