Aranea Serket is fucking awesome. (pt. 1)

She's one of the single most fascinating characters in the comic and I rarely see anyone take her seriously or really consider the gravity of her actions and what she does. So I'm going to do what I do best and talk at you about it. Sit your ass down and get motherfucking comfortable.

Starting off nice and simple with her classpect. "Sylph of Light". Now, what does that mean, exactly.

The sylph heals their aspect or heals through their aspect. Light is, metaphorically, the aspect of knowledge and literally the aspect of fortune and, you guessed it, light. There are many possible ways for this to be twisted but let's talk about what it means for Aranea.

In her presence, the people Aranea interacts with become caricatures of themselves. This is, from her perspective, "fixing" them; watering their complexity down into one-dimensional personalities. Seeing as the Beforus trolls are essentially Hussie's puppets to poke fun at the Homestuck Tumblr fandom, yeah, I'd say that's pretty damn accurate to how a lot of the fandom treats these characters. This power is pretty fucking terrifying in practice, though.

We see her use this power most blatantly with her exchange with Jake in the jail cell. Even before she's actively using her manipul8tion to activate Jake's untapped Hope reserves, you already see Jake being influenced by her here.