Could Terezi be using her inverse Claspect in a healthy way? She could have seen that John was going to take Roxy's advice and give up like Dirk and she had to change his Heart so he would make the right Decision.

bladekindeyewear:

When I alleged she’s ghosting her inverse role, I didn’t mean it was strictly a bad thing. It was more like I said: She isn’t in the swing of things as a Seer of Mind right now, so she’s using whatever methods of affecting reality she has available. And that happens to be the inverse method. Relying on your “shadow” to the point that it supplants your main role is bad. But that “shadow” is still a part of you, and there will come days when that facet of your personality is useful. When a change of heart is absolutely, positively necessary, you can turn to Terezi; she just isn’t going to be perfect at it, and is bound to bloody some noses in the process. I can hear certain specific people yelling “but you claim INVERSION IS ALWAYS BAD! it can’t be BAD most of the time and GOOD sometimes! CONTRADICTION! INVERSION SUCKS AND YOU SHOULD FEEL SUCK!”. But this is a complicated-as-hell issue, as complicated as individual personalities themselves. There’s a difference between relying on a dark facet of yourself when it fits and you have no other choice, that action turning out generally for the best, and mistaking that facet of yourself for your true identity, working against your nature and gradually racking up mistakes until the accumulated misfortune crashes down over everyone.

Hey now, having inversion be on a scale from good to bad isn’t, by itself, a horrible thing. It would be if a title and its inverse were actually total opposites and moving towards your inverse was always moving away from your classpect. But instead of opposites, exploiting Blood and stealing Breath, for example, are just two vaguely dissimilar things that are randomly thrown together. Thus, saying that you can move towards stealing Breath in a healthy way, without going overboard, doesn’t actually undercut your central argument that “exploiting Blood is the best way that Karkat can effect reality.”

What does undercut your central argument is all the other states you’ve invented for how a player is relating to their classpect. When someone acts according to their title and gets good results, they’re embracing their classpect. When they act according to their title and get bad results, they’re overembracing it. When someone acts according to their inverse title and gets bad results, they’re inverting. When they act according to their inverse title and get good results, they’re shadowing their inverse. And when they don’t do either, they’re underembracing their title, or it’s just an example of one of those times when not everything someone does relates to their classpect.

Between all those, your theory “predicts” everything that could ever possibly happen to anyone. The theory degrades from “acting according to their classpect will be good for them” to “they will or won’t act according to their classpect, and this will have positive or negative consequences.” This is one of the main reasons I think your classpect theories don’t actually work as descriptions of the characters. They say so much that they wrap around to saying nearly nothing. At the very least, this heavily biases you towards the first idea you settle on, because anything that happens can be explained as making sense given that idea, regardless of what the idea actually was.

(Ostentatiously the difference between inversion and shadowing or overembracing and embracing is based on whether or not the character is “working against their nature,” but realistically that’s determined by the results they get. Why does Terezi going nuts and heat-butting John count as shadowing instead of inversion? Because it will probably work out well for characters. Why does Jade habitually going to sleep to learn things in her dreams count as inversion? Because it eventually led to the creation of Bec Noir.)