HOPE: the aspect of imagination

Includes: Jake, Eridan, Cronus, Grandpa Harley, Dualscar

Hope is the force the world just cannot contain. While everyone else squabbles over plans and rules and spotlights and inevitability, Hope players are looking at the clouds and seeing their dreams. Everything around them feels soft and malleable, gilded in the yellow glow of excitement. They have big visions and while they don’t have a plan to bring that vision to reality, they just know its there, just beyond them, they just have to reach a little further. Hope is the thing with feathers.

But the world doesn’t want to answer. Rules, structures, laws, blah-di-blah, all of it is holding the Hope player back from their goals. It’s very hard not to take it personally. Everyone thinks the Hope folks have their heads in the clouds, that they’re ineffectual and easily distracted. Why can’t they understand? Can’t they see how wonderful everything could be, if the universe stopped dragging its fucking feet? We’re all teetering on the precipice of something new and exhilarating, if we could just get free!

And oh, it makes the Hope players want to tear at their hair and scream. It’s an agony, being so close to the thing you want, the thing that’ll make everything better. If their friends and allies just worked together, helped them reach a little further, knock a little harder, maybe the map would change. It’s so goddamn fucking close, how come no one else can see it? Stop obsessing over petty boring shit and look! Reach!

Hope is the thing with talons.

The longer the Hope player is denied, the more they press and strain against everything that holds them in place. They are fettered and can hear the creaking of the bindings, see where the cracks are forming. Anticipation is their constant companion and guile is their shadow.

At its manifestation, Hope breaks the system, bucks the narrative, and arrives like a natural disaster. Cronus and Dualscar both fail to reach that fission point, languishing in their failed dreams and growing increasingly bitter like the death of their ambitions is festering within them. Eridan’s desire to control his destiny, for relevance, for power after being ignored for so long, it snaps into place with a force that shatters the team and breaks the concrete reality that Kanaya is tending to, all in a near instance of pure disaster. And Jake, the most triumphant Hope player creates impossible things with careless words. When Aranea infuses him with his full potential, the game itself strains, and gold seeps through the cracks he’s made in the foundations until the whole timeline needs a reset.

Hope rattles and hums in the back of its players’ skulls, this constant whisper of what if, what if, what if, dogging their steps like an incredibly insistent voice of reason. Its impossible to tell if its the angel on their shoulder or the devil. Hope is hungry, and everything is just barely beyond their grasp. Just reach a little further.

Talismans: Screw The Rules, I Have God Mode, playing with cheat codes, comfort media, daydreaming, misdirection, hedonism, raw talent.

You may be Hope if… deep down you genuinely think you could fix, like, everything if the world made you king for a week. If you just had a chance, you could literally make everything better. It’s not even that complicated.