Witches & Heirs: Adherence and Manipulation
Well, here we are again. It's always such a pleasure. (Do you remember when you tried to kill me twice, blah blah blah...)
Witches & Heirs are a pair with a lot of material to work with, owing to the fact that Homestuck's main protagonist happens to fall under this category; though comparatively the other characters in the group (besides Jade, fellow Main Character) happen to be relatively obscure.
...But I've also written a whole goddamn analysis on one of them, so this should be fine.
The Witch:Heir class dichotomy embodies adherence, manipulation and fundamentally, control. This is both control over the Aspect, and the control the Aspect has over the person - and practically functions as a means to manipulate & bend the Aspect freely.
Canonical Witch players are Jade Harley (Witch of Space), Feferi Peixes (Witch of Life) and Damara Megido (Witch of Time).
Canonical Heir players are John Egbert (Heir of Breath), Equius Zahhak (Heir of Void) and Mituna Captor (Heir of Doom).
Point A, the narrative function of the Witch.
Narratively speaking, the Witch is the Class of active manipulation. What this translates to is a person whose Aspect has a heavy influence & sway over their life and their actions, which ends up manifesting in them growing to control & influence it in rebellion. And therein lies the key word everyone uses when analysing Witches - rebellion.
The Witch is somebody who rebels against their Aspect. They bend the rules, play around with it, they think they're above its whims. And this, more often than not, is because they don't want it to try and control them in turn.
Jade Harley, Witch of Space, spends her whole life in isolation. Space has her under its thumb, she's got one big, floating empty canvas to play around in and nobody else to inhabit it with. She's so far away from anyone or anything, and has no freedom to explore it to her heart's content because of the fucking First Guardian that keeps teleporting her around.
Feferi Peixes, Witch of Life, has her future decided for her. She's the princess & the heiress to a colossal empire, and the trajectory & development she's meant to undergo is pre-planned. Her life isn't her own to control, and she has to worry about a titanic sea monster that'll kill everyone on the planet if she doesn't tend to it.
Damara Megido, Witch of Time, finds closure to be something hard to swallow. All the toxic & debilitating relationships in her life, she can't bring herself to burn the bridge until the bridge starts burning her - and that's when she resorts to pulling teeth and cutting off heads. And her post-scratch self ends up being groomed & made to serve the Lord of Time himself.
Noticing a pattern here? Witches often find themselves literally controlled by a grand manifestation of their Aspect. Becquerel for Jade, Glb'golyb for Feferi & Lord English for Damara/The Handmaid.
And this brings us to the point that Witches want to rebel against these forces of control. Jade has to learn to break the rules, to disobey her guardian & travel as far from that desolate rock as she can.
Feferi wants to bring great, sweeping change to the whole empire and everything underneath it, she's got big dreams & wants to change the way that everyone's lives grow and develop.
Damara figures out that she doesn't have to take shit & deal with abuse because she can end things, and oftentimes in her situation that means ending lives. And, furthermore, bringing about total oblivion with the Scratch.
(Damara was totally justified in doing that, by the way. Fuck you, Meenah & Rufioh).
This leads to the fairly digestible Point B of the Witches' practical function.
The Witch controls their Aspect to an absolute. The power they gain is to manipulate it and make it do whatever the goddamn hell they want it to do, best exhibited with Jade who gains complete dominion over physical space; which ties directly into her Quest.
Even then, there's still an upper limit to her strength, but from what we see of her God-tiered self (and she's unfortunately the only Witch to reach the God-tiers), Space basically becomes her bitch.
It's one of the most straightforward power sets of any class. Manipulating the Aspect is pretty simple to grasp, and it's moreso the narrative idea of a Witch that's harder to explain.
Point C, the narrative function of the Heir.
Heirs find themselves in an opposing situation, but like the Witches, the Aspect has them under its' thumb. Like the Witch, they find themselves with a huge influx of their Aspect that they don't really get a say in - though I think the difference is that the Heir isn't aware of it as much.
John Egbert, the Heir of Breath, is unrestrainable. He's impossible to keep down or chain in a way that matters, and that often applies to him being impossible to sway emotionally as well. He just glides, freely, from one thing to another without a care in the world - obeying every whim of Breath and disallowing himself the time to dwell on one thing and process it.
Equius Zahhak (yes, I'm going here again) feels empty. He has no substance to himself, and he despises it. Every single facet of his life, he feels is controlled by the untenable nothingness inside him that he can't fight back against, and Void is all he feels he has to him.
Mituna Captor, the Heir of Doom, is fate's chewtoy. He's overwhelmed by prophecies & foretellings of Doom, finds himself repeatedly suffering & stagnating as the world subjects him to misfortune after misfortune, and ultimately sacrifices his own sanity & stability for the greater good.
(And, of course, I don't think I need to mention how the Psiionic gets the raw end of the deal as well).
The Witch uses their Aspect. The Heir is used by it. And though these often overlap, the passive nature of the Heir means they're far more likely not to fight the control their Aspect has over them.
Point D also ties neatly into this, the Heir's practical function.
In the sense that they may metaphorically be consumed by their Aspect to the logical extreme, they are literally granted the ability to become it.
Not only is John seen turning himself into gusts of wind, but further on in the story once he gets his 'retcon' powers; he basically becomes untethered from the narrative. He's unable to stop himself from jumping between places & ideas, becoming instability in its purest form.
This means Equius could become invisible, which is really funny.
So, overall, I find that the Witches & Heirs are deceptively simple to comprehend - and that perhaps my initial frustration with trying to work with them comes from me searching for a hidden complexity that wasn't there. The key words here are definitely control & rebellion, and the way that manifests in them.
I wouldn't go as far as to say their sessions always have this great influx of their Aspect, because I think it's more personal to them - but often the metaphorical cloud of their Aspect that follows them ends up influencing other people around them. That's how changing the Aspect works, right? Change with it, change through it, change it itself. That's the joining point of both Classes; they change.
(That's interesting in of itself because it implies Feferi as someone who changes change, but that's something I'll focus on more when I write about Life; which happens to be my own Aspect anyways).
Next week, the post will be about the most controversial players in Homestuck analysis; The Princes & Bards.
(...oh, christ, please don't make me write about the Makaras).
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