Faithful: A Short Discussion on Characterization & Narrative.

[loveslashangst]

Hi all! O here again - LSA is going to be out for the next few days while she finishes her move to MN (sniffles on the Q.T.), so any posts you see will be coming from me. I've got some administrivia to let you guys know about, and there should be another couple of fics coming soon, both independent of anything else we've written so far. (I have a late birthday present for LSA and Ianto, whose birthdays are about a day apart, that is a fairly serious kinkfest; LSA, bless her heart, has a crossover fic that I think y'all may kill us over. :) )

However, a discussion started in comments that we thought was interesting enough to get its own post. Mostly because I ended up writing three long-ass comment responses to it. :D

zoethezombie left us a review on the latest chapter of Faithful that goes in part:

[W]hat's with all the hating on Jack? I feel like I'm the only Jack supporter here. :-( Considering the number of security breaches, keeping that little bit of info to himself just seems prudent. Otherwise, they might have all been crispy, crispy bacon when Suzie came back....and Ianto has a history of leaking passwords over Jack's dead body. Anybody remember that little tiff before Abbadon was unleashed?
The part that ticks me off the most is that other characters treat him like he's not INCREDIBLY EMOTIONALLY DAMAGED and just expect him to react like a healthy person. Cut the guy some slack, he just spent 2000 years buried alive.

(Zoe tells us that she meant this more for fandom in general. We're not picking on her by any means, we think it's an interesting issue.) We also noticed that there's a lot of "Jack, you TOOL!" comments this time out (which is awesome, tells us we got woobie!Ianto's perspective right!), and we thought it was worth tipping our hands a bit to talk about our trio, how we use them narratively, and what we're aiming for. We love comments and discussion as always, so follow us over the jump.



Re: Hating on Jack.

I've pointed out to LSA recently that I feel Jack has taken a good bit of abuse in Faithful so far, and it's not just from Ianto and John - we've mistreated him a bit as a character too, and it's about time he got some proper lovin' soon. :D

LSA and I actually both ADORE Jack as a character. #2 on the list of "Things that Drive Us Insane About Torchwood", however, is Jack's TOTAL inconsistency as a character in terms of motivation, drive, and even response to situations. The screenwriters seem to use Jack at least half the time as "mysterious sexxi man what moves the plot forward," and JB himself has said in interviews that he doesn't tend to worry about consistent emotions or responses, just acts the way the directors tell him to at the time. So finding Jack's motivation and voice in any given scene requires more discussion than any other character.

That said, it may not be totally clear, but we think Jack is in the right to be angry with Ianto in this chapter. Unfortunately, he's being a bastard about it because he IS incredibly emotionally damaged, and not just from being buried alive. What we know of Jack's history in canon revolves around the central issue of abandonment: Jack loses (or is abandoned by) the people he loves, over and over and over and over and over. His mother's emotional abandonment after Grey's and his father's death. Rose & the Doctor. Alex (the previous head of Torchwood). Which means first and foremost, no matter how he loves them, he clings on incredibly tightly. If Ianto's killed Gwen, even by accident? Yeah, he's not going to take that well.

At the same time, because he expects to be abandoned, or be the one who survives, he's gotten incredibly phobic about emotional commitment on deeper levels. You can only have your heart broken so many times before you quit giving it away. One of the central tragedies or flaws to Jack is that he gives himself away physically*, and superficially emotionally, seeking connection, but there's a slippage or disconnect between that and the deeper emotions. It's not that he doesn't feel them; it's clear that he loves Ianto desperately. And that he fell in equal love with Estelle, with his wife, even with Jack Harkness '41. But he's almost completely unable to trust in that love, because it's going to leave him eventually, and most likely sooner rather than later, so why admit to it and get hurt again?

(*The other fascinating paradox about Jack, to me anyway, is that he's full of so many stories, we assume true ones, of how many beings he's indulged with over the years. And yet, during the show's run, he's been the least promiscuous of all the characters. We see him flirt, but that's almost like a reflex interaction. All hat, no cattle. Leaves me wondering if this is writer cowardice, or if Jack is being devoted to Ianto by choice, or what.)

Anyway, so, we have a fucked-up Jack who keeps getting left by people, and who's got (in theoretical canon) 5 BILLION years of being left by people ahead of him, though he doesn't know that necessarily. One of the central things that LSA is interested in addressing (which I think she intends to push through John) is "Jack coming to terms with his immortality" - that there comes a point where he has to stop thinking in human-life terms and shift to, well, godlike ones, for lack of a better word. If he is to survive and remain sane, his perspective has to shift - but he's hanging on like grim death currently to the human outlook. His perspective is important to him, even if it's damaging or damaged.

That said, the other trick to this chapter (and to Faithful in general), is that we're not seeing Jack through a 3rd-person-omni or even 3rd-person-limited authorial perspective: this chapter is through Ianto's eyes.

In fact, every chapter of Faithful is through someone's limited POV, which means we're filtering your interpretation of events through theirs. And their interpretation of events is NOT always the correct one. Because Jack is by NO means the ONLY emotionally damaged one in this trio.

Ianto is a "lying liar who lies," in addition to being "obsessosexual" as rm is fond of saying. Seriously, the lengths he went to to save Lisa? the boy is gorgeous, but he is NOT sane. Not only that, but it took him, what, less than two months to fall into Jack's bed after Jack EXECUTED Lisa in front of him. Ianto needs an obsession, a Cause, something much larger than he is, to serve and devote himself to and drive himself forward. Healing Lisa. Torchwood. Jack.

In some sense, I don't think Ianto would be nearly as obsessed about Jack if Jack wasn't hurting him over and over and over, and then rewarding him with sex and pretty words. (And yet, even in CoE when Ianto is DYING, Jack STILL can't say those three little words to him.) In second season, the writers gave us a Ianto with more of a backbone, and a better sense of what he's capable of (up to and including BadAssedness!), so we know he's got spine in there somewhere. But it's still too easy for him to fall into the subservient role, and swallow the anger and emotion rather than have it out when Jack's being an ass. A good example, having just rewatched Ep1 of CoE: the moment where Jack & Ianto are in the hospital, and Ianto's acting kind of cutely giddy, about being thought of as a couple, and Jack shoots him down in one sentence? Watch how fast Ianto closes that off and puts it away. (Makes me want to slap Jack stupid every time.)

These two have some seriously co-dependent relationship juju. Making it healthier is essentially like treating an abscess - you have to lance, drain the rot, and then scrape out the dead tissue, before packing with gauze and antibiotics. It stinks, it hurts like hell, and it's difficult to watch.

Speaking of co-dependent abscesses, let's look at John for a minute. NOT an advertisement for sanity, this one.

LSA's favorite word for the Jack/John side of the triangle is "pretty poison." John is an utter psychopath. He obsesses the way Ianto does, but without the moral qualms about killing people to keep them. (Or if they look at him funny...) John has his own moral code that he lives by, but at the same time, John (believes he) is superior to other people. Rules are things for other people. And other people are to be used, fucked, discarded or manipulated as needed. (Jack's got his own huge streak of this. As someone else noted, what the hell kind of reputation did Jack have within Torchwood & UNIT that they came to him in 1965 and said "We need someone who won't care about giving away children to aliens"?)

In the timeline for Faithful, not three days ago, John manipulated Ianto into *shooting* Jack, to make Ianto *feel* better, and to make a point to Jack. And for his own amusement as much as anything else. Now, it may be true that shooting Jack is like a punch in the face to someone else, but I'd like to think that's still not the action of a sane man.

At the same time, John tends to be the voice of "reason" in this fic, for which I would actually argue LSA is channeling Spike at least as much as John; both characters have a disturbing tendency to cut through the bullshit Sturm und Drang with a few incisive and well-chosen words that indicate they've seen the heart of the situation, and are not prepared to put up with other people lying about it to themselves or others. So he tends to be more of an authorial voice, to the extent that we have one, than the other two. (Also, I think LSA is more than a little infatuated with him; John can be a charmer when he chooses.)

So, as noted, we have not one, but three very damaged characters whose POV is not authorial, but limited to their own prejudices and ideas. Each character is going to want to believe that their actions are correct, and that they are motivated by right thoughts (except possibly John, who knows better and doesn't care particularly), and it's not particularly pleasant for them when their errors get pointed out.

We had to go a long emotional distance to get Jack to finally break down in Chapter 21 and admit that he loves John, and did wrong by him. (And trust me, that's coming back narratively.) And that he loves Ianto, and has wronged him as well. (And that wound is nowhere near done draining, though this chapter has been a surprisingly big step forward.)

Ianto's flaw in this chapter is just as fundamental: we (the fangirls and fanboys) love Ianto as a character for his smugness, his sarcastic and dry wit, and that, as he says, "He knows everything." Well, sometimes he doesn't. And sometimes he believes his own press. On the show, we get him handing off the info about Flat Holm to Gwen, for example, behind Jack's back. And, as you note, the security passcodes & protocols to open the Rift in "End of Days." We liked the idea of taking that to its logical end, because it's a bit silly (and deus ex machina) to assume that Ianto knows and understands everything he does, all of Jack's secrets, down to the bones and circuitry all the time. He THINKS he does. But to quote CoE again: "I tell you everything. But I've barely scratched the surface, haven't I?" It's interesting to us to have Ianto come face to face with his own arrogance and assumptions and how they affect others, negatively as well as positively.

John's confrontation... well, we know what we have in mind. It's not going to be pretty.

So each of them has damage, and none of them is particularly good at talking to each other for resolution; devotion tends to be proved more through actions than words. Ianto's blind faith and subservience in Jack is not healthy; Jack's inability to commit emotionally is not healthy; John's disconnect between his emotional wants and his belief in his own superiority is not healthy. All three of them have MASSIVE control issues.

There are a lot of things we have to break before we can put them back together into a more beneficial configuration; like draining an abscess, or perhaps more accurately, re-breaking a mis-set bone, the process is a painful one, but necessary for things to get better.

Anyway. Long comments are long! Hope that addressed your concerns, however, without tipping our authorial hand TOO much. Rest assured that we spend a LOT of time discussing what the boys do, how they feel, and how we go about portraying that in our fic. there's always ways we can do it better, so we'll take that into account as well.

Thanks for the thinkies on a lazy Sunday, -O.