#jac ily for ur comments on ur post they are truly so clear-worded and like. logical.

[jack-kellys]

so we all know life is a circle. thus fandom is a circle. we see things come back around like the de/twinkification of racetrack higgins. or cowboy versus artist jack kelly. or "mom" friend david jacobs and the perpetual need to make the newsies some kind of heteronormative family. and yet again we've found our way back to the anti katherine pulitzer arc of her "getting in the way" of jack and davey's popular subtextual/fanon relationship. (yes im late nevermind that.)

now, not being a katherine fan is different than being anti-katherine. not being a katherine fan means you might have criticisms like "i'm not sure how she serves the newsies narrative better than, say, sarah jacobs, as sarah is more aligned with the newsies contextually/societally and katherine is very distant and rich lol", or even "i'm not a big fan of how katherine seems to be tired of jack's shit for most of the play and then 'suddenly' finds romantic interest in him within one song".

but being anti-singular-young-woman-character because of a ship between the main two boys is. a tired take is it not? again with the circle, we've had this discourse already and its been cut out. since 2012 and 2017 we been talking about this girl and her value, but not in the context we should be.

(because the context we should be talking about it in is a newsies 1992 versus newsies broadway context, not an anti-katherine context, but i digress.)

katherine's value. what is there to mine from? she is an extremely young woman reporter, 17-18 years old, whose article makes the front page of the new york sun. since she writes under a pseudonym, i'm presuming she writes with skill well above her age to be published at all (yes, even writing vaudeville reviews). in past productions she either finds the newsies at jacobi's because she saw the walk-out (TWWK) from inside The World (UK), or jack kelly simply interests her enough for her to seek him out again (Broadway/Tour/Live). she is unsure about herself as a writer despite her skill which is made clear in her song. she is rich. she did not need to have a career and was encouraged not to. pulitzer is her father and she does not get along with him. she matches jack word for word, often with davey at her side. she mills comfortably about the newsies through the second act and has a friendship of some kind with specs specifically. she also literally says "that's a face [jack's] that could save us all from sinking in the ocean/like someone said 'power tends to corrupt'" essentially prophesying the act 2 betrayal. which is crazy.

you can draw your own conclusions from the above, but all of it is essentially canon? right? so maybe you don't have to be a fan of all of it, but you're really going to tell me absolutely none of this is compelling. that none of this is something you can interpret for yourself as complex. that albert is more complex.

this is not me saying you have to include katherine in everything, because that isn't what this post is about. this is about individuals choosing to dislike or devalue katherine by only viewing her in relation to her as a romantic interest, instead of a complex character in a period piece with a full arc. yes a full arc. it's the musical that's rushed not katherine.

@we-are-inevitable speaks on this extremely well in the comments of this post as well, more in connection to katherine as being a compelling romantic interest in the context of newsies speaking in the defense of love interests/often women characters. in this post i speak on how i would navigate jack/katherine as a director, and in this post i speak on how to direct something to believe in to make it, well, believable, aside from its awful writing for both kath and jack. because again, fandom is a circle, and i literally talked about how to "fix" jatherine in august 2024. at length