HEART: the aspect of identity

Includes: Dirk, Nepeta, Meulin, Bro Strider, the Disciple

While others step into the fray wielding tools like the flow of time or a lit stick of God Mode dynamite, the Heart player’s medium is their self. Which does admittedly sound a bit lackluster in comparison to the various possibilities. But it is romantic, is it not, to face your fear armed only with your self? To be reliant on no outside forces, no capricious willpowers, only your Heart?

Heart is something of the Occam’s Razor of the Aspects. It is the domain of self-exploration, self-iteration, and evolution. It’s a sword (or pair of claws) to be sharpened and learned thoroughly. Thus, Heart players have a particular knack for being whoever is needed in a given situation. They wear a lot of hats metaphorically speaking, and the self is very much a performance enacted based on the situation. To be clear: performance of identity does not mean that identity is fake. With every role the Heart player enacts, they are fully themselves. 

The concept of being fake or being a liar is one that haunts the Heart players often. They struggle with feeling duplicitous or even being a liar. A huge part of their journey of self-discovery is accepting themselves. No matter what Class a Heart player is, they will struggle with this basic truth. But that in of itself is wheting the blade; when they put in the work, they get better, they become more refined, they know themselves more and more. They can comprehend strange emotional bedrock that is difficult for others to grasp.

This also leads to being sort of obsessed with cerebralizing those emotional truths. Through charts or grids or theses or whatever medium is preferred, the Heart player is inclined to care a lot about relationships, emotions, romance, as if they can be quantified. It’s all on the same path of turning wisdom into hard intelligence.

As the Heart players go, all maintain this level of scholarship. The Leijons are all known for categorizing matters of the heart (small H), with Meulin and Nepeta both coming from a culture that believes strongly in emotional destiny, in a Right and Correction combination of romantic interests, and thus do their best to try and divine what those are for the people around them. Meulin perhaps reached a higher level of emotional wisdom through her following of the Signless, understanding the constraints of the quadrants, and wrote all the intelligence she could into the walls in hopes it would help someone someday. And Dirk similarly uses his self to try and help people, to be the person his friends need, even as he struggles with fitting the roles blocked out for him. There are some internal truths he cannot suppress, even when Roxy for instances wants him to. His conflict is one of knowing himself too well as much as not well enough.

Unified, Heart players are dramatic, eager to help, and wardens of the emotions of those around them. They know maybe more than most that everyone has an important job to do.

Talismans: Code-switching, many acquaintances but few truly close friends, secret keeping, a playlist for every mood, extreme acts of loyalty, self-deprecation, +50WPM but enjoying writing things out in longhand.

You may be Heart if… you genuinely have some kind of Tragic Backstory but it takes years of friendship levelling for anyone to unlock it. They don’t need to know, it’s not important, even if it made you into the person you are today.