#for all I know in years of classpecting this stuff might've been said already

[scalematez]

Hope vs Rage: My Two Cents

The relationship between the Hope aspect and the Rage aspect is one that fascinates me, because as far as I’m aware these are aspects that are very easy to misunderstand (though, a lot of aspects are easy to misunderstand in general). I believe this is largely due to what it is we have to glean from in canon material.

The first introduced player of each aspect we get are Gamzee and Eridan respectively, a Bard and a Prince, destructive classes that both wield their aspect and ghost their opposite aspect.

One interpretation I’ve seen around is that Hope is associated with holy powers, and even religion, while Rage is associated with demonic forces, cults, destruction and the like. The idea comes from how angels are directly associated with the Hope aspect, both with Eridan and Jake English, while Gamzee on the other hand is in a sort of juggalo cult.

Now bare with me here, but I think this is only partly right, in my opinion.

Hope is commonly associated with holy powers, but it’s my theory that it is just as equally associated with demonic ones. Hope is the instrument of BELIEF, something that is necessary for both the holy and demonic, and the thing that drives both religions and cults alike, faith itself. Hell, even the angels of LOWAA themselves are described as "awful feathery demons". Gamzee’s place as the last living member of a clown religion is a form of him ghosting his opposite aspect, Hope. He is shown to truly follow his belief in it.

Inversely, we see the opposite embodied in Eridan. The opposite of belief, after all, isn’t “belief in something supposedly a lot more evil”, it’s DISBELIEF. Rage is everything that Hope is not, it isn’t a dark evil inverse of Hope.

Gods and demons alike are something you have to believe in for them to hold any power over you, Rage is refusing to let them hold any power over you.

Eridan is aggressively atheist, he staunchly refuses to believe in anything that doesn’t have a traditional scientific explanation. He doesn’t believe in magic even as he’s holding it in his hand, referring to it as "white science", and his first response upon meeting a land of supernatural entities is to kill them all indiscriminately.

He is a force of destruction all around, being that he's either destroying Hope (which leaves Rage, an aspect already generally associated with destruction) or he's destroying THROUGH Hope (either as a concept or by using a beam of literal holy light energy).

Though the more I think of it, describing it as exclusively the aspect of "destruction" feels a bit misleading. In some cases that'd be apt in a more literal sense, but in some that makes it sound a lot more sinister than it actually is.

I think a better word to describe it in a less antagonistic setting is actually "deconstruction".

Belief is an element of construct. If it doesn't exist physically but you believe in it, it is considered a concept. So the opposite of that would really be deconstruction. You can deconstruct physical things, but you can deconstruct non-physical ideas as well.

Neither Hope nor Rage are inherently more good or evil than the other (I'm disregarding the True Sign quiz). Our first introduced examples for each are both antagonists, and the same principle of evil applies to their Beforan counterparts (though in very different ways). I think this is important to both aspects, that either is just as capable of bad as it is good.

I personally think Hope and Rage make a lot more sense as aspects when you view them both as an extension of or response to suffering, but that's an essay for another day.