#bitter jackgirl posting

[morsick]

i've recently noticed that the fandom tends to overlook in the analysis how strongly jack was influenced by the time he spent in au world. of course, mostly it happens because show itself forgets about story arcs as soon as they end, but still.

it's insane that jack has been alive for only a few months when he was forced to fight a fucking war. can you imagine what a war can do to a person who began to form his worldview just a few months ago? just how traumatic must it have been for jack who already has been heavily traumatized right after he was born? and it wasn't addressed by the show at all! yes, jack became more aggressive and ruthless after his return to the home world. but the reason for that is just glossed over, and suddenly jack showing any signs of his trauma grows into the argument that he's a dangerous monster, and thus violence against him is excusable and winchesters' abuse towards him was okay. it wasn't. the show just didn't want to show any sympathy for anyone's trauma except for the winchesters'.

[soullessjack]

maybe I’m being mean but at this point whenever I see sam dean cas girls post about their guys’ mischaracterizations all I can think is “you’ll live” and Oprah shrug gif because I have had to endure six years worth of seeing my guy exist as a baby shaped stage prop for the others or a teenage shaped baby who listens to fucking conehead gray and hides under blankets when he hears thunder. like not to make it a competition but I really truly believe I objectively have it the worst here im sorry

[restlesshush]

Not to keep bitter jackgirl posting but when people say he’s not given any proper personhood on the show… genuinely the jack seasons would be less disturbing as a viewing experience for me if viewing him as a person didn’t come so very easily to me. Like literally, you think about things from his point of view for one second and you’re like “god, this is horrifying”. Like, yes, aside from yockey episodes (and yockey very much writes him as a person, so if you miss that ???), it’s largely a question of piecing together how his interiority must be based on how a person would feel if they experienced all of the things he’s experienced (which he’s experienced to facilitate the plot, not to serve his character) but like, it’s not hard. If it was not so easy, watching the show would be less upsetting for me because I wouldn’t be hit by this stuff constantly sfghhfgff

[aturnoftheearth]

it goes like this:

0: no cas posts or they’re just all terrible. like horrible.

1-3: you’re not a casgirl, few cas posts and most of them are bad (not focused on him, takes that i personally disagree with because it’s my ranking), you don’t hesitate to make him the pining lovesick fool 2013 trope (sorry i just really hate it 💀).

4-6: alright you’re getting there. a good amount of cas posts, some really good ones, a good amount of bitterness, not afraid to post a hot take in his name, maybe he gets some development. as a treat.

7-9: probably a casgirl (maybe a jackgirl), lots of bitterness (rightfully so), lots of cas posts and they’re great, most of the same opinions.

10: we share all the same cas opinions (the right ones), your bitter casgirl hours are 24/7, you think about him and tear up, if i were to die right now in some sort of fiery explosion due to the carelessness of a friend, i would trust you with my blog. he’s your everything, your best friend, you get him.

i rate your blog based on nothing but castiel vibes

[morsick]

I don't want Dean (or Sam, for that matter) to be a caretaker or a father to Jack. But if he at least tried to be a decent human being to him, it would have been nice.

[restlesshush]

Feeling compelled to make a more rampantly bitter jackgirl version of this post. Because like, the character stuff re fixing Dean and Jack’s relationship (which is what I talk about there) is one thing – how a resolution that hinges of Jack just automatically forgiving Dean doesn’t fix anything, given that while Jack doesn’t understand the wrong done to him (which he doesn’t, and which his instant forgiveness would be indicative of), any forgiveness from him is meaningless. But like, the fact that it doesn’t work as a resolution on a character level is only part of the issue there. There’s actually a lot more wrong with it than that.

Fundamentally what the Jack-instant-forgiveness trope does – along with its offshoot, where it’s directly specified that the things Jack experienced haven’t affected him – is remove Jack and his interiority from the equation. His personhood isn’t relevant to the story – the only function he serves is as a little absolution tickbox at the end. Whereas the thing is, in terms of approaching a narrative like that in general, separately from the specific character dynamics at play here, the actual problem being dealt with is “how do we respond to the fact that X character has been mistreated?” so it should be fairly clear that the situation can’t be satisfyingly resolved without at least acknowledging the feelings of the injured party. When it comes to Jack stuff being handled in fic, though, this is very much the reverse of how it generally seems to get treated – Dean (and maybe also Cas) gets to work through a bunch of complex emotions, and then Jack’s end of it is just… immediate, all-encompassing forgiveness, that doesn’t even need to be earned. And this is more or less understandable from the point of view of fic authors caring about Dean (and Cas) much more than Jack, and it is fine to be focussing on someone else’s point of view rather than Jack’s, but Jack’s point of view does absolutely need to be taken into account too. The situation is about the harm done to him (in theory, him being hurt is the reason there’s anything to work through here in the first place!) so there’s something very very discomfiting about watching the hurt done to Jack be used as a means of character exploration for everyone But Him – it leaves the really uncomfortable implication that his feelings about what happened to him are somehow the ones least worthy of looking at.

Obviously I also talk a lot about how (if you assume he has an emotional throughline, which feels like quite a basic courtesy) Jack is definitely deeply affected by everything he’s gone through in canon, including to the point of trying to kill himself repeatedly, and from this point of view it’s especially jarring to see his feelings quite so overlooked. But even if it wasn’t that extreme, dealing with the fallout of hurt done to Anybody and caring about it on various levels (eg in this case, generally Dean guilt; the effect on cas and dean’s relationship specifically; etc) but not on the level of The Effect It Had On The Person, is incredibly bizarre. But even more than it just being odd – to do that you really have to not be thinking about the personhood of the person who’s been hurt, which is really disturbing to see in the context, of specifically 1) a neurodivergent character, and 2) someone who has suffered repeated cruelty from someone in a position of authority over them.

And then to move away from the optics of it, it is just bad from a storytelling perspective as well. I do understand the impulse to just have Jack forgive Dean, given Dean and Jack stuff is such a lot to work through if taken seriously but like, it’s really not a satisfying conclusion to have a character grapple with the pain they’ve caused to someone else and then have the resolution just be “oh it’s fine!! They absolved you!!��� Obviously it does Jack a massive disservice to reduce him narratively to someone who goes from being an angst-facilitating passive recipient of mistreatment to a effectively forgiveness mechanism, rather than getting to have any meaningful role in the tackling of What’s Happened To Him, but also, it’s very much a shortcut to avoid fully facing the implications of what you’re dealing with. Like, if you want to have Dean work through the guilt of having hurt a person (which is what happened here!), then deciding “no, actually, the person wasn’t hurt” does nothing but weaken the much more interesting story available to you. You move Dean’s very grounded and juicy guilt into quite an abstract space, which is robbing you of some interesting character work. Fundamentally, if all you care about is telling a good story as opposed to anything else, claiming that Dean’s actions didn’t have an affect on Jack and/or having Jack just automatically forgive Dean is just lazy and uninteresting writing, which is a pretty solid reason in itself not to do it.

To reiterate, I do understand why Jack tends not to be prioritised here, given people are generally more interested in Dean and Cas as characters, and given how underwritten Jack is, etc, but it’s still true that you absolutely do have to take Jack’s feelings into account in order to resolve things well here, and that people frequently rather flagrantly don’t. At its core, the situation only exists to be tackled because of Jack – his feelings are absolutely central to finding a satisfactory resolution to it. Deciding he doesn’t really have any might be a neat little short cut, but the result will be weaker as a story than it would be otherwise, it’s not going to work satisfactorily on a character level, and also, crucially, the whole thing is just a little disturbing and pretty insulting re how Jack as a character is viewed – which is in theory not what you want to be doing with a piece of writing that is ostensibly trying to address Jack stuff.

[restlesshush]

Incredibly high new follower to notes ratio on my bitter jackgirl posting (3:48), I am delighted by this, you three have excellent taste <3