heirloomairloom

[heirloomairloom]

Stuck in the Endless Abyss level on Hiveswap (ie Screen number 2)

I tried looking at various objects.

I think the purple color might be a reference to a new Troll blood type? Maybe a caste higher than fuschia?

#HiveswapTheory

I’m guessing I might need the Eight Extra Months of “Bug Fixing” skill to progress from this point, but I can’t find it.

Help?

Seriously. Windows 10. Anybody know how to get past this?

Edit: Silly me! Xefros’s Reinstall the Game to Your C Drive technique lit the room up. I’m really kicking myself for not having solved the game’s first puzzle sooner!

[heirloomairloom]

The Truth About Jane’s Assassination Attempt

Something’s fishy about how Jane almost died on the moon. Let’s see if we can’t get to the bottom of this mystery!

Notice how Roxy nearly instantly knows where Jane is, despite the fact that Jane had only sent the following two snapchats photos:

This one shows only a banner threatening Jane’s life. There is no way Roxy could have recognized it.

This one gives a dark and blurry view of a red wall with some shadows on it.

Remember that Roxy is one of the players who chose to live in the Carapace Kingdom, which built this installation.

This explains how Roxy knows about the building and the moon destruction plan. But even if she had seen that building before, even if she had been in it or even made it herself, there’s no way one picture of a wall would be enough to identify it uniquely. Jane could be anywhere in the world, so long as it is dark and painted red. How does Roxy instantly know where she is?

The second question is how did she get there in the first place?

She was using a hacked transportalizer. And why did she stay in the base instead of fleeing? Because Roxy told her “find a place 2 hide were comin to ur rescue.”

Roxy and Jane are both God Tiers. Jane could have easily flown from the moon to Earth in the same amount of time it took Roxy to fly from Earth to the moon. And why did she even use the transporalizer in the first place?

Because Roxy invited her to dinner. But what is Roxy doing asking Jane to join her date with Calliope at a fancy restaurant? Little protip: If you’re taking your girlfriend out on a nice Thanksgiving/birthday date and she starts texting her best friend to invite her to come too? That means your relationship is crashing and burning like an airplane that’s rapidly loosing altitude over a district of Tabasco sauce factories.

Yet this is happening in their first year on Earth C...

... 5000 years into the new civilization’s history.

But three years later on John’s 19th birthday, April 13th 5003...

... the two of them are still together.

Maybe they patched things up.

Or maybe Roxy had a more sinister motive and was relying on Calliope’s inexperience with human social norms to get away with such a strange and suspicious action.

Jane was kidnapped through hacking. Who is an expert hacker? Roxy Lalonde.

The moon destroying plan is supposed to be a “surprise” for the creators...

...but who knew about it beforehand and could have even given her kingdom the idea herself? Roxy Lalonde.

The whole plan hinges on the fact that Jane will use the hacked transportalizer a few minutes before the laser was scheduled to be fired. And who guaranteed that she would be there by inviting her out at exactly the right time, then telling her to stay put? Roxy Lalonde.

The whole thing is a set up. Roxy was trying to murder Jane the whole time. She is the one who hacked the transportalizer. She’s the one who made the fake banner framing a group of radical troll racists. She’s the one who timed it all so that Calliope would be a witness.

Roxy is using poor innocent Calliope as her alibi. Notice how Calliope did not bring her own phone. They’re just passing Roxy’s back and forth, which is why you never see one holding a phone in a picture taken by the other. This is why Roxy brought Calliope along on her moon rescue mission, despite the fact that Calliope cannot fly and so can only slow Roxy down. On one hand, it gives Roxy a witness to tell the others that she did everything she could to try to save Jane’s life. On the other, it prevents Calliope from trying to call for help from...

...Jade, who can fling vehicles at fractions of the speed of light, and who could therefore rescue Jane much faster than Roxy herself.

...John, who can instantly retcon himself to the moon and just as instantly retcon himself and Jane back to Earth.

...Dave, who can use time travel to arrive at the moon before he departs and drag Jane to a safe point in the future.

...or the Creator Simultaneitivity Jubilee Committee, who Roxy should clearly know exists because of how easily she recognized their base and who are certain to delay or cancel the firing of the laser if ordered by either Roxy or Calliope, who are two of the direct rulers of the Carapacian Kingdom.

Roxy will, of course, claim that she wasn’t thinking clearly to explain why she rushed off on her own, and poor naive Calliope will be there to back her up.

As for the motive? I’m not clear on that one yet, but my gut tells me it’s the oldest one in the book: love. Roxy is afraid Calliope may love Jane more than her, so she’s rubbing out the competition. Further upd8s may provide more clues that give Roxy different or additional incentives to get rid of Jane, however.

Edit: Thank you to Reddit poster Treek for pointing out that Jane needs to die a just death for it to stick. The most likely explanation now is that Jane’s bout of megalomania at the end of the last update is not a new development, but part of a gradual slide into darkness. Roxy’s most likely motive is that she realizes Jane is dangerous and is willing to sacrifice her for the greater good.

[heirloomairloom]

Hey Karkat! Guess what!

It turns out Echidna was wrong! In the 5000 years you’ve been gone, the trolls created a peaceful society without you guiding them!

Oh Karkat... fuck you. Fuck you for thinking you could ever make a difference.

[heirloomairloom]

Urgh, I may as well tackle one of the "the ending is actually deep" theories, and, since this is the one that crossed my dashboard, it may as well be this one.

The only thing you can really do in life is set goals for yourself, decide what you want, and then do your best to seek that. Homestuck operates the same way. All these characters ever wanted was to be together and live happy and safe���— what greater victory is there, than to achieve that?

Well, for starters, they could overcome their teenaged personal hang ups and grow into mature, well adjusted people like the entire rest of the story including parts of the ending itself were leading up to.

And it is only after she falls asleep that her session seems to “Pop,” and cease existing. The last observer is no longer present, and so that manifestation of reality shuts off. Her dreamself, existing outside the normal flow of time, seemingly just merges with the Alpha timeline.

This is the first of many points that simply get the facts of how paradox space works wrong. When Rose goes to sleep, she wakes up as Dream Rose, who can observe reality just fine. Dave and Rose had been asleep at the same point in that timeline (Dave mentions that he woke up Rose the way she woke him up in the alpha timeline) and this didn't end their timeline.

Well, if sleep can't end timelines, what about character death?  Nope. Remember how there are no Gamzee ghosts? The Hussie-avater explicitly says this is because there were no timelines were Gamzee died. Instead, he lived to the end of each of them and got wiped out when they each petered out into nothingness.

It also comes into play with alternate timelines. Timelines only branch based on the decisions of the players. Every Homestuck character is in and of themselves a vector of possibility, based on which paradox space can expand its own existence in infinite ways. These effects are compounded and exponentially increased for every way that characters can interact.

And the propagation of existence and the experience of existing are their own inherent goods. The alternative to existing is to simply Not Exist, and the alternative is preferable if only because it’s more interesting. So in a sense, for reality’s sake, the more variation, the better. You can disagree with that, but it’s a philosophical point, not a narrative one — it’s pretty obvious Paradox Space agrees with me, and — given all of our continued existences — that reality does too.

Both Terezi and Aranea say that reality actually hates this kind of thing.

GC: P4R4DOX SP4C3 1S PR3TTY V1C1OUS 4BOUT PUN1SH1NG THOS3 1N V1OL4T1ON OF 1TS PL4N TG: punishing GC: SUR3 GC: 1T F1NDS W4YS TO 4NN1H1L4T3 TH3 P4THS WH1CH DO NOT CONTR1BUT3 CONSTRUCT1V3LY TO 1TS OWN PROP4G4T1ON GC: 4ND 1T 1S 3QU4LLY M3RC1L3SS TO THOS3 WHO 1NH4B1T TH3M, 4ND 1N P4RT1CUL4R, THOS3 WHO C4US3 TH3M GC: 1T 4PP34RS TO H4V3 4 S3NS3 OF JUST1C3, DONT YOU TH1NK?

AG: Think of it like circulatory system, where the veins and capillaries that do not help the overall flow of 8lood through the system are likely to wither and die. Those are doomed offshoots. AG: Reality itself is using you and many others to propagate its own existence. Strictly speaking, there is only one path to its successful propagation. 8ut it still permits you to make choices. Not all that are conceiva8le, 8ut some nevertheless, as dictated 8y who you are and the challenges you face. And you are free to make key decisions however you like, as long as you understand that some of these paths unfairly or not will lead to o8livion. 8ecause those choices do not contri8ute constructively to the perpetuation of all existence, including your own. AG: Such is the 8urden assumed 8y anyone who plays this game.

The Alpha timeline is the Alpha timeline because of Lord English. It is specifically described by Doc Scratch as the timeline which leads to his own creation — and thus, by necessity, Lord English’s creation as well. And since Lord English’s influence is partly responsible for influencing the creation of every character we’ve met, it is also the timeline which leads to everyone existing in the first place.

Prove it.

None of the characters who talk about the mechanics of alternate timelines attribute them to Lord English or regard them as unnatural at all. Is it possible that literally all the exposition about timelines is wrong? Sure. But a story in which the villian's evil actions are never explained, get misattributed to natural forces, and are undone purely by accident, with neither characters nor readers ever realizing there was anything to undo, is a BAD STORY.

In fact, Sburb’s late game mechanics actively contradict the idea of an Alpha Timeline — what’s the point of God Tiers if making the choice to become one will result in doom? That doesn’t exactly jive with Skaia’s typical ability to retroactively prepare for future events — it would likely just not create a quest bed if it was that against a player god tiering.

Why create a Black King if his victory would doom winning players to an offshoot timeline? Why bother creating entire planets? Sburb could just create only the parts the players will actually visit, and leave the rest of the Land a blank grey sphere. Why bother creating sessions at all when they won't be won?

Yes, the game does offer people choices knowing that they won't take them.

This is why the Alpha Timeline is so specific and stringent, and why any deviation from it leads to doomed timelines.Doomed timelines come about when stable time loops are failed that are necessary to propagate reality.

But normally, after a point, Sburb wouldn’t really need to use any more time loops to propagate its own existence. In essence, then, in a ‘natural’ Sburb game, it makes sense the “Alpha Timeline” would end, and there would be no more stable time loops dictating the course of their lives unless a player willingly set one up themselves.

Not all doomed timelines are caused by broken time loops. Every time a player makes a choice, they are casting aside the other possibilities they could have had. If they didn't, there would be no choice at all. When Terezi stabbed Vriska, she was making a choice to allow that timeline to continue while allowing the other potential realities to pass by. If she didn't, if Terezi really did both those things in separate time lines that both continued on, each as valid as the other, then she is no longer capable of making a true decision. She's no longer a person. She's Frisk in Undertale, going through both the pacifist and genocide routes just because those are both options and so doing both is the only way to 100% the game. Terezi is no longer the person who chose to kill one friend to save the rest of them. She's Terezi 4133057135, who was randomly assigned by a roll of the cosmic dice to exist in the universe where she stabbed Vriska instead of the one where she didn't.

In fact this is likely the true nature of the Ultimate Reward: Not just a Universe — an infinity of space — but also an infinity of time.

In essence, post-Sburb victory probably looks a lot like the dream bubbles do! With two obvious differences: you wouldn’t have the overlap of the same person existing in the same place, and you wouldn’t have the stagnation and hollowness of existing in a reality essentially completely defined by the past.

Everyone you love, you are with, in some version of reality. Everyone you want to be, you eventually become. An inexhaustible series of branching spacetimes for kids who have become gods to become, enjoy, and create themselves and each other anew again and again and again.

Universes are mortal. Even if Jack, the Felt, Lord English in his A2 body, and Calliope's black hole don't kill universe C, it will die of old age one day. And even if each of the players makes a new choice every picosecond of every day, they will never cross from large but finite into infinity.

What's more, not all things that could happen are possible in Homestuck. Terezi could have responded to Vriska by putting on a tutu and performing a ballet. But she didn't, not in any timeline. If no action you would ever take would lead to goal X being achieved, then you'll never achieve it in Paradox Space, no matter how many timelines you spawn or how much you want it.

Jade comes to the deepest understanding of herself, her physical reality, and her Aspect out of all the human kids. This domination of her aspect and power make her the most effective character among our protagonists’ team, and essentially a single-person game changer.

Jade was powerful because she merged with an omnipotent dog. This is why Calliope says she will lose her powers after the sun is destroyed, even though this would not disrupt her understanding of her aspect.

Then we have Terezi, who seemingly experiences an epiphany after being fully honest about her feelings with Vriska. Many people seem to think she’s depressed by the end of the story, but I don’t see it. She experiences what seems to be a complete connection, not just to her own alternate selves, but to the decisions and paths of pretty much every single character in the story.

Terezi admits that her antagonistic persona is something she can't break out of to tell her friends what they mean to her and laments that she wants to know about her alternate selves even if it wouldn't be a magic cure-all for her problems. She then sees her alternate selves and ends the comic by acting like nothing is wrong and insulting Jade. If this was supposed to definitively communicate to the reader that her problems were solved, it doesn't work, because her behavior exactly matches the front she used to put up.

Specifically, John is the Heir of Breath, and he literally inherits the plot of Homestuck from a Lord, and begins to change it to the benefit of his friends. In essence he has reached a level of Sophia that allows him to see his entire reality for the oppressive narrative it is, and not just rebel against it, but reconstruct it entirely.

John's retcon powers are responsible for Lord English's creation. Literally, if not for the fact that John's pre-emptive retcons were a fore-ordained part of the timeline all along, Lord English would not exist. Retcons are just as much under the control of Caliborn's chokehold over the timeline as everything else.

His Ultimate Self dies along with the story, with his sector of paradox space, and with his Alpha Timeline. Without the ability to interact meaningfully with others, he can’t change or grow, and thus he dooms himself to true stagnation.

There is no canon evidence that Lord English's ultimate self was harmed by him presumably getting shoved into a black hole. It's even ambiguous whether Caliborn's ultimate self survives as Calliope in universe C. It depends one whether or not the merged Cherub that hatched from their egg was one person who diverged into two personalities (like Jade and Jadesprite) or two people who started off merged together (like Davepetasprite.)

God Tier Calliope, the ultimate expression of not trying to affect reality but respecting the paths and expressions of others, died saving everything in one single moment of impact, swallowing the entirety of the story of Homestuck within her black hole.

Beta Calliope chose the path of the conqueror. She told Echnidna to blow up Prospit and promised to conquer and destroy 15 planets full of life in exchange for the power to hunt down and punish evil for the rest of eternity. Her final act was to kill all the ghosts in the dream bubbles to take Lord English down. She was a lot of good things, but was even more devoted to sacrificing others for the greater good than Vriska was.

But attempting to portray a literally infinite reality is a loser’s game, as far as artistic work goes. No matter what Hussie decided to show or not show us, people would use it to decide that one version of Homestuck’s future is Absolutely Real — Canon — while others are Absolutely Not.

This is ridiculous. There are so many ways to represent an infinite (or at least arbitrarily large) number of timelines that continue on without being doomed. Just show, like, a couple of tubes with pictures of the kids doing various (but mutually contradictory) things on them, then pan out to show that there are a whole bunch of tubes branching off from each other and that they continue on, far up into the distance. Or hell, just put an actual 3D infinity symbol over them. That wouldn't even be out of place for Homestuck. There would be absolutely no way to misinterpret that as anything else or realistically argue that only one of the shown timelines was canon.

(Because I know for a fact some people are going to use this as justification for shipping gay characters in heterosexual pairings or whatever, keep in mind that while reality is essentially infinite, it’s still ultimately created by the characters! That means that realities the characters don’t feel are true to them aren’t going to be desirable for them, and likely would not be made. Infinite causality sure is weird!)

So at the top of the page when you said all ships are canon, you were wrong by your own admission, because my OTP of Dirk/Kanaya will never happen. And so that quote must not have been talking about some hypothetical post-Alpha Timeline world, because you assert that not all ships would be canon in such a scenario.

But our culture is really not past the notion of authorial intent. For all intents and purposes, if Hussie had closed anything in Homestuck as definitively as a list of “endgame ships” or with a definitive statement of Who Lives and Who Doesn’t, if a particular characters’ arc resolved in a particular definite way, all of fandom and fanfiction and fanculture would follow his cue.

Here is a list of couples who are either dating or heavily flirting and implied to be interested in getting together at the end of Homestuck: John <3< Terezi, John/Roxy, Rose/Kanaya, Dave/Karkat, WV/PM, B1 Jack Noir/MS Paint. Sure, they could break up and new couples could form in the future. The same could be said of any additional relationships seen in any hypothetical extension to the ending. These already are our end game ships, barring something ridiculous like Hussie chronicling the characters' entire lives up to their deaths.

Here is a list of characters who are definitely, definitely dead beyond all hope: All A1 Trolls, ancestors, guardians except B2 Dad, Eridan, and Feferi.

Here is a list of characters who were last seen standing around a reality destroying vortex and are dead barring bullshit deus ex machinas in the epilogue: Sollux, Davepeta (and thus Davesprite and Nepeta), and Vriska.

Here is a list of characters who completed their character arcs: pre-retcon Tavros(got to do something impressive and useful), Kanaya (formed a relationship with Rose and restored her species), Vriska (died of hubris), Aranea (died of hubris), Equius(stopped being a space racist), Eridan(forgiven by his victims' ghosts in the afterlife), Meenah (accepted her position as the leader of the troll species without going mad with power), John (stopped acting immature, finally got to feel important, got a girlfriend), Rose (resolved issues with her mom), Dave (resolved issues with his bro, accepted that he was a hero, came to terms with his sexuality), Dirk (got a handle on his self loathing), Roxy (overcame alcoholism, met her mom, kept her friends together, got a boyfriend, and revenge killed the woman who murdered her mother) and Caliborn (punished for not earning his wings by getting sucked into a black hole).

With all of that set in stone, I think we can stand a few more main characters resolving their issues on screen without falling down the slippery slope to pure determinism that will kill all fanfics forever.

All the characters got progression to their character arcs, they learned something new or came to some new degree of insight and resolution. But all of them did so in a way that makes it clear this is only the beginning of their story:

Karkat, Terezi, and Jake have actually backslided. They are far less healthy than they were at the start of the comic. Calliope meanwhile is crippled forever. Without Caliborn around she will never be able to grow up properly.

And what about Roxy? What has she got left to do to finish her character arc? What challenge hasn't she essentially overcome? What goal of hers remains unmet? Nothing, she's done as a character, as well off as anyone can hope to be at the end of a story.

It never really made sense to expect the characters to wrap up all their issues and problems in the span of a few hours before fighting a bunch of Big Bosses.

Rose, Dave, Dirk, and Equius all did this exact thing.

That's why all these "they're people they don't have character arc" theories fall flat. They are too clever for their own good. You say that half the characters having unfinished arcs is ok because its a statement about stories not being realistic? Well then the ending still sucks, because half the characters DID get that exact kind of unrealistic, storybook resolution, which completely undermines the point the story was allegedly trying to make.

Many questions in the ending are basically Schrodingers’ boxes. Does Vriska survive? Do the Beta kids get to live free? Do the trolls get to live forever, too? Did the ghosts get to go to the new universe as well? Hey, for that matter, what about (Vriska) and (Terezi)? Do the kids even have to go fight Lord English at all, or did changing the alpha timeline make it so they don’t have to?

For every black box the narrative gives us, we are faced with a question. With a little lateral thinking, we can answer all of these questions for ourselves, and we can come to different yet compelling conclusions for all of them.

Then why stop the story where it did? He could have just as easily ended it right after Cascade. What happened after all the bosses were killed? You don't know, so make something up! He could, in fact, have stopped the story at any arbitrary point. Just choose a random page after John went through the juju, cut out all the content past that, and put up the white curtains. These kind of theories apply exactly as well regardless. What happened after John stole Terezi's scalemate? Hussie can't tell us, because then the mystery would be gone. The End, thanks for playing!

Here is the punchline to the V A S T J O K E:

Homestuck ends by giving its characters the same freedom we have, and by giving us the power to follow them down whatever chain of choices we wish to watch them make.

It believes it’s characters are vectors of infinite potential. But it also believes that about us, the readers. It believes that about you.

Do you want the story to proceed so that Terezi flies off into dreambubble land to drag Vriska back home and make out with her? Do you want Dave and Karkat to start dating Jade? Do you want it to turn out that the new universe has the means for the trolls to God Tier? Do you want it to turn out that all the ghosts got to be revived and live in the new universe too? Wanna write “All Ships Are Canon” postfic?

Go for it. Go for all of it. Create it, and it’s canon. It’s real. No timelines are doomed anymore, so now everything is alpha timeline. Everything is canon and important and true. You don’t even have to make fanfic of it if you can’t go through the effort: all you have to do is hold it as a truth in your heart, let it play out within you, and as far as Homestuck’s canon is concerned, it’s real.

People need neither permission nor encouragement for this. I guarantee you that right now someone is writing a fanfic where Centaur!John is going on his first nervous hate date with Grunkle Stan (except a Grunkle Stan from an alternate universe where he was a post-apocalyptic cowboy.) Abandoning the rest of the story just to make that fanfic slightly less non-canon is a horrible idea.

And for all the talk about how all endings are canon... they aren't. One ending is canon, according to you. The ending where the heroes addressed a specific problem (there only being one Alpha Timeline) through a specific method (the defeat of Lord English) achieving a specific result (life in a universe without doomed timelines.) My personal ending in which Lord English wins and goes on to kill all the characters (not just in one timeline, ALL of them, forever) except he spares the trolls so that they can reproduce and he will have even more trolls to kill in the future is not canon. It can never be, because it contradicts every other ending that could exist.

[heirloomairloom]

Remember the good times and cut Hussie a little slack. The good parts of Homestuck are still about as large as the entire Harry Potter series, and were written much faster during a time in which the author was being jerked around by a company that was committing massive embezzlement against him and starting his own video game development studio. Hussie must be so tired of this shit, I can't begrudge him for giving up on the story. Look at Homestuck 2.0. An honest to God movie star begging fans to make content for their Youtube channel for them. Like, holy fuck, I feel so sad for these people. It's not like he intentionally made a bad ending to spite his fans.

I think you may be overestimating just how much was missing from the ending too, so maybe making a list of unresolved plot threads and discussing them would help. To take the examples from your post, you seem to have forgotten that the Deringer was used to alchemize Caledfwlch, without which Dave wouldn't have been able to overcome Caliborn's immortality to destroy the final incarnation of Lord English's soul. Playing the rain would have just repopulated the oceans of LoLaR for her Land's quest, which the game never actually intended her to complete in the first place. LoLaR's quest was just dumb cutsey kiddy stuff to spur Rose through her teenage rebellion phase, as Dave explained.

Quick update on where I'm at. (TL;DR: Still haven't given up on Homestuck yet, but damn it's hard.)

It’s 1 AM, I’m trying to go to sleep. As usual, my thoughts drift to Homestuck, whether I want them to or not. Except this time I think to myself… “Hey, it’s been a while. I’ve had time to heal. It already hurts a whole lot less. Why not try to think about Homestuck intentionally, accept the ending, and start to finally process things?”

And so I think about it. And it seems alright! …For about three minutes.

Then my thoughts drift to the Denizens. To how we saw so little of them. To how one being implied to be a “witch” and “not a snake” was all we’ll ever know about her besides a shitty silhouette. To the paltry few mostly-offscreen Choices that were made. To how Andrew seemed so blithely underconfident that he could do justice to their faces that the closest thing we ever saw to a Denizen’s actual face was that SHITTY Demon Mobster Kingpin ripoff Yaldabaoth sketchface in Collide.

And then – THEN – I realize that not only did we never see Hephaestus, but his entire Choice, his entire epic repairing-one-thing SCHTICK, was absolutely and UTTERLY irrelevant to the plot in every single way. No payoff. He just fixed a shitty metaphor-sword. There’s no way to resolve that in the epilogue. It’s just permanently a thing that never mattered, forever.

And my blood just BOILS.

I understand the Unstuck and Unbound theory/theories. I understand that the POINT could have been that this really never meant anything all along, that these were all distractions. That Caliborn saying his veins swum with red herrings might have been a hint that all the overwrought foreshadowing in Homestuck would need to be completely sidestepped and unfulfilled if Lord English’s plans were ever to be glitched-out-of. If the kids were ever to be happy and free. I GET that.

But I can’t fully buy the Unstuck and Unbound theory, no matter how much I want to. I can’t buy 100% into it without serious confirmation. (Especially not with so many theories busted to hell by the end already.) And whichever parts of me DON’T buy into Unstuck and Unbound, whichever parts doubt the ONE POSSIBLE JUSTIFICATION for Andrew throwing the whole fucking plot out the window and jump-cutting to an easy happy ending… those parts can’t help but be angry. Really, really angry.

Angry that it seems like Andrew was having a bad year or two and just… decided to take a guillotine to his story and cut it short undone.

It’s as if you made a good friend, a really REALLY good wonderful friend, and you spent years together, and you knew they were eventually going to move out of the country, but you were going to make it as good a time as possible while he was there. And you do EVERYTHING together, and when the end finally comes you prepare to throw the biggest bash of all. But then he fucking SCREWS YOU. (Not that so many theories turned out wrong – that was always in the cards just from the nature of theorizing, part of the fun – but that there are NO FUCKING ANSWERS and everything is wrapped up by pure magic and nothing else, in a story that was so good about doing the exact opposite of that for its entire length.) He screws the SHIT out of you and all of your friends right before he leaves, vanishing with your money like a deflating Ponzi scheme, and has no intention to even write back to you about what he did (Epilogue) anytime soon. Is in no hurry to apologize, or even fucking justify himself. He just leaves behind a note saying “you figure it out”, and moves on to his next big thing (Hiveswap). And no matter how much you want to believe that he had the best intentions, no matter how much you believe he must have had a REASON, it’s impossible to believe with all your heart that that’s true. Not when he doesn’t even take the fucking time to say “I’m sorry”. (WHY did he have to say he’s not even in a hurry to do the epilogue? Why didn’t he even throw in an “I’m sorry, but” before he said it??!?) It’s impossible not to be angry. It’s impossible to try and forgive him on that unexplained, broken note. And it’s almost impossible to avoid the sense that all your good experiences with them in the past have been retroactively poisoned, the sense that you were utterly wrong about your friend having ever cared about you at all.

…It’s really hard. I don’t know how to stop being angry about this and still think about Homestuck, still help clean up the huge mess left behind by its wreckage. Every permanently-unanswered question that can’t possibly be addressed by the epilogue just… gets me so mad that I have to take my mind back off the comic. What do I do?

Any recommendations? I’m not giving up, I won’t let this ending do that to me. But I could definitely use some help. Any more advice on how to come to terms with this, how to be able to still stand Homestuck canon enough to finish analyzing it?

[heirloomairloom]

Why would Vriska and Sollux get sucked in if Aradia can just fly out? They can fly just as well as she can.

From the timing of the scenes, it looks like Aradia has already gotten out of dodge while the juju is still doing its work, meaning she'd be much farther away than the others, who are nowhere within sight during her scene. For comparison, Lord English can fly and he probably didn't make it out alive. Point taken on Sollux though, since we don't see him at all. He could have bailed even earlier than Aradia did and be completely safe, or he could have died during Collide, impossible to say.

[heirloomairloom]

I will say that there are two flaws in your ==> post regarding Karkat, Kanaya, Terezi, and Calliope being the surviving players (other than things like the fact we know and have seen the fact that Universe C will eventually be destroyed [but that is not necessary to dwell on, because it is so far removed, being in the far-flung future]) : Those are that Roxy has demonstrated the ability to transport herself and others directly into the furthest ring, andThatTheBetaKidsMayBeReleasedAndEscape.

There's nothing special about getting to the Furthest Ring. Anyone can do it if they just fly past Derse's orbit. It won't help them get back to universe C. Although if the horrorterrors are feeling merciful, they might meet up with Aradia and join her on universe spanning adventures.

Hope that last ask (regarding your ==> post) was not too insulting... I did not intend to be so blunt, but ran out of character space. Anyway, what I meant about the Beta Kids possibly escaping was that the nature of the Ultimate/House/Homestuck Juju being used against Lord English has not completely been explained, and seeing as there is the possibility it spit the Beta Kids out so that Lord English could be sucked in (being composed of 4 people), IFeelThereIsAPotentialForJohnRetportingThemOut.

Consider things from the Beta kids' perspective. A minute ago they were planning to kill Caliborn before he became Lord English. If they survived, they have no reason to not just teleport right back to LoCaM to pick up where they left off now that Caliborn has wasted his strongest weapon. (Unless John lost his retcon powers by going through the house again, in which case they're just as doomed as Vriska.)

I hadn't considered that the juju might suck in Lord English. Though if it did, it would have to spit him out again at some point before it went back in time to become part of Yaldabaoth's treasure.

[heirloomairloom]

==>

Homestuck has always been consistent with the length of its “next page” arrows. There is one line for each player. Four for the human universes (until they merge into a single session with eight) and 12 for the troll universe. But when we get to universe c, we go back to four for the last page. Why?

Think about the fates of all the living players.

Out in the Furthest Ring, Lord English gets defeated, followed by Calliope’s black hole taking out the whole area around it. Vriska, Sollux, and all the ghosts die.

Aradia lives through it to watch the black hole. She either lets herself get drawn into it or flies off into the Furthest Ring.

The beta kids likely followed John’s plan to attack Caliborn:

JOHN: aside from fixing the time line, there's another benefit to my new power. JOHN: once we all decide we're ready to fight him, i can just zap us all right to him. JOHN: we could take him by surprise again. JOHN: i really doubt he'd be able to handle us if we all clobbered him at once! 

Their souls were stuck in the juju, and probably destroyed when it was used as a weapon against Lord English or directly afterword when the area around it got sucked into the black hole.

The alpha kids are stuck on the Land of Colors and Mayham, or, at best, they can take the portal in Caliborn’s exile station to the empty A2 Incipisphere.

So who does that leave in universe C to claim the ultimate reward? Who, after all this time, gets to repopulate a planet in the newly created universe and guide its development?

Karkat, Terezi, Kanaya, and Calliope

Thanks for playing!

[heirloomairloom]

Do you like to read class theories? I've already posted two and am planning on doing a whole set of six (one for each verb pair).

Sure, I'll take a look. Let's see...

I think I like your Knight/Page theory best out of all I've heard for the pairing, though it fails to explain Horuss. We know he fulfilled his potential by becoming a fighter, yes, but also by becoming a mechanic, poet, etc.

While Give works for Maids, it cannot be Heir's verb, as none of John's many powers have involved giving wind. And to answer your question about Rogues giving, Roxy makes Rose in Game Over (and later Dirk's sword) incorporeal by giving them some of her store of stolen Void.

[heirloomairloom]

Act 7 Analysis

Here's my analysis of how Act 7 went wrong.

I don’t think Act 7 is a bad ending. I think it’s straight up not an ending and wasn’t originally intended as such. First of all, you have to understand how Hussie put Homestuck together.

If you trawl his old Forumspring archives enough, you'll find out that Hussie would lay groundwork that could ambiguously lead towards certain plot points he had in mind, without necessarily committing to them. For example, the eight player session on Mom's terminal.

This was a nod towards the idea of a combined kid/guardian session, but that's all it was. If he decided not to go that route, it would be easy to explain it away as some random session from Earth like FedoraFreak had. Jade's final frog is an example that resolved the opposite way. Finding out who sendificated it to her could have been a vital plot point, but since Hussie decided not to use it, it's simply a semi-intentional red herring that was probably prepared by some carapacian, just like the exile stations were.

So, given that strategy for writing, how could Hussie have decided on an ending so far in advance? Comparing the timeline in the newspost to the Homestuck archives, work on Act 7 started at about the same time Jane entered the medium and ended around the time John was experiencing his dimension hoping powers for the first time, though by that time animation would have been mostly done and very hard to significantly change. Thus, Hussie had to create an animation that only contained things he was dead sure about or was willing to commit to completely. The eight humans and meteor crew trolls surviving barely constrained him at all, and the fact that they would create a new universe and enter it is a no brainer. The big plot points Hussie was chaining himself to were a revived Calliope and Vriska, a god tier Calliope destroying the Green Sun, and Lord English being defeated by the Homestuck juju. This partially accounts for why the animation is so ambiguous.

Is Dirk and Jake playing soccer an indication that they're dating again? That they've reconciled and decided to be friends? Or even that they never broke up at all? We can't tell, and I think this is intentional. Hussie himself probably hadn't decided yet, so he left himself room for the story to work it out. The animation doesn't tell us because Hussie was going to (and did) tell us before the animation hit. Same thing with the picnic. Both have had feelings for her, so did Jade wind up picking Dave or Karkat? Haha, turns out it was actually Dave and Karkat who are the couple there, but the picture itself doesn’t communicate this.

I think the huge holes in the plot left by Act 7 share a similar origin. The flash doesn't explain what Calliope is doing or why, or how the juju kills Lord English, because when he was storyboarding the animation, he was planing to explain those things in the comic beforehand. This wasn't intended to wrap up the plot, it was supposed to be an ending cutscene, eye candy to get us feeling emotional about things finally coming to a close. It wasn't supposed to tell us the details of how the story ended, although it was forced to take up (and fail at) that role. It was just a final look back at what we already knew. 

That's why Act 7 leaves so much hanging up in the air, like whether Vriska, Aradia, and Sollux survived, whether (and how) Lord English was defeated, and whether or not all of reality and unreality was totally destroyed by Calliope's black hole. Honestly, it's absurd to think that Andrew "Words" Hussie would intentionally create an ending that explained too little. This is a man who created a multiple page long news post because people misunderstood some of the minutia of how God Tier resurrection works.

There are several obvious dangling plot threads that essentially prove Hussie was originally intending more content before the end, even as recently as he was commissioning art for the last part of updates. (Recall that Collide “came right down to the wire” according to him.) The sprites aren't in the final animation, even though it would have been trivial to have killed them all off in Collide or to have added a few more pages of them fading away as the game was won. There's also been the sudden focus the idea of alternate selves being one, starting with John talking about his "canonical life" and Rose worrying about Jasprose polluting her "brand" and culminating with Terezi: Remember and Davepeta's exposition to Jade. It was probably intended as lead up to some big event to tie up the billions of dream bubble ghosts and underscore that the retconned timeline was just as important to the story despite having not been part of the alpha timeline. (Another of Homestuck’s constant video game metaphors. All the branches of a game’s story are important, even the ones that aren’t canon.) These aren't the work of someone trying to create a deliberately ambiguous ending, but of someone desperately emailing the parts of his essay he has finished to his professor on 11:59 PM the day it's due.

So why did Hussie choose to drop it now, before its time? I don’t have any inside information or mind reading capabilities, so I can only speculate. It's very nice animation that took a year to produce. He could have just been tired of sitting on it for so long, or maybe the animator(s) really needed to be able to add it to their portfolios in order to get jobs. Maybe he was desperate to keep people from forgetting about Homestuck, which is pretty reasonable since the IP is his main source of income. (See also the "take a Homestuck selfie and post it on your social media" thing.) Regardless, I think it was a huge misstep. I would have preferred a news post fessing up that he couldn't finish Homestuck and just laying out all the plot points we'd skipped but would need to understand Act 7 properly.

It's really a pity, because Act 7 really is beautiful, and not just in its animation. The whole structure is very Homestuckian. We get to see Lord English and the players’ final fates, him being defeated and them living happy lives on their new planet. Then it moves back in time to when they are just winning their games, showing us the cause after the effect.

But we didn't get to sit back and enjoy the wonderful parallelism of the heroes about to begin the lives they've chosen as their Ultimate Reward, just as Caliborn is damning himself with the Ultimate Reward he chose. We can't because we never get to see that downfall. His scene ends with the Furthest Ring's destruction rushing forward until it almost meets the door forming on the juju, ambiguous imagery that could mean anything. So the animation doesn't end on the triumphant note it would have if we knew how Lord English was defeated. Instead it ends with anxiousness, because we all think the other shoe is about to drop. After Act 7 ended, I was ready to see how all the action in the flash was wrapped up in the walkaround that I was sure was coming on the next page. I wasn't feeling the satisfaction of a tale well told, with everyone finally getting what they deserve juxtaposed with scenes of why they deserve it. In the context it was released in, Act 7 was reduced from the stunning final note to the story that it could have been to a confusing mess.

So where does that leave Homestuck? At the time, I thought that it was literally Hussie's way of throwing up his hands and admitting that he couldn't finish the comic. After mentioning the "epilogue", it's right back where it has been for years: another pause before the next batch of content, the whole comic shambling along past its natural end, restlessly lurching away from its rightful grave. I'm sure the epilogue (or the epilogue’s epilogue) will tie up everything, or at least enough things, to be satisfying and let us make sense of what was going on in Act 7. Hell, I’ll probably rewatch Act 7 and love it now that I suddenly understand everything, but I really wish it could have happened in time to see Act 7 the way past-Hussie from 4 years ago intended it.

[heirloomairloom]

BKEW was wrong!

BKEW was right!

[heirloomairloom]

Life/Void has the same problem Blood/Breath has: it’s entirely centered around one pair of people, in this case Jane and Roxy. The Ring of Void is the Black Queen’s ring from B2, and shares its Aspect with the female Derse dreamer of that session, just as the Ring of Life shares its Aspect with the female Prospit dreamer. Similarly, Jane’s Denizen is named after the Greek goddess of dawn, and is a palette swapped version of Roxy’s denizen, named after the Greek goddess of night.

Meanwhile, Light/Void is stated in more universal terms. Calliope says that it’s safe for Roxy to enter her dream bubble because she’s a hero of Void, but freaks out when Rose enters specifically because she’s a player of Light. Further, Aranea claims that it is frustrating for Light players to try to understand Void, which aligns perfectly with Calliope’s exposition to Jade about Space players understanding Time.

It’s always been my position that we should interpret anything that sounds like classpect exposition in the most literal way possible. Introducing the Life/Doom pairing and saying they’re total opposites would be an elegant way for Hussie to provide a definition for an Aspect which otherwise got very little screentime, while still leaving open the idea that totally unrelated Aspects could have similar powers, since if two totally opposite Aspects can share powers, than clearly two less different ones could as well. Further, most of the Aspects are the kind of fundamental things that gods would govern, and I think that death gods are too common and varied in mythology to be represented solely by Bards/Princes of Life in Sburb.

(Incidentally, I disagree that a Prince of Mind would have brain destroying powers. A Destroyer of Choices ought to have abilities to take away an enemy’s options: blindness to stop physical attacks, muteness to stop magical ones, barriers to stop them from running away, etc.)

Blood/Rage Theorypost

So, Aspect pairings are a thing that exists. Doom/Life and Space/Time are canon, Light/Void is heavily hinted at, and Heart/Mind is pretty solid. So, why should you stop believing in the universal Blood/Breath theory in favor of Blood/Rage? Read this (long) post for evidence in favor of it.

Keep reading

[heirloomairloom]

Blood/Rage Theorypost

So, Aspect pairings are a thing that exists. Doom/Life and Space/Time are canon, Light/Void is heavily hinted at, and Heart/Mind is pretty solid. So, why should you stop believing in the universal Blood/Breath theory in favor of Blood/Rage? Read this (long) post for evidence in favor of it.

Firstly, let's define the Aspects themselves. Blood is leadership and social power, as well as "vitality" which wont be relevant here. Blood is represented by the Kings' Scepters (which never get much screentime) and the Queens' Rings, which grant them their position as monarch and allow the use of the Red Miles (which look like stylized blood vessels.) Rage is anger, or possibly all emotions, and maybe other stuff, which again isn't necessary for showing the two's dichotomy. Rage is symbolized by clowns, by which I mean its symbol is literally, as Hussie put it, "the arcane iconography equivalent of an angry clown face."

The dichotomy between them can be summed up as order vs chaos or as the Condesce puts it "this is what i get for lettin all proper dudes run shit instead of nasty clowns." Blood builds up order and cohesion, only to have it torn apart by the emotional impulses of Rage, which then settles into a new order. This can be seen in Jack Noir and the Warweary Villain, who serve as potential rebels against the Queen and King in every session. The monarchs are in charge, concerned with the proper order of things and fulfilling their roles in the game, refusing to break the rules for their own benefit. Jack and WV, on the other hand, don't care. Jack wants to kill off all the players and Prospit's monarchs before the game has even started and take over for himself, while WV wants to end the war and get rid of the kings so that Skaia can be at peace. In case you have trouble imagining the Mayor as an embodiment of Rage, remember this scene:

Mayors are so much better than kings. You hate kings and you think kings are really stupid. They are petty, bossy tyrants and are really full of themselves and are basically awful in every way.

God do you hate kings.

Normally, Jack only wants to exile the Queen, instead of killing her. The B1 Jack became angry enough for murder, though. Why?

He was forced, due to Gamzee’s influence, to dress like a clown, the symbol of Rage, which made him angry enough to kill. He goes on to claim the Queen's Ring and the King's crown. Jack achieves a union of the two, still wearing part of the clown outfit that spurred his rebellion and using the Red Miles from his bloody, ringed hand to express his anger at the universe.

Your boredom is surpassed only by your all consuming rage and contempt for existence itself.

B1 WV, on the other hand, has done the opposite. He's afraid of Blood, because his leadership (symbolized by the Blood based Red Miles) killed his own followers. He's also afraid of becoming an avatar of unrestrained Rage, and thus becoming a monster like Jack.

Coming to the actual players of the Aspects, Karkat and Gamzee are the heirs of two traditions, one Blood themed and the other Rage themed. Each is the messiah of an Alternian religion, with Karkat being the Second Signless and Gamzee's soul entering Lil Cal to become both of the Mirthful Messiahs. These two religions are heavily influenced by Blood and Rage, respectively.

Let's consider the subjuggulators first. Obviously, they worship and act like clowns, but their religion has further connections to Rage.

For the subjugglators in their small numbers to keep such a large population under their control, it would be very useful to have the ability to psychically amplify fears through dreams. They may have directed their chucklevoodoos on every susceptible mind in the population. Each lowblood may have a little highblood voodoo doll lurking in their subconscious, making them too terrified to organize any sort of rebellion.

The subjuggulators rule by psychically manipulating their subjects’ emotions. Further, Alternia's society expected trolls to focus on fulfilling their individual emotional desires to the detriment of society as a whole, constantly scheming against one another.

CT: D --> Try to be cognizant of your desires and needs CT: D --> And attempt to regard those around you as simple vehicles meant to bring about your gratification

Under the tarp is the completed gift. You of course have no intention of delivering this to your neighbor as promised. You naturally will doublecross your accomplice, just as you assume she has plans to doublecross you. You assume she is assuming the same of you. Business as usual for blue bloods.

Opposing them were the Signless and his followers. The Signless's creed was based on the social order of Beforus.

But it may also have been due to his mutation that he began to have the visions. Spontaneous, lucid imagery of his world in peace, before its fall. He would never see the complete picture, or fully understand his previous incarnation's role in prompting this fall, or know of my hand in it. But the visions showed him all he needed to see. They held the promise of his people's true potential, beneath the ages of conditioned cruelty. They held the spark of revolution.

On Beforus, high status meant not that you were expected to use your inferiors as tools for your desires, but instead care for and guide them.

ARANEA: The jo8 of each 8lood caste was to serve the needs of all those 8elow it. ARANEA: We were to use our progressively greater longevity and wisdom to help the lower castes learn and grow. To listen to them and try to provide whatever they were missing. Like a hierarchy of caretakers with increasing social responsi8ility.

Emotion is replaced with leadership, Rage with Blood. This is the message the Signless would have preached, based on his memories of Beforus. And how did that end?

During his penance, it was said the Sufferer's compassion for his people underwent a divine transformation, into limitless, burning rage. It burned hotter than the irons shackling him to the imperial flogging jut, and redder than the blood soaking his Righteous Leggings. When he was finally killed, his anger rung through the cosmos with his last breath. This Vast Expletive was his final sermon, and somewhere encoded in its wavelengths was the truth in his teachings, waiting to reveal itself to any who would inherit his burden.

Blood became Rage, which was passed down to Karkat. Karkat always struggled with constraining his anger. Early in the session, he performed well. He restrained Jack Noir's Rage with Blood...

...harnessing it into something useful. He even uses Jack as a party member, getting the murderous ArchAgent to carry a torch for him while he solved puzzles in dungeons.

He also unites the two teams in his session. It's only when all his efforts are rendered meaningless by Bec Noir that he starts to lose control.

FCG: IF I FIND OUT WHO'S RESPONSIBLE FCG: I WILL FCG: I DON'T EVEN WANT TO THINK ABOUT IT NOW. FCG: WASTE OF GOOD FRESH RAGE. FCG: I'M A LITTLE TIRED OF ALL THE OLD THINGS I'VE BEEN ANGRY ABOUT. FCG: IT'S GOTTEN SO STALE. FCG: IN A WEIRD WAY I'M SORT OF LOOKING FORWARD TO HAVING SOMETHING NEW TO BE PISSED OFF ABOUT.

CG: I REALLY DON'T KNOW WHY I TROLLED YOU LIKE THAT SO PERSISTENTLY CG: FOR SOME REASON DEEP DOWN I JUST KNEW THAT I HAD TO CG: EVEN IF IT MEANT DIGGING MYSELF INTO A HUGE HOLE WITH YOU AND EVERYONE ELSE THAT WOULD BE HARD TO CLIMB OUT OF

And, indeed, by giving into his anger, his leadership fell apart and people started giving in to their murderous emotions (Vriska to anger, Eridan to fear, Gamzee to religous zealotry, Equius to submission, and Nepeta to vengeance) Hussie implies that Gamzee directly had a hand in some of this as well.

Now knowing he had this ability, we can wonder whether he used it during his rampage, in addition to using it on John/Dave. Did he use the ability to befuddle Terezi into pinning the crime on Vriska in spite of laughably overwhelming evidence to the contrary? Turning Terezi against Vriska was likely the only way he could kill Vriska, due to her cerebral "luck neutralizing" ability. Did he exaggerate Karkat's fears to destabilize the team? What about Equius? Maybe he exaggerated his fear of failing to show a superior deference, to the point of incapacitation.

Between Karkat's failure and Gamzee's treason, the team's Blood gave way to Rage. Then, Karkat manages to make it swing back the other way, pacifying Gamzee and restoring peace.

Just like with Jack Noir, Karkat stops a murderously angry Rage character who has a bleeding wound. And what are the symbols for Blood and Rage?

A bleeding cut and a clown face, directly combined right there in plain sight.

Finally, the Cherubs are also a part of the Blood/Rage divide. They are the Mirthful Messiahs Gamzee's religion worships, and have tons of symbolic relations to Karkat. (Text color, typing style, links to Calmasis, the theme of separating yourself into two people (past and future Karkat, Caliborn and Calliope) who hate each other even though they're really just arguing with themselves, etc.)

However, Caliborn is more associated with Rage, being a more direct model for the Mirthful Messiahs and served directly by Gamzee and Kurloz, both heroes of Rage. Meanwhile, only Calliope wears the jacket with sign of the Signless cufflinks on it, which ties her closer to Blood.

Thus, the conflict between the two of them is set up as another example of the struggle between Blood and Rage.

That's quite a lot of examples of Blood and Rage being eternally opposed. Meanwhile, Blood/Breath symbolism is largely restrained to only contrasting Karkat and John. Homestuck contrasts John equally with Jane, showing how the other parties' leaders differ from the original group's. Just as the parallels between John and Jane don't necessarily imply any connection between Heirs/Maids or Breath/Life, neither should that one case of Blood/Breath symbolism trump the much more numerous examples of Blood/Rage.

That leaves Breath/Hope as a pair, which admittedly doesn't have a lot of evidence. Symbolically, Breath has a gust of air and Hope has wings, meaning that perhaps Breath is the wind beneath Hope's wings. In that case, perhaps I'm wrong about Breath not being inspiration, and really Hope is belief while Breath is the motivation to actually put actions behind a belief. Further, Breath is tangentially associated with fairies via Tavros and Rufioh, and fairies fill the same niche of "idealized versions of us with wings" for trolls that angels, associated with Hope, do in human society, providing another, if very tenuous, link between them.

[heirloomairloom]

Aspect Pairings

Welp, looks like I got fucking schooled about Aspect pairing in the newest update. I suddenly and retroactively don't understand or have understood anything.

Having said that, here are what all the totally official and canon Aspect pairings are going to be. I see no reason not to believe me on the subject. ���Obvious and critical mistake about the very basics of this system”? I don't remember me making any those, and you shouldn't either.

(Also, new update while I was finishing this. If it confirms any of this, I totally called it first.)

Blood and Rage (Order vs. Chaos) Blood is all about leadership and social control. I have come around on the Queens' rings (with their Bloody Red Miles) as a symbol for Blood. Further emblematic of Blood is Beforus, with its structured society of caretakers and responsibility, as well as the Sufferer's movement inspired by, and attempting to recreate, it.

Rage, on the other hand, is about wild passion (or at least anger, but it will probably get all the emotions in order to keep pace with Blood) and uncontrollable outbursts that tear apart Blood's order. Rage's representatives in a session are Jack Noir and the Warweary Villein, two people with huge chips on their shoulder about their rulers and big plans to do something about it. Alternia is also Rage dominated to mirror the Blood dominated Beforus. It's basically chaos, with the nobles all scheming against each other over their petty personal dramas instead of working together to expand the empire more efficiently, all encouraged by the whimsically brutal subjugglators, which are clowns, just like Rage’s symbol.

(Don't believe me that the cute Mayor could possibly be an embodiment of Rage?

“Mayors are so much better than kings. You hate kings and you think kings are really stupid. They are petty, bossy tyrants and are really full of themselves and are basically awful in every way.

God do you hate kings.” He's also afraid of both Blood's rulership (that the Blood he wields will kill his own followers, like so...)

and also going too far in the other direct, towards Rage and becoming like Jack, as in the same dream seen above.

There's also the fact that the main heroes of Blood and Rage are the messiahs of these Aspects’ two opposed religions.)

Breath and Light (Free Will vs. Fate) Breath is freedom. The Breath ancestors do what they want, the world around them be damned. The Summoner is born on a world where his blood means he'll always be a lowly minion? He subverts the military to follow him and comes close conquering the world. Poppop is raised by a cruel, genocidial alien empress? Whatever, MOM! He ignores all her abuse and grows up to be a famous comedian anyway.

Light, however, is luck, all the factors in your life that you can't control. Vriska refuses to take personal responsibility for anything. Everything is happening to her, from being saddled with a hungry lusus to stepping on dice all the time, and there's obviously no way any of that could be the consequence of her own actions. Aranea's views (from her conversation with Terezi) are the same. She holds Terezi equally responsible for the Vriskas from both timelines, not just the one she killed, because Terezi is just a tool that reality is using to propagate itself, not a person living her own life.

You can see the interplay of the two with Vriska and Tavros/John. Vriska is the outside, uncontrollable influence in both their lives. There's very little either can do to stop her from controlling their destinies. From Tavros's paralysis to John going god tier to empowering Jack Noir (though that one was a team effort with Gamzee). The difference is that, while Tavros is cowed into obedience and lets Light control his life, thereby never achieving his full potential, John just shrugs, says “whatever”, and keeps on truckin', same as always.

(There's also the fact that Breath and Light were the first two Aspects Hussie created, before and even more fundamental to a narrative than Space (setting) and Time (progression), people to go out and do and be things (characters) and circumstances to stir them into action (a plot).)

Doom and Life (Death vs. er.. Life) As boring and obvious as it is canonical. Next.

Heart and Mind (Identity vs. Choices) Heart is soul and the identity that it provides. The “Brand” of You that defines a character across timelines and alternate universes. Mind is choices, those times when You doesn't really matter because being You could result in taking completely different actions in a given situation. The one shapes the other, identity influencing which decisions you're capable of making and decisions in turn helping to further define who you are, in an endless feedback loop.

Bladekindeyewear has written a lot more words about this one, go read some of them. (Ignore the words equating Heart to love and Mind to logic or hiding your identity. Those specific words are wrong.)

Hope and Void (Becoming real vs. staying unreal) Hope is about how unreal things (beliefs) can influence the world anyway. Hope makes fake things a bit more real by believing in them. Void is the nonexistence it draws things out of, and to which they return when there is no longer enough belief to power their realness attribute. While Hope is the most powerful Aspect, heroes of Void often struggle to make a mark on their session.

(You can see this with Brain Ghost Dirk, and, also, through the process of elimination.)

Space and Time (???) While literal space and literal time is obvious, there is also Space covering propagation to consider. There's a lot of things Time could get to balance that out. Limitations to counter Space's endless growth (and demonstrated by the merciless rules of time travel and Caliborn's games), extinction to counter Space's creation, or even a wildcard like growth (why is the clock always ticking down to the end of the Game? Because Sburb is childhood, and if you don't complete the Utlimate Alchemy (growing up) before it's over, you lose).

[heirloomairloom]

Hey now, that's a radical misstatement of my position.

Let's take a real "slam dunk" argument: Time covers death. It's pretty obvious, right? Space covers propagation, and has strong yingyang themes with Time. Then there's Lord English and the Megidos, among a ton of other stuff. But think for a minute: why does every session require a Time player? Is it just some random bullshit way for Paradox Space to screw over players, like not prototyping before entry? Consider how the end game plays out. The genesis tadpole gets launched at Skaia, then, somehow, there's a full grown frog there. What if the Time player is in charge of jumpstarting the Genesis Frog's maturation? Then the relationship would actually be Space covering birth and Time growth. Caliborn, however, uses his mastery of growth to make sure he only grows in the ways he wants (ie physically, as he's the only player with an adult body, but never emotionally.) The Time related death symbolism would then be symbolic not of Time itself, but of Caliborn's corruption thereof, growth being replaced with death to represent Caliborn's absolute and wrong-headed control of Time.

Maybe that interpretation is correct, and maybe it isn't. The point is that it's impossible to untangle symbolism that's providing clues about an Aspect from an Aspect being used to symbolize something else. The heroes of Life are all heirs to the troll empire's imperial line. Coincidence, or clue about Life? Knights keep helping heroes of Space in frog breeding. Reference, or a hint at Knight's class verb? It's impossible to say.

So, if circumstantial evidence isn't sufficient to prove what an Aspect is, what would be? A character providing exposition, of course. Also, a character displaying a class power that can only be explained in that way. Thirdly, if we saw a character, could reasonably expect that the comic covered everything important they'd done, and their title could only be parsed by adding to the Aspect's definition, that would also be enough. For example, if we hadn't gotten this exposition but Kanaya had finished the comic having never repaired a breach in space, that would be enough to definitively say that Space must include propagation, as there's no other way to read her as a "healer of Space" without focusing on how she repaired her species's broken reproduction cycle. Of course, this one isn't available to us until the comic ends, but we can still apply it based on how much of the comic we have left. (ie John hasn't done anything wind related other than use his class powers, and it doesn't seem likely that he'll do anything like that in the short time before the end, so it's probable that Breath covers something more than just wind.)

Further, of the Aspects we have gotten exposition on, none has canonically covered more than two things (Void has nothingness and concealment, Space has location and propagation.) Thus, it is unlikely that other Aspects govern substantially more than two things apiece. Given that there are many, many things you could reasonably associate with any Aspect, and only at most two of them can actually be right, the correct stance to take is that any particular guess is highly likely to be wrong.

Thus, though I happened to be wrong about Space not covering reproduction, I still maintain that I am almost certainly right about it not governing other kinds of creation, beginnings that aren’t part of a cycle of propagation, art, or anything else but the two things it is confirmed to contain.

(This logic is separate from other problems, like Aspects that cover things so broad they apply to almost anything (like direction for Breath) or Aspects where we have literally seen in-comic evidence to the contrary (like Brain Ghost Dirk existing because of how much Jake believes in the single possibility of Dirk as he actually is, rather than in alternate possibilities of how Dirk might be.))

Uh-huh. There’s some confirmation for whoever remained in doubt, here. Space is creation, beginnings, growth. The “birth” to Time’s “death”, really.

There really are people who doubted that, you know! Really rare, but the occasional person I’d talk to where I’d go over evidence that an aspect covers SO much more than just the literal thing it sounds like – or the first word we’d heard associated with it, like “fortune” for Light – and they’d go like “no, it’s just the one thing, you’re talking out of your ass”. I can understand them not seeing how much time and effort we’ve put into prying these aspect factors out of the comic, but… yeah, I’m not sure how to help those people.

[heirloomairloom]

Vriska Resurrection Theory

So Vriska's probably going to come back to life, but we can't just wipe out all the ghost Vriska stuff.

Here's how I see us preserving punk ghost Vriska: there's already a spare one. When Terezi looked into the future, she saw two timelines: Timeline 1: Terezi stabs Vriska, who becomes a ghost, leads the pirate treasure hunt, and eventually gets the punk makeover. Timeline 2: Terezi lets Vriska live. Vriska goes on to fight Jack Noir, who kills all the other trolls, then she gets wiped out when the timeline ends. Terezi chose to make timeline 1 the alpha. Thus, we have stabbed Vriska (Vriska 1) as a ghost in the furthest ring, and Jack Noir fighting Vriska (Vriska 2) who got time-annihilated. After the retcon, I think that instead Terezi will see this: Timeline 1: Terezi stabs Vriska, who becomes a ghost, leads the pirate treasure hunt, and eventually gets the punk makeover. Timeline 2: Terezi talks Vriska down and convinces her to stay. Vriska joins them on the meteor trip to the scratched human session. Terezi will choose to make timeline 2 the alpha. Vriska 1's personal history is barely effected by the retcon. She now retroactively comes from a beta timeline, but she dies and winds up in the furthest ring regardless, doing all the things we saw her do. Vriska 2 is the one who gets rescued, and lives to enter the human session.

(Alternatively, Terezi might see  "talk Vriska down" as a third option this time around, corresponding to a new timeline, and Vriska 3 is the one who lives. This might actually be more likely, because there was one conversation Vriska had with John in a dream about the Jack Noir fighting timeline, which would need to be retconned if that timeline no longer happened.)

[heirloomairloom]

Hey now, having inversion be on a scale from good to bad isn't, by itself, a horrible thing. It would be if a title and its inverse were actually total opposites and moving towards your inverse was always moving away from your classpect. But instead of opposites, exploiting Blood and stealing Breath, for example, are just two vaguely dissimilar things that are randomly thrown together. Thus, saying that you can move towards stealing Breath in a healthy way, without going overboard, doesn't actually undercut your central argument that “exploiting Blood is the best way that Karkat can effect reality.”

What does undercut your central argument is all the other states you've invented for how a player is relating to their classpect. When someone acts according to their title and gets good results, they're embracing their classpect. When they act according to their title and get bad results, they're overembracing it. When someone acts according to their inverse title and gets bad results, they're inverting. When they act according to their inverse title and get good results, they're shadowing their inverse. And when they don't do either, they're underembracing their title, or it's just an example of one of those times when not everything someone does relates to their classpect.

Between all those, your theory “predicts” everything that could ever possibly happen to anyone. The theory degrades from “acting according to their classpect will be good for them” to “they will or won't act according to their classpect, and this will have positive or negative consequences.” This is one of the main reasons I think your classpect theories don't actually work as descriptions of the characters. They say so much that they wrap around to saying nearly nothing. At the very least, this heavily biases you towards the first idea you settle on, because anything that happens can be explained as making sense given that idea, regardless of what the idea actually was.

(Ostentatiously the difference between inversion and shadowing or overembracing and embracing is based on whether or not the character is “working against their nature,” but realistically that's determined by the results they get. Why does Terezi going nuts and heat-butting John count as shadowing instead of inversion? Because it will probably work out well for characters. Why does Jade habitually going to sleep to learn things in her dreams count as inversion? Because it eventually led to the creation of Bec Noir.)

Could Terezi be using her inverse Claspect in a healthy way? She could have seen that John was going to take Roxy's advice and give up like Dirk and she had to change his Heart so he would make the right Decision.

When I alleged she’s ghosting her inverse role, I didn’t mean it was strictly a bad thing. It was more like I said: She isn’t in the swing of things as a Seer of Mind right now, so she’s using whatever methods of affecting reality she has available. And that happens to be the inverse method.

Relying on your “shadow” to the point that it supplants your main role is bad. But that “shadow” is still a part of you, and there will come days when that facet of your personality is useful. When a change of heart is absolutely, positively necessary, you can turn to Terezi; she just isn’t going to be perfect at it, and is bound to bloody some noses in the process.

I can hear certain specific people yelling “but you claim INVERSION IS ALWAYS BAD! it can’t be BAD most of the time and GOOD sometimes! CONTRADICTION! INVERSION SUCKS AND YOU SHOULD FEEL SUCK!”. But this is a complicated-as-hell issue, as complicated as individual personalities themselves. There’s a difference between relying on a dark facet of yourself when it fits and you have no other choice, that action turning out generally for the best, and mistaking that facet of yourself for your true identity, working against your nature and gradually racking up mistakes until the accumulated misfortune crashes down over everyone.