Please tell us your headcanons for Hecate Hardbroom's family life growing up! I have so many conflicting ideas and this seems to be an area where there are several very popular thoughts, but also a really diverse range of interpretations and inventions reflected in fanfic.
I find this so tricky because I like everything to be neat and canon compliant, and there’s just so little to go on! Like, there’s basically nothing in on-screen canon and the Meet the Teachers page only notes that she had an “austere upbringing”. And I like to have a little more to hang my headcanons on, so I haven’t explored this much yet in fic. And there’s also the fact that we may well get more info on Hecate’s family in the next season, and I don’t want to get too attached to my headcanons and have them turn out to be wrong!
All that said, if I had to choose something, this would probably be it:
Hecate’s parents died when she was very young, or were otherwise taken out of the picture. She was raised with strict discipline by an older aunt with very traditional views. It wasn’t that the aunt didn’t love Hecate - she absolutely did. And they got along reasonably well too, both of them being fairly quiet, studious people. They read books of magic together, they had long discussions about magical theory and the Witches’ Code, they expressed affection for each other using the aunt’s familiar as a proxy.
So it’s not as though Hecate was deeply unhappy or felt particularly deprived or neglected, but she did sometimes feel as though there was something missing.
(On the other hand I’ve read some great fic where she has a sister, or where her parents are still around, and I’m pretty agnostic on the whole question. The main part that’s important to me from my personal perspective - although I know some people disagree and that’s fine - is that her childhood was austere but not abusive.)
