#on how my portrayal is going to be heavy on the 'he literally. genuinely. sincerely thinks he's a good guy ]

[hcndsomejck]

cp verse thots and ponderings.

ever since mina / @neuroslayyer​ answered that ask [i am vibrating] i have been ferally thinking about the different types of verses jack would have in cp2077. mind you i have not finished the game (my adhd makes it hella difficult to bulldoze thru games, but i love it so much, pls be patient with me) but HAVE gotten to anders hellman so!

he is literally so easy to port over.

verse one: he’s a corpo codemonkey pretty much like his position in tps. corpo suits are very hyperion in nature from my observations [my main v is corpo]. arasaka especially from what i have gathered. it’s a very man-eat-man world even in the shiny, ‘civilised’ towers. [it’s a mirror of the streets, just played on a board meant for 4-dimensional chess.]

story may be relatively similar to tps as well; a suit desperately wanting to climb, being instead climbed himself by those around him until he manages to outmaneuver an exec or director and gets to sit in the cushy seats. [OR] he could be in the throes of lording himself over the rungs below him. 

perhaps not as delusionally insane as in borderlands? i’d love to examine jack in a space where he errs closer to sane than ‘emblazoned by eldritch vault magic making his already massive issues larger than a fucking planet’[1] (see below).

verse two: he’s an engram, akin to tftbl but given how engrams seem to be literal copies of living memory, personality, and soul matter (to my knowledge) it’s less an AI and more actually jack himself. cue anyone getting to suffer his delusional (or not so much as stated before) hero complex, sadism, and flippant disregard for certain groups’ wellbeings!

a few ideas for this one could be for v’s. another jack-in (puns!) gets them a second engram that may, or may not fix their issue w/silverhand. jack erasing/easing johnny’s hold and cruelly shoving him in a box? he’s a hero- he’ll save you! it’s ‘what he does’! jack and johnny fighting and v holding the mental popcorn and despertely needing a drink? 

i don’t think he’d actually replace johnny- unless it’s a post-game verse where; because v has had an engram before, something just easily moves in? johnny and his bits are too integral to the story (it literally drives it) to overwrite him entirely.

UNLESS it’s an au where jack himself basically takes johnny’s place as the anti-corpo, larger-than-life, narcissistic ‘hero complex badass’- where... .... well i just realised they are rather similar aren’t they? HMMM.

borderlands may be an insane space western but it can also be shifted to cyberpunk easily and idk i am noodling and yelling into the void.

[1] -  pls talk to me about a verse where he is actually soft for his angel in the way a more healthy society defines it, rather than [genuinely] thinking entrapment is protection and abusive ‘tough love’ is actually fine. (yes victims can become like their abusers without help but what if- what if his defiant bullshit served him well there? idk. the victim to villain trope IS more convoluted than how most tend to write it.) 

i am notorious for giving layers to shitty father figures [eg; professor hojo in ffvii]. like fuck yes he’d still be awful but staunchly refusing to do to angel what his grandmother did to him.

[zappho]

Some Meta on Murdock and mental illness

Generally speakig, The A-Team is a dumbass, light-hearted comedy with action on the same level as youtube poop videos. Obviously there isn’t alot of depth to be found here. The show had tons of different writers, all with their own take on Murdock and none of them offer any clear info or a proper backstory for the character. It’s basically up to the audience to fill in the blanks and that’s exactly what I’m gonna do by overanalyzing the mess that is the show’s canon.

The question of whether Murdock is ‘‘‘really crazy or just faking’‘’ has been around for over 30 years, but I’m gonna argue that he’s both.

When Kelly visits Murdock in the psychiatric hospital and confronts him about why he’s living there in the first place he gets instantly uncomfortable.

He really didn’t want her to ask, it’s why he’s been avoiding her. Joking about how you’re hashtag crazy™ is easy; having to admit that you’ve been institutionalized for over 10 years because you have legitimate problems is much harder. (Sure, the VA also gives him a convenient cover from the military police, but if that was the only reason for him to stay he wouldn’t react to Kelly’s question in this way). “It’s a long story”, is all he says. There are clearly some painful memories here that he’d rather not delve into.

He’d have to explain how he got committed in the first place. We know that after the gang was arrested for war crimes in ‘71, Murdock was still serving as a pilot in ‘72. They never clarified when and how Murdock was sent home, but i’m guessing without his only friends around and it being, you know...war, his mental health eventually deteriorated until he received a medical discharge straight into the VA hospital.

After Murdock gets wrongly released in season 1, instead of his friends being worried about his supposed cover getting blown they just shrug it off and go ‘Oh well!’ (This could all be due to the show’s inconsistent writing, but you know)

No longer being an inpatient would finally allow Murdock to be employed as a pilot again (his #1 passion), and yet he seems really disheartened about the situation. Even though the hospital gives him no privacy, the staff barely respects him and he spends most of his time there by himself, he still prefers to stay.

For a character who’s allegedly cheery comic relief, he sure gets his feelings hurt alot, mainly when dealing with other people’s ableism towards him. B.A. and Face are obviously just palling around, just guys bein’ dudes, they don’t want to hurt Murdock for real, they probably don’t realize how sensitive Murdock is about the subject. Usually he plays along or shrugs it off, but sometimes he gets genuinely upset. In the first half of In Plane Sight he’s so fed up with it he tries to ‘‘act normal’‘ until #Woke #Queen Hannibal reassures him that they love him the way he is.

PTSD was barely starting to become a diagnosis when the show first aired, but I think it’s fair to say he suffers from it. The pilot episode states that he has anxiety, paranoia and memory loss, so that checks out.

With PTSD you don’t just have to deal with flashbacks and nightmares, but also intrusive thoughts, images and memories about your trauma. Murdock copes with it by getting hyperfixated on a new activity or pretending he’s someone else. This is were alot of people will go ‘‘haha wow look how wacky and insane he is! He’s talking to his sock 😂’‘. But Murdock knows it’s all made up nonsense, he just needs his mind to focus on something else. What’s important here is that he never lets his coping mechanisms distract him when he’s flying, first of all he’s already focused and also he doesn’t wanna crash (lol). There’s a believability to his actions that’s missing in the 2010 reboot.

In the episode where the gang helps out the vietnamese cook from the POW camp where they’ve been tortured, Murdock tries to distract himself with some golfballs. He soon starts projecting his trauma on them however.

I think this is the only time in the show where Hannibal tears up, so this scene is kinda significant. As the leader, he probably blames himself for getting his team captured and tortured, and seeing that Murdock is still so strongly affected by it gotta hurt. 

Compared to the rest of the gang, Murdock’s alot more fucked up over the war. There are subtle changes in his voice whenever he talks about it. In the ep about their old war buddy Ray, Face was reminiscing about how cool of a guy Ray was for borrowing him his helmet, Murdock’s memories meanwhile are much less upbeat. ‘My bird was the only one left in the sky’ he remembers while we see an image of a field filled with shot down helicopters. His experiences are bound to be different from the other three as a huey medevac pilot. Murdock did have one off-screen breakdown in the present timeline, after collecting every newspaper article about the upcoming execution of the team in Firing Line. Apparently it was bad enough that he had to be restrained. It’s been 10 years, so he’s recovering and getting better, but he’s still not all there yet.

Everyone knows Murdock’s just messing around when he’s being interrogated by the military about his connections to the team, but like what about when the military isn’t there; or NO ONE is. He often talks to himself or just puts weird shit in his mouth for no reason while nobody’s paying attention to him (eating leaves, paint, an entire raw egg, a frozen sandwich). Sometimes he’s just unhinged like that.

Another thing that’s brought up a few times in the show is his anxiety. Murdock’s often seen being generally tense, sweaty, uncomfortable or reflective in the background of a scene. (I have no idea if this was a deliberate acting choice but Dwight does have anxiety irl so who knows if that had anything to do with it, I mean who knowsssssss, i’m just observing)

He’s got a habit of fidgeting with his hands or touching his neck when he’s stressed out. Murdock also does it when he’s telling his psychiatrist Dr. Richter about his dreams “If you were me, wouldn’t you be terrified to put your head down?” he asks him.

Richter isn’t really paying attention though, because he’s so used to Murdock’s non-stop clownery, he can’t exactly tell when his patient decides to be honest about his feelings for once. He just replies ‘Well only if it was a bad dream’. Which really irritates Murdock because what other dreams besides bad would he have? So he derails the session by rambling some made up bullshit on purpose.

Richter knows that Murdock uses humor and fantasy to cope, but he’s obviously tired of Murdock’s cringe antics, he just wants to help him. But Murdock doesn’t like to open up and be confronted with his traumas again, he just wants to avoid talking about it all together. There are still parts of reality that Murdock’s not ready to deal with, or he wouldn’t always retreat into his fantasies.

Before he can continue messing around a helicopter passes by and Murdock freezes for a second. Richter assures him that the helicopter is real; Murdock nods and starts fidgeting with his hands again, seemingly in deep thought. We know from the season 4 finale that he hears the sound of rotor blades when he dissociates. He was definitely being sincere here.

After getting drugged by some military goons he has a few brief flashbacks (feat. cheesy 80′s neon filters): seeing the chopper fly away, getting stuck in a potted plant as if he was walking through the jungle, being surrounded by heavy smoke and sparks from the burning carpet).

Despite being the 2nd highest ranked team member, Murdock dislikes being in charge and gets severly distressed when anything goes wrong that he might even be slightly responsible for. Most notably is the episode where the owners of the diner get kidnapped after Murdock got knocked out by evil cowboys or hill billies or whatever they were. Instead of telling anyone what happened, he’s just lying on the floor, repeatedly calling himself a failure until the others show up.

Seems like Murdock gets startled more easily than the rest of the crew as well. We often see him flinch when guns go off; one time he literally wore fluffy ear muffs to a backalley shootout.

This short moment from Family Reunion always stood out to me. Face opens the van door a little too quickly and it takes Murdock so off-guard he has to take deep breaths to calm down.

Murdock sounds exhausted when he has to remind Face not to sneak up on him. Face also realizes he messed up, he just wanted to check up on Murdock and not trigger him on accident.

When it comes to portrayals of mental illness in fiction there’s obviously better representation out there than Murdock. But sometimes you just wanna see a mentally ill character have a good time instead of being miserable 24/7. And Murdock’s already got the worst behind him, he’s had therapy for years and friends who love him. I just think that’s refreshing to see, especially with a character who’s so kind and openly affectionate.

[ufonaut]

could you recommend me some comics to read that have a good amount of batjokes content? and any that you think would be essential for a new dc fan to read? thank you! have a good day!

hiya, yes, of course!!!!

batjokes-positive comics:

the killing joke  – an obvious choice but it still remains some of the best written joker content out there, words dont do it justice, you just gotta experience it

batman (2016) #48 and #49 – the best man arc from tom king’s run, this is the very peak of batjokes for me personally in the sense that joker’s feelings are treated as not only real but entirely sincere and exactly as important as selina’s, bonus points for just how well joker is written (both from a gay pov and a mentally ill pov), i’ve gotten a bit into why it’s so worth reading here and here (warning: part of the wedding arc but considering the outcome i’d call it entirely safe)

arkham asylum: a serious house on serious earth – this is one of my all time favourite comics and while its portrayal of joker isn’t anywhere close to my favourite, the story itself is amazing and pretty heavy on the ‘bruce is exactly like his rogues’ symbolism, if ur into that (which i am)

batman: europa – i haven’t actually finished reading europa because i’m the worst kind of fan but i’m told it’s full of batjokes

the joker: devil’s advocate – not a favourite of mine but hints at joker not being straight, very batjokes-heavy

i’m probably legally required to mention the new 52 arc that goes through “death of the family”, “endgame” and #48 (snyder’s run this time) because it’s definitely a staple of a certain type of batjokes but it’s never been the thing for me (warning: joker cutting off his own face, lots & lots of gore and edginess), it’s not bad per se but definitely not the direction i think batjokes should go

dc essentials for new fans

superman for all seasons – this is the definitive, and i dont use this term lightly, superman comic, it’s the best thing i’ve read in my LIFE, it literally captures clark’s character perfectly and honestly was what got me to love him so much. it’s a good introduction to who, exactly, clark is as a person too so i definitely recommend it and am planning on rereading it myself VERY soon simply because it’s so amazing

world’s finest (1990) – bruce/clark & joker/lex team-ups ahoy. great plot, even greater writing, one of the best thing dc’s ever done imo

batman (2016) #51 - #53 – also from tom king’s run. bruce has to go on jury duty for mr freeze’s trial and tries to convince everyone that he’s not guilty. ESSENTIAL and EXTREMELY good bruce characterisation, up there with top 3 bruce moments as far as i’m concerned solely because it actually acknowledges that batman isn’t bruce’s real self but rather a coping mechanism, his life as ruled by trauma and the very real fear that every new tragedy will be That Night again 

superman: speeding bullets – an elseworlds one-shot (which is a sort of alternate universe) about baby superman being found by the waynes and growing up to be bruce. it somehow manages to be a very solid comic in its right and features some A+ bruce and clark characterisation

justice league international (1987) annual 2  – very corny, extremely hilarious and an eternal favourite. joker does his thing, batman is so very tired

robin: year one – pretty much what it sounds like but it’s very well-written and it’s got some very peak harvey dent moments

scarecrow: year one – GOTHIC HORROR GOTHIC HORROR GOTHIC HORROR crane’s origin, a very dreamy comic for me personally despite the ooc bruce

batman (2011) 23.1 – joker adopts a baby monkey and lives out his dreams of being the world’s bestest dad (genuinely & sincerely good)

batman (2011) 23.2 – solid riddler story, one of the few times eddie is actually shown as being mentally ill and it’s very well written

penguin: pain and prejudice – oswald origin, made me cry the first time i read it, which is the highest compliment i can imagine (and oswald’s not insufferable for once)

batman: gotham adventures #2 – one of the best two face stories i’ve ever read, made me love harvey forever and ever (warning for childhood abuse)

mister miracle (2018) -- 12 issues miniseries by tom king & mitch gerards, still on-going but i got into it without knowing literally anything about the characters and it’s now one of my all time favourite comics (and also! one of the most real thing ive ever seen written about trauma, this is literally everything), it also invented true love