#that we have to cling onto love and udnerstanding and humanity | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

linkspooky · 6 years

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Ahhh, Pandora Hearts is one of your favorites? I still love you even more 😍 so, what are your thoughts about Jack? At first, I liked him, but After all he did... I think he just lose himself in lonliness, so I don‘t know. I just can‘t bring myself to hate him

Alright, it’s 3 am. Let’s explain the giant twist that the entire manga of Pandora Hearts is based around. Starting with the beginning, Jack is introduced to us as somebody who has had his entire identity ironed away slowly by his mother forcing the image of his father onto him.

Jack says Lacie was the start of his identity problems at first, but that is what we call a blantant lie, Lacie is the thing Jack chose to cling to in order to keep going. I’m going to use trope terms to explain this in order to make it easier to understand. Lacie is Jack’s manic pixie dream girl. She’s this carefree girl who seems to have no problems of her own and suddenly takes an interest in his life, seems to possess a wisdom he doesn’t have for navigating the world, seems to exist to give him companionship and guidance, and then disappears suddenly from his life before he can ever develop enough to see her as a human being.

It’s just a metaphor I don’t think Jun Mochizuki was specifically thinking of this trope, I’m just using it to explain the way that Jack perceives Lacie. Lacie is not at all a person in his mind, she is something that gives him identity and meaning and a reason to live onwards after his mother completely eroded away any chance he had to make an identity for himself by forcing the image of his father over him. Jack was constantly compared to his father, loved because he resembled his father, beaten because he resembled his father but never regarded as an individual.

Jack clinging to Lacie is like a baby duck imprinting on it’s mother, he does it because she’s the first person to ever look at him. A lot of Pandora Hearts is thematically about the identity we find in the other people around us. This is why Jack is going to be compared unfavorably to Oz (his ultimate foil) later, but we’re not quite there yet.

Lacie to Jack is an excuse to keep living, the one he needed at his lowest point. The problem is that after that point Jack never once tried to find anything else besides Lacie. He also traumatized himself a whole bunch in the pursuit, so you know write that down.

This is also, all advice that Lacie gave him under the pretense that she is some kind of wise person with special insight into his life because she suddenly cares so much about him so of course he follows it because it’s the only guidance he has.

So when I say it’s traumatic I mean, Jack lived through traumatizing things that dehumanized him as a person, including selling his body for money. Sex work is not dehumanizing of course, but it is when you are a teenager which is the implication that we are given. So, Jack already has no sense of identity, he finds one in Lacie kind of but pursuing it means walking down a road of thorns where he has to hurt and hurt himself over again and dehumanize himself, inflicting all of this trauma for the sake of continuing to live.

Basically repeated trauma, most of it which Jack threw himself into because he thought he had to in order to have a reason to continue living completely eroded away every sense of identity he had as a person.

Then when Jack finally meets Lacie his end goal, he can’t get close to her. Because once again it’s not really about Lacie. Jack doesn’t even love Lacie that much, just the idea of her because it’s a mechanism to keep him going and give him a reason to live because he’s an unwanted bastard who was never loved by his mother yadda yadda.

That’s why he’s so happy when he admits that Lacie doesn’t know him, or that she never really cared about the short time they were together, and he was basically like finding a stray cat on the side of the road that she found cute. If Lacie doesn’t care about him, then his distance can be maintained and he can still continue to see her as an object.

Even though Lacie was his end goal destination, Jack would never have allowed himself to love Lacie, even if tragedy had not intervened and killed Lacie prematurely. This is because the Lacie that Jack loves is entirely an idea in his head, and if he were to get close to and learn about the real Lacie then that idea that he needs to cling to for his very reason to keep living would disappear.

Another thing that’s important to remember is not only does Jack have no sense of identity, he also loathes himself. He’s terrified to get close to Lacie, but also any mention of his own identity completely unnerves him and throws him off.

So Jack’s entire character up to this point is trying to maintain a delicate balance so he can have a comfortable distance from both, from himself and from Lacie. To maintain that he has to have zero self reflection at all, and not look to Lacie either but the Lacie in his head.

Like this is again partially a symptom of the trauma that Jack had to undergo just to survive. Lacie reaching out to him is seen as the same as the many other people who reached out to him to violate him. Yet, it’s the only human contact he knows.

In the same chapter we see Lacie embrace him, we also see the red queen embrace him in much the same manner. Jack has to reconcile both of these touches, but they are irreoncilable so again his mind goes to the delicate balancing act.

An extremely delicate balancing act that’s all tied around Lacie.

So of course, when Lacie disappears the balancing act topples and Jack loses his reason to live that he had constructed for himself. He starts becoming like a living death, until Glen the former decides to play around with him a little bit and gives him a pet project.

Because Jack is desperate, he’ll look anywhere for a reason to live except himself, because his number one fear is that his mother was right, that everyone was right and that he was empty and worthless.

Then what do we learn at the same time as this flashback is revealed. That Oz was never a person to begin with, just a rabbit that gained a small amount of sentience and was turned into a chain.

Oz and Jack are foils. They are both people without strong central identities, Oz because he was an inanimate object, and Jack because he was a person who through abuse and traumatic circumstance lost his.

Jack is ultimately a coward who can’t face himself though, and part of the reason why is because his friends around him failed to udnerstand him or connect with him, and part of the reason is Jack himself failed to understand himself or make himself possible to understand by others.

It’s intersting to me, Lacie the person Jack was the most distant from because she only ever existed as an idea in his head understood Jack a lot more then Glen ever did, even though Glen is the one who wanted to understand him and genuinely cared about Jack to the point where he let himself be blind to his flaws. Ultimately probably because Lacie was much more of a fatalist, but after losing Lacie Glen just wanted to have one nice thing ™.

So finally we reach Jack’s own explanation for himself, which is a truncated version of this whole post.

I told too many lies and lost sight of myself, but it’s not just that. Jack also refused to face others honestly. He only ever showed Glen a perfectly practiced image to get close to him, he only pursued Lacie as an image he had in his head. Jack could not find himself, because he did not engage at all with others except in really indirect and symbolic ways.

Jack doesn’t love Lacie, but she is an excuse for him to continue living without having to face himself. Which is why ultimately at the end Jack resolves himself with what he could have done all along to move on from Lacie.

He admits to his own pathetic self. What he should have done from the start, but went through time loops and world’s worth of hoops in order to escape himself. Like, Jack whines about losing himself but ultimately Jack is also the person who decided to throw himself away and that he couldn’t face himself.

When he’s honest, he’s finally seen again, and finally touched. Except this time when he’s touched it’s not shown with the same kind of hands that everybody else whose exploited him touched him with.

One genuine touch, because she finally gets to see his true self, and in that moment of her seeing him, Jack finally refinds himself as well.

Which is what Oz did already. He’s able to survive being told that he’s literally just an inanimate object and find an identity in that because he was always trying his best to honestly face his friends and those around him. Our identity lies in the people around us, if only Jack had learned that sooner he wouldn’tve almost destroyed the world twice in his wild goose chase to find himself.

#metasks #meta #pandora hearts #jack vessalius #Anonymous #ph meta

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