Gendered Classes

i realise immediately after posting this that this is super vague. the gendered classes that i think are talked about in the comic but im not sure are classes that are only given to people of a certain gender. lord and muse as male and female respectively, and prince was male exclusive too. not sure if there were more. but like, what about nonbinary people? do genderfluid people in a single player session change between lord and muse whenever? those kind of questions.

I was trying to figure this out at one point. We know that prince and bard are male, and I believe we know that it's a six-six split between gendered and non. There are some that we know are non-gendered:

Knight: Dave and Latula

Seer: Rose and Kankri

Mage: Sollux and Meulin

Rogue: Roxy and Rufioh

For others we only see one gender, so some guesswork is required. Thief is probably non-gendered, it's a gender-neutral term and the counterpart of Rogue, which we know is non-gendered. The three female classes are likely Sylph, Witch, and Maid, with all three having feminine connotations. That gives us:

Knight: X

Seer: X

Mage: X

Rogue: X

Thief: X

Prince: M

Bard: M

Sylph: F

Witch: F

Maid: F

Heir: ?

Page: ?

This leaves either Heir or Page as the last male-exclusive class, and I'm really not sure which. I'd be inclined to say Page, as I think it has slightly more masculine connotations, but I'm not sure. Also, the whole thing is kind of dumb anyway! Degender the classes 2025.

I remember poking fun at Skaia saying "This concept is barely conscious yet it's still sexist" and I found that pretty funny lol. I mean the post was probably some sort of deeper analysis but yeah. Skaia is sexist and iirc Porrim actively tried to challenge her role because she recognized Skaia was sexist

“I remember **seeing a post** poking fun at Skaia”

Forgot to type those words into my message

I never took those explanations as particularly set in stone tbh. Gender doesn't have hard rules, so anything that is tied to them by default also really doesn't. I always took it as Calliope just having a binary view of the world, one Cherubs are just wired to possess, and one that she distances herself gradually from.

I will say, tho, that the gendering is probably carrying over for the Jungian archetypes which inspired the Homestuck classes to begin with. Stock characters as a whole are very gendered (prince charming, evil hag, damsel in distress, etc.), but experimentation with the base ideas they offer are at this point as the original ideas themselves.

And while, again, I do not believe gender has any hard rules, it would certainly be interesting to see explored what it means, in the context of Skaia's narrative, to be a male Witch or a female Prince, for instance. One could simply take the verbiage of the Class and apply it, but the Classes are not simply about powers. They are, still, stock characters of sorts. So, is a female Prince a Princess? Or is a female Prince more of a "woman in disguise" kind of trope? What does that role look like in the narrative of Paradox Space, and the story being told?

Additionally, what could that mean for a character that has transitioned? What would June Egbert's "Heiress of Breath" be, if it'll even be. I do not think she'll become a different Class entirely, but her experience as a Heir of Breath will probably change. That is not necessarily connected to gender, but is also not not connected to it.

Do we actually get any dialogue that any class is gendered in the comic? since I do remember it being implied to be true for some classes, but I can’t remember from where.

I also think there’s no real reason for any class to be gendered, and unless someone said something, the sample size of session we see is so small that it’s not like we can confirm if a class is exclusive by just two or three people playing the role.

though against the “gender doesn’t matter” bit, assigning classes gender roles then assigning people them against that role could be good fuel for a character’s personal journey to be about their relationship with gender, either their own or their perception of it.

Skaia itself being sexist is a funny concept, but i feel like it could also just be explained away by happen stance, the typically gendered titles happened to align with the players in the way they did the way we see them, but it could easily break those rules should the situation call for it (i.e a male witch) because while the title is gendered, it fits the player well enough that its fine.

additionally, Skaia forcefemming someone so that they realize they are trans would be really funny.

Okay so, I personally don't use gendered classes at all, and iirc Hussie said back when ze used social media Calliope was wrong, but when I say I don't use gendered classes I mean that no classes are ontologically gendered. Having girl Princes or Knights is definitely something where i engage with those things being male terms/terms normally gendered as male, and I would recommend doing similar in the context of boy maids or sylphs. i think what gets me is how little people are willing to examine gendered classes in fandom, or applying them in completely thoughtless contexts. Maybe it's because I watched utena at the same time i got into homestuck, but it's weird how many people take that completely at face value in canon and assume they have to stick to it in their fanadventures

Whatever, go my girlprince

My feeling is that Calliope talks about gendered classes as a thing bc for them, at the time, they existed in a very sharp gender binary, and saw the world in that way. I think though, that she's just... wrong. There's really nothing else that suggests classes as gendered, we only get it from them, and they're an unrealiable narrator. Like. Callie also thinks that the kids will get wings when they godtier.

iirc most of this comes from calliope, who is running off of a pretty small sample size. she seems to be pretty correct in her examinations of what the classes are and what they do but she is a cherub. cherubs function nearly exclusively in binaries. her worldview revolves around the idea that everything comes in twos. its pretty much all she knows, from caliborn and the differences between them and what she knows of her kind, etc. so she probably viewed the sessions through an extremely binary lens because in her understanding of the world everything exists in a dichotomy, including with gender and to an extent active and passive classes. i think active and passive do exist but they are not nearly as much of a binary as she presents them, they can be sort of mixes but it determines a heavy leaning (thieves lean towards individuality, rogues others, whatever). so she knows that for her, everythings a binary, she knows that theres a difference between active and passive, so she probably assumes theres a gender dichotomy too when theres not rly any reason for there to be

don't let everyone here distract you from the truth that page is a girl class and the pages in the comic just never figured out they were girls.

there is a bit of common misconception being spread here. Hussie has never commented on whether classes 'really are' gendered, or if Calliope was right or wrong about the subject. all Hussie HAS said, to my understanding, is that it is "possible to make a female character a prince". (http://web.archive.org/web/20160224200223/https:/twitter.com/andrewhussie/status/454750351334584320)

these are two very different things! whether it's "possible" to "make a female character a prince" is a question about someone's original character, to which "sure" is very obviously the correct answer; but whether your original character can be a female prince is not the same question as whether prince is "exclUsively designated for male players" (p. 4564) in canon. because Homestuck's princes exist within a specific narrative context, and classes are roles designed for a specific narrative context! whether a character chooses to follow the role set out for them by their class or to rebel against it is up to the individual hero, but that's the role Sburb expects them to play out in its grand fairy tale. and the roles in fairy tales are startlingly gendered: Prince and Bard are male-skewed destroyer classes because the only fairy tale characters who are afforded the privilege of being destroyers tend to be men, and while anyone is free to write a fairy tale with a female destroyer in it, Homestuck is a very particular fairy tale written by Lord English - who just happens to love stories about male destroyers!

i propose the JESTER class, exclusively for clown-gendered players. it is perfectly neutral in +/- alignment, and as such has no dual. A jester is one who pranks their aspect, and pranks others with their aspect. A jester of light might tell their enemy to move a little to the left, and as luck would have it an anvil falls on top of them. a jester of space might tell their aspect "im actually over there" and have teleported away by the time space remembers to stop being distracted and impose the laws of reality on them.

there is a bit of common misconception being spread here. Hussie has never commented on whether classes 'really are' gendered, or if Calliope was right or wrong about the subject. all Hussie HAS said, to my understanding, is that it is "possible to make a female character a prince". (http://web.archive.org/web/20160224200223/https:/twitter.com/andrewhussie/status/454750351334584320)

Thanks for the clarification. This makes more sense, and honestly I think from an authorial standpoint, "you don't have to follow the canon rules exactly" is a better answer (and closer to how I approach things). I do still think more people should consider Calliope as unreliable narrator, but in the sense that in Homestuck unreliable narrators can still be right