The thing is there's just not really a way to discuss 28 Years Later without including The Bone Temple (which is fine, I think it's fine when things exist to be parts of a series; 28yl is very good but it is undeniably made better by the revelations given in tbt), and you shouldn't be discussing The Bone Temple's themes without discussing Jimmy Crystal (and the cult overall). He (and they) ARE inherently connected to The Themes, and idk it's a Little disheartening that some ppl can't see that. Jimmy Crystal IS an exploration of nationalism he IS an exploration of tradition he IS an exploration of war and violence and he is undeniably an exploration of memory (which is inherently tied to national mythology, tradition, belief, etc), merely presented through such a heavily distorted lens as to be rendered nearly unrecognizable. He and Spike are character foils; he and his cult are essentially the second half of all the questions posed about Spike and his upbringing in Years (and I have argued in the past that Spike certainly did not have a "good" or "normal" upbringing, merely a different type). Lindisfarne is the preservation of things that are considered by US, real people, to be "traditional," that's why Lindisfarne "makes sense," that's why people fall for it. JIMMY brings the preservation of things that are considered by almost nobody to be worth preserving, that are "nontraditional" and undesirable, specifically the preservation of violent youth cultures (the sportswear, the chains, the graffiti, the entire "gang" structure overall, the fact that it immediately reads as a "gang") - because the point is it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what people used to consider good or respectable or necessary for preservation, because they didn't survive and this guy did, and HIS memories, his extremely unreliable, warped memories from when he was eight years old that have been surely warped further by a lifetime of hallucinations and the near-complete destruction of any social context those memories initially took place in, are what get to inform the rebuilt world (or at least his little pocket of it). The whole Jimmy Saville shit is about negative national mythology! And nihilism and the fallibility of memory! That's the point! And that's without even getting into how the presentation of Jimmy's Satanism as not separate from Christianity but merely its inverse (and to exist solely in opposition to something is still to reinforce that thing; tries to do away with entirely lives as an inversion of it thus continuing to refer to it indirectly, and etc.) is also directly tied to tradition, and nationalism, and patriarchy (patriarchy in the most literal sense, too, a cult of a father who, in critique of Christianity, yes, but of nationalism too, is completely hallucinated). Through being an inversion of Christianity and of "family," through his preservation of the "nontraditional" (but still very unshakably British), through the way he's controlled by unreliable and unobjective memories, through the sheer brutality of the violence he's at the wheel of (and how that violence, ganglike, yes, but sometimes almost cartoonish, childish, manifests itself differently from the militaristic efficiency of the violence enacted by the people on Lindisfarne, including actual children), Jimmy Crystal IS the themes of 28 Years Later. I don't care how much the x reader posts annoy you, you cannot ignore him. He offers just as much to these thematic analyses as anyone else
