#specific classpects

Thank you, I'm glad you like the guide!

I don't personally think nailing down how each classpect combo works is a good idea. When I started this project, I never intended to write out every specific combination. I think doing that is a really bad idea that will limit what is supposed to be, per Terezi, a vocabulary of hyperflexible mythology.

I did a few bc people asked and I felt compelled to, but as my inbox kind of filled up with nothing but requests, my stance on this firmed up.

Like let's say I delineate every single Heir combo possible and someone who's definitely an Heir reads them and goes "huh none of those feel right". The thing is that I believe you could have two people who are Heir of Mind who are different people, but their best fit is STILL Heir of Mind.

The thing about classpect that's fun is that it's very specific, but not so specific it excludes interpretation.

My take on all this is meant to be a guide, and I feel like we lose something from me writing out every combination.

(sorry this took so long, it's been a Week at work and then I wrote a primer on mechanical keyboards, whoops)

Someone requested Page of Blood and ever since I have been kinda snickering at the idea of one because I am not sure but I think that a Page of Blood is just Sora Kindgomhearts. I say this as someone who only played, like, two of those games and drinks the Disney haterade. But the archetype that comes to mind for me is the Fool With Friends, the sort of protagonist in a story who doesn't really know what the plot happening around them is but they keep walking into the background of important cutscenes until they stumble into a character arc, you know what I'm saying?

That's the least hospitable read I have on the classpect. A kinder one would be someone who is the beating heart of team of people, the gravity well that holds everyone together, but isn't the leader by any means. Pages cannot be leaders, I'm sorry, but no. But they can be the person everyone else looks at and is like "I've only known the Page of Blood for twenty minutes but if anything happened to them, i'd kill everyone in this room and then myself."

Because a Page of Blood is going to have amazing innate affinity with Blood without putting in the work, but it's all gonna feel incidental. There is a charmed quality to the way they operate. All the red chords and tethers of Blood form a safety net for the Page to fall in.

But... I always come back to Pages losing control, and I always come back to Blood's cost, and the thing about a net is that it can catch you... or it can catch you. The Page of Blood may stumble their way into a tangled mess of emotions and bonds without knowing how to actually deal with them. Blood benefits heavily from being someone who knows how to communicate well (and here I gesture to Karkat Vantas), and I think its a muscle the Page never feels the need to exercise. They might be actually bad at communication, at anything beyond the surface level connection, so when things get difficult, they might feel left adrift in the ocean of red without knowing how to do more than doggy-paddle.

You know who's a Knight of Doom? Neo Matrix, from the Matrix movies.

I'm only kind of joking. The concept that comes to mind for Knight of Doom is someone who is aware of the ones and zeros of the world, can "see the matrix", but views it as a tool to use essentially. I think what would stand about about a Knight is that... I tend to think of Doom players being very angry at The System, because that system is what is going to lead to everyone's demise. The mechanics and cogs that propel that system feel like the Doom player's enemy, right?

But I don't know if a Knight feels that way. Knights are one of the Tired classes, and thus have all that resignation and burnout that go along with it. I think a KoD is going to look at Doom as inevitability, but would be able to see better than most the actors that put the system into place. Another person says "we need to make the oil companies pay!" while a Doom player is like "Here are the names and addresses of the people who should pay," if that makes sense.

IDK why I associate Doom with activism so much, but I do.

Also given the "I just work here" vibes of the Knight, I think a Knight of Doom is going to be very good at self-moderation. AGAIN THE ACTIVISM METAPHOR but the KoD is going to look at the people around them and go "dude, I know your mad but go take a weekend off before you burn out and fuck us all over." They know more than most that the struggle is going to be of attrition, and come ready with comfortable shoes and a sleeping bag.

someone dropped me a ko-fi and asked for more thoughts on the idea of a Page of Heart, and I wasn't sure I had anything until it hit me out of the blue.

so the thing about Pages is that they get people to serve them without knowing that's what's happening. with Tavros, his goal was to have fun and to fly around, even when what he wanted to do was not strategic to the overall team plan. (Breath players don't super care about the overall objective of the game, after all.) Aradia, Kanaya, and Vriska all contributed to this.

With Jake, his whole thing is being a liar who doesn't want to do anything to upset anyone buuuut also wants to get the things he wants. He manipulates all his friends, wins the English Sweepstakes, and is 'served' by everyone until it all goes to hell.

So what about a Page of Heart? I think a Page of Heart would be someone who just so happens to encourage the people around them to aid them in their personal journey, who help them with their self-iteration and evolution. Page's power curve is very steady and gets super high without many people noticing, so I think a Page of Heart in a narrative would have a really strong character arc, nothing but the hits, to the point the people around them feel stagnant.

The Page's guilt is relevant here of course. A Page of Heart probably knows full well that their growth is at the hands of the people around them, but may not feel... equipped to turn around and give that same effort. They may be plagued with that feeling that they are demanding too much "emotional labor" from their friends. (Let's allow it to be tacit that the entire concept of applying emotional labor to non-professional context is busted. I know, and I hope you know this too.)

A PoH needs to learn how to give back, or to at least see clearly if they are taking advantage of people and temper that. But Heart players already have trouble wondering if they are duplicitous, so being a Page as well? Oof. It's hard to ask them to "be real" with folks.

Sup, someone dropped me a tip and asked for more thoughts on the Rogue Of Breath classpect. Sure thing!

We already have one Rogue of Breath, but as we all know, the majority of the Dancestors are used primarily as jokes, which makes it a little hard to use them as a basis for analysis. My main goal was to just try to keep things consistent. Rufioh does not tell us as much about Rogues as Roxy does, but I don't want to just discard stuff because it makes the task more difficult, obviously.

So, Rogue of Breath would be one who distributes freedom to their team. The big takeaway I had from trying to close-read Rufioh Nitram was that he was often an outlet for other's people's freedom and exploration but he himself didn't always get a lot out of the relationships, and was himself rather flighty. (lmao? eh)

Thus you may think of a RoB as someone who helps the members of their team break loose from something that is confining them. Or, break is not the word... Break is the Hope word, not the Breath word. Breath lets a person slip sinuously out of the bounds that hold them. So a RoB would help their allies do that, to slip the leash of their restraints as it were.

But I think it would be like guiding someone out of a Labyrinth that you were then required to go back in. A Rogue of Breath would do the work, guide each of their friends out of the confinement, but feel like their own escape was being put off and off, and it would make them jaded. Which becomes difficult when they want a break, or for someone to free them for once, but they're the only one who knows the way.

Well, would you not think that a Prince of Heart is also using personhood? A Prince gains power from fealty to their aspect. To be kind of tawdry and cliche, it's as if being True To Your Heart gives you more power in a way that leads to incredible limit breaks.

In comparison to a Prince of Heart, I think the Knight of Heart is not really up for talking about Personal Stuff or trying to sort through their shit. They start out with a really strong sense of their Self; it's something else that is their barrier.

(Worth nothing, both Knight and Prince are Tanks in my reading.)

Knights kind of feel like the "Hey I just work here" class. The actual functions of what they do with their Aspect, that's really easy. Karkat was always good at Blood, Dave was always good at Time, it was their Other Issues that tripped them up. (Being queer and troll queer/cullbait respectively.) If you're a Knight of Heart, I think you're journey of growing up is easier than others, but complicated by Something Else. Knights are super queer to me, so someone who figures out super early they're trans but then has to contend with the new expectations of gender they weren't socialized with, that feels to me like a very KoH arc.

Now a Page of Heart lmao feels like the Disney Movie Protagonist to me. The one who learns in the end "you have all these cool abilities but the power came from inside you all along." It's incredibly twee. Thought I will say, the guileful nature of the Page paired with the romantic nature of Heart is very funny to me. I think a Page of Heart would be an absolute heartbreaker, like would make Jake English seem like a fucking nun in comparison.

HEY BUDDY GOOD TO SEE YOU.

A Maid of Space, so one who is burdened by Space. As they tend to seek out something that feels impossible due to their aspect, and the big limitation of Space is that you're really constrained to a very rigid domain and tend to struggle with a specific part of Living In A Society, I'd say you'd be a Maid is there is a thing about modern society that is pressing down particularly hard on you or is difficult for you to come to terms with. For Jade it was being a narrative toy constantly being shoved back in the box which is a little amorphous for us, but for Porrim it was sexism and the role impressed on her by her caste, and Kanaya it was her struggle with quadromanticentrism (oh my god fuck me for typing that). Now we all live in A Society of course, but the arc of the Maid that if they're successful, they will get to the other side and reach some sort of peace. So, if you're a Maid, you may feel a boot on your back but have hope you'll get free of it.

An Heir of Space is going to be the exemplar of the Space aspect, so the tactile reality of things. Space is about being locked inside a specific possibility range and having great control over that domain but zero beyond it. And the power curve of an Heir peaks early and stays constant. So I would posit an Heir of Space would feel more trapped than many other classpect combinations. The boundaries of possibility would feel like the edges of the universe. There is nothing beyond. They would be draped in a feeling of stagnation, of having seen it all already, and be like intensely world-weary even in their twenties. To which my advice would be to be better at reaching out to friends who do still have hope and who seem to be flourishing, to try and understand where that comes from inside them and try to emulate it. Fake it until you make it.

But that requires the step of actually reaching out and not letting yourself be convinced you're a burden. Which is hard but is a struggle worth having.

Worth noting that a Maid's source of their aspect comes from within and is under a lot of their control. An Heir also has a very strong personal connection to their aspect, but its impersonal and entirely not under their control. They are under control of their aspect.

do you have any thoughts about sorta self-contradictory titles? heir of blood, for instance, sounds like itd be hard to reconcile using your definitions. what dya think an heir of blood would be like?

I don't find Heir of Blood to be contradictory? That to me parses as someone who's life is directed by the many tethers between them and others. It sounds to me immediately as a deeply fraught existence. Someone who has no choice but to be tangled up in all those red threads until they can't get free. what made Karkat a frankly mind-bogglingly good knight of blood was he had full utility of blood, he could reach out and grab the tethers and drag his cavalcade of shithive friends to where they were needed. its the nature of the utility of the Knight that made him so damn good at what he did.

(sidebar, i'm of the opinion that Karkat Vantas is the best leader in whomstve, that he's the punctuation point on the running joke about leadership. but that's a different story.)

in contrast to knight of blood, an heir of blood has zero grasp of the aspect. it's not a tool to be used like a knight's aspect, it's just the will of the aspect dragging the heir around. so to me an heir of blood is going to be this sort of gravity well of connections.

i conceptualize blood as a viscous, thick pool, one that is so heavy it takes effort to stand up in it, to keep on your feet. the heir is not going to keep on their feet. they're going to have to hold their breath.