#anyway i can see some of my tales of arcadia roots and troll!jim thoughts peeking through in this analysis lol

[archaeopter-ace]

I love all the angst you can wring out of ‘Jack and Ted are excluded from human society because the world is prejudiced against people that are different,’ but I also love entertaining the idea that their way of life, living off the land off the grid, is not inherently worse than living amongst humans. Like I’m not saying Thoreau was right, and while John Muir did a lot for conservation as a movement, he got a helluva lot of stuff wrong, notably thinking that indigenous people needed to be forced off their ancestral lands so they wouldn’t ‘ruin’ it. So today when framing discussions about conservation I often deliberately push back against this idea that Man and Nature are mutually exclusive forces, and that humans are somehow a separate agent instead of an organism that exists within ecosystems. I say all that to clarify that when I say “Jack and Ted’s nomadic, outdoors lifestyle can be equally fulfilling to one lived amongst humans,” I’m emphatically NOT saying that Cities Are Bad Rotten Awful Places To Live, and we would all be happier in the woods. However, neither should we say that modern civilization with all its conveniences is the most desirable thing and if you don’t have it you’re missing out. Maybe Jack has tried the company of men, and tried the company of monsters, and prefers to hang out with the latter not because of any defect in the former, but because monster society has its own worth, and can be cherished on its own merits.