#that man loves his escapism more than Dax from Fenton Lodge

[thepointingghost]

ok whats ur opinion on dax and alice's father. forgot his name. i have opinions but my opinions of adult figures are generally bad so im biased

oooh okay okay. Robert. Robert Jones.

This is mainly focused on Dax but with Alice it's more a reflection of how he messed up with his son, those dynamics juxtapose one another so we can see specifically how Dax's relationship with him has been destroyed over the years.

It's clear he cares about his family: his work is a sacrifice of his time and body to help them as best he can, he stays in contact regularly, and he's at least aware of COLA protocol (Code 47). It's just that his family is Gina and Alice and the kid from his previous marriage whose eyes remind him a little too much of her, and it hangs between them so much that it's too late to ever address it, and... yeah, it's easier to stay in Aberdeen than reconcile with him. I think he made a mistake out of grief and maybe there's some hope of repairing the relationship, but realistically? He's lost the agency to decide that.

We do see some improvements with Robert in Unleashed, in the most basic form of respect: he lets Dax keep his bodily automony and refuses to consent to the COLA Project's magnetite scheme. It's not nearly enough, but it's something. There's respect.

But my opinion of him starts to sour with this part of Dowsing the Dead:

It had never, never occurred to him to be ashamed. Worried, freaked out, confused—yes—all of those things but never ashamed. Maybe that was what Gina had put into his dad’s head. ... ‘Special’—that was the word. It had too many meanings. Even bad things, like awful disabilities, got called ‘special’ these days. Maybe his dad thought what happened to him was ‘special’ in that way. The letter should have made him feel better. All it made him feel was ‘special’—in no good way.

Respect can buy you courtesy, but it can't buy you understanding. There will forever be a distance between them because what Robert Jones cannot understand is the power and pride of being different.

Looking a bit deeper, here's how I read him. Robert represents a very steroetypical, nuclear family–style of parenting: the stoic father, bringing in the money and leaving the turmoil of parenting to his wife (tm). The honour of the family rests on him, but the work in bringing them up and actually providing for them is delegated. The latter should have been to Gina, but... well, that's another question.

While Gina is disgusted by Dax, Robert is wary, unsettled. While Gina is frustrated and stressed over the burden of raising children without any emotional support from her husband, Robert runs away to provide for them without ever needing to think about his first wife's sacrifice and what it left behind. Robert wants a normal life, one where his firstborn is just a bit different, not 'special' and strange and COLA.

Of course, this is a harsh reading of him. Off the top of my head I'm pretty sure Dax was born in 97 or 95? And so in DtD he's, what, 13? In any case post-financial crash and look around at job security over the past couple years. Robert has a lot to juggle with work, Alice and Gina, and the COLA father admin stuff, but the fact is he's let himself neglect Dax to a point where it may be irreperable. He's worked hard for a normal life after the death of his first wife, and Dax is the scar that cannot fade. An outlier. Someone to appease and promise change.

Despite all of this, I don't hate him. I know enough members of my own family who reflect that not-quite-understanding mindset that I can't go and have fictional daddy issues too! (there'd be too many in the cola verse anyway let's be honest) To put this all together, the political context and grief made way for incompabitility between Dax and his father, and there is no way to fix that - only manage, with copious amounts of therapy.

I wish we had gotten to see a more emotional scene where Dax gets to shapeshift in front of Robert: would he have the same fascination as Owen in FtF? Would he recoil in fear? It doesn't matter. We never got that - StS subverted it, and far bigger problems prevented it. Dax had no honour, no pride he could display, and that's that.