#hecate hardbroom character analysis

[heathtrash]

What are your thoughts on Mildred and Hecate relationship? I kinda wished the writers toned down Hecate strictness a bit, sometimes it kinda looks like Hecate is being abusive to Mildred.

sO, i'm going to preface this by saying i do not engage with The Worst Witch for Mildred & Hecate content and have no particular desire to see any friendly feelings between them and certainly no maternal affection from Hecate for Mildred. my ideal for them is that they are a student and teacher in the same school and go through a natural growth of mutual respect by the end. Hecate simply wants her to succeed and has a distant level of fondness for her, and Mildred is at first scared of her but develops respect for her. that's not everyone's shared feeling of course! so just bear that in mind.

in book canon, Miss Hardbroom is far more playful with Mildred, though still has moments where she's actively cruel. it's clearly a source of amusement to her to magically sneak up on Mildred & co. while they're up to something, but not for the purpose of humiliating them. narratively, she's set up to be the Stern Teacher to Mildred's Book Dumb/This Loser Is You. (this is loosely the dynamic Constance Hardbroom occupies in 1998, but in general they make her deliberately less effective at commanding a classroom in this to allow more space for shenanigans.)

the 2017 series deviates by accentuating Hecate's strictness, which pushed her more into the Sadist Teacher trope at times. in fact, this was almost the reason i never watched it and decided to give it a miss after seeing the initial trailer (yes, REALLY; i'm sorry Raquel). that wasn't Miss Hardbroom to me, even though i don't really care about Mildred and Hecate being friends.

now i have a better appreciation for the reasons they did this (while i still think it's kind of,,, not wholly accurate to the character and reads as uncomfortable in places) and love Raquel's depiction of the character. to make Miss Hardbroom "scary" for this era's youth and more of an antagonist in select episodes, they overcompensated and went overboard with her cruelty. it's important to recognise that they were really going for nuance in individual episodes, which reflects the intended demographic of the series.

however, Hecate does have scenes where she has more than one side, but these are limited and fleeting (usually with an adult, and only sometimes with students in the life-or-death situations) and the growth doesn't persist between episodes. this is why the arc in S4 with her suddenly becoming the Misunderstood Loner with a Heart of Gold feels a bit out of character with the little to no build-up they provide. suddenly she's okay with random children hugging her, even though she's supposedly the teacher who puts professionalism first, who has always needed to maintain distance because everything that was revealed in S3 (i.e. she could never allow herself to feel anything for anyone because they'd just leave while she was stuck confined to Cackle's)? most forced growth ever.

i think one of the most obvious cases of Hecate's abusiveness is when she sends Mildred to Wormwood's Academy when she herself was allowed to remain at Cackle's after turning Indigo Moon to stone. but - a big but - she is distraught over Ada at this point (plus, this is the big finale and they had to have a "Mildred actually gets expelled" moment, so they can bring her back in time for her ultimate success). this is not to excuse her behaviour, but it is an emotional reaction that she herself acknowledges.

yet the abusiveness is also in the tiny things, like begrudgingly passing Mildred in her exams, constantly telling her students that they're doing badly, etc. and i fully stand behind that. i have some thoughts about the things children pick up from media about how they should be treated by adults, and The Worst Witch sometimes crosses some boundaries there.

there are definitely ways of portraying strictness that don't edge into abuse. this is mostly true of the book, but the 2017 series sometimes gets this right too. i would never want to take away a core characteristic of Miss Hardbroom by simply making her "softer". i think there were sometimes choices that could have been made very differently with Hecate, both in her unkind and kind moments, but that's not something that's very easily explored within each 28-minute episode of a CBBC show. and that's why we write fanfiction!

(also i wrote this in a very minimum effort moment without referencing anything so forgive me for not providing more specific examples. i'll probably talk more about this at some point when i'm not pushed for energy!)

[lesbian-in-leather]

Okay so I just finished watching The Worst Witch (2017) and I've got to say, the amount of people that love Miss Hecate Hardbroom and Miss Ada Cackle's relationship very much confuses me

Like, don't get me wrong people can ship whatever they want and this post isn't even just about them as a romantic relationship, I'm just like super concerned that they have a pretty unhealthy dynamic in general. Like, just off the top of my head, some of the main things about this that are really fricking dodgy:

Miss Cackle repeatedly ignoring Miss Hardbroom's advice, laughing at her misgivings and having a complete disregard for her opinions in several situations (Note: I ackowledge Hecate was not always in the right and, many times, her advice SHOULD have been over-ruled. But Ada rarely gives her the chance to explain, to make her case. That isn't equal to any degree, and shows a complete lack of personal or professional respect)

Miss Cackle could have released Hecate from her Confinement at any time. She just... chose not to? Because a 13 year old girl made a mistake. And it isn't that she felt ut was morally wrong to release her because she does eventually do it so... what was the hold up? The only reason Ada freed her at that point was because Hecate was going to quit so did she just not want Hecate leaving? Did she want complete control over her? Shady. Don't trust it.

Forcing Hecate to not only be the one to deal with adult Indigo Moon when she comes to bring her daughter to Cackle's, but tricking her into going without any warning. For Hecate, she had just applied to be Indigo's mother because she loved and cared for her so much. Indigo changed the ENTIRE course of her life and she's been dealing with the reprocussions for 30 years and then she is pushed, completely unprepared, to an adult version of Indigo who grew up without any knowledge of who she is. Who's life was better because Hecate herself wasn't in it. And she just had to process that in about five minutes becase Ada wanted to... what? Make a point? Dick move if you ask me

These are the main things I can think of right now but my point is, while I do enjoy their interactions sometimes and they have an interesting dynamic, it's not a healthy relationship. A lot of the time, both of them still act like Hecate is more of a pupil then Deputy Headmistress

Tldr: Miss Hardbroom and Miss Cackle have a pretty unhealthy relationship and I want to talk about it