check displeased, the podcast

oh thank you for this note! I also appreciate that you like the podcast! :D

It kind of feels like when the fandom has taken ownership of the completed work to dive into what happens past cannon and the fact it's not aligning with the authorial intent means she needs to get back on a steer the ship, if that makes sense.

I (tomato) am in one sense legitimately excited because I ended up loving years 3 and 4 even if my interpretation of the events were tonally "wrong," and because I'm really interested to see what Ngozi can bring back to Check, Please! after several years away, honing her craft, making new work, getting new ideas...and after all, maybe it's because I also write original fiction, but I do truly believe that as her work, Ngozi can do whatever she wants with it, including write absolutely wild off-the-rails futures for every character! then fans can continue to make whatever fanworks they want to make, whether or not Ngozi approves: that's the beauty of fandom.

my assumption based on the image she posted on Patreon to make this announcement is that Bitty may not be the main character, so that also makes me feel excited.

As far as the lack of female characters, again I had the most fun with this comic when I attributed any lack of depth in the characters to Bitty’s lack of interest in others, in notable contrast to his self-perception as a caretaker who is always thinking about other people; he’s just not really thinking about what *they* want. When it comes to women in particular, I think there’s definitely something to be said of white gay male culture and the way it’s shifted as the positionality of queer identity within the culture has, where they’re more accepted into the dominant culture because of their proximity to white male straightness, as opposed to other identities (in a way that’s in conversation with the social positioning of straight white women, of whom Bitty’s mom is one). Obviously the comic doesn’t dig into this textually, but I do think this reading of the text offers something in that respect.

It also fits with the idea that he’s lying to himself about his mother being his best friend, lol

I also think it’s interesting how Bob’s shoulder is literally blocking the cameras and crowd from Jack’s view; he is literally walking between Jack and the voyeurism of the crowd, creating a barrier with his body (it’s the only gap in the trophy-columns where none of the crowd is visible), and it’s the only panel in this strip where Jack actually appears happy. He’s looking up at his dad and smiling. So my read was always that the expectations/pressure were imposed by the culture and Jack’s relation to it moreso than by Bob himself. But if Jack experiences anxiety to the level that it’s pathologized, of course he’d wonder if his father secretly was disappointed the way everyone else seems to think. I think the idea that this alone isn’t enough to trigger the level of anxiety Jack had surrounding his father downplays the structural and cultural function of parental expectations and the fact that they serve as an extension of the way society pressures people to conform to hegemonic cultural standards.

Kind of tangential to the current strip, but I remember reading a fic where “ugly baby Jack Zimmerman,” which is played for laughs in the comic, was instead taken at face value, and the author had articles about it showing up in tabloids that were ultimately used to fuel plastic surgery rumors about his mother. I think it’s worth noting that Jack’s mom is also famous, and in a career that invites its own level and brand of (highly genderized) media attention and speculation. Of course he’d conceptualize all the pressure on him through the lens of hockey, and therefore focus his interpretation of his own reactions around his father and their relationship, because hockey is what he ultimately defines himself by, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t being reinforced through other things that may have been less obvious. Like I definitely think Bob would have had a learning curve with Jack’s anxiety/sexuality/arguable autism, but I’ve never really read disappointment or shaming there.

I also think it’s easier for kids to interpret pressure being placed on them through the lens of their family rather than through larger societal structures that they don’t really understand, especially since those structures both perpetuate and are perpetuated by the nuclear family as a construct. I think children understand their positionality in relation to their parents much more intuitively than their positionality within the larger cultural context. I also think people tend to assume that family is some fixed, innate thing that exists outside and irrespective of social and economic structures, and therefore any kind of family-based trauma must always come from some very specific and situationally unique interplay within the relationships between family members (which obviously plays a part in many situations) rather than problems with the family structure and its function in society that make it inherently traumatic even to well-treated children with well-meaning parents. So I don’t actually think Bob being actively mean to Jack is necessary for him to form the impression he had of him, and to me in some ways it’s *more* interesting if Jack’s view of his own childhood/history is warped out of line with what was actually happening because it begs the question of why he feels that way without immediately imposing the obvious answer of well, Jack saw him as mean because he was mean to him. Part of what interested me so much about this relationship when I first read the comic was that seeming disconnect between Jack’s view of his father and the view we get as the audience, because I think the straightforward daddy issues narrative has been strip-mined to the point of becoming kind of boring and repetitive, in addition to being from the get-go a sort of misleading framework, because I think the root of the problem actually lies within the role of fatherhood, at least as constructed and positioned the way it is in western society. So what interests me more are questions like, how was the concept of daddy issues constructed and who benefits from its continued use as a paradigm? And how can we position Jack in relation to that paradigm? In what ways does and doesn’t it provide an effective framework for interpreting his character? Can we create a better and more holistic framework?

I also think with anxiety in particular, there’s this general narrative that anxiety/depression/etc are caused either by individual brain “abnormalities” or by a “bad childhood” in a way where individual bad actors are blamed for the thoughts/behavior, instead of actually looking at how anxiety and mental “disorders” are socially constructed, the function that pathologization of thoughts and behavior serves culturally, and the ways in which the onus is shifted away from anything that might require systemic change to a very individualized failure in either the biology of the individual or their specific life circumstances. I think these narratives not only protect from scrutiny those systems whose failures result in continuing instances of these common experiences of structural violence and violation, but actually end up perpetuating them by forcing people to submit to the authority of the state and the psychiatric apparatus (which, in the same vein as the family structure, positions certain persons in authority who, even when well-meaning, still have the systemic power to enact state-sanctioned violence and control against a person’s will, the mere fact of which I believe is inherently traumatizing—even if wealth and fame are strongly protective against this violence due to the fact that it’s used to uphold the structures that created the categories of wealth and fame in the first place). Ultimately, I think there’s this false wall erected between psychology and sociology that is inherently and deliberately limiting, and I think it’s very interesting to interrogate that through fiction.

Anyway, that was just a very long way to say yeah, Bob and Jack’s relationship is fascinating to me, but maybe not for the same reasons that it is to others, lol.

Upon first reading this strip, I didn’t think Bitty’s lack of skill or a relationship between them would derail Jack’s plans; I honestly kind of assumed that Bitty would ~change Jack~ enough that he was able to reconstruct an identity that didn’t center around hockey and ultimately let hockey go and pursue something else that wasn’t so dangerous and damaging to him, but obviously that didn’t come to pass, haha

Quickly on the glossing over of Bitty’s closet incident, I do think that if we see the vlog entry comics as being framed as a visualization of Bitty sharing anecdotes with his online audience, it makes sense that he would gloss over that. I think part of the reason why his self-image is so at odds with his actions etc is that he just ignores things that don’t fit within the image of the person he wants to be, and I honestly think he would see airing his trauma on the internet outside the context of a joke as gauche/tacky/etc.

Also the idea that Bitty is maybe not actually that good a baker because his Signature Thing isn’t actually that difficult to make… This is why my entire enjoyment of this comic was based on my interest in this framing device and the idea that Bitty is an unreliable narrator who is just constantly gassing up his baking and how much everyone appreciates and benefits greatly from his domestic prowess… also like maybe the guys really are that enthusiastic about pies because they’re hockey bros who can’t cook and are on restrictive dietary plans and have low standards. I mean, as far as I remember it’s ultimately a baking vlog, so as much as this is a video diary, it’s also Bitty attempting to market himself and build an audience in-universe, so that taken in conjunction with the idea that social media only shows the best part of a person shown in the best possible light is really going to skew and bias the narrative whenever we are looking at strips that are meant to represent the content of his vlog.

(I do think there are definitely moments that strain against the boundaries of this framework, particularly when it comes to digressions into other POVs that don’t have a clear vantage point for an outside viewer to access, but at least in the case of the coaches strip, it’s pretty easy to believe that Bitty could—and might be motivated to do so in this particular vlog update based on Jack’s comment—extrapolate the contents of such a conversation between the coaches based on discussions that he had with them during/after the recruitment process. Part of what will be interesting about listening to this podcast will be seeing if this framework works as well as I originally thought it did at the time even in these earlier comics; maybe there’s more digressions that don’t fit into it within the core text than I remember. However, this framework could help to explain the lack of obvious sympathy/empathy from his teammates, because I think there’s a certain push to check in with people who are literally cowering on the floor just as like a social lubricant and a way to avoid awkwardness/guilt—plus the social push to perform masculinity in the form of gallantry/chivalry, since Bitty is, well, coded and perceived a certain way—but if Bitty is also exaggerating just how bad the incident was, then I think the extended joke sequence would fit better into these particular hockey bros being slightly assholish rather than like, assholish in a socially inexcusable way.)

Anyway, all this to say I felt similarly displeased with the comic’s progression, which is at least partially attributable to the fact that this way of reading the comic became pretty much impossible later on. To me, this kind of voyeuristic slant to everything seemed to fit with the themes of hockey as performance (both in and of itself and performance of masculinity/heterosexuality/able-body and mind-ness) and pro sports on a broader scale turning people into spectacles to be consumed both by the game itself and the culture surrounding it and in the capitalist sense of the people watching it being consumers of this performance. It also felt in this way kind of like a metacommentary on hockey rpf in that we were only viewing carefully curated and presented pieces of real people, who are literally trained to make themselves as consumable/palatable as possible (with the goal/effect of making them seem/see themselves as mere extensions of the team and sport itself), which seemed to mirror both Jack’s self-concept and self-presentation (including his suppression and destruction of self in service of hockey) and Bitty’s initial distaste for and subsequent idealization of Jack (the way sports fans oscillate between vitriol and idolization of the teams/players in a very intentional way manufactured to maintain/maximize engagement, which is only possible if this sense of distance and purely surface-level engagement is maintained). It disappointed me not only to know that this was not intentional, but also to have that way of interpreting the narrative become less and less viable as the story went on and started to break away from these framing devices. Especially because this framework makes the shallowness of the characters and their interactions/relationships interesting and provocative instead of frustrating and unsatisfying, which is what I was left with once it was discarded.

Sorry for all the parentheticals lol I was just excited to find other people applying a media critical lens to this dumb little comic