#also it was as I was drawing this I realised Eridan was the beginning of my certain taste in characters lol

[cicadaemon]

Rereading Homestuck, plus some random motivation, made me want to try and redraw an old bit of art. I had to trudge through my old devianart account, lo and behold one of my first Homestuck fanart from Feb 16 2012.

I like to think I'm improved just a bit

[onlynear]

NOW. i know sol isn’t mine like i don’t go here but he’s got the most notable examples of yellowblood/mutant powers in canon, and in order to talk about mituna’s psionics i have to draw from him! let’s get into it.

VOICES OF THE DOOMED. 

sollux hears voices of the recently deceased and they tell him that alternia is doomed. it’s important to note that this happens before the trolls begin to play sgrub -- this is very specifically part of sollux’s mutation, and not something he achieves through being the mage of doom. similarly, mituna, being a yellowblood mutant, experiences premonitions (frequently brushed off by others as paranoia and gut feelings) about other trolls, and the danger they pose to both mituna himself and the party at large (noteable examples are meenah, who he hates not only because he just doesn’t like her but because she gives him intense visions and migraines) and damara (who he knows to be extremely deadly). mituna, while not as academically-minded as sollux, is pretty genre-savvy, and he’s able to differentiate his mutant-visions from the classpect-visions he gets later on. 

MIND HONEY.

mind honey, as we see in canon, merely enhances existing psionics. it’s incredibly unhealthy for yellowbloods, as it’s addictive and acts almost like sopor slime, in a way -- it makes sollux’s lusus dimwitted and satiated, and loosens any inhibitions and ability to think rationally, do anything requiring fine motor skills and, most importantly, prevents a mutated yellowblood from keeping their powers at bay. as we see in canon, both captors keep their eyes covered (mituna, even pre canon, wears his hair thick and over his eyes, as he constructs his helmet with his alchemiser once he enters sgrub) -- this is because, should their eyes go uncovered, it’s much easier for psionics to fire out ad-hoc should they feel any intense emotions. seen as mituna’s psionics, post-accident, are broken, mind honey doesn’t power them up anymore, but it DOES soothe the almost constant chronic pain he’s in (migraines, muscle aches, pain in his eyes), and so his lusus feeds it to him in order to balm him, just a little.

PSIONICS.

now. this is the good part. as we see just before sollux gets ko’d by eridan (’ready, prince?’), sollux’s psionics are under his control -- he either powers them up himself, charging them before he has to use them in a fight, or they’re tied to his emotions. i like to think it’s a little bit of both, and that’s why mituna is so unsteady once his psionics are broken -- a very real and very major part of his mind has just shattered completely, and he can’t regulate nearly anything (memory, feeling, social cues, etc) in the same way as he could before. 

a lot can be learned about psionics from the eridan and sollux duel, in fact: when sollux uses his psionics to levitate himself, his glasses come up onto his head, thus solidifying that keeping a captor’s eyes covered nullifies their powers somewhat, sollux is clearly less Present in the battle than eridan is (which is to say, sollux is stationary and channelling all of his energy into his psionics, where eridan is able to react and move and cast his Science Spells with more autonomy), all of the force of the pisonics does in fact stem from a captor’s eyes, etc. i believe that not only was it eridan’s hope (or more accurately lack thereof) was just... stronger than sollux’s psionics in the moment, but also the massive strain sollux underwent trying to beat eridan that lead to him getting knocked unconscious. psionics are hard work. using them a little leads to drowsiness, using them a lot leads to exhaustion, and using them too much leads to death, as we see when sollux dies after piloting the meteor. mituna burned himself out in such a way that he almost died (reminiscent of sollux’s half-death). i wouldn’t call him lucky, but it was a close call, for sure.

SPECIFIC TO MITUNA.

‘eli,’ i hear you saying, ‘you literally do not write sollux’. to this i say I KNOW but their powers are BALANCED BY EACH OTHER just stick with me here!! so. i don’t by any means want to discredit sollux -- he is immensely powerful, after all -- but mituna, being older and more relaxed (tbh just in general) in terms of his status as a mutant and his powers (which he actively practised using from a young age) is... more so, when it comes to psionics. i’m also very confident in saying mituna would be incredibly average at programming and such, which is where the balance comes in, yk? two sides of the same coin with different expertise. 

mituna was an incredibly powerful psionic to boot. his powers went beyond that of just powering spaceships, telekinesis, levitation, etc -- if used correctly (or, rather, correctly by evil), mituna could have been an incredibly deadly and horrific doomsday weapon. he also had vision twofold, two dreamselves, and,of course, his preminitions about the future, which he tried time and time again to warn others about, to no avail. the trouble is with mituna being who he is (loud, obnoxious bordering on abrasive, mischievous, snarky and cynical by nature but most always up for a bit of fun, essentially a wildcard), it was very easy to not take him seriously, call him biased and move on. mituna assumed that he, as the sole prophet and one of two believers (the other being kurloz, natch) was to be the one to take out the threat he predicted was going to wipe out his friends and doom their session. unfortunately, this was a case of wrong genre savvy -- mituna, being heir of doom, WAS the threat (or, more specifically, his psionics were), and the best outcome of him going to neutralise said threat was always going to be the accident that rendered him changed for good.

however. i am by no means saying that it wasn’t GREATLY thanks to kurloz’ chuckevoodoo and his input that mituna is As Bad As He Is. kurloz was there, accompanied him to this great overexertion and his mind control had some hand in ruining mituna. of course, we have no idea what happened (other than mituna burned himself out heroically, saving everybody only for meenah, who he’d prophesied about all along, to kill them all anyway), but i refuse to believe that kurloz being there doesn’t have some greater bearing on what went down.

now. as for him not knowing if he’s god tier or not: my gut instinct would be no. however. i think his confusion on the matter lends itself to the idea that he may have been close to going god tier -- perhaps getting halfway there (keeping with the two theme) or intending to at least before he burned himself out. as heir is someone who either becomes (literal) or is changed by/inspires change by their aspect (metaphorical), and doom as a class represents sacrifice (metaphorical) and control over death and destruction (literal), i’m okay with saying that god tier mituna would be absolutely formidable, as long as he was his coherent self.

mituna uses his psionics before sgrub, and once he enters the game and crafts his helmet, his specubus becomes ‘helmetkind’ (later ‘hemletkind’, naturally). he can go longer using them than sollux can (and most yellowbloods, actually), but that itself is dangerous, as he can often drain himself without even realising he’s about to do so. not having the psionics is very distressing for him later on, especially as the incident is so fragmented that he doesn’t exactly understand what he did to break his powers so thoroughly. the psionics are not a separate part of mituna -- they are tied so closely to his brain that each affects the other, and destroying his psionics only lead to him being the way he is now, with no way to recover.