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steph-is-asleep · 4 years

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Steph Talks For Way Too Long About Sollux’s Harry Potter House

I havent been able to stop thinking or talking about this topic for like 60+ hours

first wanna say that it’s really hard to interpret how people are sorted because JK Rowling is apparently shitty at writing. So people seem to have wildly different opinions on why people are in the houses they’re in because they view the houses and their qualifications differently.

I’ve also never read a harry potter book and havent watched a movie for like 5+ years maybe so i had to talk to like 3-4 people who went though huge harry potter phases and we talked for over 3 hours cumulatively for me to make up my mind.

I think it’s really important to say that because Sollux isn’t really a main character, there’s a lot we have to make guesses on. Hussie didn’t make a big sheet full of Sollux’s Dreams and Ambitions, Morals and Beliefs, so we have to fill in a lot of blanks on what we think those are based on a few things. Who he talks to, and associates himself with and what he does

The point being we don’t have a lot to work with.

It’s also pretty important to say that Sollux puts on a LOT of fronts and facades. He’s only truly mean and cruel to people he doesn’t like or care about Plus Karkat. He plays Fake Mean a lot, and if you dig even a centimeter under it, we see time and time again that he’s just pretending and does actually give many shits.

Sollux is also really passive in most things that he does. He doesn’t really question anyone’s authority or make a point to fight something out very often. The only time we ever see him resort to action to solve his problems are when dealing with Eridan. And even then, the first time we ever see them talk, it’s Eridan walking up to him and Feferi privately having a conversation and Sollux telling his gf to “make him go away.” And then after Eridan doesn’t go away, we see him resort to fighting. His PQ arc also has him antagonize Eridan and then drop a building on him, so like, yeah. Usually, when presented with conflict, Sollux either removes himself from the situation quickly, or if he’s unable to do so, makes it extremely clear that he doesn’t want to engage. In most cases, Sollux is by himself, sitting alone and not making attempts to talk to anyone else. It’s totally possible that he’s more social at other times and we only see him when he’s at his worst, but we dont see that so we can’t really speculate much on it. Point being, he’s very passive and self contained/oriented.

What i really want to put emphasis on is the people he associates with. His main friends we see him talk to willingly or at least show fondness for are Aradia, Feferi, Kanaya, Terezi, and Karkat. Three of these are considered main characters, or are at least given character arcs to some extent. These are the good guys. The guys who at least try to do good, and show compassion, and care about others. The characters we see him either avoid quietly, avoid loudly or vocally hate and commit violence against are the rest of the characters. Namely Vriska, Gamzee and Eridan. (im kinda gonna gloss over Vriska because his distaste/hatred/unpleasantness towards her doesn’t have to be a moral statement on his part. It’s pretty easy to assume that anyone with his past to her would have a similar if not identical stand point) These are characters that actively do bad things, they murder and harm others at worst and are gross nasty incels at best. And even the best case in that scenario is still blabberingly racist and, treats sollux and the people he cares about like shit. Sollux doesn’t associate with people that the comic have established are villains, or at least do things that are pretty unambiguously wrong or evil.

In Sollux’s pesterquest, Kanaya tells MSPA reader than when The Thing with Aradia first happened, Sollux refused contact with Kanaya because she didn’t cut off Vriska. He was upset at her for being associated with someone who traumatized him. This is very telling of sollux’s personality and his relationship with his friends, and it’s a side we don’t see of Sollux any other time in the comic or in his PQ arc. It’s only when she tells him that she doesn’t cut Vriska off due to romantic feelings for her does Sollux change his mind. He doesn’t bring up Vriska, Aradia, his grief or his trauma at any point while at his visit with her that we see. He doesn’t appear mad or reluctant to be there, he makes jokes, smiles, and reminisces memories with her fondly, even almost sleeps over at her place for the day. It’s like he’s completely forgotten about being upset at her at all, or is at least choosing not to bring it up out of respect for her.

Again, it’s unclear how much time has passed. But when you start his arc, the reason youre talking to him is because he’s been reclusive out of grief. He hasn’t been talking to people lately and his friends are worried about him. So clearly enough time has passed for him to be okay with seeing Kanaya, as that’s his sole purpose for leaving his hive that day at all, but not enough time for him to be fully recovered.

This moment in his arc showcases his loyalty that he has for Kanaya, and possibly his other friends. He seemed quick to forgive her, or at least bury whatever resentment he may have been harboring. One may say that his cold shoulder to Kanaya would be indicative of a lack of a loyalty trait at all, that if he were loyal to her, he wouldn’t be ready to possible end his relationship with her over this. But i kind of view it as a sort of bluff? Like Kanaya essentially told him that his trauma did not at all change the way she feels about her, Kanaya still has a crush on Vriska after hearing about what she did to one of her good friends. To some, this may have been a slap to the face, an entire dismissal of his trauma in it’s entirety. But instead, he sees it as a valid reason for not cutting her off, he shrugs it off. I feel like if he were serious about not wanting to be friends with Kanaya while she was talking to someone who hurt him greatly, her crush wouldn’t have been an excuse.

I also wanna touch on his loyalty to Aradia very quickly because you dont need me to tell you that he cares about her. Once again for like the third time, we have to make guesses on how much time has passed between events. From the time Aradia dies on Alternia, becomes a ghost with an entirely new personality, a robot with another personality, and then finally her alive Godtier self, Sollux’s feelings for her are very consistent. He seems to not really care for the ghost or robot versions of her, he even sits a chair away from her during Openbound on the meteor, and doesn’t talk to her much, is very cold towards her, and even tells her that she’s incapable of feeling when she tries to tell him goodbye when she explodes (it’s also worth noting he cries after this, which i think is the first and only time we see him do this). When Aradia comes back to the meteor, alive and herself again, Sollux immediately leaves the rest of his friends to go hang out with her. Even with Karkat begging him to stay, he just peaces out, without even really thinking about it. We have to assume that if it’s not written in the dialogue, it isn’t being said. So he doesn’t discuss wanting to leave with Aradia or with anyone else. He just decides he’s leaving, and then does. And he stays by her side for almost the rest of the time we see him. He ditches later for other reasons, but don’t worry, they’re back together by the time Collide is happening.

Point being, for the most part, he sticks by his friends unless they’re doing something he disagrees with morally. If he’s not down for what’s happening, he’s not down for sticking around. He even seems to be better friends with Nepeta now that this version of her isn’t really hanging out with Equius that much, someone Sollux would no doubt not get along with for many reasons.

Some of my friends pointed out that him sticking by his morals so strongly is something a Slytherin would do, coupled with the fact that he’s kind of a dick or something idk that much about Slytherins. But I think Huffliepuff is very much about comradery. We can tell a lot about Sollux based on who he surrounds himself with and what he does and doesn’t participate in. He doesn’t participate in trolling humans, he doesn’t participate in helping Vriska do something he doesn’t feel good about doing, he doesn’t participate in any of the relationship melodrama happening around him. But he helps his friends. He helps Kanaya open the viewfinder to see and talk to Rose, he helps Kanaya do little errands in his PQ route, he helps Terezi find out who Dave is, and he sacrifices himself to save the remainder of his group (which btw only contains the people I’ve previously stated he associates with minus feferi not that that means anything i just thought it was kind of fun to point out). I mean, he got better but its the thought that counts.

Someone could make a point that “If Sollux is so loyal, why didn’t he mourn Feferi even a little bit when he found out she was dead?” And yeah, that’s a good point to bring up, and i don’t really have anything to say about it other than….maybe he knew by this point that death doesn’t really mean anything? Maybe his euphoria of finally being lifting of the voices was happening at the same time? And also that he predicted he’d go blind like a million pages ago and now he can finally stop worrying about it? Is he happy that he’s talking to Terezi and right now that’s more important? It’s hard to tell. Sollux doesn’t really explain himself apart from “missing being her matesprite” when in Erisolsprite form talking to Fefetasprite form. It’s hard to tell what their relationship was at the time, or what his feelings truly were immediately afterward. I kinda think it was the foremost of those explanations, he probably knew that she’d come back as a ghost, or something?

Anyway, those are all the reasons i can think of at the moment for why I think Sollux would be Hufflepuff. A lot of his personality revolves around his friends, who he considers friends and who he doesn’t consider friends. Send me asks, message me, and do that shit if you wanna talk more, but i probably won’t have a whole lot to say lmao. Or ill just restate a lot of what i said here.

Props for getting this far. For the record, if Sollux for some reason was unable to be in Hufflepuff, I’d probably put him 50/50 Ravenclaw or Slytherin. I really don’t think he’s a Gryfindor because as I understand it, that house is very much about being courageous, and standing up for yourself and i went off for way to long about how he’s a little weenie man who does nothing mostly.

#its 3 am #sollux captor #homestuck #headcanons

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utopianparadoxist · 7 years

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Unifying Myths: Thief/Rogue - Pirates & Outlaws

For the time being, I think Thieves and Rogues are better fleshed out than Princes and Bards, and the imagery surrounding them is quite a bit clearer. So this is going to be a shorter post, but I still think we’ll cover some interesting consistent elements to Thief and Rogue players. And maybe a bit more?

And as with our post on Royalty, we’ll start with a case of Roleplay rather than focusing on the classes themselves. Specifically, I want to look at Aranea’s mad power grab, because it tells us some interesting stuff about how ancestral figures work.

Namely, that it seems to have as much to do with the consumers’ interpretation as anything inherent to the mythic figure. To Vriska--a Thief--, emulating Mindfang seems to mean emulating a Fairy--in other words, being more like Aranea.

But to Aranea--who is already a Sylph-- emulating Mindfang means emulating a Pirate, while striving to take control from the session by making herself the most relevant and powerful party in it. In other words, she’s trying to be more like Vriska.

This doesn’t go any better for Aranea than it went for Vriska, of course. The consistent underlying theme with roleplay seems to be that, while taking inspiration and influence from role models can be a source of strength, taking it too far and trying to be someone you’re not usually won’t end well.

Roxy is also linked to Piracy. Roxy’s relationship with internet piracy and hacking is a modernized take on piracy--casting her as an internet pirate of sorts.

Several of Grandpa’s mummies in both Homestuck and Hiveswap are dressed up as pirates, linking Roxy to the archetype in his memory. Alpha Dirk, the specific Dirk dating Jake, is similarly remembered for his class roleplay--Grandpa remembers him as a knight rather than as a Prince.

But Roxy is also linked to Robin Hood, who was not a Pirate but rather part of a wider band of individuals that certainly includes them: The myth of the Outlaw.

Historically, the title of Outlaw was a legal punishment that declared the individual outside the protection of the law. In general, it means that the individual was pushed out of society and could be killed with no legal consequences.

And it’s this myth that unifies the rest of the Thief/Rogue players, because all of these players share common themes of fleeing their respective societies, and existing beyond the boundaries of the law.

Nepeta and Roxy qualify almost by default. Nepeta lives in a cave and hunts wild animals for food, and is alienated by what blood colors mean in her society’s brutally repressive hemospectrum.

Roxy, of course, doesn’t really HAVE a society anymore. But even so, she’s paranoid and suspicious of the Condesce’s plans, viewing herself as a whistleblower speaking the truth about a massive corrupt scheme.

But both Meenah and Rufioh fit the bill as well. Meenah runs from her society entirely, retreating to seclusion on the moon. And Rufioh escapes to a forest, living in the wilderness away from Beforus’ standard social system.

All this focus on sitting outside the boundaries of society sets up a fascinating parallel for the Steal classes and their dichotomous pair: The Warrior classes, Knight and Page, who operate off the verb Serve.

(Credit for this wrinkle goes to @grippingtraverse and @the-null-hypothesis77, who came up with a model for understanding all twelve classes that we’re still exploring as a whole. The Serve and Steal classes present the clearest and most inarguable part of this argument, enough so that I thought it worth presenting it here.)

Serve can mean to ‘Give’, an easy counterpoint to the Outlaw’s ‘Take’. But Serve can also entail providing service--to one’s friends or to one’s society.

As such, the Servers have a consistent law enforcement motif that often brings them into conflict with other players-- particularly with Thieves, who tend to steal for selfish reasons and so often transgress the social contracts of their groups.

Both Dave and Karkat respond to their friends being hurt with a desire to hunt down and punish wrongdoers--at various points, Terezi and Jack Noir are such targets for Dave, and Eridan and Gamzee are for Karkat.

And discovering Vriska’s elaborate gambit to create Bec Noir is what incites Tavros into finally confronting her--reasoning that she is now a Bad Guy by association, and thus deserves to be stopped.

It’s worth noting that this pursuit of wrongdoers is often based on a nebulous and personal understanding of “Justice” that has as much to do with the Server’s feelings and opinions as anything objective.

This is particularly obvious with Jake--a Page--in his conflict with a Thief in Meenah. Here Jake uses justice as a pretense for indulging his personal hero fantasy at the expense of facts or context. This trend doesn’t particularly flesh out Thieves and Rogues more, except that it puts them into a thematic context with their “rival” classes.

It also suggests that the other quartets of classes with contrasting verbs could well have their own recurring motifs. Fairies and Royalty both being linked to Courts and Prophets and Magicians both being linked to the scientific process does seem to point to the idea.

But I don’t think I’ve found canonical links as clear-cut and coherent as those for the Serve and Steal classes, so I just wanted to throw this out there for now!

Now that the Outlaw myth has been established, that completes the set! I hope this helps us all take Classpect thought and analysis to a new level. For my part, I have been hard at work on the scripts for the next round of videos on both Homestuck and Hiveswap, including a post outlining Classpects to a broader audience.

I hope you all look forward to it. For now,

Keep Rising!

[Patreon] [Hiveswap Discord]

#Homestuck #Classpects #Thief/Rogue #Page/Knight #Outlaws #Warriors #My MSPA Analysis

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