#i have a lot of sympathy for a crotchety bastard who is bad with kids but becomes responsible for three of them bc there's NO ONE ELSE

[shenzuul]

Thinking about Samos and Jak's relationship. It's interesting that Samos is not a father figure to Jak, from either side's perspective. For one thing, Samos has a daughter who explicitly refers to him as her dad, while Jak never refers to Samos by any familial titles. And then there's the scene in Jak 3 where Jak tells Damas he never knew his father.

I like to think that at some point, Samos realizes that he is not fit to be Jak's sole guardian. Not only is he not equipped for it temperament-wise, he has conflicts of interest that mean he cannot be trusted to be the sole caretaker of Jak's well-being. Samos' first loyalty is to Haven, and knowing what he knows about the future, he's always going to be balancing what he needs from Jak against what Jak needs.

But it begs the question, how did Samos end up identifying as Jak's mentor but Keira's father, even though Jak was his first dependent? Samos arrived in the past with only Jak in tow—when and how did Keira appear in the picture? How did Jak feel about Keira being able to call Samos her dad, when he couldn't? How the hell did Daxter fit into this? I'd love to see how that drama went down.