Meaning is subjective.

In a crowd of people facing down an invincible hellbeast, there will be someone who thinks “we’re gonna die,” someone who thinks “my religion knew this would happen” and someone who thinks “this is my chance to prove I’m a badass.” All these people might conclude that they should do the same thing (run away) and each of them would consider their own thoughts logical, but they’re bringing different assumptions and unique perspectives to the situation. If they survive to tell others what happened, they’ll all tell different versions of the story. Even though they behaved the same, they disagree on what it meant and why it happened that way.

BlastYoBoots has a theory that Sburb players’ “destinies” are self-fulfilling prophecies; that with their intents and actions they shape reality constantly and retroactively. Self-awareness is not just a side quest, but the true purpose of the game. The heroes must decide to be themselves in order to fit the roles they unwittingly gave themselves.

Self-discovery is not a scripted procedure you can follow like an automaton. You’re obligated to know what’s going through your own head, even if the end result of that knowledge is a decision never to think again. And even if there is only one possible course of action you could take throughout the game, the way you think about your role – and thus your aspect – is critically important to the shape your destiny will take.

In other words, even if all aspects govern the same thing, the way each assigns meaning to the world is the part that actually defines them. A single problem with two possible solutions, whether real or hypothetical, can make all the difference in leading a player down completely different paths.

Time and Space players both recognize that the only constant is change. Where they disagree completely is how change affects the control they have over their lives. For Time players, agency is a thing of the past that diminishes over time; and for Space players, a thing of the future that one must prepare for and await.

All their other differences follow logically from these basic opinions.

Time is the inevitable.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but that means “death.”

Time players wake up every morning and think: “I am one day closer to the day I die. It could be tomorrow. It could be today.” Every second is precious to them. Perfectionism and deliberation are the enemy. Doing something right now is more important than doing it a certain way, or worrying about why you did it in the first place, because stopping to worry about such details could mean you never get it done. This extends even to habits of thought and speech; a hero of Time is likely to say anything that pops into his head.

Those of a more analytical bent are haunted by the mortality of the world itself. No matter how they live or what they accomplish, they know a day will come when nobody is left to remember them. They wish they’d been born sooner. If doing things promptly is valuable, doing them in the past can set the whole course of history. Time players don’t feel like they can change history once it’s been set in motion.

Mistakes are absolute. A hero of Time who screws up will think “it’s too late to fix that… unless I can somehow change the past.” The power of time travel offers them that opportunity, but does not absolve them of their failures. The cost of this power is death.

Time as a symbol for mortality goes back kind of a long way. The grim reaper gets his scythe and hourglass from the Roman god Saturn, by way of Father Time. In the English language we have loads of clichéd one-liners like “your time is up” and “your days are numbered.” The clockwork deathtrap motif was probably influenced by the Saw films, where a fanatical serial killer puts people in mortal peril to impress upon them the fragility of life. I’m not totally sure but I think Hussie has seen a few of these.

The keywords that symbolize this aspect are easy to catch (stuff like “moment,” “clockwork,” and “time flies”). There’s just one that people miss a lot, and that’s the idea of spending time with your friends. Time players have serious trouble with this. When they finally bring themselves to do it, beautiful things can happen.

Space is the final frontier, the biggest place in the universe. Every star is individually humongous, and they’ve got plenty of elbow room. Space wasn’t always that big (it started as small as a thing can possibly get) but it began growing and never stopped.

Space players are mesmerized by growth. They know that all the stars and plants and animals are made of the same basic stuff, and they’re inclined to think of the universe itself as a vast living being, growing and evolving and overcoming its own flaws with the passage of time. (This happens to be completely true.) And taking it as their role model, they look forward to growing up.

Growing up means self-improvement, and thus a willingness to learn from your mistakes. Heroes of Space know that even in the wake of total failure, even if they have to start again from scratch, there is such a thing as second chances, and they’ll do a better job the next time around if they learn the lessons of the past. They may not believe in reincarnation, but it’s something they wish for, and they fantasize about what they could become if reborn.

Time travel makes things complicated for Space players. Stable time loops force them to repeat mistakes they’ve already learned from, without the option of doing a better job the second time. Changing the past requires that they die and forget whatever they’ve learned. As useful as this tool might seem when they first encounter it, these heroes must learn to eschew it and do things the hard way. Their reward is control over literal growth, size, location, and distance, enabling unparalleled freedom of movement.

Ectobiology is, in theory, a task that anyone could accomplish. (Case in point: John and Karkat.) Putting Space players alone on frog-breeding duty seems needlessly arbitrary given that the creation of a universe is the goal of the entire team, but turn the plan around and the reasoning reveals itself. The freedom of adulthood goes hand in hand with the responsibilities of adulthood, and that means taking care of a baby (after making it in the first place, of course). The fact that it would grow up to be an entire universe instead of just a human lends all the more weight to this test.

The logic behind frogs-as-universes isn’t especially obvious. In western civilization, butterflies are a considerably more popular symbol of growth and metamorphosis. Unfortunately, they’re also quiet. Frogs croak, and loud noises (like the Vast Croak) are an important symbol of the Big Bang. Coming from the other direction, the spirograph shapes traced out by Ptolemaic epicycles happen to resemble the blossoms of the sacred lotus plant, which are ubiquitous in Sburb.

Verbal cues are in abundance with Space. In addition to everything connected to spacey powers, watch out for room (as in bedroom) and personal space.

Feb. 4th edit: As pendingmetamorphosis pointed out: “We saw the birth of the Green Sun, and the death of the Red.” I guess I should have put these sections in a different order…

Assuming a connection between beliefs and powers lets us narrow down the search for class verbs and god tier abilities. For example, a lot of people speculate that Time players have to “preserve” or “protect” the timeline’s integrity, but we can see now that they don’t think of it that way at all. Rather, they are presented with a plan for the future that (they think) has been decided without them, and carry it out fatalistically. If that plan involves death and ruin, so be it. If it involves total destruction of the flow of time itself, them’s the breaks.

Dave does all the stuff he’s scheduled to do and dies when he’s scheduled to die. Aradia’s private memo has spoiled the ending of the trolls’ quest, so she already knows many instances of her will come back from doomed timelines. They bury any urges to “fight fate” because they’ve seen the future and know it will happen anyway. Even though mastery of Time lets them find loopholes in this plan, and even if god tier powers can thwart the inevitable entirely, they must first run the gauntlet of compliance with stable time loops. Thus, a Seer would hand out information necessary to these loops, even if it meant her friends’ deaths; and a Thief would steal things she knows will be stolen anyway.

Since writing this post, I’ve gotten more or less the same question from a bunch of different people: “If your aspect is the part that describes your personality, is your class the part that doesn’t?”

Of course, that’s not what I’m implying at all. A Thief is still a person who reasons “I don’t have enough, so I’ll steal it;” a Prince still thinks “I’m surrounded, so I’ll fight my way out.” To tie this back into the opening thought experiment, we could say the people in the crowd have a variety of aspects (because they interpreted the omen differently) but the same class (“one who runs away”). In other words, your aspect is the way you ascribe meaning to the world, and your class is how you express your relationship to it with your actions. Your title as a whole paints a far more complete picture of your personality than just one or the other; it’s more than the sum of its parts.

Things your title does not define include your name, your species, your MANY INTERESTS, the moon you dream on, your innate ability as a warrior, your level of competency in the game, or (for the most part) who you’ll befriend or sleep with. Some of these things might be interconnected, and some are a combination of your title and other factors, but none are predicated on your title alone.

There’s one last thing I’m compelled to point out.

The ghosts of dead players (from doomed timelines or otherwise) show up in dreambubbles in the furthest ring. The chaotic topography of this realm neutralizes the Time and Space aspects, not just literally but metaphorically. Ghosts no longer face death or the process of growing up. They have none of the responsibilities of mature adults, nothing left to regret, and no motivation to improve from their mistakes. They have infinite time to spend with either the people they’re close to or total strangers.

Lord English’s rampage changes all that. By bringing death to the ghosts, he makes Time meaningful again, and Space is along for the ride. The trolls in the dreambubbles need to grow up in a hurry, insofar as they still can.

If they even remember how.