#altho difficult to answer bc of. u know. the nature of the question

[claymotif]

spare wip essay pls??? i would LOVE to hear more about sasha + co and also relatedly what the tsh casts various perspectives on fate + free will are

YES oh my god thank u for asking <3 sorry it took me so long to answer again <3

first up the main trio's thoughts on fate/free will (more or less):

delwyn literally does not believe in fate. "he's the chosen one" yeah whatever. he understands in theory how prophets' magic and divination witchcraft works, but as far as he's concerned those magics show a very rough draft of the future which can be influenced and changed by any number of ppl and decisions a la the butterfly effect

for obvious reasons he starts to question this as the story progresses and they keep getting closer to the apocalypse despite their efforts to stop it. for him this presents as a lot of "maybe we're just making the wrong choices" (which. not a great feeling) but it eventually culminates in him accepting and embracing his foretold destiny

chan is a little more complex. he knows on an instinctual level that his visions are. like. the most probable set of events based on the choices that everyone's currently making/most likely to make. it's not necessarily set in stone, and chan's changed the outcome of his visions before, but he's never in his life had a vision about an event on such a large scale. usually his visions are like "you get an F on the next math exam" and he says oh shit and actually studies therefore changes the story and doesn't get an F. for an apocalypse-scale vision he's not even sure how that would work. how many ppl's choices would he have to change? how far in advance are the key choices made, if there are any at all? he's literally never done this before but he has to try!! he would never forgive himself if he had the ability to stop it and didn't

junhee is. to put it lightly. completely unhinged. he doesn't really believe in fate so much as he believes in magic. and, like, he can see magic. so magic is, according to him, sort of akin to a distant god. it's this all-powerful force that could completely sap humanity of its free will, but most of the time it doesn't care to. by and large, daily human lives go on unremarked and unimportant. but if the magic wants* something, all it has to do is pull, and humans are powerless to resist it.

( "want" is a very human feeling and magic as a force is very much not human, but we're approximating here )

tl;dr junhee believes in free will given to humanity by merit of an apathetic guardian. sort of. he doesn't really think magic is a guardian to humanity, because of, like, all the fucked up visions and stuff. but whatever.

this also leads to an interesting dynamic between the three of them b/c chan is digging in his heels, kicking and screaming and fighting the whole way down whereas junhee has accepted that all of this is inevitable. they fight a lot and delwyn is like "guys PLEASE i am trying not to cause an apocalypse over here"

on to sasha and co.:

except im actually starting w/kei first because i think that's simpler. kei is a divination witch, and as i mentioned before that means her magic is less precise than chan's. it's sort of the difference between chan seeing "a hurricane is coming" and kei seeing "a natural disaster is coming" or, worse, "something terrible is coming". a lot of the time it gets her the info she needs, but it's not an exact science. because of the imperfections of her system, she's never seen a prediction followed by an event that she couldn't rationalize as having been predicted, which means she is a firm believer in fate and has had several existential crises over the concept of free will. seriously don't mention it to her she'll start crying again

(aside from her weird obsession with divination magic in particular, kei is actually like a completely normal person. like she has friends and a social life and interests besides her magic and studies. it's weird)

sasha is a they/them from southern cali who is like insanely good at blood witchcraft. they spend like 50% of their time volunteering at hospitals and free health clinics and blood drives and such, but they can also put their magic to more sinister uses (including tracking rituals which they use multiple times to find delwyn's crew). sasha has Seen Some Shit, and that includes watching ppl make bad decisions that had some pretty dire consequences. thus they fully believe that delwyn will cause the apocalypse (although to start with kei's divinations aren't that precise) even if it's by accident, even if maybe he's the kind of person who would never normally cause an apocalypse. it's sort of like. good people make bad choices sometimes. that sort of philosophy.

hana is one of sasha's dearest friends; she doesn't actually have any magic of her own, which is part of the reason she ended up in socal despite originally hailing from georgia; when they realized she wasn't born a mage/seer, her parents tried to encourage her to study witchcraft in one form or another. she refused, cut all contact w/them the second she turned 18, and skipped town the moment she graduated and she got herself a nice degree in cs/ux design. she hasn't seen or heard from her family in 6 years lol

anyway she does not believe in fate (she hates the idea that some grand plan for the universe could be okay with individuals suffering so greatly for it) but she tags along anyway when sasha announces their plan to find the source of kei's divinations. the only reason she's okay with it at all is b/c sasha literally lies to her about their intentions lmao.

everything comes to a head when sasha reveals their plan to like actually kill delwyn around the same time that they. u know. find him. and hana learns that one of delwyn's "world-ending psycho friends" is her baby brother (chan), for whom she harbors incredibly complex eldest-daughter-trauma type feelings.

so the three of them are like. "sasha and co." they're the three who are in on the plan (insofar as sasha feels like letting on to them) and the ones traveling across the country for sasha.

so YES this has been "tsh cast's thoughts on fate" as well as a (relatively) quick and dirty intro to sasha and their friends!! thank u again for asking i love you <3