Games With No Stakes

The Curtains

I was a 17-year-old recovering edgelord sitting at my desk on the first day of AP Literature and Composition, which is basically an English class for super-geeks like myself. Our teacher walked into the classroom, and I expected nothing; I only took this class at first in order to challenge myself, put another test on my college application, and maybe get out of a mandatory English requirement. I didn’t; not because I didn’t pass the test, but because my college required me to take their writing course anyway.

It wasn’t all for naught. Our teacher drew a circle on the board, and started to explain an important concept to us. I could never really articulate it in words, but this simple diagram pieced a bunch of what I was trying to aim for together, and taught me a valuable lesson. Here it is. The whole reason you’re in English class.

This is an author’s work.

This is the “circle of interpretation”, containing all interpretations of the work.

This is the circle of valid interpretation. Note the dotted line.

Finally, here are all the interpretations of a given work.

Together, they make a pretty rainbow. The only thing dragging your interpretation inside and outside of the “valid interpretation” circle is if other people tend to accept your justifications for your interpretation. Basically, cite your sources, but for fiction.

Since these are fictional works, you can justify just about any interpretation if you try hard enough. The thing that makes an interpretation “more or less valid” is the ease in which it can be justified, by both you and other people. You can make an interpretation easier to justify for other people by presenting your sources, with quotes. If your logic makes sense, then other people go “I see why you did that,” and add on their commentary. This kind of discourse is possible in literary analysis, because literary analysis is fundamentally a game with no stakes. We’ll come back to that idea.

There’s a meme that pops up sometimes when people complain about school, which is a frequent occurrence around me, because most people I hang out around are either in public school, have recently (e.g. less than 5 years ago) graduated from public school, or have been traumatized by public school hard enough that they feel the need to complain about it. It comes in text post, comic, or Venn diagram form, but here’s the crux of it.

A book says “the curtains were blue.” The teacher says “the color of the curtains represents the main character’s loneliness and depression.” The author meant “the curtains were blue.”

My friend loathes this meme. I asked him why, and he said it’s because he finds it fundamentally anti-intellectual; he thinks it’s an excuse for people to not read into metaphors, not question the media they’re given, ignore the subtext in their fictional media, and claim that they’re the smart ones for blatantly ignoring what could be right in front of them. Quite frankly, I think he’s correct, in more ways than one! The conclusion implies the author’s interpretation is the “sole correct reading,” that you can get points taken off for not having the “correct reading” rather than not justifying your reading eloquently enough, or that anything other than the literal meaning of the text is nonsense. That meme spits in the face of a game with no stakes.

Literary analysis is fundamentally a game. It is “a form of play or sport, especially a competitive one played according to rules and decided by skill, strength, or luck,” according to the dictionary. It is a form of play or sport between academics and enthusiasts alike; it is as competitive as you want it to be (but usually not); it is played by the mutually agreed-upon rules of the language you communicate in and the language the work is in, which are descriptive, not prescriptive, and the rules of logic and reason, which are less descriptive. The validity of your interpretation is entirely decided by your skill at justification; if you can justify an interpretation, it is valid, and if you can’t, it is not. It is not decided by your conclusion. It’s a game with no stakes. There are no winners and losers. Two people can have valid interpretations. Ever wonder why the “themes” section on Wikipedia isn’t just one sentence? That’s because multiple people played the literary analysis game, and they all won! Everyone can be a winner, but some people choose not to. They end up fighting with each other on Twitter and then getting banned because nobody likes them. There is no point to spitting in the face of a game with no stakes.

To close that topic, here’s what English class is actually about. This is why we talk about why the curtains are blue.

https://jerz.setonhill.edu/the-curtains-were-blue

The Balls

Part of attaining that validity is the quality of your justification. Part of writing that justification is doing it in the first place, finding your sources, and not stopping to question whether it’s “valid.” You make it valid through your work. If you find your work is an uphill battle, then keep working, and come to a different conclusion instead. Realizing that you could be right, and you may be wrong, is an internal conviction you have to make for yourself. Doing this requires balls.

Yes, I’m going to talk about the balls.

Recently (2022-04-21), I find myself saying “I’m going to talk about the balls” and “it’s all about the balls” a lot. In saying this, I am using a metaphor for confidence and self-respect, referred to by a slang term for the male gonads of vertebrates. You do not need literal male gonads to have confidence and self-respect. I’m also going to use classpecting as the primary example of how to have balls.

I play a tabletop game based on the webcomic Homestuck. In this webcomic, four kids play a game that has world-ending consequences. In this game, each player is assigned a title, or a “classpect” in the fandom’s terms, composed of their class, and their aspect. Their class is how they act on their aspect, such as Bard, Page, Knight, Rogue, or Seer, and their aspect is a fundamental concept that builds reality, such as Time, Life, Breath, Doom, or Void. Their full title describes their role in the story. Some describe a classpect as a character’s personality, but that’s a lackluster explanation; it implies a personality is fundamentally immutable, and completely falls apart when the master classes are introduced, Lord and Muse, which are stated to define an aspect in its entirety. A character’s personality, as written by an author, is determined by their role in the story; the function they will serve is the reason they will have that personality in the story the author is about to tell.

Andrew Hussie, the author of Homestuck, left this system incomplete. We don’t even know if he listed all of the classes or aspects, or if there are more out there that were never featured. Each class and aspect obviously represents more than what it says on the tin, but we’ll never know, because Andrew backtracks on multiple statements made within the comic, which are a rare occurrence. When asked for a complete guide to Sburb, he stated he “doesn’t want to let [his] own bad ideas get in the way of [him]self,” and I don’t blame him, because he’s said things he came to regret, such as the idea of gendered classes, or one gender laying claim to a specific way of shaping reality, which is ludicrous. Given the amount of classpect theorists out there, I doubt they’d even respect him. Maybe some would, but the ones who would don’t have balls. They’d gladly cut off theirs to satisfy Andrew.

Because of the system’s incomplete nature, a bunch of wannabe classpect theorists whittle away their time needling back and forth about what powers a class or aspect would have, or who would win in a fight solely based on their classpect. Most of these assumptions are based around another assumption, that classpect is based on personality. Again, I highly doubt it’s based on personality in a meta-sense. The abilities of the character are determined by their role in the story. Act 5 is a meta-commentary on how stories work; hell, even the death mechanics of God Tiering is a commentary on how characters are killed off! A character only dies in a traditional story if they committed heroic acts and died in honor of themself or someone else, or if their death is just, and is a fulfilling and vindicating conclusion to an arc. That’s why the Heroic/Just death clock exists; it’s playing literary analysis, the game with no stakes, and assigning fictional stakes to it!

The best classpect theorists, in my opinion, are the ones that put their ideas out there in a post, provide justification, and leave room for other people’s responses or further interpretation. Just like literary analysis, the validity of the justification is based on the logic linking the sources provided. I may not agree with you, but I should be able to at least see how you got to where you are. I strongly disagree with optimisticDuelist’s interpretation of Knight/Page being made “to serve,” and with Page being active and Knight being passive, and with active classes being “for themselves” and passive classes being “for others,” and the very concept of active/passive classes beyond something Calliope made up, but I respect them immensely because I see how they got there. They left their trail of breadcrumbs through the comic, and I picked them up and found where they’re coming from. Some people disagree with his takes, call them “hot,” and call him “wrong.” I used to be one of these people. I’m no longer one of these people.

However, something I see pop up a lot is an assumption that one classpect theorist has to be right, and the other has to be wrong. You picked the wrong classpect for my character. I have the right power set for this classpect. Is this the correct interpretation for this title? I beseech you to stop doing this. If the system’s fundamentally incomplete, and there’s room for interpretation, then the right or wrong answer is entirely dependent on the justification presented.

I’m going to say this bluntly, I am fundamentally disinterested in questions such as “would [title 1] or [title 2] win in a fight?” or “what powers would [title] have?”. I try not to answer these, because I find my opinion has carried undue weight with it before in my role as a community manager, and because I don’t care about the outcome. Both questions miss what I think the point of a classpect is: a character’s role in the story. The character themself determines their powers, the characters themselves determine which one will win in a fight. The classpect is there basically for flavor. If a character takes their role in the story and sees it in a different light, they can change around their power set entirely. Roxy’s “create objects out of thin air” is more akin to a Space player’s ability than anything, but it was necessary for her role in the story to create the Matriorb and be the key to helping her friends. Stop asking these questions. They’re Googleable.

Also, don’t classpect other real people; that’s akin to determining their role in the “story”, or real life, for them. That’s rude and has terrible implications.

How do you classpect a character, though? You need to determine their role in the story. How do you determine their role in the story? You need to use the tools of literary analysis, including making up reasons about why their curtains are some color or another, in order to determine the context of their situation. What decides if you deduced the character’s role? The strength of your justification. What decides its strength? Well, partly the strength of the logic you used to make connections between different parts of the source material to support your overarching idea. The other part? You guessed it.

It’s about balls.

I hope you’ve been paying attention in English class. You’re going to need it.