#also sorry for answering both your questions in a row at uhhh. 2:30 am. my bad homie

[planet4546b]

hi i would like to hear more about ur recent jackie revelation. how is their new origin different from what u were working with before? in what ways does it make things simpler? does it make anything else more complicated? etc etc as u please

ehehe jackie <3

spoilers ahead if thats something you care about. personally i dont give a fuck bc i <3 dramatic irony

idk how much of jackie's backstory i've talked about so sorry if i've said this before but just for clarity's sake: jackie is from a parallel dimension to the one we're in (one of many names for this dimension would be wave0, jackies would be from wave8 or wave15 or something). in their dimension, a group also tried to stop the coming end of the world, and jackie was involved in this group but bailed towards the end of their journey bc they were bitter and selfish. they abandoned their world for ours and their world was completely destroyed as a result.

all of that is completely the same!! the thing that's different is the group they were traveling with.

in the old version, they were traveling with a bunch of (essentially) random people. all of the people in the group were important to them, they got along and were friends, etc etc, but they just had absolutely no relevance to the story at large because theyre all dead and because jackie's relationship with their past is complicated in a way that means they don't want to talk about them. like i never even had names for these guys (i have a lineup of them somewhere from an unfinished jackie amv, but those were all on the spot designs hgjlkdsa)

(sidebar: this is all a holdover from the last version of the story, ladybird - jackie's backstory in s/n was lifted almost entirely from their lb one, just because it happened to work, and because jackie is a character i tend not to focus on i hadn't thought a ton about it until recently so it was just sorta one of the last remnants of that old version that needed to be cleared out)

in this version, jackie was traveling with alternate versions of sam, mel and emily. this is much more of a typical 'i came from a slightly different timeline' type of thing, but i really like the complexity it adds to all of the relationships on the board - it means jackie has a reason to try to save these people (they've watched them die before), they have an odd sort of familiarity with everyone that no one can quite figure out, they keep looking at these people and seeing someone else. i already made you read my whole essay on jackie and samira and adding to that the fact that every time jackie looks at sam it's a familiar face?? that its someone they personally doomed? whew.

AND its about how everything is always doomed. its about jackie coming from a doomed world and how they think 'well if i had stayed maybe we would have been able to stop this' and that objectively not being true - it's always going to fail, no matter the universe - and then they die in this universe before they can ever realize just how doomed everything is. like is it better or worse to die with a little bit of hope left????

so overall it makes the backstory more simple (which follows my own internal rule for backstories) but makes character relationships and character fate more complex + more tragic and you know i LOVE a complex character relationship. it's gonna take a bit of work to get it to totally work with everything else in the story, so there's a small chance i'll change my mind if it just doesnt gel right, but i REALLY like it for now. picking up jackie and rattling them around!!!!