Heir of Doom [#060 / 144]
Title Breakdown: [Esoteric Carrier] of [Aesthetic Culmination]
Class: Heir. Arguably the most Passive class in the Game, the Heir manifests or channels their Aspect, instantiating its essence within their own 8eing. The Heirs arc is one from disconnection from their Aspect to transcendence through it; like their opposite/complementary Class, the Mage, they experience their Aspect fully, but unlike the Mage, they do so not through understanding and interaction with their Aspect but rather through unity with and transformation into their Aspect. The Heir is Analogous to the Seer and the Witch, and is a Carrier Class like the Bard and the Rogue: the connection between an Heir and their Aspect is therefore extremely abstract and almost spiritual, by contrast to the Catalysts’(Knights’, Mages’, and Maids’) practical and agency-oriented connection to their respective Aspects.
Aspect: Doom. Associated with structure, suffering, sympathy/empathy, and resilience in the face of mortality and inevitability, Doom is the opposite/complement to Life and is affine/analogous with Hope and Time. It shares Time’s connection to death and finality, and Hope’s connection to grand narratives and acceptance of the inevitable; however, it differs from Time in that its connection to death has more to do with inevitability and persistence than with conflict and struggle, and it differs from Hope in that it is associated with pragmatics and rational interpretation of internal structure, rather than with leaps of faith and personal conviction. Doom is an Aesthetic/Ethical Aspect, like Heart, Mind, and Life - this means that its narrative domains have to do with personal action and interpretation of circumstance, and its metanarrative domains have to do with sub-textual meaning, as opposed to text or hypertextual context.
Mechanical Profile: The Heir of Doom becomes and inherits the inevitability of death, and their role in the Game is suffused with both the slow and painful march of Time and its consequences, and with the Hope to carry on even in the face of that. Like any Heir (or really, any Passive Class), their control over their Classpect-related abilities is likely to be indirect and abstract, and at times the extent to which their powers are beyond their control is likely to prove problematic - Heirs often initially struggle to act in harmony with their Aspect, and the greater the contention and dissonance between their aims and their Aspect’s, the more serious these problems could become.
However, what Carrier classes lack in capacity to Assume Direct Control, they make up for in the clarity and completeness of their connection to their Aspect, which is capable of manifesting in unparalleled bursts of raw power when the Heir is able to fully synchronize with the essence of Doom. Such synchronization is most likely to be achieved through the dialectical synthesis and simultaneous acceptance of both inevitability and the Will to persevere beyond the inevitable, and to pass through the shadow of death and be transformed without being destroyed.
The in-game abilities associated with Doom aren’t particularly deeply explored in the text of Homestuck; as such, most of what can be said about said abilities is speculation and conjecture. Doom, like its complement, Life, is connected to cycles of creation and destruction, growth and the consumption necessitated thereby, and of course, Death and Rebirth, with Doom having the stronger connection to the negative/destructive pole of this dichotomy. Consequently, it seems likely enough that an Heir of Doom would be able to channel into themselves symbolically destructive and transformative energies, such as fire (combustion, conflagration, oxidation) and decay, chemical, nuclear, or biological. Key to understanding the nature of Doom are the notions of inevitability and necessity, for within the domain of Doom, by contrast to its analogue, Time, death and fate are not hostile forces with which the Aspect-bound must valiantly contend, but rather processes essential to survival and being which the Aspect-bound are called upon to embrace with equanimity. This principle is reinforced by the link between the Doom-bound and self-sacrifice or martyrdom (see the Psiioniic, who was himself an Heir of Doom, tragically consumed by Doom but - crucially - not in vain). Like the Time-bound, the Doom-bound must walk the line between righteous self-sacrifice and senseless self-destruction/self-abnegation, and this line is all the finer for those Doom-bound heroes belonging to Carrier classes like their Heir.
A final note on the relationship between the Heir and their Aspect, that seems especially relevant in the case of the Heir of Doom - an Heir’s connection to their Aspect develops slowly, and, at initially, on a level that is often subliminal to the Heir themselves. That is to say, an Heir of Doom will begin to Inherit Doom, and take on its mantle of resilience and sacrifice, before they are aware that they have done so. However, once this gradual process of investiture has progressed, and the Heir has both realized their own capability and accepted the responsibility placed upon them, it’s quite likely that said process should culminate in a sort of climactic moment of inheritance - the moment of recognition of power is also the moment in which the power is made real. This moment of culmination could be ecstatic or traumatic (or neither, or both), but will almost certainly occur in a moment of transformative actualisation, which moment is all-but-certain to prove foundational not only to the structure of the Heir’s personal growth, but to the progress of the Game itself, and of all of its players. The road of Doom’s Heir is far from smooth, but could well be the lynchpin of the Session itself.
Personality: In terms of personal character, Doom players have a tendency to manifest some level of stoicism or cynicism - altho, crucially, this detachment is not necessarily representative of their essential character. Rather, it is a mechanism of survival by way of detachment; in the face of the suffering that haunts the Doom-bound and those around them, it becomes necessary for (in this case) the Heir to, to a degree, abstract themselves from the seemingly intractable harshness of their circumstances.
This quality of Doom-bound Heroes may seem, perhaps, as less-than-copacetic with the Heir’s calling to embrace their Aspect, and more broadly, the world as a whole - indeed, the arc of the Heir as a Mythological Role is necessarily bent towards greater connectivity, rather than any sort of toughening, distancing, or abstraction. However, this apparent contradiction should, ideally, be resolved over the course of the Heir of Doom’s in-game character development: as they realize their connection to Doom, the Aspect, their projected cynicism and their feeling, voluntary or otherwise, of distance from their world and their peers, should be sublimated into a willingness to connect with their surroundings not despite the likely harsh character thereof, but because of it. The great virtue of Doom is a sort of universalizing sympathy and empathy through comprehension of the structures underlying the cyclical confluence and disintegration of all things, and as the rightful inheritor of that virtue, the Heir of Doom carries in themselves a sort of paradoxical Hope - that even in the face of Death and Decay, they Live and Grow, that set as they may be against the headwind inexorable of Entropy, they weather onwards, establishing structure, shelter, and solidarity yet in the center of that storm.
“Do or die, you'll never make me
Because the world will never take my heart
Go and try, you'll never break me
We want it all, we wanna play this part
I won't explain or say I'm sorry
I'm unashamed, I'm gonna show my scars
Give a cheer for all the broken
Listen here, because it's who we are....
We’ll carry on, we’ll carry on.”
My Chemical Romance, “Welcome to the Black Parade” (The Black Parade, 2006)
