BREATH
A sequel to SPACE.
Thanks to optimisticDuelist, Psychic Sylph, localbeefcake, and espressodepresso for beta reading.
Detachment, Idealism, Freedom, Motion, Wind, Charisma, Plot.
Breath is the purest Aspect, innocent, naive, and holy. Rising upwards, it reaches toward the world of ideals, and pulls all reality with it closer to that heaven. It is the Cardinal Notion, the Aspect of Idea, that which does not exist, save for its thinker’s choice to make it a reality. It is the Wind of Change.
Symbolically, the Breathbound bear a certain association with the Fool, the first of the Major Arcana and the Tarot card that represents new beginnings, optimism, possibility, and falling off cliffs.
Homestuck’s Breathbound are John Egbert, Heir of Breath, Savior of the Waking World, Tavros Nitram, Page of Breath, in whose wake armies follow, and Rufioh Nitram, Rogue of Breath, the sexiest man in Paradox Space.
Detachment
Idealism and Escapism
John Egbert likes movies. John Egbert loves movies. He loves talking about movies, and making references to them, and reenacting movie scenes when the opportunity presents itself. He is naive, and a doofus. He thinks in terms of fiction. Of stories. There are rules in his head for how things ought to be. Tire swings belong in a kid’s yard. Fire belongs in a fireplace. In philosophical terms, John Egbert possesses a natural intuition for a concept known as the Forms.
Constructed by the Athenian philosopher Plato, the Theory of Forms is the idea that all physical objects are merely shadows, imperfect duplicates of the Forms, unchanging perfect blueprints of all conceivable things, from tire swings to love, which exist outside reality and can only be understood through careful contemplation and analysis.
John Egbert has never read Plato and probably couldn’t tell you which country Athens lies in. Nevertheless, his mind instinctively follows in those ancient tracks. He knows with the unerring certainty of a thirteen year old that the Form of Kid’s Yard has a swing, that the Platonic Fireplace contains a fire. This intuition for the conceptual comes in handy elsewhere as well, as John is the first to figure out the secrets of Alchemy, the combination of physical objects on a conceptual level through the use of grist.
And yet, reality does not always conform to the expectations laid out by the Forms. When faced with a break in his idyllic, idealized reality, John is prone to spectacular breakdowns. When he learns that it was he himself who ruined his beloved posters in his sleep. When faced with the fact that his hated clown father is actually a boring dude who does a regular desk job to keep his family going instead of engaging in absurd harlequinlery whenever John isn’t looking. When he’s older and in a sour mood and suddenly beloved Con Air just isn’t that great a movie anymore, John snaps, raving and ranting and flailing his body around to vent excess nervous energy. At least he has the presence of mind to not fall apart over fucking gushers.
Conversely, John possesses an unsettling ability to remain calm in the face of more conventional horrors, a mastery of repression, for good and for ill. He quickly makes peace with learning he has died not just once but on two separate occasions, and is able to displace his grief over his father’s death quickly when faced with a murderous Bec Noir. His post-Scratch self fared arguably even worse, growing up under the thumb of Her Imperious Condescension, and still managing to seem reasonably well-adjusted, at least outward.
optimisticDuelist adds:
John’s detachment is an effective defense mechanism, but it also makes him a little dangerous to people who are the wrong kind of emotionally vulnerable to him. Notably Dave and Davesprite have their mental states and struggles with queerness and existentialism dramatically worsened by an oblivious John, frivolous and carefree enough to genuinely treat everything Dave says as a joke.
Tavros, too, remains fairly calm even when an ordinary game of Flarp takes a turn for the worse with attempted murder and permanent paralysis, and maintains an overall upbeat attitude despite the countless hardships the story visits upon him. His dancestor, Rufioh, speaks in a chill, laid-back cadence inspired by Dante Basco, even when trapped in the body of a hideous metallic horse.
It is this contrast, the hinterlands between the idealized world in their heads and the intruding complexities of messy reality, that the Breathbound are forced to navigate. They are prone to diversions and flights of fancy. When presented with a new confusing subject, John tends to ramble about media he likes rather than confronting the actual subject at hand. In stressful situations, Tavros turns to Rufio, his imaginary friend who represents a sense of self-confidence Tavros can’t quite manage to maintain in reality, or even fully understand what it would entail.
The morality of the Breathbound is linear and straightforward, they see good and they see evil, and they know which is which when they see it. When Tavros learns of Vriska’s part in creating Bec Noir, he simply declares her evil, and moves to stop her. When John faces down Caliborn, source of all of Homestuck’s suffering, he immediately declares his intent to make him pay for his sins.
And yet, when matters seem too complex, it takes time and effort for them to navigate the morass. John struggles greatly with understanding Aradia’s calm acceptance of the horrors of paradox space, and it is only after a two page roundabout that he is able to confront the fact that Vriska, someone he likes, might not be entirely a good person.
Greatest of these struggles is Rufioh’s. Closest to Damara, and the only one who truly understands her, Rufioh knows of her allegiance to Lord English, and her desire to see the demon destroy their friends, but he does nothing to warn his peers of it. Perhaps it is his guilt over the pain he has caused her, the pain that drove her to such extremes. Perhaps it is his messy feelings over his own fraying relationship with Horuss, the relationship he earned by betraying her. Either way, he is trapped by his own attachments and fades from the story, unwilling or perhaps incapable of properly engaging with the complexities of his situation.
Momentum
The Wind
Freed from worries and uncertainties, the mind quickens, and moves with the ease and spontaneity of a gentle breeze or the force of a typhoon. Breath is the Aspect of motion and momentum, and the chaotic, ever-swirling mass that is the wind.
The simplest form of this power can be found in the Breathbounds’ arsenals. While hammers and lances might seem like unusual weapons for wind-associated characters, what unites them is the force imbued by weight and momentum, whether in the form of massive overhead strikes or charging jousts. John’s hammers start small, but rapidly grow enormous, their size explicitly correlated with their power. The pogo hammer takes this concept to the extreme, building momentum through repeated strikes and releasing it all in one go.
John’s connection to the power of wind is as intimate and potent as expected of a main character. As an Heir, a passive magician, he invites it in, and it swirls around him, touching all those he encounters, changing their fates in the process. At first, this is unconscious, the Breeze moves as it will around him, but with time he gains control, his will becoming that of the wind.
In the symbolic visual language of Homestuck, Breath is consistently depicted as thick blue strokes despite the invisibility of air, as befitting of an Aspect so closely associated with abstraction. Primarily, these surround John the magician, but Tavros, too, is drawn with blue lines when simply breathing in in preparation for a revival kiss. In this, Breath is a visually spectacular Aspect, delivering many grandiose scenes.
The Breeze is a power that lifts spirits and pushes them upwards and forwards. This applies literally- in the form of flight, from John’s jetpack and effortless aerial mobility as a god, to Tavros’s love of the winged Pupa Pan, to Rufioh’s flashy wings- but also metaphorically. When his friends are stagnating, John sends them letters, inviting motion into their lives, setting them on a new direction. He distracts, he plays pranks, he invigorates. He’s a good shoulder to cry on. As the leader of the beta kids, John is the first to step forward, into the game, into godhood, into the retcon, and he pulls the others along in his wake, though he gives orders only rarely.
Tavros wields the power of uplifting speech more subtly, and for a different purpose. As befits a Page, one who is Served, his primary skill is the acquisition of helpers. He receives Kanaya’s aid in constructing an imaginary friend to shield his fragile self-worth, and asks her for help keeping Vriska off his back. This is also how his psychic powers manifest themselves. Tavros wields the power to commune with beasts, cajoling and convincing, suggesting actions that appeal to them. While his abilities are similar to Vriska’s, and he theoretically can directly control them, this is against his nature, and his ability to convince others is impressive even without such forceful methods. With just a little bit of time, he can construct an impressive personal force, devoted to doing his bidding. Give him more, and he’ll assemble an army that spans the horizons, purely by his own personal charisma, echoing the power of his ancestor, the revolutionary leader known as the Summoner.
This raw magnetism has a dark side, however. Without fully meaning to, Tavros attracts Vriska, who for her own reasons delights in pushing him this way and that, imparting her own momentum on him and trying to force him into becoming someone he’s not. Rufioh, too, is cursed by his own attractiveness, his flashy wings, easygoing attitude and constant bascoisms making him a beacon of romantic attention for the entire Beforan session. Only John is spared these messy attachments, his goofy awkwardness making it difficult for his more obsessive admirers to get a grip on him, while his complicated feelings on romance stymie his own search for love.
Plot
So what kind of stories does Breath tell? It tells stories that don’t let themselves get bogged down. It tells stories that have momentum. As TexTalks puts it, it tells story-driven stories, those that exist for the purpose of being told. Stories with dramatic slow-motion. With grand reveals. With ridiculous gags. Stories that have you on the edge of your seat, just waiting to see what the author will do next, what problems they will create and how those problems will be resolved. Stories with a capital-P Plot.
This is, incidentally, the exact kind of story that John likes. Armageddon, Problem Sleuth, Ghostbusters, anything involving Nicholas Cage, so on and so forth. Not only that, John himself naturally turns any story that focuses on him into such, his go-getter attitude injecting momentum into it as he chases sburb discs and fetches Tumors. Simultaneously, his goofy mannerisms dispel the emotional theatrics of those he talks to, turning Karkat’s angry rant into hilarious awkwardness with just two words even as he hints at Plot Developments yet to come.
Tavros, too, is more at home in this kind of story, as befits his love of the whimsical Pupa Pan, though his involvement with Vriska pushes him ever away from this as her influence wars with his own. Still, it bears noting that once he is fully the master of his fate, the ghost army he assembles is surprising, dramatic, hilarious, and a simple solution to the otherwise thorny problem of how the plot is going to get the ghost army back together for the final confrontation.
Though we see little of him, Rufioh, too, is enamored with stories, having grown up in the isolated community of the Lost Weeaboos. As a Rogue, however, his thirst for love has driven him into messy entanglements that wholly arrest his momentum and turn his tale into a snail’s pace tragedy. As the Summoner, his life is so fantastical and dramatic as to be compared to a child’s story.
John’s confrontation with the House Juju forms the ultimate manifestation of this theme. As he reaches into this hole in the story he is consumed by its power, absorbed into his Aspect (a common risk for Heirs). He is left wandering the margins of Homestuck without any real ability to affect the plot or be affected by it until he masters the power of the Retcon, leaving behind him marks of retroactive foreshadowing for his triumph, and with Terezi’s help setting the stage for the story’s dramatic finish.
Summary
Breath is an Aspect concerned with detached, abstract ideals and conceptualizations, prone to approaching reality in terms of fiction and simplified models. While the Breathbound are often seen as naive, their straightforward mindsets buoy their spirits and push them toward bold action. As such, they are deeply tied to the idea of Plot, pushing the story forward toward new horizons and suffering when it stagnates.
For additional reading, see Bladekindeyewear’s essay on the Aspect.
