The huge, huge piece missing from my APN theory is a definition of the active/passive dichotomy. In the interest of thoroughness, before diving into it I want to review existing arguments for class alignment. Here’s everything we think we know, ordered only by how well we know it:

Active (-): Prince, Thief, Lord, Knight, Witch, Maid, Mage

Passive (+): Bard, Rogue, Muse, Seer, Heir, Page, Sylph

Those in bold are reported as such by Calliope, and are the most reliable, followed by those mentioned in Hussie’s commentary. Popular speculation is in italics. I’ve summarized arguments about the second and third categories. My goal below is one of criticism; I introduce no new theories whatsoever.

It was immediately clear, once Calliope had introduced the term, that Scratch’s Seer spiel was describing a passive class. Apart from Rose, though, the alignment of the B1 kids was hotly debated. Jade’s powers have the effect of helping people even though she alone is in control. John always acts in the interest of others, but then again, his powers seem to benefit him alone. Going strictly by powers, we can’t tell which is active.

Later exposition suggested that behavior is the most important factor, as if to say passive players get inherently selfish powers and must want or decide to use them for the team. Now we can see John’s passiveness at work, and in terms of attitude, mature Witches begin to look very active. And because the game is all about growing as a person, changing your behavior to something more appropriate to your role is a very plausible-sounding personal quest.

Hussie’s discussion of Derse and Prospit dreamers agrees with this reading:

Dave and Rose turned out to be very active players. Dave time traveling all over the place, making a fortune on stocks and such. Rose went on her crazy solo mission to break the game and fight Jack. Jade and John had more passive roles through most of that, players who were “acted upon” by other players and circumstances. John was always being led around by trolls this way and that, drifting around wherever the wind took him. Jade was especially passive for a lot of the story, spending a lot of time falling asleep (or being put to sleep) at key moments. It wasn’t until she reached god tier as a Witch (said to be a highly active class) that she became extremely active, making lots of stuff happen, rounding up planets and all that. Rose may have been a similar case, being excessively active as a Derse dreamer, but then flipping over to a passive role upon reaching god tier as a passive class.

His analysis is couched in subjectivisms like “it seems,” but the connections it draws are novel and interesting, the whole thing makes worlds of sense, and we take what we can get. At this point, someone arguing for -Heir or +Knight must also say that Hussie is lying just to trick us, or that he doesn’t know the active/passive rules as well as we do. Since I can’t take either idea seriously, I consider Hussie’s descriptions nigh-unassailable.

Copying alignments from B1 to B2 gives us the so-called moon balance argument for -Maid and +Page:

On Derse, we have a male player who is already active and a female player who must learn to be more passive; on Prospit, the male player is passive and the female player learns to be active. We know Dirk and Roxy fit this pattern, but there’s no guarantee that Hussie’s love of symmetry extends to class alignment. That must be taken with a measure of faith.

(Knowing everybody’s titles, we could also analyze the troll sessions to see what happens there. I haven’t done this.)

Gender balance arguments, on their own, are very shaky. We can’t show that (eg.) all Witches in all sessions are female, because there might be sessions we haven’t seen yet with a male Witch. This goes for every class Calliope hasn’t covered. We can show that some Witches are female, and we can assume that the margin of error for statistical representation in canon is fairly low. In other words: Witch is probably mostly female, and Knight is probably mostly male.

A few speculators claim to know which classes are gender exclusive, usually by discussing the names. I think such strong assertions are perilous. The same reasoning has already yielded false positives for Seer and Mage that proved incorrect when we later met Kankri and Meulin. I do consider it safe to infer gender bias through names; thus, Mage is male-leaning instead of completely neutral. But calling on gender exclusivity to argue a verb layout, even for Sylph, is flimsy at best in the absence of further exposition.

Hussie claimed on twitter that the active set is slightly male-leaning. We might argue from this that both Mage and Page are active, but that’s not necessary because Lord already tips the scale even if one of the two is passive. It does, however, rule out having both -Maid and -Sylph, or both +Page and +Mage. If +Page is confirmed, we can assume -Mage, and if -Sylph is confirmed we can assume +Maid.

Costume arguments are a source of unending ridicule. For a while there, some of us (I’m including myself) got really obsessed with shoe colors, culminating in debates over the exact shade of purple used for god tier Kurloz. I’ve seen just one really neat argument that ignores color schemes entirely, instead observing that pantaloons were once considered as masculine as codpieces. (These garments were in fact often worn together.) By analogy this leads to -Witch/+Sylph, leaving -Maid with +Heir. Nothing is said of Mage, but this theorist seems to follow BlastYoBoots on -Knight/+Page, which was arrived at partly by comparing Tavros to Robin.

Aspect balance is an argument I’ve seen very little of, because it’s very weak. The implications, however, are interesting. -Maid would make the Life and Time aspects all-active; +Page would make Breath and Void all-passive; +Mage would make Doom all-passive. Space, Light, Heart, and Hope are mixed no matter what, as are the less-relevant Blood, Mind, and Rage.

You could say that aspects always have mixed alignment, which leads quickly to -Mage, -Page, +Maid, and +Sylph. Or, if by investigating aspects you conclude that some are always active or always passive, you might end up with -Maid, +Page, -Mage, and +Sylph. I would like to see arguments along these lines if anyone can show them to me. In particular I’m interested in hearing how they mesh with aspect duality, which pairs the “monopolar” aspects with ones that must be mixed.

(A very sly person visiting a con might ask Hussie if such monopolar aspects exist, or rather, whether he writes some aspects as all-active or all-passive. He might not realize how much his answer tells us until it’s far too late.)

The most popular argument, and the most complicated, comes from inversion. This theory gets a lot of flak, most of it unfairly. BlastYoBoots has “anti-fans” who feel that if he’s wrong about one thing he can’t be right about anything. So if Boots says Knight is active, Knight must be passive even if Hussie agrees with him, unless it actually gets confirmed in the comic and then they say they knew it all along and Boots heard it from them. I think they’re nuts and their arguments mostly self-destruct.

Still, inversion is far from flawless. Parts of it are weakly argued (albeit enthusiastically) and no theory that draws on it can be any stronger than those weak links. Certain things are just glossed over: The exact mechanism for class inversion, the connection between that and aspect inversion, and the motivation for verbs having antonyms come to mind. Worse, it’s contradicted by some of his other big theories. For example, if Sburb is all about changing reality and one of the class verbs is set up as the antithesis of change, those classes are automatically useless or evil. But a poor argument doesn’t negate its own conclusion, so I’ll assume it’s sound and explore the implications.

Boots identifies several inversion pairs that appear throughout the comic. A Seer may act like a Witch, and vice versa; likewise for Pages and Thieves. Maid<=>Bard is the next strongest case. Knight<=>Heir was considered for a while, but dropped. “Inverting your title” is synonymous with resisting your role, whether consciously or subconsciously. A Seer of Light’s behavior is the polar opposite of that of a Witch of Void. Inverting makes everything harder for you and will get you killed unless (or even if) you go back to doing your real title.

Boots’ class layout revolves around those first three inversion pairs. We know about -Witch and +Seer, so inversion must happen across alignment boundaries; thus, -Thief implies +Page, and +Bard implies -Maid. The rest fall into place based on the use of antonyms. So if Sylphs heal, they “create,” the opposite of “destroy,” which yields -Maid/+Sylph. -Knights and +Pages exploit, -Mages know (like Seers), and +Heirs and -Witches change.

(Inversion may cross gender boundaries only because it doesn’t change your title. An inverted Seer of Light acts like a Witch of Void, and may have nearly the same powers, but she’s still a Seer of Light. This is important.)

Difficulties arise with the introduction of Lord and Muse: Given seven verbs, only six can have each other as proper antonyms. Preserving antonymy can mean disqualifying one pair from inversion, or allowing a contradiction into your system. Boots tries to avoid both, reasoning that the master classes must literally be one with their aspects, via the verb “embody.” This raises the question of why, for example, Prince wouldn’t invert to Bard, or Thief to Rogue, if “different aspect” plus “different passivity” counts as inversion. The waters are muddied further by the concept of “sub-roles,” where you channel the title opposite yours as an additional source of power (which is good) but don’t actually invert (which would be bad). I’m not sure how your actions can represent both your real title and its inverse when they’re entirely defined by their stark differences, but maybe he’s planning to explain that.

These problems are well known. Suggestions for fixing them are plentiful, if not methodical. If this was my main priority, the first thing I’d do is throw out antonymy… And then I’d be toast. I’d still be able to deduce active and passive alignments, but not an entire class layout. I’d need a separate method for replacing all the verbs I messed up. And I’d still need an explanation for why inversion is “a thing,” and how exactly class differences are connected to aspect inversion. By failing to address these problems, I go nowhere.

I call arguments “weak” not when I think they are wrong, but when they rely too much on guesswork. The approach which sounds the smartest and looks easiest on paper is simply to compare players’ actions to the definitions of “active” and “passive” and see what fits them. In practice, this is the weakest approach of all, because we don’t know the real definitions. We know things about them, but our information is not complete, and it seems to contradict itself.

Our judgements of passivity are chiefly subconscious, and our inferences thereof are tautological. Is X passive? “It looks passive.” What else is passive? “Whatever looks like X.” Why is X passive, then? “Because it looks like something that’s passive.” Perspectives built on inscrutable assumptions cannot be shared with others, leaving dramatic posturing as the predominant means of persuasion. Without a method, we are running around in the dark with our heads chopped off, shooting each other in the foot.

I realize this post has been overwhelmingly negative. My intent is not to take part in the melee, but to help draw a line between what we can analyze and what we can debate only by yelling at each other. Awareness of this boundary will help us shrink the territory of the latter; I’ll save my attempts for a later post. For now I’ll just point out that some of my theories are in that category, so the arguments I hope to debunk include my own.