#awwggghg I’m gonna be sick

[soullessjack]

need to know what you think of soulless jack . deranged about that whole arc.

I am so abnormal about him oh my fucking god. Literally a beast in a situation. Gnawing on him at all times. The most interesting part of it is seeing how much genuine anger and impatience and downright ruthlessness he’s capable of when the chips are down. Like, they were already hotheaded and stubborn and set to a plan but now, if anybody gets in his way he won’t fucking hesitate to remove them by whatever means he can. I mean he threw Rowena back into her apartment when she refused to help any more and literally sabotaged Baby’s engine just to keep Sam and Dean away long enough to finish the spell he’d cast specifically for them.

And it really just adds to the idea that his excessive politeness and usual mild mannerisms are truly nothing more than a performance, a robotic exaggeration of traditionally socially acceptable or likable traits displayed to gain approval, acceptance and to emulate human normality (autistic masking 101). Like we’ve seen instances of him being impatient and impulsive and all those other charming qualities beforehand, but now without a soul to help him regulate those traits he’s truly a lot more volatile than he’d ever want to admit or accept.

It’s also a major insight into the perfectionist complex he was inadvertently instilled with by Sam and Dean (and Cas, but more on the latter) at the very start.

Dean instills the notion that Jack is already inherently/biologically evil and therefore fundamentally unsalvageable, because how can you possibly fight or be saved from what you really are? His indirect comparisons of Jack to Lucifer and Cas also don’t help with this, because that leads Jack to try and emulate him and Cas as much as possible without ever finding a solid sense of who they actually are. If they can be more like Cas, they can be more good, and thus they can be accepted and gain respect + acknowledgment of their humanity.

Sam instills the notion of purpose as a means of value and worth by way of seeing Jack’s powers as a tool to save Mary (re: inter-dimensional can opener). He also instills the notion of respect and humanity as something earned through effort, but not inherent to the person. Dean can’t possibly respect Jack as a mostly-human being or respect his autonomous choice to be good; he can’t possibly respect an inherently evil monster. Jack’s humanity and goodness has to be proven with hard labor and grand gestures. Sam is also the one to tell Jack up front that he is inherently dangerous; that while they may need to protect Jack from various threats in the world, they may also need to protect the world from the threat Jack potentially poses. Dean is similar in that regard, but he affixes danger to moral standing, unlike Sam who is aware that Jack does not consciously want to be a threat.

Castiel instills a similar notion to Sam’s, wherein destiny and affixed purposes within greater plans act as complete justifications for everything; for unconditional love, for unwavering faith, for actions, etc. He and Kelly both wanted Jack to live because they shared the idea that he could bring paradise on earth, and nothing more. Re: emulation of a better person and purpose as value, Jack now thinks they have to be just like Castiel, that they have to accomplish the grand scale cosmic miracle Kelly dreamed of in order to ever be truly good or worthy or to continue being loved by his chosen father (and to make Kelly’s death actually he worth her sacrifice). I think this explains why they butt heads with Cas most often, as well as their overt retaliation against his defense in Moriah. His unwavering faith is not in Jack as a person or as they really/already are, but as what he believes Jack can be.

In some form or another, all of the parental figures Jack has view him as a tool for something (except Mary, I’m pretty sure she was the only one to actually see him as a kid). All of this culminates to mold an extremely skewed view of morality for Jack, where he personally denotes evil/monstrosity to anyone or anything that intentionally kills and harms innocents, whether they’re human or not. He also denotes goodness/humanity to Sam and Dean, to hunting, to killing the aforementioned evil innocent-murdering monsters, to protecting and saving. Mia Vallens also instills that inherently monstrous traits can be utilized for good like her closure shifting, and as such Jack throws themself into hunting, into the role of a protector, of a hero that crushes villains and always wins—because even with the burdening idea that they may be ontologically evil and fundamentally unlovable in their true nature, they can be loved and accepted and achieve some semblance of goodness through purpose, destiny, and utilization of their nature for good.

Thus, Jack cannot handle failure of rejection, because he objectively views every failure and rejection as proof that he cannot be anything he’s tried to be. If he fails to protect his loved ones or to be more like Cas and The Winchesters, then he’s failed to fulfill the purposes and destinies that he sees as a reflection of his own self worth, ergo his true nature must be evil. Then it comes to a full on collision stop when he lashes out at Mary and inadvertently kills her. and every single fear, every single basis of the rejection Jack has faced, everything they spent their entire life fighting to prove wrong, was proven right. They are hopelessly genetically evil, they cannot meet their affixed purposes and ergo they have no value. His powers can’t be utilized for good as he’d intended, only for destruction and death. All these interlacing notions just get worse with their actions under Duma’s manipulation, because he’s just happily killed more innocents, and despite having the heartbreakingly good intention of making the world a better place to make up for Mary’s botched resurrection, the action outweighs the intent entirely.

The Moriah script specifically notes how truly unhappy Jack is with being soulless and with Dean being right, because he never wanted this. He never consciously wanted to hurt the people he considers to be all he has in the world, or to cause as much harm as he ended up doing, but to kill and destroy is the inherent nature of all monsters, so he essentially takes his failures and actions as insurmountable proof that he is truly helplessly evil, whether he consciously wants to be like this or not.

Despite how dysfunctional and harmful TFW ended up being to Jack’s development, I do also think that his soulless arc reflects his attachment to them in the best worst way possible; the fact that he genuinely loves this ragtag handful of weirdos enough to not only destroy himself over them, but to destroy others for their sake….the fact that he stakes so much of his identity and livelihood on them that as soon as he gets an inkling of losing it all (ie Mary pressing that something is wrong with him) it makes him go fucking insane…::so horrendous and juicy…

I just wish more was done with him, that he’d lasted longer than four episodes and that the writing didn’t flip back and forth between “Jack is horrified by what he’s done and what it implies for his livelihood with the Winchesters as well as the long/standing question of what his true nature really is” and “Jack only logically knows what he did wrong and blames Mary completely.” As is evident with this entire post, there’s so much to be gleaned from Soulless!Jack, and also just Jack as a character I think is extremely rich in discussion.

** btw, tysm for the ask!!! I’d been looking to have something long winded posted eventually but didn’t know what to start with. too many ideas for the blorbo just ricocheting off of my inner skull walls).