#this is way less coherent than the jester herself post but I did take out some weird digressions

[utilitycaster]

I fully agree with your Jester Growth Opinions and unsurprisingly I'm very interested in hearing about your thoughts on Jester and Essek as narrative foils

Sure! Honestly I feel someone, and I think it may have been you, made the point that Jester's morality is "you can be evil as long as you're not evil to me/consequences don't really matter as long as our friends are okay" and Essek's episode 97-99 morality was like "I'm not...not evil yet, per se, but I feel terrible about being evil to you" which is what got me thinking about their characters more generally. It's definitely less pronounced and very different from the Caleb and Essek parallels - it's a lot more complementary than the same, I guess?

Anyway, they're both initially very much defined by two things, for me: a pretty lax attitude towards the consequences of their fairly self-interested actions (in Jester's case, it's much more a pampered only child behavior, vs. Essek's outright selfishness), and very, very deep need to appear as though they know what's going on and having the situation under control

It's funny because I think most people's obvious reference for "character who wants you to think it's all under control" is often, well, kind of cold, remote, and arrogant like our first impressions of Essek . Jester is a pretty unique portrayal of like, the popular girl who is in way over her head, because usually stories about that archetype either focus one very specific and somewhat external reason why she's in over her head and don't really explore the character beyond that (think like, after school specials) or else they make her extremely bitchy. You rarely get that portrayal in which she's sweet and nice because she's equally terrified of being a disappointment and being disappointed, and also she's just genuinely friendly, even though it feels very real.

It's also funny because despite that shared attitude of "I will do things I deem important to me and not really think through the consequences for anyone outside my small circle, if that" (which in Jester's case is still usually, well, chaotic but morally pretty neutral at worst vs. Essek providing his country an excuse to bring low-level hostilities to a flash point), both have this very real attitude of "only I can [spread the word of the traveler properly/handle the true powers of the Luxon]", like, there is one consequence they do care about and don't trust anyone else to bring about properly, but it's only one.

In the end we see Jester's priorities shift and facade fall away in real-time, and she gets a pretty clear priority shift in the form of "okay you've found your dad and it turns out your god does not want his word spread at all, so uh...what do you, Jester Lavorre, actually want to do" but we kind of only get the jump for Essek from "I feel terrible about hurting my friends" to "if it is important to you than it is important to me" (vs. Jester who I think truly internalizes that sense of responsibility - she doesn't need it to be important to others to be important to her) and we don't really find out what his new goals may be other than Normal Wizard Curiosity. On the other hand, Essek's facade is sort of just ripped off in episode 97. Jester and Essek are great to contrast because first, Jester starts off in a much different place morally (and in terms of power), and second, Essek, sort of by default as an NPC, doesn't get quite the same agency and development and so he speedruns half of it against his will, and is still in the middle of the other half.

(fwiw I also think this is why it makes sense they end up with people with respectively similar attitudes towards The Facade - you need someone who can recognize it- but who start the story already extremely focused on consequences and end up sort of meeting said people in the middle)