#ughhhhhhh fuckdhfggg

[charmac]

Somehow I never really realized that Andrew Friedman and Charlie Day only have a 5 year age difference between them (I assumed it was closer to 10 years), and I realized I've kinda always assumed Uncle Jack was a grown adult when he moved in with the Kellys, when Charlie was a kid (perhaps incorrectly?)

Is Uncle Jack supposed to be canonically significantly older than Andrew Friedman is? Or is he actually cast to his age and supposed to be in his early thirties in Season 1? (I don't think there's an actual answer here, they don't age him in the script or discuss it in the TASP episode.)

But I'm wondering: do you guys automatically assume Uncle Jack is significantly older than Charlie? Or am I alone in just, like, ignoring the actor's actual age and defaulting him to, more or less, looking as he did in Season 1 when Charlie was a kid?

We don't really know the circumstances of Jack originally moving in with Bonnie and Charlie, but now realising their age difference, Jack actually being fairly young when he moved in with them almost, upsettingly, makes more sense than him being a grown adult at the time:

Bonnie taking in her much younger, teen brother (in some absence of her parents being able to care for him, or even paying her to take care of him instead) and sticking him in her son's room would logically make way more sense than if he were a grown man at the time. In many ways, she would see these acts as good deeds: becoming a caretaker to her brother and giving her son a pseudo-brother (who seemed to be happy to love and protect him), which would almost explain why she cannot accept (or even fathom) that this instead resulted in inflicting extreme trauma on her son.

Similarly, the closer age difference between Jack and Charlie would account more for Bonnie being able to turn a blind eye/take Uncle Jack's side when it comes to the "wrestling" comments. If Jack was a grown adult, it's hard not to not raise an eyebrow at, but you would almost expect that a teenage boy would be rowdy with his nephew, and that they would playfight, if not actual fight, quite often while sharing a small space. Conceivably, Bonnie really wouldn't have stopped to question the relationship between Jack and Charlie at the time if he was her displaced teen brother, as opposed to her strange adult brother.