I expect crickets

[filenotch]

Name any story I've written, and any character in it, canon or OC. I'll tell you three things about that character that I didn't put in the story. One request per person

From yin_again, who stole it from someone else.

Comments

[synecdochic]

I think, actually, that Jack is incredibly gifted, when it comes to empathy-for-others, and has had to force himself to tamp that down -- empathy being an active hindrance, in his line of work, for the most part. Jack does display a stunning grasp of people from time to time. He also displays a stunning level of insensitivity. I think he had to make himself learn to forget that other people are people, for the most part, because a well-developed sense of empathy is an active detriment to a career soldier (at least one whose role involves killing people as much as Jack's clearly has).

For all that he's totally unwilling to do anything in the way of self-examination or talking about his feelings, he seems to understand others' pretty well, and it's clear that he's a very well-respected leader; that kind of cult-of-personality leadership often comes from others feeling like the leader understands them, and can provide them the right reassurance at the right time, after all ...

I always thought Jack was incredibly interpersonally gifted, and had to learn (in a lot of ways) to not listen to it. To me, a lot of what he had to learn (what Cam/Cammie had to teach him) as JD is how to get over that shutting-out. Learning something you never had to begin with is hard, but learning to listen to something you actively made yourself stop paying attention to and block out, well, that's even harder.

[filenotch]

Yep. You're right.

[synecdochic]

I've always thought it was one of his truest tragedies, really. And so much of JD -- in whatever incarnation -- is my way of trying to show all the ways in which he might have learned how to get past it ...

(And it's so interesting to see which of the ways he succeeds, and which ways he fails, in each universe, because they're all different. Not that one's better than the other. Just different.)