#bangs my hands on the table ‘Jargument! Jargument! Jargument’

[palin-tropos]

ok let’s do it. let’s have it. the Jargument

if you interact with the really early posts I made for my pathologic/main blog followers about disliking jeanvic that’s okay but pls bear in mind those are pretty much the feelings I had right as the credits were rolling

if he’s your blorbo he’s your blorbo, god knows I’ve gone to bloody war on behalf of another character who often provokes negative emotions (bachelor daniil dankovsky pathologic)

but also if you want me to soften on the character it’s not gonna work to be like “actually harry deserves it” or “jean did nothing wrong” cause I already have thought over those things and disagree

I tend to really dislike characters who are written by fandom to have a static or constantly resetting antagonistic attitude towards a sympathetic character and it’s the sympathetic character’s job to just get accustomed to verbal abuse and take it less personally and eventually warm up to the cranky attitude instead of asking for it to stop.

NB: harry having done fucked up things in his past doesn’t make him less subjectively sympathetic by the end of the game. unless you decided to play him as a jackass but well I didn’t lol

my initial reaction to Harry Du Bois after one playthrough was pity for the fact that the amnesia seemed to save his life (and if he intentionally tried to induce it, I have even more pity for the fact that he was trying to save himself and save the world from himself at the same time), because it removed him from his toxic cycles of shame and interpersonal drama and self-loathing. the way I played him, he made more progress in a week than he’d clearly done in years. and that’s cool! that’s a good story!

what I felt at the end of it is that I wanted to give him more time. another week, maybe a month. but he can’t, he needs a job, because he needs medical care. I felt downright scared to let him go off with the Precinct 41 characters, because it might be too soon to try to get back to the regular cop life (I mean fuck being a cop anyway but that’s another matter)

I was really emotionally invested in this fictional character man and so, you know, sorry about being skeptical that he was going to be okay being pulled back into the life that made him want to die in the first place, by characters who didn’t even want to visit his bedside when he was recovering from a bullet wound, even though they had time to sit around for days in a cafeteria wearing a wig and dodging all sincerely asked questions. it felt like a reasonable reaction at the time