| >> |
No. 72410
>>72407
>1. that isn't an aspect power. that's just her personality, which might fit in with her role thematically, but it isn't something the game bestowed her
In Homestuck, and thanks to the non-linear nature of time in Paradox Space, there's essentially no difference between causation and correlation. Her aspect is her aspect because of her personality and her personality is her personality because of her aspect. Both were the cause and the effect of one another. It's the sort of thing that can only be true in so self-aware a piece of metafiction.
There's a tendency to think of a character's Mythological Role as a character class, but that's not really the way it seems to work in practice--there's no suite of abilities that are universal to all or even most members of a Class and the way each Aspect manifests seems to depend on the individual as well. Aradia and Dave are both Time Players, but the way they use Time is entirely distinct. I don't think this is solely because of their classes--I suspect if we saw another Knight of Time, he would not use Time Turners, and he might very well not work almost exclusively in stable time loops.
In practice, the Mythological Role seems to work more like a High Concept for the character in general. It's descriptive rather than prescriptive. That's why characters' first time using their Aspect is rarely "magic" or a skill in video game terms, but in the items they create through Alchemy--again, look at Dave and his Time Tables. Theoretically, that combination of items was available to anyone. If John had borrowed Dave's turntables or something, he could be the one doing those stable time loops. Or even if he hadn't made them, he could've just borrowed them and spent three days getting stronger instead of just one. But it wouldn't have happened for anyone but Dave, because it wouldn't have made sense for anyone but Dave to make and use them. They are connected to his personality, and also to his High Concept.
"Temporal inevitability," I think is the term they use in-comic, but it could just as easily be called "Narrative Causality" to steal a term from Discworld. "Roxy did that because it's part of her personality" and "Roxy did that because she's the Rogue of Void" are synonymous statements. Or even "Roxy did this because it what's supposed to happen at that time." And like....it's true for all works, to a certain extent, that characters do things because that's what's supposed to happen at that time, but in Homestuck's case they do it because they are aware that that is the thing they are supposed to do at that time, or sometimes, they refrain from doing it because they know it's what they were supposed to do at that time.
This has all probably been fairly scattered and silly reading, but I think what I'm getting at is that thinking of Homestuck too much in terms of consistent Rules and standard Causality is missing the point of what Homestuck is. It's not random, but it's not a Functional Magic type of system, either.
|