HOW'S MY DRIVING? + CONTACT

[socntonrers]

HOW'S MY DRIVING?
aka Insert Praise/Crit/Flames Here

Comments are screened*, anon is enabled, and IP tracking is not. So please, don't be shy! My muse list is here, feel free to crit any of my current or previous characters as you see fit.

* but I am not incredibly secretive about my HMD and it's a pain to rescreen everything if I want to reply (

Comments

[socntonrers]

I'd like to start by thanking you for taking the time to write this up for me. The main reason I've been so frustrated over this recent drama is because everyone seems to prefer to take the easier route of flat bashing and anonymous comments on rp!s and the anonmeme. Though I wish the rp!s drama could have been avoided altogether, there's really no way to go back and change that. I appreciate the time and effort you put into this, so I'll try to respond to my best ability (and I apologize in advance for my rambling, it keeps happening).

Even if I never expected Jack to reach this point when I first apped him, a lot of this was planned and expected from the start. The facility definitely isn't a place designed to turn characters into better people. However, the situation it puts them in forces characters to adapt. If Jack continued to act the way he does in canon, he would be getting killed on a weekly basis and constantly get his ass handed to him. He's in a setting where he's powered down significantly most of the time, and despite being a 10 on the power scale most of that comes from his planet-destroying lasers that are unusable in F1. Jack is a violent, sadistic sociopath, but he is not stupid. If killing people all the time is only going to make things more difficult for him, he'll hold back a little.

None of his current relationships started because he wanted to get closer to people. On the contrary, he's done nothing but try to push others away. His relationship with Dave, for example, mostly consists of Dave going out of his way to help Jack, followed by Jack fucking Dave over along with maybe some minor token of gratitude. After months of this he realized that having Dave around was more useful to him, since the kid insisted on helping. From then on things kind of spiralled out of his control. His relationship with John is based on similar circumstances, and it's also notable that both Dave and John were originally taken from a point before they even knew who Jack was. His relationship with Ramona was formed when he was in a more naive state, and when he went back to normal he went back to finding her annoying. It was only because she insisted on being his "friend" that he decided to tolerate her, stating that it was his way of repaying her for helping him and that he wasn't obligated to do anything else for her. His relationship with Patchouli was a business arrangement which was carried out as planned, his lingering attachment to her is because she's incredibly useful as well as vulnerable and easy to take out if she becomes a problem.

One thing I cannot agree on is the interpretation that Jack is a soulless piece of game programming. To say that he has no thoughts beyond his goals in the game, no sympathy or compassion or any of that, it makes for a terribly flat and uninteresting character. Jack doesn't need to be an emotionless machine of death to act the way he does. This would also suggest every other carapace character is as hollow and soulless, even when the exiled characters clearly show an ability to show such emotions. Jack definitely isn't a kind or caring person, but my interpretation is that he is capable of such emotions. He just doesn't really get to use them often.