so you suggested it as being unable to be compellingly argued, but four years ago I updated my guide with a Controversial Change: I used to have Maid(-)/Heir(+) and Witch(-)/Sylph(+) but I abandoned those in favor of Sylph(-)/Heir(+) and Witch(-)/Maid(+).

and now i'm going to argue it!

Sylphs as healers and Heirs as creators are pretty set in stone, and I think that healing and creating are pretty inherently similar. I describe Heirs as effectively healing in the way that a tree recovers from being carved into, by growing and growing until the carving is a much smaller part of its whole. The thematics are a little rough, but I think of the Lady of the Lake and King Arthur. the Lady of the Lake is obviously water-y because. you know. lakes. but she's still easily read as a fairy, and also Sylphs are more broadly defined as otherworldly, graceful women. I think it works well enough.

Witch and Maid are actually a lot easier to argue for in terms of thematics, I think. Brooms and shit. Cinderella. idk, the vibes are right I think. but I had a harder time justifying the actual class stuff of it to people. but here's what I've got:

Witches manipulate and change their aspect. in practice, they can change it so much that it's nearly unrecognizable. Feferi is a perfect example of this, because by facilitating the creation of the dream bubbles she blurs the line between life and death more literally than just about anything else I could think of.

Maids, I think, also somewhat change how their aspect works, but not in such a direct way. a lot of people have described Aradia as having healed/tidied up the timeline to keep it from going doomed, and I don't think it's completely unreasonable to read it that way, but how did she do that? well, she brought in a bunch of doomed Aradias to get the job done! I describe Maids in my guide as "reinforcing" their aspect, effectively covering for the weaknesses of it in a way that, similarly to Witches, can result in breaking the rules a little.

Jane's one revive rule makes the most sense to me as a tampering with the rules of the game. there are very specific ways in which you can be brought back to life in SBURB, and it makes sense to me that Life players usually are not an exception to that. SBURB is a GM allowing the Maid to rule of cool their way into cheating the system a little.

all in all I'm still to this day destroying my brain trying to figure classpecting stuff out, but this has stood the test of time in my guide for a while now so I figured I should share it