This series (along with some related material by other people) has been adapted into video by OptimisticDuelist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqRoIBNcboY
Almost a year ago now, Andrew Hussie released the Extended Zodiac, and with it came a picture that has kept my mind buzzing and spinning ever since.
So what does this picture look like? It looks like a lot of things. It looks like the Aspects, arranged in a circle with some fancy spirographs and stuff for ornamentation. It looks like a strange little color study, and we’ll get back to that thought in a moment. Most of all, and I must shamefully admit this took months for my friends coinageFission and optimisticDuelist to convince me, it looks an awful lot like the zodiac.
And why wouldn’t it be zodiac-like? The full set of Aspects was first introduced alongside the first batch of twelve trolls, who are famously zodiac-themed. Many traditions, including the various flavors of Christianity that Homestuck draws a lot of its theming from place a great deal of importance on the zodiac.
But let’s put a pin in the zodiac stuff, and then return to another observation. Colour study. Because the first thing I noticed about the new picture was that it was suspiciously brighter near the top than the bottom, and vice versa. Even the background maintains this pattern, shifting seamlessly between a purple bottom and a blue top.
There are further design patterns in place. Aspects with similarly shaped symbols (Void and Space, Life and Breath and Hope) are next to each other. The colors red and yellow are present only on the right, while the colors white and blue are found only on the left. All in all, I took this image to hint at a system for understanding how the Aspects connect to each other and can be understood in terms of one another, a system I have called many things as it’s developed, but which I now dub the Aspect Zodiac.
Four Aspects stand out in the Aspect Zodiac. Space and Time have always been singled out as special Aspects, without which the Medium, the story’s setting, cannot properly exist, and equidistant between them we find Breath and Blood, the Aspects of Homestuck’s original protagonists John and Karkat.
In this post I will explore first these four Aspects, and how they together define the parameters by which the Aspect Zodiac is to be judged. For their paramount importance, I have dubbed them the Cardinal Aspects.
Second, I will describe the principles which connect the Light-Mind-Void-Heart quartet, the four Aspects more closely tied to the Space-Time set of Aspects. In keeping with some zodiac mumbo jumbo I don’t really understand, they are known as the Fixed Aspects.
Finally, I have asked OptimisticDuelist to make an essay on the Doom-Hope-Life-Rage quartet, the four Aspects more closely tied to the Blood-Breath set of Aspects. They are dubbed the Mutable Aspects, in no small part for their shared association with duality.
[Two by two worlds: The Cardinal Aspects]
