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hungeringheart · 8 months

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Can you please do a session analysis with Prince void, Rogue of space, mage of life, thief of time

Woohoo, we are back in business baby! Finally answering my backlog!

Anon, as you're the oldest anon in here I think I owe you a particular apology for how long this took -- the others I can honestly tell I got married and then hurt my spine and couldn't do much of anything all that time and then the holidays rolled in, but you were "only" a casualty of common or garden depression ::( ... at first.

I hope I manage to make up for that!

So all right, in our little world we have our dramatis personae.

☆ Prince of Void

☆ Rogue of Space

☆ Mage of Life

☆ Thief of Time.

I have a clear favourite already! Which is unusual, admittedly, but I'm admitting this because I have to make a legal distinction for both you and myself between your Prince of Void and my fantroll blorbo, Yudhei Tanina, imperial failson. :^)

Or maybe I don't! Maybe you'd like to hear how I write that one, and cannibalize a bit. Either way, two for one deal here, let's get mystical!

Prince of Void

Prince, active "Destroyer" class; a Prince destroys with, through or the essence of their aspect. I suppose they could also subvert their aspect and subvert through their aspect, but they would do it more aggressively than bards are able to, and more selfishly, very like the difference between Rogue and Thief.

There are also undertones of command and nobility, though they're played differently than a Lord's.

Ah, Void, the aspect of mystery, secrecy, depth, obfuscation, the arcane, the dark. The aspect, apparently, also of obsession -- just look at Grimdark (Inverted, Void) Rose, or Equius, in his element! We can also make a case for Roxy... but let's not get into that, it is very sad after all.

Truly the most sexyman of all the aspects. Muah. Chef's kiss, chef's kiss I say!

The presence of this Prince within the parameters of your play predicts that, bluntly speaking, everyone is phucking screwed. Not because of the Prince, necessarily -- although maybe because of the Prince, you could do that. You could write a story about a Lovecraftian-Machiavellian paranoiac ruining everyone's lives with their hidden depth of obsessive eldritchness. I kind of did it (almost).

There is a second path. In a specifically trollish, caste-bound reading of the role of a prince, and also in a parallel human one focused on the romantic concept of royalty, nobility obliges, and so a hypothetical good, realized Prince of Void must serve the cause of victory through their capacity for destruction.

That's sort of the concept behind my Yudhei -- a literal prince (both by blood and in that he's the Prince, like a Nasi, of his Empire's religious-legal supreme court -- a president and an emissary and interpreter of the eldritch gods, and most importantly the Empress' fruity vizier) who sincerely believes that only he, or at least his benevolent direction from the shadows, can fix anything. The Void is all around, see, and nobody else can see and thrive in it...

Yudhei's biggest problem was/is that he's incapable of delegating to other people, which in his case was because his entire life is a conga line of increasing horrors, and everyone who raised him including the monster openly thought he was an abomination who ought to have realized his destiny as a condiment sweeps ago.

For totally understandable biological and social reasons he decided he was physically and psychologically the only non-Horrordeity person in the entire universe even slightly capable of coping with his problems, so he simply never told anyone anything that would endear him to them, ever. Also, per his own beliefs, as the only competent person anywhere at all and one of the most powerful individuals in the known universe, of course he was both entitled and obligated to meddle ominously in everyone else's lives!

(Actually, the SGRUB-SBURB double reacharound game in that story is directly a result of him realizing what the game is, releasing it into the world, and herding his mostly estranged siblings and their friends into an enormous daisychain of linked sessions. He fucked it up for everyone colossally.)

I think this is probably common to the entire classpect, for different personal reasons -- whether a Prince of Void personally wants to destroy Void or use it to destroy (or both) or whatever other reading you prefer, they do it out of motivations that ultimately grow out of a deep feeling of loneliness and being in danger from others, which they build a "castle" around and defend from others using whatever power or privilege they have. They may, as you can see, also deeply need to be sure that no one else is lonely.

We can kind of see similar behaviours playing out with Eridan, Prince of Hope, and Dirk, Prince of Heart, with respect to their own classpects. Eridan's White Science thing is an obvious result of feeling failed by the concept of whimsy and magic, inextricable from the concept of religion (which after all presumably dictates that whatever happens to anyone is moral as long as the castes look right). Dirk has no idea who he is, and vacillates between tearing down others and leveraging what he does know about souls and the like to help them.

So then, what would you like your Prince of Void to be?

You have options! Many options, even.

Distant, lonely, altruistic but misguided seeker of mysteries?

Enlightened aspirant to the status of Horrorterror for themself (I once wrote against this exact concept but as a Mage)?

Machiavellian grey eminence?

All three, somehow?

What you do depends on what you want from the narrative.

Rogue of Space

Rogue: Class of altruistic redistribution. One who takes their aspect or uses their aspect to take for the purpose of sharing the loot with the team.

Space: Aspect of potential, room to grow and breathe, and actual physical space, dimension and physics.

I also quite like this one, and no doubt the players for it like it for the same reason: how do you take and give potential, safety, place-belonging? Can you do that with size? What does that MEAN?

To think about it, let's address our canon Rogues, Roxy (famously the Robin Hood of Void, whatever that means), Nepeta and Rufioh.

Examining their patterns we can see that what a Rogue seems to actually "do" to redistribute their aspect is be dealt an objectively fucked up hand, and then through sheer yes-anding, willpower and a little bit of luck and legerdemain.

In that way they really are the Robin Hood of whatever it is -- it's not "about" the stealing (and Rufioh certainly wasn't meaning to steal freedom from other people, that's the opposite of what Rufioh was meaning), it's "about" the other Robin Hood trait of being handed hot nothing and making a balloon animal out of it that helps everyone somehow. Stealing is kind of incidental here; you can think of it as more like ... the effective use and allocation of limited resources. Some of which you happen to need to steal.

Roxy making things from literal nothing isn't actually doing any crimes, and Nepeta is a furry roleplayer, not an identity thief, see? They do things that seem like they should be illegal, and iirc they do both actually steal, but rogue is a broader term than thief...

So then, the Rogue particularly of Space is someone who doesn't have a lot of space -- room to breathe, literal actual living-space, space away from people. But even though they're deficient, they provide to others -- they're the street-corner therapy friend with a skeleton full of closets full of more skeletons. The guy whose couch is always open, for "free", except if you consider it a form of payment to listen to them obliviously go on about how they went to a protest once and got robbed by otherwise completely see-through cops ("I never saw it coming!"). We all know and love one like that.

What does it mean that they're in over their head like they are? In their cramped little room covered wall to wall with struggle art, their own and others', where does the room for others to breathe end, and when do they actually get to breathe themself?

Who watches the watchers? Who recognizes the one who recognizes others?

Mage of Life

Mage: Class of the active seeker of understanding for themselves or for its own sake: the visionary, the prophet, the wizard.

Life: Aspect of the way of things, cycles, systems, growth, flourishing, struggle, and development.

Personally, I'm a Witch of Life, but I can respect the single most Earthsea classpect in the catalogue.

The Mage of Life has essentially the same arc and lifepath as Ged from Earthsea, which is a fascinating cycle you should read if you haven't.

I'll try not to spoil too much in case you haven't in fact read the books -- I really do treasure Earthsea and think everyone should read it, even if they never touch any other fantasy.

But, so, then -- a Mage of Life begins the session with no understanding of Life. Their being a Mage, this doesn't also need to be true of the rest of the cast; for the Mage's journey it doesn't really matter whether their friends are all perfect boddhisattvas in tune with the cycle or not.

The point is that they personally aren't. The point may even be that they personally don't get it -- they could be merely naive or actually malicious, in the vein of a smug young capitalist aspirant too deep in the hole to care about a burning planet.

Either way, whether they're essential to the group's victory or not (it may help humble a particularly industrialist Mage if they aren't), they have to engage with Life on its own terms. Perhaps their Quest relies heavily on becoming a participant in and interdependent with their Consorts' society? If you like, you can also have them wake up to the realities of certain systems -- have them acknowledge their own gender, their demographic's structural role in their own society, the way they've been shaped by their own struggle, the ways they didn't see others' before.

Out of your entire cast here I think this person is the one who's most likely to benefit the most from the game... if, of course, they flourish and learn and grow and survive.

They might not. Knowledge is power, after all, and it's not quite that only the strong survive, but how equipped actually are the only available people in the world to hold them up if they flag?

Their journey's a very hard one most of us are still on, and they'll need support. Without it... well... it doesn't bear thinking about.

Thief of Time

Aspect of routine, ritual, rhythm, pattern, the relation of past and future, relation to the coming end.

Class of one who takes away from others for their own benefit, to fill their own lack.

Ah! Traditions, traditions. Without them, how would I get three words deep into the Fiddler on the Roof tradition monologue before you realized what I was doing and seriously contemplated shooting me?

Bulwark, scaffold, thing on which a spirit grows; Time is the complement and antithesis to Space, the concept of learning to relate to yourself as a mortal creature dancing its own brief role in a spectacle without end. Homestuck has this as a central theme -- I think all aspects in some way relate to either conforming to or defying or iterating the way of things, as is required for making your own way as an adult, though some do this more literally than others.

Time's concern is with rhythm and repetition, though, and in a way with predestination, though it doesn't take Doom's stance about embracing the inevitable.

It's left open-ended what a Time player wants to do with the rites and patterns, and most people write their Time ocs as rebels in the vein of Dave.

But ... you can lack Time-- literal Time to live, metaphorical Time to dance to -- so severely that you need to aggressively and hostilely appropriate other people's.

What if structure is something some people actually want?

I had a conformist Seer of Time many moons ago, when I was barely older than he was myself, Khanan S. by name (six-player game, as you can see). Great kid -- his inciting incident will be instructive here. Khanan, see, was a sort of person immensely concerned with religious norms and rituals, the right things done at precisely the right times, in a cycle that will go on forever (even past the end of our own universe). But you can't do all that when all your friends formerly from the Internet are people who don't get it, can't get it, and who need you desperately.

So he did a lot of flailing around, a bit of ill-advised shaving with Occam's razor (lalala none of this is real lol the world can't be over because it can't, also I'm 14-15 years old I'm too little for this) and trying to make it work, very Magelike behaviour you know. And then his friends started dying because he refused to be a big damn hero, at which point he leveraged his understanding as someone who once actually did have Time (before the end of the world; to keep the beat of life unending; to be a child), to provide his friends with some sort of a framework for themselves.

Also from Alpha Khanan's point of view he was trying to make sure everyone else (including his own alternate selves) understood what to do with their Time over, and over, and over, and over, and...

Well, for him it didn't pan out, he went a bit grimdark. Everybody else had to help their Khanan (#18) herd Alpha Khanan back into the Furthest Ring where his natural habitat now was (completely deranged and well on the way to becoming a Horrorterror), it was great. Existential. Horrible, actually -- imagine being trapped in the void forever because the people you love most know that if they kill you, their better and kinder and softer and stronger version of you, which is you but completely stupid, ignorantly cruel and irredeemably naive, will also die. And so they won't even give you the mercy of letting you stop spinning plates for them. They hate you and they need you and you love them because you have nothing else.

Homestuck, everyone! And that's why he turned himself into an Earthsea dragon type of game construct - can't be sad if you can't experience sorrow and live forever as a caretaker of the cycle! It's almost like growing up and going to divinity school really (it's nothing at all like that even slightly. When this was current events my friends and I had also just read Omelas and seen Madoka.)

Cool story bro. What have we learned here that's applicable to a Thief?

Well, what if somebody never had time, or Time?

What if they were very ill and very hurt, and their community had no more communal tie to the rest of time than any random arbitrary bunch of strangers?

What if they thought they were the only one of their friends who really suffers, who really gets it, because at least the friends have something they can point to and say "this is my way to go, this is who I am, this is a map for my life, this is me"?

What if they envy their friends' connection and sense of knowing what to do to be a friend, their friends' connections to their cultures, their friends' banal musicality and sense of timing?

What if something told them they could take that for themselves?

I imagine your Thief of Time is probably the sort of person who's chronically online and loves to argue -- they need a sense that they do something, anything a person is supposed to do better than other people, because for the moment, their sense of self depends on diminishing others. And of course they love to take up others' time. It makes them feel seen, heard, and something very far removed from but still tangential to loved.

This is probably a very complicated and sad character, typifying the struggles of the other three: pathologically alone, naive, and without the luxury of either space or a blueprint for their own development. Their arc seems tragic, to me. Let's have a look at how it all goes together, though -- there is a happy possibility even for them. There has to be, right?

Otherwise everyone else is wrong, and they're right, they're the only one who's right.

Flow

So there's these four friends. I don't know them, they're very open-ended -- but I do know that they live in a particular type of world, or at least a particular type of connection to each other.

Insofar as their friend group is a world, there are patterns, and these will carry over to the needs of the session.

Void has a Prince -- that person destroys the void and through the void. Perhaps they destroy the void of ignorance by being the homework friend for the others, but they also hurt others by prying too far into their lives. They destroy through void by being unapproachable and clammy themself -- in that players reflect their aspects, this perhaps tells us that the nature of obfuscation and darkness in this session is self-protective and vulnerable. It might also tell us that some mysteries need a soft touch... and some secrets have power.

Space has a Rogue -- potential and physical space and room for development is unequally distributed in the beginning of this session, and this player's mission is to fix that, however they can, for their friends. To do that, though, they'll first have to figure out their own problems and see their friends a little bit less personally -- perhaps mediated by their Land Quest? Prior to ascension, this Space Rogue might not be very roguey in a team focused way -- or at least not effectively so, although they will try.

Life has a Mage who is on a mission to understand what the fuck it's all for. Depending on your personal philosophical mileage regarding this, what you want their position in the group to be and how they react can vary -- I think, depending on how realized they are, though, their friends might have an easier time of it...

And of course, the Thief of Time. Thieves, like rogues, mean there is a structural imbalance in the distribution of their aspect -- the difference is just that they think they're subsequently justified in hoarding it for themselves. In the Thief of Time's case, all they really need is one friend who has it all figured out to feel that they need to micromanage and manipulate their friends in order to feel something. Maybe they want the leadership role naturally occupied by someone else, and flail around imitating success because they don't know how to be themself, really. Vriska sort of thing.

So the world has a neutral Void (of course, the Void is only ever neutral), a shortage of Space and Time, and at least one person has no idea how they're supposed to work with this.

A difficult situation, to be sure, but personally I think you can write it! I'd love to see!

Good luck!

#homestuck #classpect #classpect analysis #session analysis #homestuck fansession

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