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INTRODUCTION
Let’s start with some basal understandings of my approach, here. I’m not affiliated with anyone, including but not limited to Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Andrew Hussie, and Dirk Strider. I am a biochemist who read the comic last year and liked it a lot. I did not nor will I ever write Homestuck.
But I really, really like Homestuck, and my absolute metric for the success of any explanatory interpretation of Homestuck is ‘does it help me enjoy Homestuck more, whether through interesting lines of inquiry or large-scale resolution of narrative and metanarrative themes’. Thinking about Homestuck, in any sense of that phrase, is something I enjoy for its own sake. By writing this essay, I presuppose that this is something that you, reading this essay, also care about and enjoy. If there is one thing I guarantee through this essay, it is… ten to thirty minutes of thinking Potentially New Thoughts about Homestuck. Some of you read really fucking quickly.
I think prescriptive, drawn-from-non-Homestuck-literature interpretations of classpect are artificially limiting and, more importantly, unfun. If Carl Jung reads Homestuck I will be fascinated to know what he thinks of it, though admittedly, my first question will concern how the shit he managed the whole resurrection thing. Until then, I favor my own critical reading skills and interpretations over those of a corpse, though for those who know me, this may be overselling what I’ve got going on between my ears by a little bit.
That said, I think descriptive interpretations of aspect can be very fun, and very useful in making sense of the Many-System Engine of Homestuck, and that is my ‘thesis’ of sorts in presenting this (re?-)interpretation of aspect theory.
So without further ado: the chart I made and posted on Twitter with a vague promise to explain it later.
Some people liked this, some people did not. I think we can all agree that I have some explaining to do.
First off, what do classpects ‘mean’, under this understanding of aspect theory? Good question.
CLASS AND ASPECT: HOW ARE YOU GETTING THIS?
My approach to ‘classpect’ is pretty straightforward. Every character has some relationship to every aspect, and can be understood through their position relative to every aspect. The classpect, however, refers to the relationship with defining primacy for that character, the strongest and most important relationship on their narrative journey. Every character has some relationship with selfhood, which positions them somewhere on the Heart-Mind axis. Every character has some role in propelling their session towards its end state, which positions them on the Doom-Life axis, and their instrumentalization in service of this outcome implicitly positions them on the Time-Space axis.
Within these many defining relationships, every character also has one relationship that is particularly definitive of them and their place in the narrative, which may only be completely apparent to a reader after the story is complete, or to the author once the entire trajectory of their story is finalized.
Telling us a character’s classpect, therefore, is a huge tip of the cards as to what their narrative journey is going to look like, and which particular components of that journey are worth paying attention to. Classpect is lampshading authorial and narrative intentionality, telling you, ‘pst, here’s what you might want to pay attention to!’
Dirk, for instance, spends a truly enormous amount of time grappling with his instrumentalization in matters of fate. He has a very strong relationship with Time. But his stronger relationship, and the much more definitive one, is his relationship with selfhood, with the personal application of abstract meaning, and therefore with Heart. Specifically, with his destructive relationship with this concept.
To descriptively classpect, then, one would first attempt to determine a character’s most definitive aspect connection. What will their ‘story’ be ‘about’? What has it fundamentally ‘been’ about? That’s the defining aspect. From there, you can narrow down to class by considering how the character relates to their defining aspect over the course of the narrative.
I don’t personally endorse the idea of classpect-as-personality, because personality is in a lot of ways endogenous to a character/person, while classpect is the exogenous result of interactions-with-overarching-narrative. It makes a lot of sense to use, say, a personality test to determine Which Aspect Is Most Important To You/To The Character You Are Taking The Test As, but class, which I will explore much further in another essay, is another matter entirely.
Dirk’s fixation on self and personal meaning is a Him Thing. If you plop him in a different narrative, he’s still the same no-navel-ectobaby-gazing the-meaning-is-what-I-personally-make-of-it kind of dude. His relationship with his aspect is almost definitely going to be different if he grows up with human people to interact with and maybe a therapist or five. His relationship with the Heart aspect might even no longer be the definitive one, in a different set of circumstances, though supposing that it still is definitive for him, his relationship with it might just be less or just differently destructive.
Being a prince, for instance, or a seer, or a page, or whatever, is a matter of personal journey through narrative. A similar journey-trajectory could occur anywhere, in any story, Skaia-enforced or otherwise. It’s just as possible to be a Prince of Heart in a loving home, going to normal-ass high school and having friends and loved ones other than seagulls and robots. But understanding that journey is immensely specific to the character, to the author, and to the reader. A personality test for class, as I understand it, would presuppose confidence in aspect, and would ask you things like ‘has your relationship with your aspect been suffocating or liberating?’ and ‘do you think of your aspect as an ally or an enemy?’
Maybe I will make that quiz someday.
In fact, I almost definitely will.
But understanding this, the only way to unravel aspect theory from the narrative presented by Homestuck involves basically taking a word-scalpel to our favorite characters and unpacking that shit through their fraught relationships with narrative, how the narrative treats them, and how they treat it, in return. That is the point of this essay.
So let’s get back to the meat of it, huh? That wack diagram with all those words on it. What the shit does that mean?
MEANING VS. MATERIAL: WHAT THE SHIT DOES THIS MEAN?
SUBHEADING: LET’S START WITH THE MATERIAL.
It’s simple, really, they said, immediately before writing thousands of words of nonsense. I’m a biologist. If we look at Skaia/SBURB, it’s a reproductive engine that operates on a cyclical basis. If we disagree on that point, we weren’t reading the same 800,000-word jaunt to the genesis frog’s emission of the vast croak.
Skaia, as much as Skaia ‘wants’ anything, wants to make more Skaia.
The ‘material’ side of the chart is how Skaia does that. These are the creative and destructive forces that, in tandem, produce a new textual universe, a cohesive, tangible work that can be ‘read’ and interpreted in turn. The text of Homestuck is something that can be printed out, bound in a cover and leafed through, watched and listened to and experienced via tactile interaction with a screen. The purview of the material is the existence of the story-organism itself.
As it applies to the ‘material’ side of Skaia’s reproductive mechanism, the Doom-Life axis represents the most fundamental, basic component of a living organism. Life vs. death, growth vs. decay, momentum vs. inertia. When I say these aspects are ‘fundamental’, what I mean is that the two other axes are just two different employments of these Basic Ideas.
You either grow - and, understanding that conservation of matter is a thing, you Consume - or you decay. These are the pure, embodied forces of life and death, beginning and end.
There’s a lot of ‘supportive evidence’, in scare quotes here, for this interpretation of Life. What all the Life players we’ve been introduced to have in common is that they come from the top of the pile, the upper echelon of the upper echelon. They have infinite momentum behind them through this class/caste positioning. They all have some kind of relationship with growth and nourishment, whether it’s the cultivation or rejection thereof.
In contrast, the only real Doom players we can apply any analysis to are at the metaphorical ‘bottom of the heap’. In Alternian society, their survival is an uphill battle. The sociocultural inertia as well as the personal inertia for the Captors is a fate of subservience and death. It’s more difficult to extrapolate the exactitudes of Sollux’s narrative relationship with Doom without knowing more about mages, since class so critically modulates the way we experience characters’ relationship with aspect as readers (one definitely wouldn’t have the same ‘read’ of Hope with only Eridan vs. only Jake as their frame of reference, not knowing how the prince-vs-page deal plays a role), but when Doom as a force interacts with Narrative, it propels it in a headlong rush to the End. That’s not an objectively good or bad thing. It’s just a thing.
Doom and Life exist in equilibrium. Too much fixation on The End loses sight of cultivating something to bring to a conclusion in the first place. Too much fixation on rampant Development without the corollary of decay is self-limiting. Conservation of matter means that eventually there is nothing left to consume but yourself.
What about the ‘instrumentalized’ and ‘delinquent’ ends of the axis, though? Well, a force is just an abstract force until you apply it, and this is the axis of application. Instrumentalized aspects serve the planned progression of narrative, in this case, Skaia’s march towards fertilization, meiotic division, propagation. Delinquent aspects don’t directly serve this goal, and operate on the fringes of Skaia’s process, sometimes even in opposition to ‘the way things should work’.
In SBURB/SGRUB, a knight and the Space player ‘should’ catch frogs together, breed the genesis frog, and create the new universe in the forge after defeating their prescribed opponents on the battlefield. The game ‘should’ be played via a logical sequence of events, culminating in a victory that instrumentalizes the forces of planned reproduction and planned death (mitosis and apoptosis) to create a magnificent new organism. A frog, a webcomic, a video game.
This is made pretty explicit by the structure of the game itself - the fact that the lack of a Time and Space player generates a ‘void session’. Time and Space are the organism’s means of organized propagation. As instrumentalized Life and Doom, they’re the measured, systematic means to get from the beginning of the life cycle to the end of it, all in one piece.
But that’s only one side of the reproductive-cycle.
You don’t get something truly ‘new’, Skaia doesn’t have any opportunity to ‘evolve’, without the forces of entropy acting on its genetic composition. You’d just get a clone of the previous genesis frog, and if that’s the end goal, why reproduce at all? Why not allocate those resources to extending the life of a single organism, if all you’re going to do is make more of it? Why not just keep telling the same story that gives you comfort, watching the same movie, taking the same narrative journey, over and over again?
Rather than perfect reproduction-of-self, which would just be cloning the previous frog, in essence, stagnation, ‘delinquent’ growth introduces an element of change, something new, unplanned, novel.
Mutation.
Where Space, as an instrumentalized force, faithfully reproduces Skaia-as-it-should-be, Hope produces relentlessly, carelessly, thoughtlessly. Both the construction of a femur and the development of an osteosarcoma are applications of the same force of ‘growth’. The vast majority of mutations are shitty, and either do nothing or have horrifying consequences.
But some are awesome. Some, over time, build up in the genetic lineage until an ape’s sacrum is repositioned and its hips are shaped in such a way that it can walk upright, and even run, to pursue prey over long distances. To add more meat and varied foods to its diet, in such a way that slowly allows mutations and swap-arounds and recombinations of genes that favor brain growth to succeed.
Extrapolated to the extreme, we have a phrase for this - profound mutations that result in such drastically increased fitness and aptitude to survive in a particular environment that they wind up effectively adopted into the species as it evolves. ‘Hopeful monsters’.
At the same time, there has to be a balance. The Skaian organism doesn’t last too long if it’s all mutation, no pre-planning. A cell that beats the Hayfield limit and divides, unchecked, is immortal. It’s also cancer. This is where Rage comes in. Hope’s profound, unplanned growth can also have profound, unplanned consequences for the narrative that can stall it before the tadpole ever has a shot of emerging from the forge. A ‘plot tumor’, if you will.
Successful organisms have a means to deal with this - an immune system that wipes out harmful incursions to the body. Just as much, though, we can conceptualize Hope as the cancer and Rage as the knife that cuts it out, the radiation that kills the misplaced cells that refuse to die. Not all change is good, especially not change that occurs without checks and balances. The industrial revolution spawned factories, cities, expansive and unforeseen development; it also spawned tenements, egregious abuses of workers, epidemics. Tangled overgrowth in an forest ecosystem, say, through the introduction of kudzu, can critically alter the equilibrium of that environment and what can survive there.
Ideally, Rage is the union protests, the forest fire, the methotrexate, that says ‘NO MORE OF THIS SHITTY IDEA, IT’S NOT WORKING’. When Hope and Rage are in balance, then, Space can grow new little sprouts in the cleared earth, pine cones that only release their seeds after having been scorched, and the progress of both Time and Space can march on, forwards towards planned death-and-growth, unencumbered by the excesses of Hopey overgrowth or Ragey devastation, because those forces are occupied by their own equilibrium. And the beautiful new things Hope invents, the ones strong enough to survive the fire, can persist along with them, and make something wonderful, something sincerely Better, through Rage’s elimination of the harmful and the unworkable.
In these ways, Life and Doom are instrumentalized and subverted, both to make the life cycle progress as planned, and to shake things up enough that there’s something new and better hatching from the gelatinous froggy egg at the end. This is the life cycle of Skaia, and this is the purview of the ‘material’.
SUBHEADINGx2COMBOBOB: WELL THEN HOW ABOUT MEANING, HUH?
I’m so glad you asked. Skaia is an organism. It’s a bigass fucking frog. It’s also, inarguably, a text. We bandy words like ‘narrative’ and ‘metanarrative’ around a whole lot post-epilogues and in the era of Homestuck^2 being a thing. But it’s very much conceptually present in Homestuck proper as well, though less in the ‘beating you over the head with a dayglow orange mallet’ way.
The word ‘narrative’ is mentioned in Homestuck proper no fewer than nineteen times. Narratives within narratives, wheels within wheels, authors within authors, stories within stories. It’s enough to drive a guy fucking crazy, isn’t it?
Skaia, because Skaia is a foundational part of this narrative, and is a narrative itself, has a second cycle running parallel to the life-cycle discussed in the ‘meaning’ subheading. Rather than life and death, the primary distinction here is ‘an answer’ and ‘no answer’.
Is there a true, parsable meaning to life? Light says yes. Void says no.
I’m not a SBURB mechanist or any kind of expert on the matter of gnosticism, lord fucking knows, I probably should’ve clarified that earlier. If anyone is just itching to jump in and explain how gnostic theory or the structure of SBURB proves me wrong, here, I completely encourage that. You can link me to the essay, and in doing so, I will gladly and gratefully grant you a pass to call me one (1) slur relevant to any dimension of my identity. Choose wisely.
Or, fuck, maybe digging deeper just makes me Righter? So far that’s been my experience of my own overwhelming Rightness, but then again, I am a known Hope player. Probably its own disclaimer right there. So take anything I say with a post-diluvian ocean’s worth of salt.
Anyway, there’s been a lot of great scholarship on the idea of the Ultimate Riddle. (Haha, ultimate, hey everyone, look at that word! We sure do hear that word a lot? Think it means anything?) I vibe with a lot of it. This isn’t especially in support or attempted repudiation of any of that scholarship. But the fact is, a lot of Homestuck is about how both we-as-readers and the characters themselves parse meaning out of the shit that happens to them.
Skaia only exists insofar as it is experienced and interpreted through Homestuck. The cyclical means of this interpretation, then, represent just as important a reproductive function as its actual, material reproduction.
So back to Light and Void. Light says, as much as Light can ‘say’ anything, ‘there is one Truth, one Absolute Meaning’. So a Light player is defined by their relationship to the concept of A Single Immutable Truth and the necessity to Search For That Truth. Void, in contrast, is comfortable with an answer left unsearched for, unexamined, unspoken.
Light, as it manifests in its relationships with its players, is a frantic search for Truth and Meaning. Light is ‘the answer’, and specifically, it’s the answer YOU search the cosmos and the narrative for until you find it. The spotlight narrowed in on the Most Important Truth.
Void is an almost passive acceptance of what is already known, what doesn’t need to be said. It’s the force that holds that all the shit left bathed in shadow when you’ve got a floodlight on your One Answer is still important, that you need all of it to make The One Answer even make sense, and how can you be sure the Objective Answer isn’t off in the shadowy corner, anyway, while you focus on the Subjective Answer? How can you ever be sure, unless you accept it all and take it in stride? Why would you even want to be ‘sure’ so damn badly? What’s that worth to you, in the end?
Light and Void, as a continuum, is the search for enlightenment vs. embracing the unknowable. It’s Vriska’s challenge to the caste system and the Story Itself vs. Equius’s inability to so in either case, Rose’s desperate need to know where she stands in the story vs. Roxy’s willingness to roll with the cards they’re dealt.
Once again, though, what about the ‘instrumentalized’ and ‘delinquent’ ends of the axis? What does it mean to instrumentalize Light and Void for the progression of Skaia’s meaning-narrative? What does it mean to use them in such a way to make new meaning rather than rehashing the same-old-same-old?
Instrumentalized, first, is the most straightforward. Blood doubles down on the meaning that is already there; tradition, the bonds of friendship and family, the connection to the material progression of the story going on in the right-hand column of that graphic I made. Blood says, ‘what’s meaningful and important is focusing on what is, the way we’ve always found meaning, in our connections and our legacy and what we choose to do about it’. Breath says ‘that is dumb, and you are also dumb for thinking it. sorry, was that rude?’.
Whoops. No, Breath says, ‘what’s meaningful and important is discovering something new, expanding that perspective, broadening the meaning-horizon and rising above the mere material of the world until ‘tradition’ is a speck of dust on a marble’.
It’s a really cool body-vs.-language dichotomy. You can make anything with your words. You can even make Homestuck, if you want, though why the fuck would you want that? (Andrew Hussie, please text me back) But you need a body to breathe. Without the oxygen transported by hemoglobin in the blood, breath doesn’t work for very long on its own.
The equilibrium between broadening and narrowing is how the narrative’s meaning evolves, just like the equilibrium between planned growth and planned death/’endings’ is how the narrative’s material content evolves. ‘What comes next’ invariably has some relationship with ‘existing understandings of the world’, for better or for worse. The future comes from the past, and the past is continually being reinterpreted as we move forward into the future.
So delinquency, then. What does it mean, to buck the narrative’s purposes, to stir shit up when it comes to Meaning and Truth? Those Hearty motherfuckers, I bet they know.
Heart personalizes and localizes meaning. Seizes the meaning for its own purposes, imbues the things it loves with meaning. This runs just as contrary to the narrative’s ‘purpose’ as Hope coming up with random bullshit and lying all the time, starting problems and kicking off unresolvable conflicts for the fuck of it, refusing to be instrumental in orderly, measured Creation and Propagation.
Heart says, ‘yeah, there’s totally meaning. It’s already here. And it’s mine. It’s personal. It’s got nothing to do with tradition and nothing to do with freedom from tradition. It’s about what I care about, as an individual. I don’t have to look for it, I choose the truth.’
In contrast, Mind externalizes and systematizes meaning, outsources it thoroughly from the self. From a perspective where anything can mean anything - since Mind has an expansive view of this attribute of the universe - maybe it logically follows that nothing means anything? Ultimately, Mind subducts its selfhood in contrast with Heart’s aggressive individualism.
Mind says, ‘if there is meaning or truth, and that’s a big ‘if’, it’s not mine. It comes from bigger-picture interactions, patterns and systems formed by billions of individuals, the overarching story, the grand scheme of things.’
The equilibrium of the Heart-Mind axis, and what they contribute to Skaia, is an application of meaning outside of the cyclical/reproductive progression of narrative. One rejects it, one embraces it, and between them, they force a reevaluation of the story and what the human cogs in the Engine Of Inevitability are worth, in the end. What it means to be a person, not just a character, in a society, not just a story.
So Meaning, in the end, is something that instrumentally drives the narrative and its interpretation unerringly forward, despite the fact that there’s a whole hell of a lot of delinquent Meaning to be found in non-narrative elements that do nothing for the ‘story’. What characters do you love? What characters force you to reexamine parts of your own life and identity? What change does the story enact on the society receiving it? In what ways does it influence your view of the greater systems you inhabit?
None of that has jack squat to do with Skaia’s specific purpose, and Homestuck’s specific purpose, which is ‘being read and interpreted’. Heart is the reading into and reading out of, the situating of what’s been read in the personal and the familiar, the reshaping and reinterpreting of the text outside of the author’s hands. Get too far into the weeds, though, and you lose sight of the forest for the trees. The text, and the greater system that provokes this inquiry, is still worth understanding, examining, and… if you like reading it, it’s worth playing along and continuing to entertain the story as something worth enjoying distinct from its effect on you.
Now, destroying that reader interpretation and personalization-of-story, deferring entirely to the overarching systems and taking them at face value… hm. I wonder if that comes up anywhere in canon-adjacent Homestuck materials? It would sure be interesting if it did.
CONTRACTION VS. EXPANSION: WAIT, HAVEN’T WE BEEN SORT OF IMPLICITLY TALKING ABOUT THIS THE WHOLE TIME?
Good point! Unfortunately, you’ve come this far, so I’m relying on the sunk cost of having spent so much time reading this to keep you with me even as I beat the carcass of the horse to a bloody stain on the pavement.
There is a contraction and an expansion ‘side’ to every axis, dealing with how that axis either instrumentalizes or deviates from the fundamental purpose.
The simple way to understand it - really, actually simple this time, I promise - is like this.
Blood is INSTRUMENTALIZED to CONTRACT the MEANING of the narrative.
(Answers can be found in the way we relate to what came before.)
Breath is INSTRUMENTALIZED to EXPAND the MEANING of the narrative.
(Answers can be found when we turn the page and write what comes next.)
Light is FUNDAMENTAL to THE CONTRACTION OF the MEANING of the narrative.
(There’s one true answer to every question.)
Void is FUNDAMENTAL to THE EXPANSION OF the MEANING of the narrative.
(There’s no single true answer to any question.)
Heart DEVIATES through CONTRACTION OF the MEANING of the narrative.
(My answer to the question is the only one that matters to me.)
Mind DEVIATES through EXPANSION OF the MEANING of the narrative.
(My answer to the question doesn’t matter at all in the scheme of things.)
aaaand
Time is INSTRUMENTALIZED to CONTRACT the MATERIAL of the narrative.
(The organized path the narrative takes to its ending.)
Space is INSTRUMENTALIZED to EXPAND the MATERIAL of the narrative.
(The organized path the narrative takes as it grows.)
Doom is FUNDAMENTAL to THE CONTRACTION OF the MATERIAL of the narrative.
(The tendency towards inertia and endings.)
Life is FUNDAMENTAL to THE EXPANSION OF the MATERIAL of the narrative.
(The tendency towards momentum and growth.)
Rage DEVIATES through CONTRACTION OF the MATERIAL of the narrative.
(The termination of the false, unnatural, and counter-to-narrative.)
Hope DEVIATES through EXPANSION OF the MATERIAL of the narrative.
(The growth of the false, unnatural, and counter-to-narrative.)
Each subset being, as has already been thoroughly belabored, its own equilibrium of contraction and expansion. That’s what the ‘contraction’ and ‘expansion’ thing on the chart means. That’s the whole entire thing.
WHY DOES IT MATTER?
Earlier, I said it was just fun to think about. It is fun to think about. That wasn’t even a lie. But while aspects and their presence in the story through the characters’ relationships with them are definitely one of the most fun system-building elements of Homestuck, they’re also a really useful way to understand why and how Skaia (narrative), and Homestuck itself (metanarrative) ‘treat’ the characters, and how the story uses them to tell itself.
It’s unquestionable that the majority of Homestuck’s text comes from characters talking to each other, and sometimes to themselves.
Homestuck runs on characters’ Narrative-Compatible Journeys. Accordingly, characters whose aspect relationships deal with instrumentalized aspects talk substantially more than those whose aspect relationships deal with delinquent aspects. Their narrative existence is effectively appropriated as Skaia’s mouthpiece.
Let’s get into why that matters.
Out of 434,851 words attributed to to the fifteen word-speakingest characters in Homestuck, the lion’s share, 233,588 (54% of the total) are owed to instrumentalized-aspect-affiliated, including Karkat (Blood), Dave and Caliborn (Time), John (Breath), and Jade, Calliope, and Kanaya (Space). Excluding cherubs, who account for 41,437 words between them, that’s still 192,151 words.
126,271 (29% of the total) were spoken by fundamental-aspect-affiliated characters, including Vriska, Rose, and Aranea (Light), Roxy (Void), and Jane (Life).
74,992 (only 17% of the total) were spoken by delinquent-aspect-affiliated characters, including Dirk (Heart), Jake (Hope), and Terezi (Mind). This all stacks up to a breakdown of 54:29:17 in terms of narrative development through instrumental:fundamental:deviant aspect-affiliates.
What that means, if we accept the premise that dialogue is the means by which Skaia/Homestuck lurches its way from point A to point B, is that players with instrumental aspect relationships are, predominantly, the engine by which the story gets told.
The cherubless breakdown, it should be noted, is still 49:32:19. I point this out mainly to account for the potential confounding variable of the presence of the cherubs’ two-player session; of course there would be more Time and Space players bopping around, there’s a whole spare session in which they’re literally the only players that exist to be introduced!
Not only does the consistent Immensity of the narrative focus on and progression through instrumentally-positioned characters with the cherubs excluded demonstrate that the relationship is not a spurious one, the existence of the cherub session itself, and the terms by which it is both explained (semi reliably?) and demonstrated to function, point to some really interesting implications for the aspect system and its relevance to Skaia’s, and thus, Homestuck’s, function.
If Calliope and Kanaya are to be believed, the (https://www.homestuck.com/story/4962 bare minimum for a session to reach the conventional victory state is the entrance two players), (https://www.homestuck.com/story/3311 at least one of whom is a Space player responsible for frog-breeding). The most important material equilibrium for the fulfillment of Skaia’s self-propagation is the instrumentalization of growth and death for its reproductive purposes. A story can exist without an internal mechanism for meaning-enforcement.
The fact that there are numerically more Space and Time players with significant spoken parts is itself an important piece of the puzzle; the Alphas fundamentally can’t keep the story moving forward without them, and their Hope-dense nonsense and lack of any player manifestation of material instrumentality both renders their session ‘void’ and demands the narrative intervention of both a Rage player plucked from another session and the inclusion of an additional, Timey-Spacey session with which to commune to keep the game-narrative rolling to the end.
If we move further down the ‘list’, the conclusion solidifies. After Doc Scratch (where I decided to stop, because he isn’t explicitly classpected and I really don’t want to start speculating outside of what is textually confirm-able) Tavros (Instrumental, Breath) speaks 8,679 words, Aradia (Instrumental, Time) speaks 7,650 words, Meenah (Fundamental, Life) speaks 5,960 words, Sollux (Fundamental, Doom) speaks 5,654 words, and Kankri (Instrumental, Blood) speaks 5,256 words.
That’s all before we hit the next delinquent-aspect-affiliated character, Eridan (Delinquent, Hope), who speaks 4,584 words. The narrative doesn’t dwell on instruments of its own derailment and subversion; at least, the alpha narrative, and the one that we are largely privy to, doesn’t.
Including all of the characters who speak over 1,000 words and are classpected in-text, an analysis performed by Tumblr user Fenn, who was immensely helpful in response to my reaching out about their work, the differences in narrative focus hold out. That’s including Jasprosesprite^2 and Nannasprite as fundamental, since Nannasprite at least is shown to possess identical ‘powers’ to Jane, suggesting a consistent aspect relationship between human and spritely permutations. Amalgamations of characters from different categories (such as Davepeta, Instrumental-Delinquent Time-Heart) are disregarded. The instrumental:fundamental:delinquent ratio remains roughly the same at 51:31:18.
It would be interesting, for future inquiry, to examine the conditions in which players of different aspect-affiliation-groups gain narrative focus. Anecdotally, Rose delivers a great deal of her exposition to Dave, and a non-negligible portion of Dirk’s wordcount is similarly relayed to Dave, and to Caliborn. Conversations with instrumental players by non-instrumental players (Roxy, Jane, and Jade talking to Callie, Rose talking to Dave and Kanaya) tend to be the most mechanistically revelatory and the narrative points at which the underlying ‘plot’, the slow crawl to the Ultimate Reward, is advanced and justified.
So, in a long and circuitous way, what I’m trying to do, here, is justify my use of the ‘instrumentalized’ and ‘delinquent’ classifications.
Skaia (and Homestuck) instrumentalizes Time and Space players to form the foundation of its story, to do the heavy lifting and get from start to finish. Similarly, Blood and Breath players are instrumentalized in meaning-making and are the conduits by which Skaia facilitates the reader’s evaluation of and presence in the story. If it seems like the narrative ‘favors’ Dave, Karkat, John, and Jade - spends time on their Stories, uses them to accomplish its ends, develops them as narrative (if not always personally-developed) entities at the expense of other narrative threads - that’s because it does. They’re its foremost storytelling devices. The narrative is ‘biased’ towards what works, what propels it to the end-state. If that particular ‘use’ of the characters happens to grind them to bits and strip away all they have, well. Too bad for them. The story is the organism, and its completion and evolution as it moves into the next cycle is the goal.
Understandably, this function is in direct opposition to the delinquent ends of the material and meaning spectra. Hope and Rage, in tandem, are the equilibria that allows the story to grow in a direction other than rote start-to-finish. Hope branches away from the main path; Rage ensures that the most tenable of these new paths is actually the one that the story takes, if any. Heart and Mind, meanwhile, force a reconsideration of the character-cogs in the machine as people, as representations of human individuals, not just gears in the Skaia/Homestuck machine. They situate the story, instead, in more confined personal narratives, or broader societal schematics, and present an alternate interpretation to rote literary notions of meaning.
Dwell on either for long, though, and you won’t have a story that starts and ends. You wind up with a decade-long, multi-million-word monster, weighed down by digressions and plot tumors and - wait.
You also end up with something unique and beautiful and fascinating and analytically rife, of course. The outliers in Homestuck are the Light-affiliates, in terms of narrative focus (word count) vs. what one would expect. That’s not just because Light players tend to be verbose; so does Eridan, and the narrative just… cuts away. What gets shown in the process of writing a story, where the lens focuses, has to be treated as a deliberate choice, one with a significance.
While Homestuck is very self-evidently a story about stories, media, and the ways they connect people and yield personal and material development, it’s a story fueled just as much by abstract meaning as it is by the applied forces at work. It’s a Light-y story in the sense that the relationship that characters have with the Light aspect gets, proportionately and absolutely, the most ‘play time’. In that sense, the disequilibrium between Light and Void favors ‘the search for meaning’ over ‘the unexamined life’ as the major driver-of-narrative.
Some of that is just because Light and Void work differently; Void keeps its secrets, Light can’t hide the truth for long. But consider just how much more meandering explication could have been textually delivered. Consider leprechaun romance. Please, for the love of all that’s good, consider the leprechaun romance. An excess of Light in narrative bloats the ‘abstract meaning quotient’. I would compare ‘Twilight’ and the Twilight fanwork ‘Luminosity’, here, as two works taking, respectively, a Void-heavy and Light-heavy approach to the same subject matter. One work says ‘there are some questions that just won’t be answered or explored, some histories that won’t be delved into, some lore you’ll just have to speculate on for a while without confirmation’. The other says ‘there is nothing about this or any universe that can’t be answered, understood, systematized relentlessly’.
So Homestuck’s Light-Void equilibrium favors explicit lore and explanation. What are some other disequilibria? Time over Space, unless, of course, you consider the fact that the author considers himself a Space player and accordingly attribute all un-attributed verbiage to Space (organized story-growth vs. organized story-ending).
This is one of those areas in which it can be really useful to think about self-affiliated aspect. I would definitely say that my work tends to be… it is… somewhat overwhelmingly Hope-y, both in the very literal sense and in the structural sense. No plot tumor left behind, that’s what I always say. No story too stupid to take seriously and extrapolate to a conclusion, no conclusion too definite not to pick it up later and have a go at it again when the mood strikes. I hate editing.
Life and Doom are at a heavy disequilibrium in Homestuck, favoring growth; so are Hope and Rage, similarly favoring unchecked narrative expansion with few textualized limits. On an absolute scale, though, Life and Hope still pale in comparison to other massive textual influences. For all its digressions and exploration of different plots and ideas, Homestuck does have one overarching narrative, as difficult as that can be to chart given the Timeyness of the Line.
There’s a disequilibrium at work in terms of Heart and Mind, favoring Heart; we see this magnified tenfold in the meat route of the epilogues. Heart is prone to meaning-digressions, meaning-outside-the-story, meaning to be found in personal relationships (shipping, a favorite character, hating one character, writing fanfiction) beyond the text itself, and it could definitely be argued that Homestuck proper, as a work, explicitly pushes the reader towards extratextual engagement, provides vehicles to do so (quadrants, ‘shipping charts’, in-text meditation on characters-as-people and people-as-characters) and examples of characters doing so (primarily through interaction with Dirk and Nepeta and their textual legacies, we learn about ‘fan engagement’ by Kanaya, Karkat, Calliope, and Caliborn, among others, and both Dirk and Nepeta trailblaze in-text fanwork like shipping charts and fanart). At the same time, Mind, the sublimation of the Self to systems and overarching stories both, is very much present in Terezi’s narrative role and interaction with Alternian systems of justice and the dispersion of her personal meaning, through the bloody scarf and the instrumentalization of Breath, to the narrative.
What’s in equilibrium? Breath and Blood both textually balance each other out very effectively in Homestuck proper. Homestuck, as a narrative, doesn’t ‘take a side’ in that regard - the past is a component of the future, where we’re going relies on an understanding of where we’ve been. We see that clearly in Homestuck’s relatively balanced approach to Introducing New Story/Movement and Understanding The Story That Came Before as it unfolds. Old answers are examined, new answers are proposed and explored.
An unbalanced Breath-Blood narrative is one in which the applied meaning-making of the work is either entrenched in the past or skates over it before moving on; consider the prequel trilogy of Star Wars for a Blood-y approach to instrumentalized meaning, and the original trilogy for a Breath-y approach to instrumentalized meaning.
The cool thing about this sort of system is that, while codifiable and comprehensible through Homestuck, it has really cool, broad, systematic applications for describing narratives and also narrative priorities. Looking back, I can describe my work as Hope and Light-dense; I tend to build narratives in unchecked, spiral-y, disorganized growth patterns, and narrow their meaning through a focus on the meandering way that characters discuss it as opposed to its instrumentalization in telling the story. Looking forward, as an approach to writing new stories, I can recognize those tendencies and either lean into them if I like where they’re taking me or lean into the opposite side of things if I don’t. In theory, at least, someone who doesn’t love the lumpy Hope-shaped approach to storytelling can edit and outline ruthlessly and invoke the Rage-shaped resistance to exploring narratives that might not Work. By recognizing where you or your narrative stands on each equilibrium, you can evaluate whether that’s the energy you’re going for and intensify or amend accordingly.
Descriptively, there may be some commonality in works that you, personally, enjoy. Applying this framework may help you identify patterns in the media that gives you pleasure and the media the frustrates you. It’s important to note that equilibrium and disequilibrium, on any axis, aren’t a moral judgement. They’re just qualities like a rug being either colorful or monochrome, a book being long or short, a stool being made of wood or made of metal. Every ‘thing’ has to fall somewhere on one of those axes. Every story, every character, every narrative falls somewhere on every one of these axes.
So why does this matter? Why is this view of aspect interesting? Because it’s a tool to describe stories. Because stories are worth thinking about and understanding, and it’s worth it to consider what we’re communicating and how we’re communicating it any time we’re putting pen to paper or word to tongue.
I’m iffy on classpecting people, as I said earlier, because it describes a journey and your journey isn’t over yet. Examining the stories you tell yourself, though, and the stories you’ve told through your actions and responses to adversity and good-fortune both, is worth doing, if only to more informedly chart a course forward. Extranarrative-classpecting, if you ask me, is best put to use when considering what kind of story you want to tell with your life, and what kind of impact you want to have on the world. We’ll all die someday, and we’ll all be bones and stories when that happens. What’s important to you? What and how do you most want to help create, materially? What and how do you most want to help understand?
Put that to a story and tell it. Living deliberately and purposefully is its own kind of art.
What will you do?