#even though the text itself esp later on. like. wants so badly to try and make reperations for those exact things. even if imperfectly

[lucabyte]

i need to know if the people who are following me who are currently in the process of reading homestuck for the first time are doing it through the Unofficial Homestuck Collection because if you aren't please say so because um. Veteran homestuck here who wants to give you the best possible experience . please. <- guy who's prepping for an upcoming homestuck reread and as such has a whole list of reccomendations

[happikattwuzheere]

was gonna try and do multiple characters in one post but nope! i have too much to say. also the pictures are all different sizes so its rly hard to get the photoset to look appealing, so we’re starting w/ blue. and also a colored pic of what adam looks like when he’s not a deer. boy’s tryin not to stand out. which goes great up for him right up until it doesn’t. lmao. i’ll talk a bit about him too w/ stuff that didnt get mentioned in the starter post about him and gansey, but this is mostly gonna be about blue. 

SO. 

there’s this fey entity, right? i don’t have a name for them, but they’re not...they didnt START the fey/human conflict, but they are benefiting from it, politically speaking? and when maura was younger, despite other witches being like “girl dont choose sides, we’re witches, we guard boundaries but we don’t choose sides,” was hotheaded and brash and went “ok but fuck that though” and one thing led to another and she ended up getting a curse on her firstborn. Oops. that’s where the kissing curse comes from, here; i’ll get into that much later in a text post probably but gansey’s survivor’s guilt thing doesnt come from him actually dying in this au it’s from something Else, but blue will still kill him if she kisses him, just, for different reasons, it’s an actual curse this time and not something to do with the nature of who they both are. 

her father’s still a tree light, but like, she actually knows that from the outset? because. they live in cabeswater. the tree lights are all around and accept her as one of their own even if she can’t turn into a tree, and as a result of that, she’s got some cool perks. 

a) extremely resistant and/or outright immune to a Lot of fey bullshit 

b) still boosts psychic energies and magical powers like in canon

c) the absolute safest person to be traveling in cabeswater ever, because the forest itself loves her, and also if you mess with her within the borders of cabeswater a bunch of tree lights will physically manifest and be like “hey buddy wanna think twice about that”

but she can’t use magic herself, still, which actually works in the favor of herself and the coven--witchcraft is in a sort of weird spot, culturally, where it’s both feared and often hated, but also understood to at times be necessary, especially by rural peoples like those of the village. im taking a very discworld spin on the witchcraft, because i love discworld and you can’t stop me, and so the attitude is, like. its frightening ancient magic and the church hates it but when there’s an emergency and someone’s on the border between life and death, or something is trying to pass into this world from another, etc etc etc, then you gotta suck it up and call on a witch because they’re the only ones who can deal with those things. so. the coven is tolerated, both because it’s too big and powerful to actually fight but also because it’s extremely needed when you live in a village right next door to fey lands. you NEED someone watching the border. however that doesn’t mean anyone wants to be seen publicly talking to a witch--but blue’s not a witch. she’s a witch’s daughter, but she’s not a witch herself, which is a step removed enough that she can go into town and run errands and also people will maybe pull her discretely aside and tell her if something’s coming up that the coven should know about, and it all works very neatly with her acting as a sort of liaison. very important role she plays, which is why gansey tries talking to her after his initial attempt to speak with the coven directly fails. 

speaking of the coven itself: i’ve been calling it the fox way coven, even tho it probably wouldn’t be called that because there’s no road called fox way that the coven is built on, it’s a big magic house out in the fairy forest, BUT they do have a fox theme because i love foxes and this is a gift i have been given. if people have familiars in this coven, they’re foxes rather than cats, because as wonderful as cats are u cant have them and foxes in the same house that will go bad. but also there’s a v small number of them, like maybe three or four total out of the much higher number of women living there, who are fey blooded like adam, but who become foxes rather than adam’s deer. persephone is one of these! (it’s worth noting the reason why they become the same animal is because of a combination of coincidence, intentional theming, and mostly just because like, virtually all of the residents there aside from persephone are related to either maura or calla) 

anyway the point is, because of this, blue’d seen enough feyblood transformations that when, one day when she was 9 or 10, on a visit to town, she saw the most distressed, disoriented fawn wobbling around frantically and was able to very quickly recognize that that was, in fact, a person who had probably turned into a deer for the first time, and responded by very calmly informing him that she knew who could help and leading him home. this is where those last two pictures come from, and how adam’s apprenticeship started. 

like, there was a lot of arguing from the witches immediately--of course we’re going to teach him how to become human again but we aren’t really going to take him on in the coven are we? he’s a boy, he’s some local kid we know nothing about, what happened to keeping it in the family, he’s the wrong animal and we’ve got a whole thing going on--at which point persephone parted everyone like the red sea, took one look at adam, went “mine now” and despite a lot of grumbling that was the end of it. she took him on a bit of a tour of cabeswater a few days later, after he’d had time to think it over, and he felt so drawn to the forest that he agreed to the apprenticeship.

so he’s technically persephone’s apprentice but like in actual practice he’s being taught by the entire coven lmao, ANYWAY

adam being adam also had a backup plan for trying to get out of the village--even at ten he figured witchcraft might be a first way out of there, he was already thinking about it, but by thirteen when the good ole abuse started (and at which point the last whispers of dissent died out very quickly amongst the coven, nope, adam is one of us now, do you want us to very threateningly hang out in your front yard sometime because we can do that--what do you mean no, let us do this,) he was also like. i dont think this is a guarantee of getting out of here i need a second job. and the thing is, as was mentioned in the original post, the fey blood also means adam’s got issues with iron; it’ll poison him if he’s stabbed with it but it also reacts to his skin touching it like a hot stove. he’s fine if there’s a layer between his skin and the iron, but if he touches it directly, it’s Bad. so ofc this headstrong idiot takes an open spot a t a metalworker’s in the village because adam is the king of making bad decisions. the witches have a betting pool on how long it’ll take him to out himself. “its fine i’ll wear gloves,” he says. “it’s the perfect disguise no one will expect someone with fey connections to work near so much iron,” he says. “i have everything perfectly under control,” he says.

anyway he totally forgets to wear gloves before grabbing an iron tool while his dad and his boss are both in the store and in clear view of him and that’s why he was getting chased by hunters when gansey rescued him 

also he and blue tried dating when they were like 13-14 and it ended about as badly as in canon and they made up later and by the time the story starts they’ve settled into very much being weird siblings. adam starts hanging out with gansey initially to try and basically spy on him, figure out why he’s here, but ends up rly liking the guy and deciding his reasons are sincerely to try and help people, and he tells this to blue who starts immediately accusing him of having a crush on the lordling and being a class traitor, because she does NOT like gansey at this point and really the nobility all prefer wizards to witches which is a stupid idiot decision and frankly the fact that this lordling is apparently enamored by some random deer is hilarious to her, but even moreso is the fact that adam actually defends the lordling to her, like, “wow adam its hilarious that the lordling’s friend thinks that you have charmed the lordling because from my perspective it looks the other way around” “shut uuuup you’re not listening im serious, like, yeah ok he put his foot in his mouth really hard when he talked to you but im telling you i dont think the whole i-wanna-understand thing is an act” “idk if i can trust you through those rose tinted glasses buddy. tell me again about that time he called you princely?” “oh my god” 

this is turning into rambling but. thats the gist of the witches and blue esp thank u for coming if u made it this far here’s a bonus persephone fox