the hijinks of my life
5 posts
the braincell fizzles
context under cut
Unfortunately I am bias and rogue is my favorite thing ever done to Jay ever. I’ve been waiting for villain Jay for so long don’t play
i’m actually sick thinking of the ninja and jay right now . they probably spent summers together . winters . springs. just growing up together
spent years in the kitchen together making pizza or joking around or having movie nights, literally maturing together and the more the world needs them the more the board games collect dust and the dartboard behind lloyd’s door is forgotten about. the ninja grew up together and now jays gone, gone somewhere none of them can fix and no one knows how to fix and jay quite literally. can’t remember his childhood or how he would always laugh when kai rage quit playing musical chairs, or how they said zane wasn’t allowed to play blackjack anymore, or how many sugars kai was allowed in his drink, or how they all piled up as kids into someone’s room daring each other to drink the wine bottle but refusing to let little lloyd.
doesn’t remember working as a delivery boy to try to make ends meet, or kai working as a party boy or zane as a chef or cole as a guard or nya at the autobody shop. doesnt remember saying goodbye to the things he loves and loved and instead now hes just there, doesn’t know how to do anything but extreme loyalty and bites people because hes been beaten and used and everyone’s tearing into him for it and he wasted his life away working a 9-5 job.
OH ANON THIS IS NOT AN ASK THIS IS A FUCKING EULOGY!!!!!!!! you cannot just SEND THIS TO ME. not when i’m already emotionally compromised. not when rogue jay is sitting there quietly grieving a life he doesn’t remember while everyone else has the AUDACITY to miss him out loud
THIS IS WHY I KEEP GOING BACK AND FORTH ON THE MEMORY THING. because yes on one hand it would emotionally destroy him to remember all the tragedies they’ve been through. it’ll be every moment of loss and pain and heartbreak hitting him like a truck all at once.
BUT ON THE OTHER HAND????
they LIVED. they had joy. they had summers and board games and movie nights and inside jokes and . so much love. they were stupid and close and young and they grew up together😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭
and now he’s just Alone. he deserves to remember the good. he deserves to choose what he holds onto
augh. jay arc.
OK analysis time! Matt said that Marcy's affection towards Sasha was more surface level than Anne's, which was described as "complicated." People might assume that this means that Marcy's affection for Sasha wasn't deep, or that their relationship wasn't.
If we're being honest here they weren't presented as having depth to their relationship so much as having acts and services. They're on the level with each other and can interpret each other's needs for a plan but they are lacking somehow when it comes to each other's emotional needs. This is something Darcy touches upon when they say they might not have ever been friends at all, and might be a core conflict between Sasha and Marcy. It's also a good example of why Anne is the actual Heart of their friendship. She connects and makes their dynamic deeper. While Marcy is desperate to keep people together and hates being alone, she admits she lacks a core understanding of emotional intelligence and this is something she admires in Anne. Marcy treats herself as a tool and mostly makes friends by doing things for them and complimenting them. She's kind of the perfect POV character for a journal that gives lore specifically because she's very attentive to things like strengths and weaknesses and team synergy, but isn't necessarily attuned to emotional intelligence. She kind of blocks herself off from feeling certain things too keenly or doubting herself, and masks it using this peppy overachiever persona.
Maybe if Marcy were more emotionally self aware, she would have been even more openly hurt by how dismissive Sasha is of her interests (even though Sasha clearly does like nerdy things), or she would have noticed that her friends don't really care for RP (etc). But in the series what we see is a Marcy so afraid of being left alone that she'll hide every emotion and every hurt aside from what she thinks will make people stay - she delivers compliments, improves infrastructure, says all the right things to earn trust. She's a great twist antagonist! Admitting that her friends don't or can't reciprocate her interests or desires is important to her arc, because it serves as a lesson to her that friendship is more than just doing things together or doing things for each other. Marcy and the others aren't just tools in schemes and plans.
We hear from Anna that Sasha has difficulty knowing when to bring other people to the table, so for someone like Marcy who thinks that she needs to earn everything through acts/upgrades, it makes sense that their relationship remained very surface level. Neither of them pushes the other to see things differently, while Anne does. Anne can acknowledge where people hurt and hurt her, and can acknowledge that this doesn't mean they aren't friends or significant to each other. Anne notes the complexity! It's why she's so compelling.
So, Marcy acknowledging how hurt she is that her friends don't want to do what she wants is significant because she also says, "I believe in you." Love goes beyond the stuff we do for each other. There's a bit of faith, too. What she did isn't right either. Being hurt isn't an excuse.
Darcy isn't just "evil Marcy," the Core is also every temptation for Marcy. Escapism, distraction, perfect friends who go on quests with her whenever she wants. There's a darkness to this kind of insecure attachment that Darcy reveals. Fear of inadequacy and irrelevance. Fear of loss. Fear of change. Fear of what is deeper than skin deep. Maybe my friends will forget me if I move. Maybe I'm just their nerd, just like Sasha's just cool. So their relationship isn't surface level to us, because this nuance is communicated to us through the subtleties of the show's execution. It's a really well acted, well boarded, well written show with fantastic music! It's really amazing!
Sasharcy IS very complicated! But it's complicated because they never dig deeper with each other until it's too late. It's also why it's significant that Sasha is the one to ask, "Can we save this friendship?"
Why is friendship with Marcy so easy? Is it because they got along and there's mutuality here, or is it because they didn't let themselves get any deeper than what was easy? It's so easy for them to just be the controller and the executor.
Forgiveness is hard. Forgiveness takes time. It takes a lot of thought, discussion, and work. Friendship in the long term, deep enough to mean something and hurt when it's gone, is similar. It's not just sentimentality and acts of appeasement.
aaaaand that's what i think matt meant when he was like "marcy's affection for sasha was kind of surface level"! I will admit I was like noooo Matt noooo don't say it was surface level whyyyy but like i had time to think abt it so i'm fine now lol lmk ur thoughts💙
smth i didn't add to my original tweet thread is that i DO find it interesting that marcy appears to specifically empathize with the experience of lonely people who grow up a certain way or doing things a certain way to protect themselves from loneliness. she seems to have an intuitive understanding of people fitting into groups via niches, but is drawn to people who already seem like outcasts as opposed to being able to identify it when someone is surrounded by people they seem to easily connect with. Marcy has this fundamentally insecure and lonely viewpoint that makes her very interesting to read and analyze, and I suspect it also contributes to her popularity. I mean, clearly *I* love her