#ted lasso is jamie’s dad

[caslutz]

i don’t talk about jamie and ted enough and that’s like a crime. so here’s what i’m thinking. jamie is dyslexic, we all know that, but i’m not sure that jamie actually knew that, which makes sense. i imagine he had minimal schooling, getting recruited to the academy so young and it’s not like anyone there cared, so jamie just grew up thinking he was stupid for not being able to read and write as well as others. that’s why, when ted gives him the book he gets almost offended and throws it in the trash, acting like it’s stupid, but really is just scared someone might find out he struggles with books, so he plays it off. ted of course, notices this but doesn’t have time to address it before jamie is sent back to man city. when jamie comes back, ted does finally talk to jamie about it and because jamie feels more comfortable around ted at this point, he tells him about his struggles and the real reason he tossed that book. ted assures him that is not his fault, and does not make him stupid, which honestly is news to jamie. so instead of putting jamie down like every other adult authority figure has, ted offers to help jamie instead. jamie is a bit hesitant but accepts, so ted holds sessions in his office with his whiteboard and eventually gets beard in on it too so that they can help jamie read and comprehend what he’s reading!! eventually i feel like this could even turn into a team thing, isaac joining in and anyone else who wants to help/learn. oh my gosh they’re such a family <3

(maybe some royjamie with this hc later idk)

[chaoticwhoknows]

do you guys ever think about jamie tartt and sam obisanya bc i do. constantly. they take up so much room in my brain. going from “no one in my entire career had made me feel worse about myself than jamie did” to sam and jamie being comfortable enough to constantly tease each other like siblings and swarm each other during goal celebrations and SAM being one of the first people (along with roy) who we see being concerned about jamie in mom city. JAMIE WEARING SAM’S NUMBER WHEN HE PLAYED FOR ENGLAND. season 3 jamie and sam are so… just so… they’re soooooooo!!! and season 2 jamie and sam are like hey what if i reached out to you through a series of seemingly small gestures in very vulnerable moments of yours bc i don’t know how to properly show that i care about you given the history between us until eventually we were just completely in sync with each other? what then?

and don’t even get me started on the parallels between them. ladies and gentlemen THE PARALLELS. the JUXTAPOSITIONS. the OTHER WORDS. their relationships with their fathers alone is so much to unpack. them cutting to JAMIE’S reaction when ola walked in and hugged sam in the locker room separately from the reaction of the rest of the team. the creators knew what they were doing with that

[expectopatronum-spell]

How is no one talking about Jamie’s dad right now??

In a show that’s ostensibly about forgiveness, there were two notable exceptions until s03s10: Rupert (aka The Devil) and James Tartt Sr. (aka that abusive piece of shit). And we were OK with those exceptions, because their actions really do seem unforgivable.

But then the show takes “everyone deserves a second chance” to an extreme, because they really mean EVERYONE.

Not just the woman who hired to as an elaborate scheme and set up up for failure.

Not just the man who wrote an article outing your mental health issues to the world.

Not just the man who shared said mental health issues with a journalist in the first place.

Not just the man who stole your car after you took him in.

But also the serial cheater who bought a whole ass football club just to antagonize his ex wife. If he is willing to apologize and work on himself, he deserves forgiveness. Doesn’t mean Rebecca has to take him back, but they both get to live their lives without hatred weighing them down.

And also the abusive father who was still hurting his son as recently as last year. Now, let me be clear on this, Jamie doesn’t EVER have to repair his relationship with his dad. Even if his dad is clearly getting the help he needs and comes out of that facility a changed man. But he can let go over his hatred and they can both move on.

Forgiveness doesn’t mean taking back the person who hurt you (although it does allow that). It means setting you both free of that hurt.

[blusandbirds]

i’m thinking about sam naming his passion project after his father and jamie’s father naming jamie after himself

[kvetchinglyneurotic]

it occurs to me that jamie's conversation with ted at the pub in 2x02 might be the first time he talks about his dad with someone who already knows that james is abusive (with the possible exception of georgie). which means that the first time he hears an outside perspective on the situation, it's ted telling him that his dad's abuse is what made him great

[korkiekenobiconfirmed]

[tuesdayisfordancing]

Fully believe that Jamie’s feelings about his mum’s boyfriend/husband Simon went from “I’ll kill you” to “I’d kill for you” with zero intermediate steps, and also that he didn’t actually say anything about it when his attitude changed, leaving his mum and Simon to observe his behavior and go “He… seems okay with you now? He hasn’t tried to murder you with his eyes in a while and he offered to clean up the kitchen after you baked…” Obviously his mum knows him pretty well and would quickly realize, but it’s still a wild moment of adjustment.

[elloras]

I'd never seen this interview before and I'm very emotional about it

[footballshowrot]

having a normal one👍

[itsjustpoopeh]

one of the things that irritates me the most* about ted's "tough dads make you better" and jamie's "thank you fuck you" thing is that... objectively it's not true. like. jamie and his dad were zero-contact for over a year and in that time jamie turned into the best player he's ever been, complying with precisely none of his dad's ignorant demands

correlation is not causation and all but preliminarily the data suggests that jamie's dad held him back is what i'm saying

(this is not the thing that irritates me the most that would be the whole toxic forgiveness thing)

[jatersade]

also I loved the parallel between 2.08 Jamie breaking down in a locker room because of his dad and crying in Roy’s arms and 3.07 Sam breaking down in the locker room and running into his dad’s arms to cry. and by ‘I loved it’ I mean

[jopzer]

happy mother's day to the realest to ever do it 🙏🏼

[jamiesfootball]

Anyways. Back before season three aired, my working theory for What Ted's Deal was - with his advice to Jamie, with the panic attacks that were layered Jamie and his son - that it would turn out that his late father had also been abusive, but that with his father's death Ted had never processed it.

Obviously the show didn't go that route, but in general these were the points that I was daisy-chaining together to build something of a narrative flow:

Ted preaches kindness and positivity but also struggles with his own repressed anger and inability to be direct in what he wants. He continually, pathologically, puts people before himself, to the point that it's becoming a breaking point in his marriage.

Ted repeatedly praises 'women' for being the more emotionally intelligent of the genders. He looks at toxic masculinity as not just a thing to be examined and overcome, but the root of why men struggle.

He himself is a product of the same toxic male behavior, and while he tries to lead by example as an individual, there's a part of that culture that he almost sees as... natural? Like a foregone conclusion. A lot of his methods for dealing with the team in season one happen within the same social boundaries he decries. If he can get Roy to step up, if he can get Roy and Jamie to stop fighting and call a truce, then everything else will fall in place, because men follow a hierarchical structure. This is How Locker Rooms Work, and-

I always go back to Jamie's first, open receptiveness to Ted's 'one in eleven' speech as the first sign that Ted doesn't know how to deal with things directly. This scene reads as Ted being very taken aback by Jamie's willingness to listen. It has shades of their later scene at the Crown & Anchor in it, with Ted being the one who pulls away from a conversation that has the ability of getting emotionally direct and real.

Ted's repressed anger. His shouting at Jamie in 1x06 over practice, but also his shouting at Nate when Nate tries to stuff the letter under his hotel room door.

Ted emotionally reaches for the bottle like. A noticeable amount of times. But especially when he's getting divorced.

Every Sunday afternoon Ted's father used to take him to a sports bar. From age of 10 til 16.

Ted's mom is completely incapable of being direct

Ted and his mom never processed or talked about his dad's death

Ted looks devastated when he sees Jamie with his father in the boot room, but ultimately walks away

Ted sends Jamie a token to show he's not alone (Ted soldier)

Next time Jamie tries to talk to Ted at the bar, Jamie opens with addressing the subject directly (the Ted soldier) and Ted deflects. Asks about City. Won't look him in the eye. Doesn't say anything to Jamie admitting he left City to piss off his dad. He just says that line about how sometimes having a tough dad is what makes you better.

He thought he knew what he was doing [about Jamie] but Sam 'went and unsettled it.' Some people aren't lucky enough to have good dads.

Ted welcomes Jamie back but keeps his distance (much more than in season 1).

Ted begins having panic attacks that feature Jamie and his son.

Ted admits panic attacks linked directly to his father's death.

So this takes us through season two, and at this point my working theory was what if it turned out that Ted most of Ted's Ted-ness had been an active effort on his own part to become something less like his own father? It would explain his disdain for male-coded behaviors while also explaining why he seems unable to truly break away from them. it would explain his people-pleasing habits (and meeting his mom and knowing she is also allergic to asking for things, I think this could still fit as a trauma response). It would explain his putting women on a pedestal, if he had a bad male role model to begin with. It would explain how his demeanor around Jamie changes so much when they have the 'tough dads' talk turning into something closed off when his body language with Jamie has always been open before (and there's a lovely parallel with how they're both sat at the bar in that shot too). Hell it would add additional weight to that talk if it turned out he was also speaking of himself. His panic attacks would make sense, seeing himself in Jamie but also his son and his own role as a dad.

That, plus Ted being a character we regularly see drinking something harder than wine or beer, usually when he's emotionally stressed. Plus Ted's dad bringing him to a sports bar every Sunday for years, and at a young age too. Plus Jamie's dad being an alcoholic. That's where I thought this was going- I thought it would turn out that the late Lasso had also been an alcoholic and a tough dad. It just seemed the obvious conclustion at the time, to make the Ted & Jamie parallel into a full parallel.

Then you add in the fact that Ted married his college sweetheart and then waited until they were in their thirties before having a kid (In the midwest. Where he definitely would've been pressured about it) and all of this to me added up to a troubled man who struggled with the idea of becoming a father long before he had a son. Someone who spent years creating a facade, pretending (like his mom) that things were okay. Someone who maybe never felt right blaming his dad for any of it, not when it became so clear at the end how much his dad was struggling.

Only to have that facade crumble the second someone else from similar circumstances showed up to challenge it.

His dad was a product of his time, the same way that Ted is a product of his dad, the same way men are just a product of toxic masculinity, and Ted doesn't know how to 'deal' with any of it but he'd thought he'd gotten to the point in life where he had some solutions. Only to find that those solutions didn't work when held up to a mirror.

So yeah. That was my theory. Then season three happened, and I realized that unfortunately my theory had a flaw. See, I was so busy looking for a Watsonian diagnosis that would make Ted's idiosyncrasies make sense, that I completely missed the fact that the problem was Doylist to begin with. The show writers never meant for us to read into all of that, because the show writers themselves didn't see anything contrary, worrisome, or tone-deaf about Ted's behavior. Not from a toxic masculinity standpoint, and certainly not from the standpoint of discussing abuse of a male character.

It's not Ted who dismisses Jamie's dad's abuse. It's the writers. Which unfortunately means, since Ted by extension is the show, that it is Ted. Which is why all of us are left watching scenes like the 'tough dads' scene or the Mom City scene and going-

What the hell, Ted?

[jamietarttsnorthernattitude]

Talking with @jamiesfootball about Jamie's Dad after they made this post and how the poor lad just wants a Dad that isn't the biggest piece of shit and they said if James was even a halfway decent person Jamie would likely be shouting that he was the Best Dad Ever.

Which got me thinking of little baby Jamie (I know he wasn't actually a baby but it's like how a dog is always a puppy) when his Dad came back into his life, and Jamie never cared that much about not having a Dad because Mummy said she loved him enough for two. But still, sometimes he did want a Dad when the other lads had theirs around or when he got made fun of for making a Happy Father's Day Mummy card at school.

But, now his Dad is here. And he's nice and little Jamie probably went around thinking he did have the Best Dad Ever.

And he did.

Until he didn't.

And Jamie spends the rest of his life chasing that high like an addict. Drugs give you dopamine right? And the first time you take a drug, the high your body feels can never be replicated, but drug users are conditioned to try and try again. And that's essentially Jamie, trying again and again for that dopamine hit of having a good Dad.

It's the hope that kills you.

[luthqrs]

“Mmm-mm. No. You ain’t giving him anything. When you choose to do that, you’re giving that to yourself.” TED LASSO | 3x11 'Mom City'

[kvetchinglyneurotic]

Both me and comedian Taylor Tomlinson want to know more about:

5 times Jamie told an alarming story about his past and no one said anything, +1 time they talked about it

This one's in the "one sentence description in my notes" stage of writing, so it's mostly vibes. I got the sense from the way that Jamie talks about his dad that he doesn't necessarily have a great framework for judging how bad some of his past experiences were, and the premise of this fic is that as Jamie gets more comfortable around the team starting in mid-season 2, he'll sometimes casually mention something that happened to him that he clearly thinks was normal but makes whoever he's talking to go ???? that's very bad???? But no one's really sure what, if anything, they're supposed to do in this situation because they do want Jamie to feel like he can talk to them and don't want to freak him out by bringing up his trauma in the middle of otherwise unrelated conversations in case it makes him stop talking about his past at all. So eventually the rest of the team has a meeting about it, Jamie finds out that everyone's talking about him behind his back, freaks out a bit, and temporarily reverts to prick-mode, and then once everyone's done sulking they have team meeting part 2 (this time including Jamie) where everyone gets to experience the mortifying ordeal of expressing their feelings out loud with words.