she woo on my wee till I wawa

So I do owe a debt to… someone… for this card. I saw someone mention Jackie Daytona as The Hanged Man once on this blue hellsite, but it was a year or two ago and I can’t for the life of me remember who said it where.

So uh. If you know who you are, please let me know so I can give you a shoutout! Also, IIRC you didn’t post much about your reasoning for choosing him, so hopefully you won’t disagree with everything I’m about to say. lmao

Anyway, here’s my reasoning for choosing Jackie Daytona as The Hanged Man.

The Hanged Man is a somewhat complicated card. There are a lot of readings for it, and some are more popular than others.

(Please keep in mind that some readings are more standardized than others, but there is no one “right” reading for a tarot card! It’s an old and messy tradition, tbh. lmao)

Like… when I say some people say this card is a traitor at the gallows and some say it’s self-sacrifice and some people say it’s an allusion to Odin on Yggdrasil and and and and

For me, I see this card as a pause, a suspension, a breath held in one’s throat. There is this sense to it of liminality, neither quite here nor there but somewhere in the process of becoming. And in that state there is infinite potential for new perspectives and understanding.

(These are fairly standard readings, btw!)

Common advice when The Hanged Man comes up is that there will be a break in your life whether you like it or not. It’s like that saying, y’know? Schedule maintenance or it will be scheduled for you. Sometimes this pause is one that you’ve chosen, and sometimes it's one that simply cannot be put off any longer.

It’s a messy, frustrating place to be, usually, but it’s also an opportunity. The Hanged Man speaks of a chance to breathe and think things through. It’s a chance to change course or become who you need to be. You will be upside-down, which is uncomfortable — but does allow you to see another perspective of the world.

That’s the upside. The downside is that you’re not going to be allowed to leave this no man’s land until this process is complete. You’re stuck, babe.

(Side note: this is why one of my favorite images of The Hanged Man I’ve ever seen is in The Insect Tarot, where the scene is changed to a caterpillar hanging in its chrysalis! Gorgeous and perfect!)

I think this reading of the card lends itself so, so well to Jackie Daytona. He is a character that literally only exists in an impermanent liminal state. He only exists as a temporary escape from the life and responsibility that Laszlo doesn’t want to deal with, and he can only exist so long as Laszlo refuses to accept these things.

Everyone comes to a crossroads at some point in their life, and you’re really supposed to choose one road or the other. But some of us, like Laszlo, set up camp right there at the intersection — and become a Jackie Daytona.

It’s not exactly a sustainable form of existence, but it can be very emotionally fulfilling as long as it lasts.

I bring up the crossroads for a reason; The Hanged Man is an intrinsically liminal card about being suspended between two states, and one major topic that comes up in anthropology when people talk about liminality is trickster figures. And boy does Jackie Daytona fit the bill.

I could honestly talk about Jackie Daytona as a liminal trickster figure for like an hour. That could easily be its own post. But for now, I’ll try to stay on topic. The important part here is that, anthropologically speaking, trickster figures have power because they are liminal. They can move from world to world seamlessly and are able to transgress the social rules that everyone else has to follow, the societal roles that everyone else has to fit themselves into; this is what gives them a sort of power that everyone else does not possess.

Jackie’s odd hovering between the vampiric world and the human world is largely what gives him his power, and it’s what helps him slither out of both his human and vampiric quandaries.

Laszlo has slipped out of his role as Laszlo and into this brand-new persona that allows him to access parts of himself that he’d walled off earlier, some of which resurface later while he’s caring for the creature that crawled out of the stomach of our dear friend Colin Robinson. He uses his brief foray into the human world to reestablish his own values system and what he wants out of the world. And, once he realizes that all this running and fighting and shirking isn’t really going to give him what he truly needs, he’s able to reassume his old vampiric role as Laszlo Cravensworth.

It’s kind of fascinating, because we know that Laszlo has so many alter egos in this show, which kind of give the vibes of incarnations like — no, I’m not gonna talk about Laszlo as trickster figure!! But just know that I really want to!!

(I’m so sorry, the nerdy academic part of me is stamping at the ground like a fucking horse right now.)

Anyway, yes, Laszlo becomes Jackie Daytona because he’s On The Run, as the episode title says, both from Jim the Vampire and from himself. He ends up stuck like The Hanged Man, except instead of being suspended in the air, the poor man is stuck in Pennsylvania.

(I can say that. I live here.)

But as he hangs there spinning his wheels, Laszlo really is coming to some important conclusions as Jackie Daytona. He never asked for this weird foray into a false life, but he does end up using it as an avenue for growth and self-understanding.

Jackie Daytona makes a great Hanged Man because he does have this sense of being stuck, of being suspended. He does have a vibe of a criminal staring down the gallows. He does have a vibe of Odin on that tree coming to understand things he never did before. He does, through his love of the girls’ volleyball team (Go Bucks!) learn about self-sacrifice.

And in the end, after he finally comes to term with everything he’s been running from, he is no longer suspended. He's seen the world from a new perspective and has come to a new understanding — and he’s finally able to cut himself free from this self-imposed imprisonment and go home.

There are lots of characters who deal with being stuck or a sense of stagnancy they can’t free themselves from, both very typical readings for this card. Guillermo and Nandor both immediately come to mind. But I think for them, The Hanged Man is a temporary state, just like it was for Laszlo.

Jackie Daytona, on the other hand, is the only character in the show whose entire identity is The Hanged Man. He only exists as a brief departure, a suspension, a sorely needed break in Laszlo’s day-to-day life. When Laszlo finally leaves the crossroads, Jackie Daytona, to some degree, ceases to exist.

Pour one out for a real one. Mostly because he is not real at all and cannot drink regular human alcohol.

RIP.

Anyway. Onto some imagery.

The Hanged Man depicts a man hanging upside down from a sort of living cross. He is hanging from one leg and the other is crossed over it. It should be noted that the wood he’s hanging from is sprouting leaves, indicating life and potential, and the halo around his head indicates some sort of enlightenment.

The Hanged Man is one of those cards that has really, really iconic imagery on it. Even decks that depart fairly radically from traditional Rider-Smith-Waite imagery seem to love themselves one thing hanging upside down from another thing.

So I don’t want to mess with that too much here. That said, I would like his hanging to be more one of perspective than something literal. Jackie is actually standing with one foot flat on the floor, the other propped back up against the regular human bar he’s leaning against, but this pose gives him the familiar cross-legged appearance of The Hanged Man.

This entire scene will be turned upside-down, so he looks quite normal when the card is reversed, but when upright he appears to be hanging. A nod to the reversed perspective will be made clear with a hooded figure in the background, upside down to Jackie but right-side up to us. This figure is Jim the Vampire, the spectral (and hilarious) figure trying to track him down in his current liminal state.

Also, I would like two small bats hanging at either side of the card — like Laszlo, they are hanging upside down, but they are doing it in a real-world sense. This is Nadja and Nandor, both sort of out-of-step with reality themselves but still living their normal lives.

From his perspective, though, they are the ones who are right-side up.

(Upside down? It’s complicated.)