#firecat1108

Sollux, the Mage of Doom, is one of the few Homestuck kids to have some idea of the stakes and path that the game presents before he hit “enter.” He’s the one who programmed Sgrub from the ruins Aradia found, after all, and he’s aware that playing the game will result in both the continuation of the troll race and the deaths of all of its players. He’s an excellent hacker, well-versed in viruses, who can hear the psychic screams of the IMMINENTLY DECEASED, so that ought to give him a boost in knowing what actions can or will lead to someone’s demise. He ought to have held all the cards--and for a while, he thought he did.

But Sollux makes a lot of poor judgment calls early on that result in him being unable to use any cards for his own advantage. He assumes he knows more than he actually does, and ends up swindled by Aradia’s lies through omission to cause the end of the world rather than save it. He sends Karkat a virus assuming it will never be activated, but of course Karkat calls his bluff, resulting in the death of everyone’s lusii. And once the game that Sollux created has started, he is unable to back out. Fate--known in this universe as Doom--runs along and carries him with it.

And from there on out, Sollux experiences a Humiliation Conga of violent misery. He’s knocked out into the mind honey. He’s killed by the Vast Glub. He’s knocked out again, and blinded. He overexerts himself moving a meteor and ends up half-dead. He’s prototyped into Erisolsprite at one end and blinded again at the other. He has no control over his life or his death. It sucks. But, in a show of personality strength, he keeps trucking along, staying sarcastic and witty and making, if not the most of, then at least something out of whatever shitty situation he finds himself in.

Meulin, the Mage of Heart, is praised as a “miracle worker” of matchmaking, but can’t seem to use the knowledge of relationships and identity that she must have in order to pull off such miracles to help herself. Her primary relationship is with Kurloz, who is not only responsible for her hearing loss but regularly mind-controls her. There are whole sections of her life made of decisions that she can neither control nor remember. And when she isn’t the victim of a bad relationship, she’s the aggressor, roping Horuss into an emotionally manipulative, unhealthy moirallegiance. Meulin has made very poor judgment calls regarding both the people she trusts and her own ideas about what is best for other people, and she and the people around her are suffering for it. Like Sollux, she keeps trucking along, as cheerful as she's ever been. However, I feel less comfortable chalking this up to a strength in her personality because in many cases she just plain doesn’t know that bad things are happening to her.

If Mages are the active Seer, like we’ve assumed in the past, it seems that they understand their aspect--Doom or Heart--whether they want to or not, or whether they can actually put it to good use or not. They’re like superheroes who never really get the good end of the stick of their own powers, and there’s definitely something appealing about that helplessness. In real life, people have information and talents that we don’t always know what to do with, or find ourselves able to do anything useful or good with. And everyone, at some point, has felt like the universe just plain wouldn’t let anything good work out for them.