#anyway w/e Good At Magic John is valid in the sense of

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Hey so I think about John Constantine a lot because who doesn't, but lately I've just been thinking about how like, he's often portrayed as like, really competent when it come to magic and I'm just over here like No!! hes a dumbass! he doesn't know what hes doing! sure hes smart at times and he has studied, but typically hes not just doing intricate rituals and casting spells, instead hes relying on other people and his wits, not magic. anyways i have feelings

Honestly and after much thought and soul searching (I don’t have a life) I’ve come to what should’ve been a really obvious conclusion: it’s because if he’s on a team he has to serve a narrative function. Like if you put John on a team he has to be adding something to it, and esp if it’s a team put together by someone else (i mean it would have to be – John’s not going around looking to be involved in anything where he has to be around reliably and do things for other people) it looks bad for the team-maker to have picked john if he’s like, incompetent.

And I don’t think John is really incompetent, i just think the point of John in hellblazer is, he’s selfish and self interested and as good as he needs to be but no more. Hellblazer usually just handwaves it as ‘i did a thing and it worked kinda’, bc Hellblazer is my kind of magic universe that gives no fucks. But he’s good enough at survival and sometimes that means saving the world (seeing as he lives in it) and everything else is just, him bumbling along and bumping into spooky shit (and also never being fully willing to remove himself from the spooky shit life, even when he knows it’s going to ruin his relationships). 

But that’s the sort of personal exploration/commentary that makes sense for a book that’s just about John & his mess. LoT/JLD care less about that -- they just need A Magic User -- and it looks weird if they pick a magic user who’s shit at it, it wouldn’t make any sense, so instead, he’s Good At Magic But A Jerk (who just needs A Team to fix him). And like he is, but as a trope (Competent Man Who’s A Jerk) it’s a little less interesting to me. 

Of course now a lot of the media that should be just John focused (more recent John Constantine-central comics, even the show to a degree) have kind of bought into the idea of him being like, good at stuff and an active character, bc again, that’s a more accessible and traditional narrative. They make him have like actual goals (saving his soul, seeing his mom again, etc) when that wasn’t as much of a thing in Hellblazer. Like the guilt over Astra and even his mother was a thing, but a thing in the way of ‘a reason for John to wallow in how shit he is (and consider leaving Magic behind)’ and not ‘a motive for John to go out into the world and try to take care of supernatural threats.’ 

I mean at least in the show it took some pushing -- having Chas be part of that push, bc he is more goal oriented [and in the comics too, btw: not so much about the magic stuff but about, i’m going to get a job and a wife and a child and be as different as possible from my mother kind of way] was a choice I liked, but in general I always had some trouble with the Manny stuff in terms of ‘here’s your chance to redeem yourself for Astra’ being a goal post John was theoretically working towards. Like he fought against it with some regularity at least, but idk, it was one of my problems with the whole concept of Constantine (2014), which was aggressively network American TV in its framing, with too much focus on ‘oh but look we showed him smoking!!! and being a dick!!!!’ instead of like, thought about why stuff like the smoking and the dickishness and the bisexuality mattered in the comics.

Like the closest the show got to understanding John’s relationship with magic was the bit with Papa Midnite where he was like ‘you use bits and pieces of a million magical traditions with no respect or understanding for them,’ which really highlighted the weird colonial/appropriative nature of John’s magic, but even that seemed to have few if any consequences for john, so :/