[ SECRET POST #2754 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2754 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.


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02.


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03.


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04.
[Of Heroes and Villains, by Minikisa]


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05.
[Orange is the New Black]


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06.
[Axis Powers Hetalia]


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07.
[Lone Survivor]


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08.


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09.
[Yasunori Kato, Doomed Megalopolis]


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10.
[Spartacus and Game of Thrones]


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11.


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12. [WARNING for underage sex (and probably dub/noncon too)]



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13. [WARNING for rape]



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14. [WARNING for noncon/dubcon]

[Buffy the Vampire Slayer]


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15. [WARNING for child abuse, rape]























Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 000 secrets from Secret Submission Post #393.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 1 (tw: rape) - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[nyxelestia]

Was her age made clear when she left? Because I thought she was an adult by the time she and Steve left Dimension Z. She certainly looked and acted like an adult.

Also, I got the impression that Jet turning her back on her father had more to do with Ian than with Steve.

[whizzy]

Nope, her age wasn't given until the night in question, when she was like, "amusing anecdote, 23rd birthday, I'm totally legal by the way". Romita Jr is bad at drawing kids/young people. Ian never looks close to the age he's supposed to be, and Jet's first appearance has her looking like she's wearing eyeliner and lipstick. A year later, she's roughly three feet tall -- comparing her to Zola and going on Zola and Steve being drawn about the same size -- and has the body proportions of a small child. But whatever age she was intended to be then plus roughly eleven years is supposed to equal the 23+ somehow.

Her shift in loyalty seemed to be all about Steve. The first rumbling was her confusion when he spared her life, because wtf is mercy. She took a whole nude shower scene to think all about it. She called Ian ignorant when he condemned Zola, and they treated Ian like a brainwashing case, like the stuff he was saying had come straight from Steve. (Which, it had.) Ian was out of the picture when she fought Steve again and did an abrupt 180, something about him explaining the concept of guilt while dangling over a giant pit.

[nyxelestia]

23 - 11 (...or 12? I thought Steve was in there for 12 years?) = 11-12, which is not much older than how she was depicted anyway, and accounting for the fact her age was never made clear and if the artist is someone who isn't always great with kids' proportions, then I'm not sure where everyone is getting "she's a teenager!" from. It looks like a bad case of "we can't draw kids" not "we drew a kid but now need her to be older, whoops".

It's been a while since I read the Dimension Z issues and I don't have them with me to double-check, but assuming what you describe is all there is...then I don't see how her change of heart is because she's attracted to Steve? (Which is kind of the implication I got from your comment and which I was arguing against). It sounds more like the "character indoctrinated with cruelty her whole life experiences support and mercy, and sees unconditional love --> Heel-Face Turn".

[whizzy]

The teenager thing comes from art and story cues that readers were using because it was all they had to go on. Height and proportions make her look like she's maybe 3-4, and the way she behaves and is treated by Zola in her initial appearance seems to agree. She runs to his side for comfort after Steve trashes the lab, and Zola crouches down to let her duck under his arm and hug him. She calls him "papa", which she's ditched for "father" when we see her a year later, even though she doesn't appear to have grown physically at all. (There's two time skips, 1 year and 11 years for the 12 total.) Then, in the book that has the 11 year skip, Jet and Ian are referred to as the two Zola "infants" right in the prologue, implying that they're similar in age.

Having her mention her 23rd birthday on panel immediately before sex did one of two things. It either retconned her age to be older than originally intended, or it acknowledged that readers could be interpreting her age as younger than intended. It's on the creative team in both cases.

If she hadn't been attracted to Steve, she probably wouldn't have listened to him or hauled him out of the pit. She'd experienced love and support from Zola her whole life. The earlier mercy Steve showed her confused and maybe angered her some (compassion being an evil weakness and all). Her about face came after Steve told her that she was blameless in Zola's crimes and that helping Steve would cure her guilt -- which she didn't understand as a concept but found the physiological symptoms distasteful.

[nyxelestia]

I guess I'm still not really seeing where attraction comes into the matter? To me, it still just sounds like she had some conflicting ideologies, with the moral one coming out on top. And Zola's training seemed pretty cruel at times, and I remember getting the strong impression that she was more of a tool for his legacy than his daughter, at least to him - he may have loved her, but it was always conditional, and if she failed him, she would no longer be loved. Steve's love for Ian was unconditional, though, in that even when Ian turned on him, Steve was trying to reach out to Ian, rather than hurt or kill him.

[whizzy]

Jet flipped sides before Ian turned on Steve though, before she got to see that unconditional love. The part that really bugged me was in the cavern where the phrox were being melted alive. Steve is going on about how it's wrong to harm innocents and Jet's guilt -- or the unpleasant sensation she describes that he tells her is guilt -- stems from knowing that it's wrong. But she never makes the connection herself, never acknowledges the phrox who are right there, trapped and waiting to die, with empathy or compassion or anything. She doesn't even try to interact with the phrox woman Steve rescued. It seemed weirdly selfish for a turning point, like all she's learned is that guilt is unpleasant; and Steve claims that helping him save the phrox will cure it.

I don't think Jet would have listened to the same speech from any other denizen of DimZ. I'm not sure she would have hauled up the rope if Steve hadn't been at the end. The attraction and fascination is tied up in Steve being another human, a potential equal where Jet has been uniquely superior her whole life.

[nyxelestia]

I wonder if maybe this is one of those situations where we might be operating on slightly different definitions/connotations of words, because yeah, fascination in the first other human in her life (other than perhaps Ian?) seems obvious, but I don't equate fascination with attraction.

And I kind of think that being a little on the selfish side makes her turning point a little more believable? That was largely how she was raised, so I wouldn't be able to buy her seeing herself as inherently superior and more worthy to everyone around her to suddenly being selfless and compassionate. It makes sense that at first seeing the mindless cruelty without having to experience it herself would tap into her latent empathy that Zola never managed to touch, and that she would learn and grow from that point on.

[whizzy]

I guess. To me, stuff like "polluted urges stirring" and "his physical beauty" and "the unrest his form stirred within me" implies attraction beyond the obvious fascination.

I don't think that acknowledging the cruelty and murder occurring right in front of her would make her suddenly selfless. It would make her aware, and if she was supposed to be discovering some empathy with awareness, it didn't translate to the page. Steve in that scene was strongly empathetic, while Jet ignored the victims -- perhaps because they were just phrox and were beneath her notice.

[nyxelestia]

I don't deny that she was, on the surface, attracted to him - I just don't think her attraction to him actually had anything to do with her changing morality/allegiances.

I think it's possible to feel empathy without discovering/understanding it. I know a lot of things I was raised to think of as acceptable or benign used to piss me off or make me feel bad as a kid, and it wasn't until years later in many cases that I understood why (I apparently had a lot more empathy than I thought as a little kid, I'd just internalized a cold hearted mask so much, even at a fairly young age, that I didn't realize it).

Maybe this traces back to why I actually quite like Jet's character and largely don't mind the way she's written. In terms of emotional development, the way she was written feels closest to my own experiences. That said, I'm never quite sure if my experiences are unusual or not, and I had been thinking that I'm really just average, but with the way people are reacting to Jet, maybe they're not.

[whizzy]

Oh, and for being a teenager, after the 11 year skip there was also the whole sexual awakening thing, which... okay yeah, maybe Jet was a late bloomer and didn't experience any sexual urges until her early twenties, but readers are going to associate that development with a much younger character.

[nyxelestia]

I guess that might be another subconscious split. The whole "sexual awakening = sign of teenager" thing isn't really that deeply embedded for me. When she looked like an adult, it just felt like it was supposed to show us how limited her experiences have been and how empty of human interaction her life has been - not an actual indicator of her age.