#bc none of it is handled with the same depth that everything in s1 had?

[greyedian]

ok briefly coming back from my tumblr break bc y'know Arcane s2 and uhhhhh... hm. Look, I'm sorry, I really wanted to like this season, but oh man I'm kinda having a rough time with it ngl

[carterhaughs]

hi so i know that you're a tulip/cassidy shipper and i was wondering on your thoughts on preacher #52 since in it cassidy was being very abusive towards tulip and she had a major breakdown on how he mistreated her.

I don’t consider the comic and show characters to be analytically congruent and really don’t see how it’s possible for them to do that storyline given their particular conception of the characters or why they’d want to do it. None of these characters is very much like their comics counterparts other than aesthetically and in the broad strokes of their narrative significance. Tulip, for example, is a far better character in every way than her comic counterpart - which I’ve discussed at length here.

I go into my feelings about Cassidy’s comic arc in-depth here and here, but long story short, I think the comics - while I do like and respect what they were trying to do thematically - demonize/downplay mental illness in both jesse and cassidy’s arcs, and along with being racist and homophobic, are very dated in their outlook. the show in most respects is doing a far better job handling such things and in order to do that, has taken the characters an entirely different direction. for example, it’s specifically connected cassidy’s bloodlust with being a vampire rather than just being an inherently violent and pathetic person (which he didn’t start out as in the comics but it’s where his arc ultimately went although Ennis has made it sound like this wasn’t always planned out) - he’s still flawed in many ways (his self-loathing and self-destructiveness and occasional spitefulness in particular) but he’s not an inherently murderous or chauvinistic person like he is in the comics, and never engages in posturing for the sake of maintaining his masculine cred like he does there. also he’s actually tulip’s friend and like her friendship with jesse, her friendship with cassidy is very solid. that was never the case in the comics where at best she was annoyed with him. so it’s not the same thing. it’s pretty clear that the only reason he’d ever accidentally get violent in the throes of passion, like he imagined in his crack dream, is because he’s lost control of his vampirism - not because he’s an abusive person. that’s also evident from the information in his file from season 1. and it’s not disrespectful to compare cassidy’s narrative on the tv show to the struggles of a recovering addict bc the showrunners and the actor himself have done that explicitly multiple times and joe himself is a recovering addict who has spoken extensively about his experiences. I think he’d know. and he has said that cassidy being with jesse and tulip is like “therapy” for him.

moreover, as I said in an earlier post, it was jesse’s violence that was focused on as particularly dangerous in its own way this season (I go in-depth abt his s1 & 2 character arcs here and here) in a way that was never explored in the comics - with tulip’s disturbance w/ the way he punched Reggie for example and nearly killed Viktor highlighted in her conversation w/ Featherstone where she says aloud, unprompted, “Jesse would never do that” in reference to domestic violence bc sometimes she’s wondered if he would (even though he wouldn’t…he’s just very unstable at times for manifold reasons to do with the abuse in his past). you can’t ignore that. none of these characters is presented as The Ultimate Evil - they’re all deeply flawed and morally complex but ultimately good. and in the finale, it was cassidy who suggested they tell jesse about the camera (comic cassidy never would’ve done that and in fact in a similar situation in the comics, keeps such information a secret) and he also immediately called jesse when tulip was in trouble instead of just turning her. he called the ambulance (which Herr Starr diverted), tried to help Jesse all he could and suggested he use the Word and when that didn’t work, finally tried to turn her - and stopped to try to convince Jesse bc he wanted him to understand how dire the situation was. there was nothing sinister in his motives in the least. and it was pretty clear, based on how long it took him to decide to turn denis and how he asked seamus for advice and tried to get Jesse to help him with the Word, that he’d never even done that before.

also, just for the record, I don’t expect tulip and cassidy to end up together, and also I love tulip/jesse. tulipcass just happens to be my favorite relationship, but not to the exclusion of everything else.