#is the Laura Bailey D&D Trademark

[c-is-for-circinate]

STOP! MAKING! ME!! CRY!!! (I say, continuing to seek out your meta posts.) Jester already makes me want to cry every time I think about her too hard; that post about her and Nott watching Marion & Luke made tears well. I gotta say, I'd have suspected Luke to be a breeze to take care of compared to trying to keep JESTER out of trouble her whole life?

NEVER!  YOU CAN’T STOP ME!  NOBODY CAN!

Jester is Always Okay.  Which sent me into a three-paragraph Jester vs Vex compare/contrast, one moment, let me go parenthetical for a bit...

(So, Jester and Vex are both absolutely the people in their parties who are Always Fine, Really, and it’s one of the few things they really have in common.  They’ve both got pretty remarkably decent boundaries about not trying too hard to fix the people around them, but they also very much operate from a place of swallowing down and sidelining their own problems so that all the energy and attention in the group can go to somebody else’s.  And with Vex, it’s so fucking obvious how much of that came as a mix of A) emotional abuse/neglect in Syngorn, and B) being Vax’s sister while he carried his bleeding, broken heart on his sleeve for so many years, but it begs a lot of questions with Jester.  A lot of questions.

Because right, there’s a very intricate balance between healthy and unhealthy here, and it’s super fascinating and super easy to overlook when they’re both surrounded by people who are so much louder with all of their problems.  'I’m actively choosing to be positive, to focus on growth and things I like, to seek out fun or pleasurable experiences because I want and deserve to enjoy life and there are plenty of things in life worth enjoying’ is such a thing!  And it’s not always clear where that shades into ‘repressing and avoiding bad feelings’!  Vex was mostly okay for a lot of Campaign 1, in large part because she was old enough, and had gone through enough seriously bad shit, that she’d managed to work even some of the repression/avoidance into relatively sustainable habits.  She had a relationship with her own feelings that worked for her, even if it came off as selfish or greedy sometimes, and the few times she did allow herself to get feelings all over somebody else, Percy was there to commiserate and be actively grateful for the evidence that Vex was also kind of flawed and broken, rather than put out by her need for emotional support.

Jester makes me very nervous, on the other hand, because she doesn’t really have that.  She is still so young, and so new at dealing with so many different kinds of misery.  She doesn’t have a bear to cry on, or a brother who tries his best to validate her feelings when he’s not too busy drowning in his own, or a boyfriend who’s happy to Drama all his insides out as an instructive demonstration or gesture of support.  The only two people Jester had, for her entire childhood, were her mother and the Traveller, who consistently praised her for being a delightful beam of sunshine and chaos to make them smile.  The guy she’s got her sights set on right now keeps himself locked down so tightly that it’s been sixty-odd episodes and half the party doesn’t even know his real accent.  The Nein repress, a lot, right across the board, and the things they repress consistently bubble up and boil over and clash against each other and then get worked on or shoved right back down again.  And Jester is so good at staying happy, and they all value her so much for that.

I am scared of what happens if and when Jester explodes, but I’m actually more nervous about what happens if she doesn’t, because there’s only so much a person can hold in before it hollows them right out inside.)

Which is to say that I, too, occasionally want to cry about Jester, sometimes on only vaguely-related tangents.  At least you’re in company there?

And yes, I do suspect trying to raise Jester must’ve been a handful and a half.  If nothing else, Luke is much smaller, doesn’t come with built-in Thaumaturgy, probably isn’t playing with a chaos god whenever he’s not being watched, and still has his relatively responsible dad around all the time.  

...on the other hand, baby Jester wasn’t also being co-parented by most of the Mighty Nein.  I feel like, looking back on Kiri, we probably shouldn’t discount their collective influence.  Or their ability to provide small children with very sharp knives.