#romspec

Heya! Yeah I’m alright. Focusing on work, playing Warframe on PS4 in my free time, occasional Homestuck RP, and just generally living self-indulgently it feels like.

So! This blog.

After all this time — years!! — Homestuck proper still gives me butterflies. Sure, there was that new survey half a year(?) or so back with stuff that clues us into radial aspect relationships / wheel neighbors, and Andrew’s hinted with it that there’s still a whole lot to the system to care about, but... as interesting as it’ll probably be to figure out, I don’t think I’ll be participating again in any of that figurin’.

You could see in my Ultimate Riddle theorypost how much stock I put into the idea that these aspects — and classes to a lesser extent — were kind of the vectors through which the ultimate lesson would be told? And together with that, how I was convinced that every loose end would be wrapped up as cleanly and excellently as it felt like they had been throughout the rest of the plot? But that monumental ENDING of his was tailored to brush it all aside as stuff that, while maybe “important” in some respects, ultimately did NOT matter. Lord English focused on complicated loops and plots and loose ends and timeline-spanning catastrophe, but ultimately he was just playing in a little sandbox thinking he was “trolling” the other kids SO HARD when they really don’t even need to give him the time of day in the end. They created a new world that they have their whole lives to tend and enjoy, before they or some offshoots of them feel like taking a break and tying up that stupid Caliborn claymation loop. By every definition that mattered, they WON. They really did get the ultimate reward. And now the essence of their characters live on in both myriad timelines (of both doom and promise) within their universe AND within the minds and hearts and imaginations of all the Homestuck readers who enjoyed these characters so much and got to know them.

And as far as the author was concerned, the aspects were... sure, KIND of neat! But really beside the point.

Which is a valid position! Just... one that I can’t handle well. Not because I think his position is “wrong” or anything, but rather just because I’m “me”. I put too much stock in this stuff. Seeing it torn from the false pedestal I put it on and relegated to the sidelines so dramatically makes it WAY too hard to revisit it and work on refining it again. So... yeah. I’m not gonna do that.

I’ll still read, play, and enjoy pretty much everything Andrew ever makes. I’ll still play through the other Hiveswap’s episodes as they come out! I just won’t, er... go at all in-depth thinking about them and theories and stuff. Cause that’s gonna sting too hard even if I wait for years more, I know now.

So instead of perpetually extending this “break” or “delay” from theorycrafting, you’ll have to take this as my resignation. I can’t promise I’ll never go so ridiculously BALLS DEEP into something theoryways like I did with Homestuck, but given the circumstances it doesn’t seem likely.

So... again! We come back to the question of this blog.

I am NOT gonna delete this dang blog. I put a lot of effort into those years of theorymeandering, people are STILL aspect theorists who can benefit from my past work, and I gather that a lot of people still like my old stuff. *I* like my old stuff! I’m not planning on throwing it away.

But there IS the troubling issue of that whole... “Tumblrpocalypse” dealie threatening to do so whether I want it to happen or not.

SO! First, I need to backup my whole goddamn blog again. That’s something I know how to do already, and plan to do today, or during the week if I can’t today.

Second, and here’s the tricky part, I need to set up ALTERNATIVE HOSTING for this stuff. Somewhere I can upload all this stuff in SOME SORT of readable, searchable form so that you and I can still get at it if Tumblr decides to shit itself. This is something I needed to do anyway, but I’ve been stalling for over a YEAR on it... about a year ago, Dropbox disallowed direct webpage hosting from its public shares, and that broke stuff like the SBaHJ Origin Archive and Wizardology Archive that I’d been hosting there in that format. I’ve been procrastinating and procrastinating on how to re-host those without bothering to set up an entire fucking website, and received SOME suggestions but never put the work in... so, that’s scheduled for this week too.

In the meantime, ANY ADVICE ANY OF YOU HAVE ON ALTERNATIVE HOSTING WOULD BE **WONDERFUL!!!** I have NO idea what the best way to go about this is, alternative-hosting-ways.

Caliborn animated Act 7. No one else in-universe or out would have omitted Vriska’s spider eye. Caliborn draws her with regular eyes, both in his homosuck style and his learn-to-draw manga style. But what does this mean?

Because the names were fun to come up with

❤ = matespritship; romantic affection ♠️ = kismesissitude; romantic rivalry ♦️ =moirallegience; platonic affection ♣️ = auspistice; platonic rivalry with mediator (auspice)

The Gnostics posited an original spiritual unity that came to be split into a plurality.

As a result of the precosmic division the universe was created. This was done by a leader possessing inferior spiritual powers and who often resembled the Old Testament Jehovah.

A female emanation of God was involved in the cosmic creation (albeit in a much more positive role than the leader).

In the cosmos, space and time have a malevolent character and may be personified as demonic beings separating man from God.

For man, the universe is a vast prison. He is enslaved both by the physical laws of nature and by such moral laws as the Mosaic code.

Mankind may be personified as Adam, who lies in the deep sleep of ignorance, his powers of spiritual self-awareness stupefied by materiality.

Within each natural man is an "inner man," a fallen spark of the divine substance. Since this exists in each man, we have the possibility of awakening from our stupefaction.

What effects the awakening is not obedience, faith, or good works, but knowledge.

Before the awakening, men undergo troubled dreams.

Man does not attain the knowledge that awakens him from these dreams by cognition but through revelatory experience, and this knowledge is not information but a modification of the sensate being.

The awakening (i.e., the salvation) of any individual is a cosmic event.

Since the effort is to restore the wholeness and unity of the Godhead, active rebellion against the moral law of the Old Testament is enjoined upon every man.

Source: What Is a Gnostic? by Stephan A. Hoeller

From what I've reread, headcanon for romantic/sexual preferences for the main characters and a few crushes, to the best of my abilities:

Captain: Aromantic asexual (super aesthetically attracted to everything, though, possibly a slight romantic thing for Snippy but not enough to really matter?)

Snippy: Heteromantic heterosexual (which is put to the test with Captain because he's super confused on what zee is and doesn't know whether he wants to try hitting on zir or not)

Pilot: Lithromantic/demiromantic pansexual (I had a really difficult time figuring out exactly what I felt with Pilot, and due to his neurodivergence may actually be closer to adfecturomantic/sexual. Strong feelings toward Captain, obviously.)

Engie: Caedromantic, sapiosexual (ANNET incident. No one aside from Annie is remotely smart enough to catch his interest so he's essentially ace)

Y'know, at risk of being That Guy (although I truly mean it kindly) I suspect the reason you and others took the ending so badly is it seems to say the things you most need to hear, yet perhaps are most uncomfortable. You spent a whole lot of time assigning things boxes and frameworks and the ending seemed designed to tell us those boxes and frameworks were utter bullshit.

On the other hand, Hussie's the one with a website full of aspect shirts to buy, so there's that.

No no, you're not "That Guy" or anything; you're not wrong, in a sense.

Part of what I'd convinced myself, and constantly advocated, was that Andrew was trying to say that a system (classes/aspects) was quite meaningful in Homestuck, and understanding it would help us better appreciate some of what the comic was trying to communicate, especially the deeper stuff about how our will manifests in reality, all that Ultimate Riddle business. I thought it was really cool, and I thought Andrew was intentionally weaving it into his comic, and valued it at least somewhat similarly.

The way it ended made it look as if almost none of that -- hell, not even the final villain -- was ultimately important.

I don't believe "everything belongs in a box". But I did think there was some cool box meaning Andrew was putting in his stuff, and I made theories and drew a bunch of boxy charts, and then the comic's ending seemed to almost shit on boxes as a whole and left half the chart undrawn with a bunch of squiggles in penis shapes instead of neat resolutions.

Fitting? Maybe! You could even argue that he was subtly trying to hint at this the whole time.

But you can still imagine my disappointment. And how it feels to have an idea you put years of emotional investment in not just shot down -- not even disproven!! -- but just ignored and completely unaddressed like it wasn't even on the radar. When you were utterly convinced that they cared about it even half as much as you did.

It still really stings. :(

And to be clear, I'm not saying that what Andrew chose to do is "wrong" at all. This entire blog's history of classpect musings was me trying to appreciate what I thought he was intentionally doing, and give it all its due, expand upon it, etc! That's why I've never brought myself to endorse any sort of rewritten fan-alternative to the ending. I was in love with what I thought his work represented. It's not his responsibility that I misinterpreted it. I thought he'd want to give us all the answers, all the remaining pieces, in some cryptic form or another; it's completely within his rights to decide not to, and to not even intend to do so from the beginning.

The concept is a very human one. It is the product of your story writing again. You have written a story about the truth, making emotional demands of it, and in particular, of those in possession of it. Your demands are based on a feeling of entitlement to the facts, which is very childish. You can never know all of the facts. Only I can. And since it's impossible for me to reveal all facts to you, it is my discretion alone that decides which facts will be revealed in the finite time we have.

So in the end, in some ways, you're right. I was devoting my energy and emotional investment towards a story that probably wasn't the one he was actually writing, thinking I'd found this deep, amazing track in it that I could feel some measure of immensely satisfying rapport in following, when the track I was following -- and the devotion I thought the author was putting into said track, the track I thought I identified with -- might not have existed at all. (At least, not in a form that was even CLOSE to as important as I thought it was: Something that "had to be addressed before the end".)

The track wasn't inherently wrong, like, morally or anything. I just thought it was there and it maybe wasn't. Y'know?

[EDIT: There’s a moiraillegiance ‘<>’ symbol between the Bard of Space and Mage of Mind/ Knight of Doom in the title, but it’s invisible for some reason. Sorry for the inconvenience!]

The Mage of Mind can understand the reasons and actions of others with uncanny accuracy, but for all of their intelligence they run the risk of being pretty shallow. 

The Bard of Space would be a chill, but slightly destructive character with an interest in death and some major klutziness. They’d be knocking stuff over left and right. They’d be bumping into others and making them knock stuff over. Not that they really have any plans on changing that. 

The Knight of Doom is a serious, orderly, and rule abiding person, who can exploit bureaucratic matters to their own end time and time again. This is probably not immediately evident in how they act though, since Knights are so fond of hiding themselves behind masks.

Mage of Mind <> Bard of Space would appear to go just about perfectly, but it wouldn’t last very long. Because the Mage of Mind so intimately understands the actions others will undertake, they could easily moderate the Bard’s behavior in such a way that the Bard might not even realize they are being manipulated. Unfortunately, the Mage has a tendency toward shallowness, so, while they could moderate the Bard’s behavior easily, they would be unlikely to work on any of the Bard’s underlying issues or beliefs. The Bard would be unlikely to change this, since the relationship would help them a good deal on the surface level, so the Mage’s issues would never even be acknowledged, let alone dealt with in a healthy way. Resentment would build fast from the Mage’s end, and the whole thing would fall apart eventually.

Knight of Doom <> Bard of Space would go much better. The Knight’s underlying sense of order would lead them to nudge the Bard away from their destructive tendencies for the sake of the group - the Knight would have to drop their mask to do so, and because the Bard would have to be openly reprimanded they would learn to moderate their own behaviour eventually. Because of the layout of this relationship, each of them would grow closer as they tried to adjust to the other’s needs and make the other adjust to their own. These two could eventually reach a level of real emotional intimacy and trust that the previous pair would not.

Decree:

+ Knight of Doom <> Bard of Space