– Steven Universe Homestuck Classes/Aspects –

So, while I was away last week I sort of binge-watched all of Steven Universe that’s out so far, and really loved it! (Pilot and Ep 1 thru Full Disclosure and Open Book.) Episode 1 was okay, 2 thru 5 were pretty dull, 6 was frankly disturbing, and 7 finally made me fall in love with it and want to watch the rest. I won’t sing the praises of the show endlessly, but the season-ending episode (”Jail Break”) was the best animated TV episode of ANYTHING I’ve seen in at least a year, Korra possibly included. And that was with the two major twists of the episode already spoiled to me by Tumblr. It was just that goddamn good. I rewatched the main scene in it like thirty fucking times.

(There might be over 50 episodes already, but they’re like 11 minutes each or something so it’s by no means a huge commitment. If you have a decent ad/flash/popup-blocker, this streaming site is pretty good; I went back and officially bought the whole series after seeing it.)

And since the show is full of bright-shining characters with colorful yet nuanced personalities (and varied strengths that go far beyond the physical), their hypothetical Homestuck titles stood out to me pretty clearly. I’m gonna go into them here, because (1) I love the show, (2) examining the narrative roles of characters is interesting, and (3) there are a surprising number of overlaps with hero roles of actual Homestuck characters.

(Mild Homestuck and Steven Universe SPOILERS both follow. If you’re reading this and don’t know what Homestuck is, this post should still be full of character analysis you might like, but I’d prefer it if you didn’t spoil yourself on exactly what the Homestuck terms mean or why. My blog is a Homestuck theory blog. If you see any links to ANY other posts on my blog in this post, be wary that they’re all chock full of Homestuck spoilers, and since one of Homestuck’s main appeals is its mind-blowing twists, you should absolutely NOT SPOIL YOURSELF if you want to read it at some point. Trust me, if you haven’t read Homestuck, you won’t even understand what I’m saying in those. Additionally, I’m making sure to leave the biggest Steven Universe spoilers unsaid here.)

Steven Universe – Page of Hope – One who arms others with ideas, belief, and optimism, and builds himself out of those ideas and beliefs. This title isn’t just a blanket statement that Steven has lots of potential: Steven demonstrates this role in every single episode. It’s absolutely his main mode of operation, and it’s just as interesting and fun to watch these methods fail him as it is to watch them succeed.



– – One who arms others with ideas, belief, and optimism, and builds himself out of those ideas and beliefs. This title isn’t just a blanket statement that Steven has lots of potential: Steven demonstrates this role in It’s absolutely his main mode of operation, and it’s just as interesting and fun to watch these methods him as it is to watch them succeed. Rose Quartz – Maid of Life – “Isn’t it remarkable, Steven? This world is full of so many possibilities. Each living thing has an entirely unique experience. The sights they see, the sounds they hear. The lives they live are so complicated… a-and so simple! I can’t wait for you to join them. … Steven, we can’t both exist. I’m going to become half of you. And I need you to know that every moment you love being yourself, that’s me, loving you and loving being you! Because you’re going to be something extraordinary… You’re going to be a human being. ”

– – “Isn’t it remarkable, Steven? This world is full of so many possibilities. Each living thing has an entirely unique experience. The sights they see, the sounds they hear. The lives they live are so complicated… a-and so simple! I can’t wait for you to join them. … Steven, we can’t both exist. I’m going to become half of you. And I need you to know that every moment you love being yourself, that’s me, loving you and loving you! Because you’re going to be something extraordinary… You’re going to be a ” Amethyst – Knight (or Thief?) of Heart – One who (Knight) exploits and weaponizes individual uniqueness and desire, or one who (Thief) takes such uniqueness and desire unto herself; Knight seems a slightly better fit, but I can’t decide if it’s one or the other. The Heart aspect represents the Inner Self, and Amethyst manages to exhibit her own through the most frequently fluid, transforming outer appearance of the group. She’s the most aggressively who she is, no matter what anyone else thinks, and rides the current of others’ desires and opinions like they’re an amusing dance: If she sees that someone wants something, she wants it more. If she sees someone’s afraid of something, she teases them using that fear against them. This can be selfish or insensitive at times, but that’s NOT all it amounts to: She ends up highlighting others’ rough edges, demonstrating to them that EVERYONE has flaws that need to be addressed… and demonstrating to her friends that they should be tolerant of the rough edges in others, by celebrating every rough edge that she can call her own.

– – One who (Knight) exploits and weaponizes individual uniqueness and desire, or one who (Thief) takes such uniqueness and desire unto herself; Knight seems a slightly better fit, but I can’t decide if it’s one or the other. The Heart aspect represents the Inner Self, and Amethyst manages to exhibit her own through the most frequently fluid, transforming outer appearance of the group. She’s the most aggressively no matter what anyone else thinks, and rides the current of others’ desires and opinions like they’re an amusing dance: If she sees that someone wants something, she wants it more. If she sees someone’s afraid of something, she teases them using that fear against them. This can be selfish or insensitive at times, but that’s NOT all it amounts to: She ends up demonstrating to them that EVERYONE has flaws that need to be addressed… and demonstrating to her friends that they should be of the rough edges in others, by celebrating every rough edge that she can call her own. Pearl – Sylph(?) of Light – Light, the aspect of information, truth, and importance, is absolutely Pearl’s domain. It’s no coincidence that her gem resides on her forehead in contrast to the gem Amethyst wears over her heart (and the ones Garnet tellingly bears on her fists ). She’s the expositor, the lecturer, the intellectual concern, and her group-dependent nature keeps her mind constantly on the lives and issues of others, making her clearly a passive class. But she doesn’t guide others or steer a path through possibility like a Seer (or Mage) would; often she has the furthest thing from foresight when it comes to a situation. Instead, her actions and influence seem to focus on creation and repair, projecting physical holograms, providing artifacts and building machines, trying to arm others with important backstory knowledge, and – as concerns one of the more conceptual facets of Light – constantly trying to govern what others should consider important. That they value what they should, realize what true strength is, and are prepared with a good enough plan to overcome the foe in front of them.

– – Light, the aspect of information, truth, and importance, is absolutely Pearl’s domain. It’s no coincidence that her gem resides on her forehead in contrast to the gem Amethyst wears over her heart (and the ones Garnet tellingly bears on her ). She’s the expositor, the lecturer, the intellectual concern, and her group-dependent nature keeps her mind constantly on the lives and issues of others, making her clearly a passive class. But she doesn’t others or steer a path through possibility like a Seer (or Mage) would; often she has the furthest thing from foresight when it comes to a situation. Instead, her actions and influence seem to focus on projecting physical holograms, providing artifacts and building machines, to arm others with important backstory knowledge, and – as concerns one of the more conceptual facets of Light – constantly trying to govern what others should That they value what they should, realize what true strength is, and are prepared with a good enough plan to overcome the foe in front of them. Garnet – Maid ♫ o-o-o-o-of Lo-o-o-o-ove ♫ Mage and Knight of Time – Yes, “and”. Mage is probably the best fit, but she’s honestly demonstrated the talents of both; it’s unsurprising that she’d be the one to pull double duty. Time represents the force of Destruction, not just acting upon foreknowledge. As an individual who not only charts a path through possible futures, but resorts to destruction as the solution to almost every problem she encounters, and even uses her foresight for temporal exploits like knowing where to look before she starts looking, Time is indisputably her aspect.

– – Yes, “and”. Mage is probably the best fit, but she’s honestly demonstrated the talents of both; it’s unsurprising that be the one to pull double duty. Time represents the force of Destruction, not just acting upon foreknowledge. As an individual who not only charts a path through possible futures, but resorts to destruction as the solution to almost every problem she encounters, and even uses her foresight for like knowing where to look before she starts looking, Time is indisputably her aspect. Ronaldo Fryman – Maid of Rage (EDIT: Bard of Hope , sorry) – Gullible compiler and creator of conspiracy theories, with a blog to prove it. A minor character, but too clear to diagnose to keep off this chart. You can always count on him to be stupendously wrong, even when he’s almost right. (And on the occasions he interacts with and affects Steven, like in “Full Disclosure”, it often serves as an example of how the opposite aspects Rage and Hope interplay.) EDIT: Separate link to the Bard of Hope correction and a breakdown of his role diagnosis here. Contains Homestuck spoilers.

– (EDIT: , sorry) – Gullible compiler and creator of conspiracy theories, with a blog to prove it. A minor character, but too clear to diagnose to keep off this chart. You can always count on him to be stupendously wrong, even when he’s almost right. (And on the occasions he interacts with and affects Steven, like in “Full Disclosure”, it often serves as an example of how the opposite aspects Rage and Hope interplay.) EDIT: Separate link to the Bard of Hope correction and a breakdown of his role diagnosis here. Contains Homestuck spoilers. Others – There are plenty of characters I just WISH I could classpect, but there hasn’t been enough of the series for them to demonstrate their true talents. Connie is probably the most glaring omission. She’s smart and wonderful, sure, but we need more occasions where her talent affects the world/people around her and saves the day to get a real idea of how she works; I have no doubt we’ll see plenty of this as the story continues. We’ve seen Greg Universe do enough that we should be able to diagnose him, but it’s tricky to tell for me for some reason when it comes to him… probably some sort of Breath or Void player. Lapis Lazuli would be a Witch of Blood at the most shallow diagnosis, and her concerns and actions have fallen pretty cleanly along the Breath/Blood dichotomy (Homestuck spoilers). Jasper could fit a Prince of Blood (as an equally shallow diagnosis), and if so, she’s not a very effective one. Onion is a Bard of some sort. All the others (Peridot, Ruby, Sapphire, Lars, Sadie, et cetera) are very much in the TO BE SEEN category.

Oh wow, that went longer than I expected. And that was just the short version.

I’ll elaborate on all of the above title-assignments at length under the read-more cut, since there’s PLENTY more to say about them.



What aspect do you assign someone whose biological age is whatever they believe it is at any given time? To a little kid who claimed he could help out on dangerous superpowered missions if he were just armed with a cheeseburger-shaped backpack, and was right? To someone who’s magic powers are the only person’s triggered by happiness and believing in himself, and who constantly encounters equipment designed for him that responds directly to what he desires and wishes for, even constructing illusions to show him what they’d be like if they were real? Who ends up finding wild mundane solutions, more often than not, to magic problems? Who can generate stories and backstories at the drop of a hat? Who seldom does what anyone expects them to do – or even be capable of – and even upends intelligent foes simply by being something they didn’t imagine was possible? Who goes all-out to fill any role and play any part he decides he has to fill in a situation, no matter what it is?

Steven has “Hope” written all over him, and it forms one of the central themes of the show. Belief in each other, in one’s self, even in those who are no longer around to remind us of their past intentions. The word “belief” is in the theme song for a reason.

Not everyone’s specialty is headbutting a situation by themselves. Many carve their wills into reality by helping others find strength, and in the process finding strength through others. There was an entire episode, “Coach Steven”, devoted to the concept of being “strong in the real way”, showing that Steven’s true strength wasn’t the muscle he hoped to earn, but his skill at motivating and strengthening others. He works to help others live up to what he believes they can be as well, working to help the alien gems act more human and relate to humanity because that’s what he personally sees in them. The Page is considered the class with the most “potential” because of this, akin to a King motivating an army of Knights.

Pages often seem to build themselves out of their aspect as well, and you see plenty of this in Steven’s behavior. Every idea someone gives him is readily internalized, every work of fiction celebrated and imitated. He once excitedly joined one of the gems in running away from home without having the slightest thing against the other gems he was running from, just because he was romanticizing a book series called the “No Home Boys” about a pair of homeless teenage boys trekking across the nation. He excitedly defended a movie Connie and him were excited about as “better than any magic” to the gems, even though Connie tried to reassure him against that level of hype. He readily admits that he likes everyone he meets. If you’ve read Homestuck, I’m sure you’ll agree that you’ve seen impressionable boys who enjoy far too many bad movies and reenact scenes from them, and can see how being a Page of Hope could play into it.

The number of crazy ideas Steven comes up with throughout the series is incredible, and just as incredible is the amount of effort he devotes to making those ideas a reality. Running a grill to cater a beach party. Building a snake-person costume to reinvigorate a conspiracy theorist’s driving purpose. Sacrificing his own clothes to create an army against another sentient piece of clothing. Baiting an enemy to divulge their plans instead of blindly searching for answers. The list goes on and on and on, and like I mentioned earlier, many of his ideas conspicuously fail. But many more succeed, and through all the ideas – success and failure alike – he makes a clear mark on reality wherever he steps.

To wrap him up and transition to some of the others, let me bring up something I brought up earlier: Someone noted – and Rebecca Sugar explicitly confirmed – that the four main characters represent four stages of emotional development: Steven is co-dependent (expected for a child and especially unsurprising for a Page), Amethyst is counter-dependent, Pearl is group-dependent and Garnet is independent. (I recommend clicking that link for brief details.) Furthermore, the way they each summon their gem’s abilities is tailored to their personalities: Pearl does so through calculation and understanding (Light), Amethyst does it without any effort at all (just by being herself, you could argue, ie Heart), Garnet says she does it by “channeling the collective power of the universe” (unsurprising for one on the Space/Time dichotomy underlying all physical existence), and Steven seems to mostly do it by either experiencing pure joy or feeling the acutely strong need to protect. Steven’s method is kind of Hope-y, but you could better argue – especially with the gem’s position on his gut, and the fact that he inherited it whole from his mother, who had it in the same position – that it represents the Life aspect, the domain of healing and growth which forms the ‘excitement’ that mixes with Hope’s ‘belief’ in the possibilities to create optimism, and which his mother clearly bore displayed with all her actions, values, accomplishments and heirlooms.

Steven’s mother, Rose Quartz, founded the Crystal Gems and embodied everything they stood for, standing large enough in the minds of the remaining Crystal Gems for reverence and awe to shine through every word they say about her, years after she gave up her existence to create Steven. Her tears had healing powers, and her gem’s magic weapon is a shield able to protect those she cares about from an attack of virtually any strength. She loved not just Earth and humanity, but life in all its forms, large and small. (Her abilities, which Steven inherited, could even grow and give life and autonomy to plants, forming warriors to defend her.) She believed you couldn’t love a rose without appreciating even its thorns, that flaws are an essential and fascinating part of life in general: As her husband, Greg Universe is fond of saying (and as she proved a likewise fondness for), “if every porkchop were perfect, we wouldn’t have hot dogs”. The cast frequently encounter thorny vines or ugly moss which Rose Quartz reputedly loved and cared for, often not understanding why she did… until the right stimuli cause those plants to bloom beautifully and fill the air with petals. And that they don’t understand why is important to her title diagnosis. Rose Quartz didn’t do what she did – saving the Earth, living on it for thousands of years, or intentionally relinquishing her own life to create Steven – out of pure altruism. She did it because she believed in it, and wanted to personally walk the path she loved! The Sylph is the passive creation/repair class, and a Sylph of Life would focus primarily on making sure others live and grow to their fullest potential (though, don’t be fooled that such passive ambitions can’t still become selfish and cross the line, as Homestuck aptly demonstrates). But the Maid, the active creation/repair class, doesn’t need others to necessarily understand what they’re doing. They’re more like a wellspring of their aspect, acting and creating for themselves often at least as much as they share with others, like the way Nannasprite kept manufacturing piles of cookies and cakes even when nobody was eating them. Rose Quartz felt free to create and nurture even when nobody else knew about it, and then turn around and generously use her power to shield and heal her friends, use her personality to nurture and lead an entire movement. The temple the Crystal Gems call home, and many of its equipment and creations, are part of Rose’s legacy. And of course, Steven is her great final legacy, to whom she gave her shield, her sword, her healing abilities, her gem, and her very life. Reread that quote of hers up above; it’s all you need to know.

To start on Amethyst, I’d like to preface her section by saying that even though HER shapeshifting powers are an expression of Heart, shapeshifting powers and tendencies by themselves are NOT an expression of any particular aspect; it’s one’s attitude and how one uses the ability that determines where the power falls (only one or two Homestuck spoilers in this nice link), and how hers play into her shapeshifting should already be somewhat clear in her short starting section at the head of this post. Amethyst’s attention is always on the countenances, feelings and actions of everyone around her, providing her an endless source of amusement. She’ll be the first to laugh at what another person does, the first to point out someone’s atypically joyful expression for the others (“look at Garnet!”), and the first to rebel when anyone tells her to behave like someone she doesn’t want to be. Many people, Steven and the gems alike, are victim to constant pranks on her behalf, Amethyst often exploiting her shapeshifting powers to catch them off guard. A Knight of Heart rides the current of other people’s personalities, tweaking and twisting the flow to their own advantage, weaponizing both that and their own uniqueness to its fullest effect. (And a Thief of Heart would copy, internalize, or coopt the desires and tendencies of others to their own advantage. Knights and Thieves aren’t always similar, but they look so in the case of this particular aspect, making which one Amethyst is a touch hard to nail down.) When using other people and their personalities, it’s very easy to be a jerk or to go way too far (especially if she gets worked up), like when she tried to taunt Greg in a heated argument by transforming to look like Rose Quartz, knowing full well it’d make him turn his eyes away and plead with him to stop. (This rather dark fancomic has her going even further.) In situations where she DOES go too far, like this – what I’ve termed “overembracing” your hero role in my Homestuck class/aspect theories, the process of falling too far into your desire to affect reality around you, to the point where you trod unjustly over the wills of others – she’s willing to apologize and take measures to make it up to the person she wronged. There’s not too much to say on her that I haven’t said already, but there’s one more large point… The path of the Knight often seems to involve overcoming a love/hate interaction with one’s aspect, and the path of a Thief often involves recognizing that one shouldn’t constantly indulge their urge to accumulate and use their aspect if they want to be truly happy. Both paths, in turn, often involve self-doubt: As individuals whose nature is to Exploit or Take, Knights and Thieves are especially vulnerable to perceiving themselves as not innately good. Amethyst – like many counter-dependent teenagers who rebel against their authority figures, constantly suffering lectures about their behavior and actions in response – eventually revealed a deep, long-held insecurity that she’s a bad gem, that she’s not a good person and that her friends might be happier if she wasn’t around at all. And she wouldn’t be the first Heart player to worry that the individual uniqueness they often weaponize isn’t actually any good. (*Gestures at Homestuck spoilers.*)

Pearl next, let’s see… hm. I put a question mark next to her class because as much as the math adds up – as creation-focused as she seems, as much as her group-dependent nature has her expecting others to live up to her standard and imposing her ideals on them, as much as her intelligent exposition seems motivated more to get the others to absorb the information (Sylph of Light) than to use that understanding to best guide their actions (Seer of Light) – it still feels a touch shaky, and I have a feeling I’m going to get a lot of asks disputing it. Sort of… actually, the more I talk about this, the more solid it feels. I was going to say that perhaps later episodes will show enough of another tendency in her to make her seem like a different passive class, but when I try to think it through and realize how little could possibly do that, it seems less and less likely. There’s the ongoing plot-hook that Pearl says she can transform like the other gems but doesn’t, her neglect to shapeshift even when her life depends on it likely having a surprising reason that a future episode will center around, but I don’t think whatever the answer to that could be might overturn this hero-title diagnosis. (Even an obsession with an ideal form could be construed as Light.) I think I’m going to leave the question mark there, though, just to tempt people to look down here for the full explanation before disputing it. One more Sylph of Light thing, then… in the episode “Rose’s Scabbard”, you see how much Pearl – as one who invests importance in others and invests effort in what others consider important – places immense value on the concept that Rose Quartz confided in her, and considered her the one she hid nothing from (which, of course, turns out not to be the case). The very idea that Rose didn’t tell her everything about herself, about what she left behind (some of which was for Steven), caused her genuine distress, and felt almost like a betrayal. She had to be the most important, had to feel that way. It was how she valued herself, and she had to overcome the temptation to feel worthless otherwise, had to learn that the immense extent to which Rose Quartz did trust her was enough.

One last off-topic side note on Pearl… a theory, actually. (Skip this paragraph if you haven’t watched the series up through the “Jail Break” season finale.) Remember how Jasper, listing off the gems on first seeing them, called her “a defective Pearl”? Plenty of people have theorized that this means there are other Pearls out there, possibly identical ones, somehow cloned or manufactured by gemkind for information purposes. (The gems seem to have no compunctions against using other gems as “tools” in certain situations, and in Pearl’s case, “Sylph of Light” could easily be the tool-like application she was originally meant to fill.) However, there’s another data-point which people don’t necessarily account for. Many episodes earlier, during “Ocean Gem”, Pearl – fighting a pair of water clones of herself – says, “I hate fighting ME!”. This was a humorous reference to an earlier episode where she had trouble with a training hologram of herself, true… but taken in tandem with what Jasper said later, it might mean something else. It’s very possible that not only are there identical Pearls out there, but that our Pearl has had to PERSONALLY SLAY DOZENS OF THEM. Dozens of versions of herself who were only a chance and a choice away from having been her! (You may have seen me post this theory somewhere else earlier, depending on who you follow.)

On to Garnet, anyway! Let’s start with her explanation of how her “future vision” works…

Garnet: No one can see the future. I can see options and trajectories.

Time is like a river… that splits into creeks… or pools into lakes… or careens down waterfalls. I have the map, and I steer the ship.

Earning two narrative roles – two hero titles – at the same time is pretty difficult, and not something that quite happens in Homestuck (aside from some special theoretical umbrella classes that arguably encompass others). You have to be quite an extraordinary person to merit that sort of diagnosis. But it’s happened before, at from my perspective: I decided to label Gandalf as both a Mage of Breath and a Seer of Breath. Garnet manages to fulfill her two roles rather admirably, and makes for an extremely clear example of a Mage especially, a class many people ask me for elaboration on because it isn’t demonstrated very clearly in Homestuck. Since Garnet is a bit more of a Mage than she is a Knight (though that makes her no less both), I’m going to start on the Mage side of things.

The twelve aspects, together, encompass all the facets of how reality unfolds. Each of them is a vector, a factor, through which reality is tilted in one direction or another in any given situation. By someone’s decisions (Mind), by someone’s nature (Heart), by someone’s purpose (Breath) or their bonds and obligations (Blood), by what possibilities one can conceive of (Hope), or of course by simple physics (Space/Time). These combine and interplay to make up all existence.

The twelve classes, on the other hand, describe all the ways in which those vectors may be affected and used to shape reality. There are classes which create, add, and repair (Maid/Sylph), classes which destroy and diminish (Prince/Bard). Classes which bring about redistribution (Thief/Rogue) or exploitation (Knight/Page). And then there are the classes which specialize in understanding their aspects: The Mage and Seer.

“Understanding” an aspect, as the Mage and Seer do, actually has little to do with knowledge. Being a Seer of Mind doesn’t mean you can read minds, and being a Seer of Light doesn’t mean you know what a book contains before reading it. Instead, the “understanding” classes are assigned based on a very specific type of understanding: Understanding how your aspect affects how reality unfolds. In the parlance of Homestuck, a Seer can envision the possible realities created by the ebb and flow of their aspect – the possibilities resulting from someone’s choices (Mind) for example – and can leverage that information to change how existence unfolds, often nudging one of those possibilities into genuinely occurring. The Mage and Seer merely differ on how one utilizes this information. A Seer is a passive class, using their information to guide others like a conductor, changing reality through them. The Mage, however, is an active class specializing in using that information to personally carve a path through to the version of reality they choose.

Garnet might be able to share her ability with others, on occasion, but most often she’s the one making decisions and taking action on her foresight, as the gems she wears on her hands suggest. If a pitcher of scalding-hot coffee is about to fall on Steven’s vulnerable human body, for instance, she doesn’t act through others to stop it; she merely steps in the way and lets the coffee spill on herself instead. Her power of foresight is what actually sends the gems on missions in the first place, missions she’s perfectly willing to tackle with or without help depending on the threat ahead of them. She leads from the front with her visions instead of the back, tanking threats and beating them head-on with powered gauntlets. In the old pilot episode (very different from Ep 1, even the character designs), she was even clever enough to leave a temporal anchor in a conversation, one which Steven didn’t notice until he had the occasion to use a magic device to go back to it.

However, her abilities come with a serious burden, as emphasized in two different episodes about it. The first is most relevant to this conversation: An episode where Garnet first admits to and describes her “Future Vision” powers (and the episode has the same name). (You can watch it here in good quality if you have a decent adblocker to kill the more exploitative popups.)

Garnet starts explaining what she foresees with Steven at different junctures, and notes particularly that many of the possibilities in her vision entail danger. She’s willing to list a variety of ways Steven could get harmed or killed in his simple daily routine, information which begins to scare him into seeing threats – and potential deaths – around every corner. This eventually leads Steven to a nervous breakdown, one where he throws himself at the danger Garnet warned him about, exhausted of running and thinking that the worst is going to happen eventually, so it might as well happen.

Time, as an aspect in Homestuck’s system, has a meaning beyond the obvious temporal one. Where Space represents Creation, birth, and beginnings, Time represents Destruction and disaster, how things end. To reference Tolkien again, here’s one of the riddles Gollum told to Bilbo, one whose answer is Time:

This thing all things devours:

Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;

Gnaws iron, bites steel;

Grinds hard stones to meal;

Slays king, ruins town,

And beats high mountain down.

And just to hammer it home, here’s a quote from the non-classic Doctor Who series’ first episode, where a conspiracy theorist is describing the Ninth Doctor, showing Rose a bunch of photographs of him from throughout history. (From what I’ve seen of the series, The Doctor seems an excellent example of an Heir of Time – yes, that’s Heir, not Lord – with an excellent balance with his inverse Mage of Space role. If you don’t know what I mean by inverse, then – ONLY if you’ve read through Homestuck – click here.)

CLIVE: Going further back. April 1912. This is a photo of the Daniels family of Southampton, and friend. This was taken the day before they were due to sail off for the New World on the Titanic, and for some unknown reason, they cancelled the trip and survived. And here we are. 1883. Another Doctor. (a sketch) And look, the same lineage. It’s identical. This one washed up on the coast of Sumatra on the very day Krakatoa exploded. The Doctor is a legend woven throughout history. When disaster comes, he’s there. He brings the storm in his wake and he has one constant companion.

ROSE: Who’s that?

CLIVE: Death.

To herald Time as your aspect is to herald destruction, and in particular (as other Homestuck theorists have helpfully pointed out), to See Time is to see Death (more Homestuck spoilers in this link). Garnet can use her foresight to avert constant threats against the lives and health of her friends, but it also means she’s constantly seeing her friends get injured and killed in a thousand different ways, knowing that the slightest step too far from the path of victory will get them brutally injured before her eyes!!! The pressure this can cause a Time player is often enough for them to collapse under the weight. At the end of the episode, when Steven is standing on the roof in a storm waiting for fate to strike him down and Garnet is trying to argue him back to safety from below, Steven frustratedly rants about this, and the fact that he finally inadvertently understands what she’s going through clearly passes over Garnet’s face during Steven’s first line below:

Garnet: Steven! - You don’t understand.

Steven: No, you don’t understand. Everything I do shoves me violently towards the end! The more I know, the more I know that I don’t know! I can’t live like this! Why did you tell me about future vision?! What’s going to happen to me on the roof?!

Garnet: This.

Steven: W-What?

Garnet: I knew you might do this if I told you about my power.

I saw this, and I told you, anyway.

Steven: But why?

Garnet: I took a risk at your expense. There was a chance you’d understand this, and we’d be closer. Steven, I see so many things that can hurt you. I should never have let one of them be me.

The key to staying sane, despite this knowledge, is what she explains immediately afterwards:

There are millions of possibilities for the future, but it’s up to you to choose which becomes reality. Please understand… You choose your own future.

Of the twelve aspects in Homestuck’s system, Space and Time – the physical aspects – only account for a sixth of them. This has an important reason, possibly the most important reason (huge Homestuck post): Reality is shaped by our will. If we stand up and act, we can shape the future. And Garnet knows that as long as she stays standing, the people she cares about most will always have one.

So, that’s the Mage reasoning. Why is she also a Knight?

A Knight of Time exploits Time’s flow – temporal and destruction alike – to accomplish tasks with astonishing flexibility. In Homestuck, there’s a point where a Knight of Time is presented with a legendary sword stuck in a stone pedestal. No matter how hard he tries, he fails to pull it out. So he comes up with a striking solution: Using his existing sword, he slices a nearby giant pillar so that its weight collapses on top of the pedestal, breaking said legendary weapon in half! Now freed from the pedestal, our Knight takes the freshly broken half of the legendary weapon as his own.

Garnet constantly takes this sort of approach to problems, even when it’s apparent that her foresight had nothing to do with it. When confronted with a sea of brambles and vines blocking a precious inner sanctum of the temple, she takes a huge boulder and punches it clear through the plantlife to carve a path. When trapped in a hostile spaceship all the way up in orbit around the planet, she finds a way back down by lobbing a main villain clear through the power core of the ship, sending two birds crashing down to Earth with one stone. To Garnet, almost every problem is a nail if you look at it from the right angle, and her fists are one hell of a hammer. It doesn’t always work, but when it does, she comes out looking as effective as she does reckless.

The Knight class is somewhat similar to the Mage class; I’ve often referred to the Mage as a sort of “magic knight”, or a knight who uses knowledge instead of instinct and in-the-moment ingenuity. But I still stand by my assertion that Garnet demonstrates the roles of both classes, and can carve paths with either foresight or instinct at will.

That covers most of the people I wanted to talk about… let’s just go into Connie and Greg some more real quick.

Connie has demonstrated admirable traits throughout the series, and has done some really cool little things here and there. When she popped the lenses out of her glasses? SWEET. When she helped Steven wield Rose’s sword and put her tennis practice to work? AWESOME. And the way she took apart tropes in the works she liked was smart and adorable. People have been theorizing that she’ll end up wielding the sword while Steven wields his shield, and I can’t think of a cooler thing to happen than that.

But she hasn’t really done anything yet.

Hero titles describe your narrative role in the world around you, your ability to affect reality. If you haven’t made a personal impact in the story around you yet, and haven’t quite demonstrated the nature of the talent you’d use to do so, it’s just about impossible to diagnose your hero title with any accuracy. Believe me, she absolutely will demonstrate her talents at some point, and I’ll be standing ready with a keyboard to start typing lots of words about it. But we don’t have a clear idea of her specialty until then, and any wild guesses at her title are liable to be proven wrong.

This is also why I don’t have clear or confident titles for the other’s we’ve seen very little of, like Ruby, Sapphire, Jasper, Peridot, et al.

Greg Universe, Steven’s father, has proven his talent on many separate occasions. It’s just… really damn tricky to nail him down. I dunno.

Take the most strongly competing aspects for him: Breath and Void.

Breath is freedom, flight, unboundedness, spirit, direction, and purpose. Greg is extremely carefree; a good friend of mine pointed out that he even lives in a van, a symbol of travel free to move anywhere he wishes. His attitude is breezy, as is his constant opinion that everything will work out in the end despite any bumps, obstacles, or turbulence along the way. And he even demonstrates Breathlike wisdom when warning someone not to overcommit, at one point, emphasizing that sometimes you have to know when to bail when things are getting too bad instead of riding into a wall and hurting yourself.

Void, however, is a bit stronger a candidate for him. Not strong enough to decide it for sure, but stronger. It’s the aspect of “nothingness”, of unimportance and the unnoticed, of falsehoods and irrelevancies, of submission and “misfortune” – where misfortune is simply a word describing when things happen to you out of line of your wishes, as opposed to “fortune” (part of the opposed aspect Light’s domain) when things around you happen to unfold according to your will. Void may sound negative, in ways, but in reality it can be VERY much the opposite. As I went into in the same Tolkien post where I diagnose Gandalf’s title, Bilbo’s title is that of a Rogue of Void. He and Frodo are the protagonists of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings series for an important reason: They represent the modern, suburban, peace-accustomed individual abruptly pulled out of their homes and thrown into a world of epic fantasy and strife. As halflings, they’re literally half the size of the heroic figures who stride next to them, and go virtually unnoticed… but the very fact that they’re unnoticed, the fact that nobody expects so much from individuals of such humility, allows them to fulfill the most important roles of all. This is the sort of role – on a smaller scale, of course – which Greg fills in the themes of this story, and is exactly why Rose Quartz fell in love with him. A car wash owner living in a van and publishing one-man-band CDs that no one but Rose ever bought, Greg seems at first glance like the least important person in the world. The gems seldom believe he’ll ever be of the slightest help with their problems, and neither a first nor second glance at Greg makes him seem the slightest bit reliable. But he DOES come through, even when you think it’s impossible, and sometimes even the very things that make him who he appears to be – that make him seem so impotent and unreliable – end up being the solution to their problems. And Rose Quartz, the now-absent mother figure that everyone admires for her presence and beauty and passion, saw this in him and left him her ultimate legacy.

Other factors play into the Void diagnosis, too, even some of the same ones that I suggested indicated Breath. His carefree attitude and the episode where he emphasizes knowing when to bail on bad ideas can both be construed as Void’s “submission”: letting things happen instead of indulging the urge to take or stay in control. His emphasis on how the best can be made out of flaws and mistakes, how without imperfect pork-chops we’d lose out on delicious hot dogs, can be seen as a Voidy emphasis on how the unideal and unimportant are essential. How he keeps piles of old stuff, slow to part with even the most broken and useless junk from the past, could easily be an additional Void sign, how even the dirtiest old things – that which others dismiss as valueless – holds memories and uses that his nature finds fond enough to keep a hold of. And perhaps most Voidy, there’s an episode in which he manages to deceive not just Steven, but even the viewer of something so convincingly that it’s a genuine shock when it’s revealed to be fraudulent later. Such misdirection is sort of Breathy, but obfuscation of information and the truth is the domain of Void heroes most of all.

Still, I can’t say for sure that Void wins out over Breath with him, and I certainly can’t decide which likely-passive class he best fulfills, even with the laundry list of accomplishments he’s notched for the Crystal Gems and others. If you have a convincing argument to nail him down to a single hero role, feel free to write up a post on it and link me to it. If it wins me over – or even if two different ones win me over – I’ll link it/them in an edit to this post.

Quick semi-accurate word-count as of posting time: 6621

Thanks for reading! Homestuck may be my focus, but I’m going to keep an eye on Steven Universe, watching and loving the series and maybe offering up the occasional theory. The episode “Joy Ride” just came out and it’s up online, so if you’ll excuse me, I have some enjoying to do. :D