#jon brings out the kid in him but with his family he isnt given that leniency

[talia-kane]

do some of you guys even like Damian???like he’s not baby he’s never been baby he was never given the chance to just be a kid until he was like 10/11 ish and by then he was struggling with winning everyones acceptance to care about being a kid, thats the beauty of his story he’s a fucking tragedy and some of you are out here saying ohh he’s baby bro shut the fuck up and pick up the comics

[clowndensation]

threshold - i have three things i want to discuss from this episode, and i need you to understand they're all equally important to me.

first: weighted jump ropes fucking rule. literally there is nothing that filled me with more pride as a kid than bringing my weighted jump rope to school, and feeling that cool, easy sense of superiority over my silly, immature contemporaries who could never handle the responsibility of the weight. if i fucked up a jump, that shit hurt. shoutout to marcus, my fellow weighted jump roper. so few understand our skill.

second: i forgot about marcus mackenzie and his dad! the spiral preying on a family is so horrendous, given the specific fear that the spiral preys on. especially considering that the distortion, free of influence, enjoys a decades long game of cat and mouse. i am once again stating that the spiral feels the most personally malicious, of all the entities.

third:

there's an interesting intersection between morality and responsibility, wherein people, when given a choice, generally want to be good. and so, if someone has impure or sinful impulses (the desire to be bad), it follows that that they then want to have that choice taken away from them. either the choice to be bad, so they can never give in to temptation, or the choice to be good, so they can give in to temptation without having to take on the responsibility of making that choice.

jon falls categorically into the latter, due to the nature and inevitability of his desires - if he doesn't prey on people, he starves, and for all of his guilt and suicidal ideation, he's both incredibly afraid of actually dying, and too guilty to feel he deserves an easy death - it's why he's constantly willing to risk his life, but isn't willing to kill himself. there's an inherent egotism in shame and guilt: the idea that you have to make up for your wrongs, rather than submitting to the idea that sometimes the best thing you can do, after committing harm, is leave, and allow other people to clean up after you. he can't just kill himself, because that's denying other people the right to use him to make up for the harm he's caused.

and so, because he doesn't want to die, but also doesn't want to accept that he enjoys his actions, and is choosing to partake in them, he wants them to be the fault of someone else, so he can keep indulging in them over and over again, and be pardoned for the pleasure he receives from it. which, of course, is a coping mechanism doomed to fail, and so instead he goes through cycles of hating himself, indulging in his vices in order to bring some sort of peace or pleasure back into his life, drowning himself in guilt, hating himself, etc etc and so on, ad infinitum. an absolute tragedy of a character. it's incredibly believable that the web isnt manipulating jon - what more is there to manipulate? there's no getting out of the situation he's in.

Ranking: 8, i loved your jump rope, marcus <3