#and im just sitting here like 'yeah... i think they're better off apart. also parse needs SO MUCH THERAPY'.
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parvuls · 4 years ago
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love this take.
generally speaking, the canon ambiguity about the actual details of their friendship leaves so much room for thought and i love it. we have the vague layout, but we don't really know anything for sure.
they were close friends for about two years and implied to be sexually involved for only one month (those 34 days after the cup). they were clearly the centre of each other's worlds at the time, but jack was literally at his lowest (drug addiction, some level of alcoholism and severe anxiety), and parse was, it seems, overwhelmingly in the closet (he's still afraid of it almost a decade later). there's also the matter of narrative porn: it's clear from the comic that parse has serious issues and is a really toxic friend for jack, but it's also made clear by ngozi that if we saw things from his pov jack would not look too good, which is supported by that panel where parse comes to see jack in rehab after the draft ("parse ii"), clearly intent on keeping their relationship, while jack looks torn; also by parse's reactions all throughout year 3, which are quite frankly pissed and heartbroken, while jack handwaves their relationship as "purely physical".
(i should mention now that i highjacked this post to work out my complex emotions about parse and that i am not, by any means imaginable, Pro Parse, so turn away if you're a stan. i just also don't believe in inherently evil characters and i think he's far more complicated than just being mean-spirited.)
the idea that things trailed off and left a lot of unresolved issues makes a lot of sense to me. i especially loved the phrase 'good intentions'. i think the key thing about jack and parse - and the reason i'm not a huge fan of then becoming best friends again post-canon, despite it being a popular headcanon and also me being a sucker for gooey happy endings - is that they just don't understand each other.
it is so, so easy to imagine phone calls post-draft becoming more and more heated. parse pushing for jack to return to hockey because in his mind he's encouraging a friend to follow his dreams and not 'be scared', and so he tells jack everything about the aces and constantly tells him he should've been there. he's just an uninformed eighteen year old who really doesn't understand what anxiety is, and so he seriously underrates it. meanwhile, jack is being eaten away by jealousy and inadequacy and failure because of these stories, slowly detaching himself from parse for his own good without realizing how lonely parse is at las vegas. saying things like "it's fine, it's better that you went alone" while thinking about the shattered dream of the two of them playing side by side, because he's trying to get over it, but he doesn't realize that he's breaking the heart of a man who's in love with him by saying that it's better that they went their separate ways.
it's easy to imagine parse being a person who resorts to taunting when he's scared or angry (a la, well, "parse iii"). jack slowly stops picking up the phone, parse has no idea what's going on with him, and he leaves more and more angry messages trying to provoke jack into speaking with him but these are so, so toxic for jack, so he slowly stops listening to them at all. they don't really understand how much they're hurting each other at all. neither of them wants to stop being friends (or... something else, for parse), each of them wants to explain their fears and their loneliness and how much they miss each other, but the abyss between them grows wider and wider and neither of them knows the right words to bridge it.
when jack finally goes to samwell and plays hockey again (with people who aren't parse - he could go back to play but he couldn't choose to play with parse?); when he makes friends and seems a little happier without parse, and he almost never picks up the phone and he's constantly being seen with thar mustached dude? it probably hurts and/or pisses parse off like hell. meanwhile jack is healing, and learning healthy relationships by being in samwell, and parse feels him slipping farther and farther away while jack feels his dream, the dream parse is living in his place, slipping farther and farther away.
yeah. the state we find them in in year 2 is definitely a gradual process. and it's heartbreaking, because it's not that they want to hurt each other. but some people are just better out of your life even if you love them.
Maybe we all just wrote “Jack abruptly stopped talking to Kent and it was brutal but decisive” for so long because as bad as it was, it wasn’t nearly so painful as the idea that their friendship slowly went off rails made of good intentions.
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