Oooo

Homestuck Classpection, storywriting, and more.

[touch-me-oooo]

Shifted Cardinal Aspects - A Theory?

If you don't know, the cardinal aspects in canon are just the topmost and sidemost aspects on the wheel. I'm starting up a fansession where the aspect wheel is shifted clockwise so that Light and Void and Hope and Rage are the new cardinal aspects. The point of this is to shift the powers so that I have something to hone my focus on.

So, aspect wheel is cardinally shifted. The cardinal aspects now are:

Void = Light (was. Space = Time) Hope = Rage (Breath = Blood)

Or,

Hope, Light, Rage, Void (Breath, Time, Blood, Space)

It seems that I MUST always relate my theories to homestuck canon(which makes perfect sense), though in my honest and serious observations I can see I've completely lost the fucking plot of the whole comic. Homestuck made me feel like opening my eyes and truly being INTO something for like. The first time in my life. Like, yes, I still know the comic, I've read it through multiple times, each time taking a fine look. And I hate what Hussie did to it. TBF, he was probably in a very strange place when he put this all together. But thank you Hussie, for showing us your "ironically good webcomic." It actually touched me, in ways nobody understands. But I have found this new dimension of the plot. And lost my mind. This knowledge, this insight, could possibly prove useful for once though.

The sessions in homestuck were twin, for few other reasons than that Hussie probably read some books with some big names on them. Jung and Campbell for example. Beyond the threshold(entry into sburb) there will be guardians, helpers, and mentors. In the comic, the two races are at odds and obscured from each other. Reading it was like reading an instructional manual on how to puke. That was because they are also, due to it literally being their pre-ordained fate, chronologically moving in opposite directions. The trolls arrive at the kids session pretty much right after having to future-past mouthfuck themselves in individual separate time zones on the meteor. Future selves informing the past selves, and the past selves being no more prepared to make a difference in how it all panned out in the end says the same thing about time as it usually does in homestuck. Needlessly complex 10th dimensional nonsense. Time is all about events, and Time was what Aradia had given the trolls when she took the hit for all the other trolls to scram, only for her to come back after death having transcended. Then they busted out the other side of the scratch into the universe they created. Karkat seems convinced he makes them Bound to his misfortune, despite actually being the only leader among them to succeed in uniting them all, pretty much AT all. John is just inverse. He IS the Hero of Journeys, whereas Karkat is the Hero of Unity(*). The Heir to Plot Progression, to be the god that became this force that pushes things toward the place they're going to be. The wind blows the way it is meant to go. No-place-else. John just controls that wind, thus justifying the depiction of his powers. John is also a leader-non-leader. He isn't the leader, he will take no such responsibility, meanwhile Karkat begged to be the Leader. But they both will lead, they will do the work, they will ultimately be the force necessary to save the session and everyone. I think because Breath and Blood were the difference between leaders, lives, species, relationships, and all such matters, and they made the depiction of those two worlds look and act and feel the way they did, WE can flip it a few degrees clockwise and achieve a method.

So, whoever is closest to Hope and Rage on the aspect wheel will then save or harm the session. One being the Hope, another being the Rage. One for the Optimism of Prospit, another for the Skepticism and Drudgery of Derse. These heroes are going to either make it through with (hope) or break through with (rage), and at the end of the tunnel they're passing through is a blinding (light). The only thing they have to protect themselves and proceed? Nothing. (void). They have not a damn thing. But. Perhaps. Thats the only thing you've needed all along. A solution in the void.

Our heroes of Light and Void or those closest to them will be the heroes keeping shit afloat. These guys are on the latitude of the graph, they're the line of increase/decrease(passive/active*). When you don't have an even balance of light and void, its either too bright or too dark. However, we're up against a tyrant of Light, using it with unmatchable strength and influence. Caliborn becomes Lord English because he killed his sister, even though he shouldn't have and he knows it. But, even as the Lord of Time he was not victorious at the end of the story. His sister, the Muse of Space, only wins when she loses. By dying, and by existing, inspires a timeline where she kills her brother and plays the doomed session, makes a deal with the mother of all monsters that ends with… Stopping. Lord English. It is unknown what happens after the trolls and kids escape into the new universe but. Yeah. There we go.

[zerotheclasspector]

So good to see an active classpector these days. Can I ask you how you personally decide upon land quests for a given classpect?

Thank you! I really enjoyed reading your takes on the Homestuck aspects!

To create a player’s Land and Quest, I need to know a bit more about them than just their Classpect. I’ll use an idea I had for the Prince of Time as an example. I proposed that one reason they may be lacking in time is that they are dying to a terminal disease or that they have a condition that has shortened their lifespan. Having more knowledge on the character allows me to take the first step: Creating the player’s land.

A player’s land is composed of two main elements. These aspects are usually based on the player’s aspect and how they interact with it (aka their Class). However, if the player’s aspect is Space, then one of those elements is guaranteed to be “Frogs”. Another thing that sometimes affects the Land elements is that some sessions have a theme of sorts. We only see them in the Human sessions, but not in the Troll sessions, for some reason. The B1 theme was the classical elements (Earth, Wind, Water, Fire), and the B2 theme was Noble Gases (Helium, Neon, Xenon, Krypton). If I was creating Lands for a whole session of players, I may create a theme for them all. So, for a Time player who has a deadly illness, and assuming their not in a session with a particular theming, I propose the “Land of Rot and Machines”. The “Rot” element refers to the Prince’s condition and the destructive nature of the Prince class, and the “Machines” element is mean to call back to hospital devices, as the Prince is likely quite familiar with them. With these elements, I can imagine a Land that has been devastated by some kind of plague, needing machines to keep it alive. Consorts are another part of Land creation, but are far simpler. There are four basic choices, Turtles, Lizards, Salamanders, and Crocodiles. It’s also implied that Serpent-Angels and Giant-Floating-Brains can function as consorts, but that’s unclear. Honestly, there are no real patterns to the consorts, so just it doesn’t matter that much. Now that I know the general characteristics of the Land, I can start to actually create the Quest itself.

The Quest for a player should A. Use the characteristics of the Land B. Be solved using the skills of the player’s Classpect and C. Help the player grow as a person. For our planet LORAM, the player’s goal would be to stop the plague from killing all of the consorts on the planet, as the machines can no longer hold it back. However, during the quest, the player would realize that plague is completely unstoppable, and that nothing they can do would completely remove the plague. The Prince would realize that they only have one option to stop the plague, freeze it in time. They would use their ability to destroy Time to permanently stop the plague from spreading. This would help the Prince of Time grow by giving them some insight about themself. They would have to confront the plague, which represents the inevitability of their disease, head on. However, by stopping the plague with their Time powers, they would learn that they actually have a way out of their fate: Fully embracing their role as a Prince of Time by going God Tier. They would be in a new body, unaffected by their condition. This would allow them to better themselves easier, now that they have escaped a predicted death.

So this is my long-winded explanation of how I come up with Lands and Quests. To sum it up, I need the character’s Classpect and a few things about their life/personality so I can create a planet’s elements, which I use to challenge the player to embrace their Classpect’s role so they can grow as a person.

[touch-me-oooo]

Heart and Mind Aspect Breakdown

WARNING: I talk about the Self in this breakdown, if you are disturbed by derealization or the question of your experience being fake or otherwise not as it seems, I would not advise reading. Sorry, and thank you. Don't worry, you're perfectly real I promise. *Kisses you on your forehead.* Mwah.

A few weeks ago I made a full aspect breakdown, where I went through each of the Homestuck aspects and wrote a little bit about them. Since then I've thought a lot about aspects. I cant stop. Every time I blink I see the aspect wheel.

But this insanity might yield some more aspect wisdom. So, here's my Heart and Mind.

Heart was particularly hard for me to grasp for a bit, and that's just because I was focusing on it's relationship to Time and Rage, and seeing it as some kind of weird thing about the Self. But, I should've been focusing on it's relationship to Mind, and it being some kind of weird thing about perspective, and how perspective influences actions.

Mind is the aspect opposite to Heart on the wheel. It represents viewing the world through an objective, logical lens. It draws from Light, and uses the objective information to make objectively relevant decisions.

Obviously, I should've taken my understanding of Mind and flipped it so I could see Heart. Heart sees the world through a subjective, inner understanding of things. It draws from Void, and uses irrelevant information that can't be understood to make decisions.

Mind says that the pepper has chemicals inside that will cause a burning sensation, so we shouldn't eat it.

Heart says that the pepper tastes hot, and interesting, and it hurts in a good way.

Notice that neither of these perspectives are wrong. It's all just a take on the human experience of how we understand things. Sometimes we think with our Minds, and sometimes we think with our Hearts. Both are equally valid ways to view and take action on what we see. Simple, heard it again and again all the time. Can't believe I ever didn't understand Heart.

[WARNING: DEREALIZING SECTION BEGINS BELOW]

But hold the fuck on. Is that really all? What about the previous take about Heart being character traits and personality? Yes, yes, that hasn't gone away. I'll talk about how these things all go together, including Mind's opposite take.

Heart sees things through the lens of Void, which represents mystery and secrets. Void is everything you won't ever know in your lifetime. Everything you don't perceive. Like, for example, who you are. It's quite hard to perceive your Self. Your Ego. Do you know who is reading this? Is it actually [your name]? Or is this body, this name you've got, a room that houses a real you? A lot of individuals feel this is true, that your body and name are only external things that house and label something that has no name, and no body. Or, perhaps just a different set of names and bodies. The only objective thing is what you feel is true about yourself. Are you a boy? A girl? Do you feel like one? Both maybe? Do you even feel like you have a gender? It's all about your personal view, which doesn't come from anywhere external. It comes from Void. What you think you are behind this shell of flesh and persona is your best guess. You find out by asking yourself questions, and the answers come from... Nowhere. Irrelevancy. It's a secret. Heart's relationship to Time is why it's so introspective. Time is the aspect of the Self, the being, the experience of beginning and ending. It's about ME, ME, ME. I'm here, I'm experiencing, I'm feeling. Heart's relationship to Rage gives it it's action. Rage is the aspect of waking up to the truth. It takes the fact of Light and Void, that there is objectivity and subjectivity, and confusion and clarity. But Rage spends too long looking at one, and gets mad when it finds out that the other exists. Rage lends to Heart the ability to see that your body is not who you are. You are who you are, and who you are is an important part of this world and your experience, so you should take action for what you believe in. "Find the truth about your Self," it says. [DEREALIZING SECTION ENDS HERE] Mind sees objectively, through Light. It takes note of Void, it says, "sure, that's there, but what's here?" It takes an interest in objective things, things it can see and feel and know for a positive fact without much introspection. It's sacrificing the acknowledgement of who's in the room in favor of finding out what the room is, and what's outside of the room. Notice how I said "sacrificing". Sacrifice is a theme of Space, which is where Mind got the idea of sacrificing trying to look into the unknowns, the Void. It does so in favor of the available information that you do know about, the Light. Light is everything you CAN see, everything you will know in your lifetime. Mind, like Heart, draws from another nearby source. Heart draws Rage for the source of it's action. Mind draws Hope. Mind is looking at Light, and looking for the best ways to achieve the ideal, the Hope. Ideals are somewhat of an unknown, which is Hope's relationship to Void. Hope is ideal due to it's relationship to Light, Light being the aspect of “the best” and most “correct” outcome. In my All Aspects Breakdown, I said that Hope is so weird because it COULD be true, and it would be sweet if it was. Mind says, "Okay, if it really can be true somehow, I'll try to find the best path towards getting it." This is displaying Mind's relationship to Life. See this shit? See how it all connects? How high do you even have to BE to think of this shit Andrew Hussie? HOW? So, anyway, if you have any insight into aspects and stuff, I've turned my asks and comments on I think, so you can give me your wisdom on the topic. Thank you for reading! I hope to do more of these in the future, if the inner need arises and I've been on a particularly wild psychologic bender.

[touch-me-oooo]

All HS Aspects Breakdown

To me, all of the aspects together represent the experience of a play. In that, Breath is the drive. The wind in our sails. It's the imagination. Being there, but not bound to anything. Free-flowing conscious, unable to be grasped, only able to be invited in by the vacuum. It's a driving force, lovingly pushing that which tries to remain still. It's irresponsibility, and agency. Breath pushes things around and around, and inspires wherever it goes. It is free of suffering, because it cannot be bound.

Life, is the energy of Breath, harnessed and made into something else. Life is organized, feeding and growing in power. It's the way your DNA is coiled, it's patterns repeated, it's boundless, complex perfection that spreads infinitely in fractals. It's turning formless into form. Through Breath it is driven. It is breaking the law of anarchy, the basic state, and rebelling against simply having an ideal, and actually fights to get it. It is eating the apple in the garden of Eden, and disrupting peace in having nothing to hold and thus being free. It does this in favor of the struggle where you must hold on, you must survive somehow. It's greedy. Life is the aspect of fighting to be able to have agency while not being fragile enough to simply have it be taken back. Life is fortified, intelligent, and hungry.

Light is all that is observable. Light is the spotlight above the stage, showing you the main events. Light is objective. It's relevance, and importance. It's showing you something. It's correctness. It's showing you the character at their most crucial moments, it's showing you success and the most pivotal moments that led to it. To view and understand Light as a whole is to see that it is lines within lines within lines within lines, forever and ever, showing you all that you'll ever be able to know until...

Time. Time is deciding where the lines end. It is commonly seen as decay. The Finite. Good old Mortality. Time decides where the lines of light begin and end. It is the pacing of the play, placing ends and beginnings here and there. The birth of a character, their events, and the death of that character is all thanks to Time. Time is also the aspect of the self experience(Heart). A good way to think about Time is to look at any tool. A hammer, just as an example. A hammer is forged, used, and eventually broken, perhaps even several times if it is repaired repeatedly(Life). You can even think about the idea of hammers. Hammers are invented/discovered, used, and eventually forgotten about. Then the next rendition of hammers begins, perhaps they're called something different or shaped in another way or used for another purpose. But the thing that Time teaches us is that every play is really the same. Every story is a rendition of the original story(Light). The story of experience. Birth, events, then death. Beginning, middle, and end. You may stuff the most random things in between, but if you zoom out, all stories are identical, and they stop only to begin again and again.(Rage?)

Heart is a difficult one for me to understand, and I don't really get other people's views on Heart when I do my research. But, I'll try my best. The general consensus is this: Heart is the aspect of Personality. It governs impulses, emotions, and the "soul", or your being, however you wanna look at it. I imagine it's role in the figurative play as a character's traits; their strengths and weaknesses, their bonds, and their romance. I guess Heartbound are particularly interested in feelings and impulses, specifically how they control people's actions. The aspect of Heart is a character's perception of the world based purely on feelings. It responds to stimuli, totally unconcerned about objectivity. But, it's also about being someone, and coming to terms with that. Or at least, that's how I understand it.

But now, Rage. Rage is the aspect of waking up to the lies. Seeing structure and recognizing that it wasn't meant to be like that. Everything is supposed to be free, I shouldn't have a body, I shouldn't even be thinking thoughts right now, this is all preposterous and I'm going to return things to their rightful states. It's seeing an ideal, A hope, being lured in, lured in, reaching out to grab it, but. You can't take it. It's only a hope. It's not real. It's the feeling of heartbreak, when you thought it was meant to be. But it wasn't meant to be, and it never was. Because it didn't happen that way. It's waking up to that, to rejection. It's a feeling of being bound, being unable to have the fake ideal even though it would be so great to have it. It's even coming to terms with that firstly, then doing something about it. Whether that be to make right the wrongs, or to impulsively destroy it all.

Blood. Blood is the aspect of relation, and how those relations bind together. It's a life of service to the tribe, in hope that you'll all eventually make it to the end happily. Think of Breath and Blood as different kinds of priests. Breath is the priest that liberates you, and sets you free. Blood is the priest that takes you in, and holds you as you both read scripture by candlelight, finding solace in service to the deities, where all else is pain and suffering alone. It isn't capture, necessarily. It's family. Sometimes family is a chain like capture, sometimes it's an anchor that holds you in place and calms you. Hugs my dude. Bloodbound sometimes have to suffer though, finding that chains can be broken, either by choice or circumstance, and when your relationships are severed, or damaged, it hurts. Being alone in a world of suffering is hard, and Bloodbound know that more than anybody else. So, depending on how Rage or Doom leaning the Bloodbound is, they may help others in taking them in to accept suffering, or taking them in to become a team, and fight against the suffering.

Doom is being bound. Bound and suffering, or bound and cared for. Often both. But either way, Doom is the aspect of giving in to the limitations. Life goes on, refusing to die as long as it has control, denying limitation and saying "I CAN". But it wont always have control, and thats because of Doom. Doom is recognizing the inevitability of not being around forever, and being okay with it. It's saying "I CANNOT", and just chilling while the fire consumes them. It's knowing there's no chance of Hope, it's knowing that no amount of Rage will turn things around, and it's knowing that the ends of Life's ever-growing fractals fizzle out into Void eventually. It recognizes that there is no amount of detachment that can unbind the Doombound from Death. Time kills all, so one way or another, bound or unbound, we will all recede into...

Void. Void is where the spotlight doesn't touch. It's further back than that. It's what the audience can't see. It's the backstories nobody knows about. It's irrelevant information, things the story doesn't go over. It's everywhere the current setting is not. It's the darkness at the corner of your eyes. You can turn your head, get mirrors, record, analyze, or guess or do whatever you can try to attempt a glance into that dark spot. But you won't ever see it for yourself. You can't even imagine it. You can try to know everything, but Void teaches that the first step to doing that is to recognize that you know nothing. Voidbound's Hearts aren't all there. They give in to the Void voluntarily. Think about how modern astronomers are mapping the stars, diligently building better and better tools to see further and further out and tracking what they can see. Then notice how unlikely it is that humans will ever see every last detail of it. We don't even know every last detail about Earth, though we record as much as we can about our discoveries. We dismiss any discovery we deem irrelevant, too, because we're so focused on what's in the spotlight. Void is realizing that the whole thing is too big, and too deep, and too detailed to ever possibly truly understand it. And so, taking Doom's advice, any Voidbound person in their right mind would just... Not try to do anything about that. And so we just leave Void to being nothing.

Where Time is the aspect of the play's pacing and events, Space is the stage and setting. Space is your mommy. Your real mommy. Forget what you think you've got. Space is the one that really made you. Space is artistic, it wastes so much Time to build little intricacies, all of them. Remember Void? Remember how I talked about all those little details you'll never know about? Space made those. Space is the mom of all of that. Sure, Time conducted some stuff in the background, yeah, but Time also left to go get cigarettes, and you don't think Time is coming back to see it all grow up. Time is coming back to end it later. What a dick. But Time might come to see your basketball game. Maybe. If Time thinks you'll win. What a fucking asshole. Anyways. Space builds on objective laws, and turns a lot of little nothings into something. It turns a lot of dust floating around into big rocks called planets, where things happen and stuff is born, then raised, and eventually dies if it happens to have the right chemicals on it. This is about as much as I'm willing to write about Space with this crummy English language. I could go on and on about Space.

Mind. Mind is the other aspect on looking at all this stuff. Where Heart looks at things with subjective feelings, Mind looks at things with objective fact. Mind excludes feelings, and in that way it is unbound and capable of doing what is objectively right. It doesn't concern personality or romantic impulses. If it's evil, destroy it. Period. Enter. Indent. Mind considers consequence, it sees what could happen if X. Heart doesn't care what the consequences are, it feels something, so it must follow it, regardless of X. What I'm saying here is that these two aspects both draw upon Light and Void, where Mind draws upon Light to see and choose the objective, and Heart draws upon Void to choose the subjective. Both are seeking the ideal, which is on the aspect wheel as...

Hope. Hope is that the person you like will like you back. It's that Santa Claus is actually real and isn't transphobic. It's that you have magic powers for real bro. It's the idea of matter from nothing, similar to how Space turns a lot of debris into something. But with Hope, it's taking concepts of nothing and turning it into something. It's that the ideal will present itself when all seems lost. That something will appear out of nothing and save you. But Rage shows us that fundamentally, Hope is nothing but ideas. It's fake. But... It's also... Fucking real???? Hope is the aspect of Hope, in that you HOPE it's real, and if you believe it, and really really do, it could become real??? When Santa Claus is standing in front of you, do you still Hope he's real? No, because he's literally right there! You can't hope he's real because he IS real, you're with him right now! Hopebound are theoretically capable of using Hope and Belief to fabricate and bring forth fake things as real things. I don't understand Hope completely, I'm just telling you what I think it is based on research and long hours pondering. It doesn't really make sense in some ways, or it doesn't function like the other aspects in that one particular part about being fake, but also real? I think it's kind of like, the driving fuel behind powerful things. It inspires things to be real, I guess?

That's it then. All the aspects on the aspect wheel. Thank you for reading my aspecting breakdown. I hope it helped you, or was at least entertaining. If you have input, or you can clarify or enlighten me on any of the aspects, don't be afraid to make contact with me. Peace. (: