#piss aspect

[land-of-polls-and-brackets]

Here's my design for the Gent Class God Tier (and also my take the piss aspect palette)! I like the "joke" aspects very much lol; they're canon in my heart.

[godtiertalk]

How exactly does the Piss aspect work?

Primarily as a joke, one must assume.

But, looking at the way other aspects relate to other phrases and meanings in popular culture and all, we can come up with some extrapolations. Not a lot, because there isn’t actually a character to work with here, but a few.

First of all, there is no other aspect that is related to water, liquid, etc at a high level. Void has symbolic connotations with water (eg the aquatic horrorterrors, Equius’s sweat, the ‘blinding slosh of liquid’ in Doc Scratch’s head etc) and Blood is, technically speaking, a liquid itself, but Piss seems to fill the blank space where “fucks with liquids” should be.

Secondly, looking at common phrases that utilize piss, we find things like “piss and vinegar” or “taking the piss,” which are suggestive of surly, snappish and biting attitudes, jokes at the expense of others, and a variety of strangely couched superiority complexes. 

To “be pissed” has dual connotations of being absolutely livid about something to the point where you aren’t thinking clearly, or to be drunk off your own ass.

To piss into the wind is to take actions that are obviously useless, and to piss on someone’s cake is to be a general ruiner of other people’s good times.

"Piss or get off the pot" suggests a refusal to take timely action.

None of these things suggests a very positive aspect, over all. 

But the one hero of Piss we (very, very briefly) interacted with seemed to be a very concise, polite individual well versed in common standards of discourse (if a bit… terse, shall we say. Short speaking.)

Piss seems likely to be an aspect relating to waste. Wasted energy, wasted thought, but also waste removal. Urine is a sterile material (at least until it leaves the body where it is contaminated by air and skin contact). It removes waste products from the body, ensuring healthy function of many systems. In a desperate situation, urine can be the barrier between life and death. 

More than once or twice, we see people and characters who are best described as piss and vinegar being barrier breakers whose refusal to give into the elements pushes them and others to keep moving, living and succeeding where they might otherwise have failed.

Piss is an aspect of distaste, assuredly, but also a vital one to health and well being.

In relation to other aspects, I would say it is likely comparable to the aspects of Breath and Time for moving forward and inducing change, and potentially Rage for refusal to be waylaid or rerouted: when you gotta go, you gotta go.