#that you'd go against your newfound ideals and risk your life for it

[aceredshirt13]

So my buddy @oshawolt and I have watched the first two episodes of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, and by far the funniest part about the show is that its complete inability to give teenaged Indy anything like a concrete logical reason to enlist in WWI results in it reading like Indy is willing to go against his friends, his family, his loved ones, all logic, and a significant number of his moral codes, solely because his bestie T. E. Lawrence signed up for the war, and he apparently values that above literally all other aspects of his life.

Like. Listen. In the first episode, Indy joins Pancho Villa and the Mexican Revolution because he wants to help people, but when a poor villager tells him how even the most just of wars inflict untold suffering on the innocents the soldiers claim to be fighting for, Indy becomes disillusioned with the war effort... only to read a letter + photograph he keeps with him from Lawrence, who says he's joining the war effort in Arabia because he believes it is a cause worth fighting for. And Indy proceeds to immediately forget literally everything he just heard that Mexican villager say and go "fuck it, we ball. and by ball I mean go to the trenches." Indy has decided that the Mexican Revolution "isn't his war", but he's American - WWI in 1916 isn't his war any more than the Mexican Revolution is. So that obviously can't be his justification??

Now, ostensibly he goes because his friend Remy, a Belgian guy he met in Mexico who was fighting for the revolution after his family was killed, decides to go back to Belgium and fight in his own homeland's war instead of the Mexican one. In fact, in the upcoming episodes, he and Remy are together quite a lot. But during the first episode set in Mexico, we are never given to believe that he and Indy are particularly close - they seem like acquaintances at best. Not much time is shown of them together, and we hoped that in the second episode, when the two of them disembark in London and enlist in the Belgian Army, we'd get some of that good old intergenerational friendship energy and really see why Indy, despite not necessarily believing in this war, might want to go to support his friend in Belgium, and his more distant friend in the Middle East.

Nah. Remy ditches Indy for a hot widow almost immediately, and for the entire rest of the episode his ass is GONE. He literally doesn't show up again except to give Indy the papers saying it's time to go to the army, and to be like "oh by the way I'm married now!" at the train station. Bro apparently does not hang out with Indy or tell him anything. Which would be understandable if they were acquaintances, but like??? Aren't they meant to be so close as friends that Indy would up and fight a war with this guy???

Meanwhile, Indy follows a cute girl to a suffragette meeting, they become best friends on the virtue of "speaking an unbelievably unrealistic number of languages" and "having literally identical backstories" (to the point where we found ourselves wishing she'd been Indiana Jones in this show instead, given that she's apparently just his cooler genderbent version played by someone who can act better), meet and get along with his tutor since childhood (who apparently is close enough with Indy now not to want him to enlist in the Army and endanger himself, despite the fact that she disliked Indy so much as a child and allowed him in so many absurdly dangerous situations that we became convinced she was deliberately trying to get him killed in a way that looked like an accident), and eventually fall in love. All through this, Indy helps with the women's suffrage movement, lends money to a poor woman and her children, watches his friend/girlfriend throw a dessert at Winston Churchill (who is in this episode for five minutes because Why The Hell Not I Guess), meets multiple people whose loved ones have been killed in the war, and is told by an older suffragette that one day of the good work he's put in today is worth one year of time in the trenches. At one point, while visiting the girl's family, he is asked why he joined the war effort, and gives an unbelievably vague and evasive answer that all but proves he doesn't even know why. And in the end, he wants to ask the girl to marry him, but she says no - partially because of the implication that she doesn't know him quite well enough to be willing to sign her rights away, and partially because she doesn't know if after the war they'll be two different people.

So let's look at the facts. Here in London, he has friends, family, someone he loves who he could spend a life with and eventually marry after they've established themselves, and a purpose he enjoys with clear, positive results. Sure, he's already signed up for the Belgian Army, but he enlisted under a half-assed fake name that couldn't possibly be traced. He scarcely ever sees Remy - he seems to owe him nothing, and owe his country no allegiance. Why not just... not go when his number is up? What reason on Earth could he have to do anything but stay?

So naturally, he just. He just fucking goes! For no conceivable reason - no conceivable reason other than that Lawrence is also in the war!

Indy's been friends with Lawrence since they met when Lawrence was 20 and Indy was a nine-year-old kid who couldn't act very well - Lawrence asked him to call him "Ned", and he still does (which, for the record, Indy's tutor, who has literally known Lawrence longer than Indy has and is on good terms with him, does not. Apparently she didn't get the nicknaming permission. Rip). Still does, because the only time Indy is able to give a concrete answer about anything in the war is when said tutor angrily asks him why he's enlisted, and he says that "Ned" is in the war! He knows this because apparently Lawrence actually kept his promise to write to him, and they've been writing letters and sending stuff to each other since Indy was a child! And - judging by every other thing in his life suggesting otherwise - Indy values the actions of his pen pal more than anyone else's opinions, his friends and love life, and his own safety and happiness! That doesn't seem like a normal way to react to the actions of a guy you only knew in-person for a few days as a child!

Unless...

...

...In conclusion, world-famous fictional film character Indiana Jones would not have become the person he is if it hadn't been for his gay little crush on real human man T. E. Lawrence.