#class verbs

Anonymous said:

Aranea’s booth could be viewed as her trying to ‘cure’ the lack of knowledge. She also ‘cured’ terezi’s sight            

Sure; like I said “cure” is certainly applicable.

For me though the question, as with “heal”, is how to fit Aranea derailing the B2 Session and getting everyone killed within whatever description of Sylph you’re using. Which is why I think “cure” is, at least, a move in the right direction from “heal”; to my mind “heal” implies a result that’s more objectively positive(or which both the healer and the healed view as positive, at least), whereas “cure” is more subjective(like the person being “cured” seeing it as negative or not in their best-interests).

Anonymous said:

What if Sylphs were their  “aspect’s cure” ?      

HMMMMmmmm...... Maybe?

I mean: if you find it a constructive and useful way to think about the class and conceptually organize what they do in-canon then that’s all that should really matter from a personal reading perspective. I think it’s certainly better than thinking of them as passive healers.

Like: “Cure” is more vague and ambiguous than “heal” so it might be a more useful class-verb, though I Still Prefer Explaining The Different Things They Do Minutely rather than trying to find one best-fit verb for the classes. So, some examples of that ambiguity: You “Cure” gangrene by lopping off a limb; you might seek to “Cure” arrogance by berating and humiliating someone(and in fact, our culture frequently presents this as the cure for arrogance through the concept of “humbling”); you “Cure” the many, many, MANY negatives --personal and social-- created by Wealth by taking it away. So “Cure”, far moreso than “Heal”, can include multiple perspectives at once which can also be in conflict re: the morality and utility of the act(i.e., the utility of amputation or social-leveling are both pretty clear and obvs, but the individuals amputated or leveled are likely to carry resentment about it, even if they acknowledge the good done by it). And this ambiguous quality of “Cure” as an idea isn’t limited. It can go all the way to the most negative extremes; hence the saying “The cure is worse than the disease”(see: most cancer treatments, particularly earlier in the 20th century when they were still incredibly lethal in-themselves; or the stuff they’ve got to do to fight antibiotic-resistant infections).

This added ambivalence and ease with internal friction/contradiction might create enough room to include Aranea’s destructive behavior within the rubric of Sylphiness. But, like I’ve said, I don’t really spend a lot of time thinking deeply about Homestuck stuff these days and haven’t read the full text of it in over 5 years, so I’m nowhere near as sharp on it as I was even just 2 years ago, let alone when the fandom was at its peak and I was cranking out meticulous theoryposts on a weeklyish basis (:T

So like I said at the beginning of this post: If you, reading the text and engaging with it, feel that “Cure” or “Cure of/for Aspect” fits for Sylphs, and that you can muster a nice little battalion of evidence from the text to support your argument, then THAT’S what should matter; not what I or anyone else has to say on the subject.

ymawgat said:

Why not: Witches and Sylphs "heal", and Maids and Heirs "give"?

Gah! I keep meaning to answer this then forgetting to do that whenever I get online! Sorry, @ymawgat​ -__-

I guess it boils down to being that I don’t think “healing” or “giving” are exclusive to those classes, nor the most fundamental similarity between those classes, nor really the most basic description of what they do, and these designations ignore how Page plays into the same interactions which “heal” and “give” are attempts to describe.

I mean, like me and @deliverusfromsburb​  are always pointing out the person proceeds the class so none of this is rigidly determinative, but as I read them “Heal” is just a facet of what Witches and Sylphs can choose to do; a particular deployment of much wider powers. Aranea’s a good example of this: she calls what she does “healing”, but influencing the God Clocks to 8reak the way she wants, to make killing people easier for her, doesn’t bear even a remote resemblance to anything one could describe as “healing”. The end-result she was attempting to bring about may have been Galadriellan in its conception, but her direct actions weren’t actions of healing, anymore than turning Jake into an Unwilling Hope Battery, so to describe Sylphs as “healers” doesn’t, to me, really capture what they’re about.

On “Give”, I just think “serve” fits better as it covers “giving”(when you “serve” someone something) while also touching on other ideas that Maids and Pages seems to share(though Heirs do look alot like those two classes as well. Which is one reason why I think non-binary approaches to Class-organization can be useful). Also, “giving” ignores the many reflexive(self-impacting) facets of these three classes; all the ways in which they do things to themselves.