rambles and rants

Wow I'm finally posting something relevant to this blog. In any case, this is probably (will be) the first part of however much I come up with for gary. Was initially going to put it all in one big ol' post before I realized that perhaps it's a bit better to break up what I've got bc my one draft just keeps on going, haha.

I'm also including some (one, really) small footnotes at the end to cite a few things, as there's info that you'll only see in the extras of the volume versions. Disclaimer: My Japanese is very sparse, and I had to use MTL to help out with most of it. So please take those bits with a grain of salt, as they may be somewhat inaccurate.

Additionally, apologies for any typos that may appear. I talk too much, lol.

In any case, let's start with what we already know about the alcohol enthusiast himself.

In mostly chronological order:

The son of a poor fisherman in Maine, he experienced abuse at the hands of his father and siblings.

An ex-serviceman who enlisted in the American army at the age of 20 during WWI.* Skilled at combat, particularly in environments similar to what he experienced during his service.

A boozehound with “a single drink a day” rule, taking this lesson from Garcia.

A silly guy

Now if it weren't for the fact that this series got axed (I'm coming for you, jump+.), I imagine I'd still be theorizing about what we'd see next for Gary's backstory, from his upbrining to when he gets on that boat to go back home. But alas.

There’s a few things I want to talk about as we may never get any more information on him, so I'll have to make due with delusion and theorizing.

First things first! Gary’s backstory about his origins and family.

It's quite literally one panel and three sentences, but there's so much to glean from this.

We see a young Gary in the corner, eyes avoiding his family as he ignores the arguement happening between his father and an unnamed character. He appears to have a bruise on his cheek, most likely from his father hitting him. (It could be dirt as well, but who knows.) His father also has what looks like blood on his lip. What I assume to be Gary’s mother is behind his father, crying as she tries to stop him from hitting the other. Alcohol bottles appear to be strewn across the floor as well.

Another thing to note is the sewn patches on Gary’s pants. Either they were hand me downs if he is isn’t the first born, or his pants got patched up. Most likely by his mother, if that’s the case.

Back to the alcohol bottles. One thing I was wondering as I was looking at this panel was this:

If his father was an alcoholic who abused him, wouldn’t he feel pretty averse to drinking?

After all, it’s something that most likely made his father more violent.

Let’s fast forward a bit to his time in the army, along with remembering Gary’s first sentence in the above panel.

“I made the first friends I ever had when I joined your unit.”

We get to see Gary’s friends and Garcia having drinks with smiles on their faces. Gary even has 4 drinks in his hands! He’s continuing to drink in the first and second panels on this page as well lol.

Perhaps I’m reaching. But I think it’d be plausible to theorize that Gary’s first ever drinks were with Garcia and his old friends. Gary does mention early on in chapter 3 that he didn’t think his first beer tasted all that good, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a planned scene of Garcia offering Gary a drink. Maybe he even refuses at first, possibibly associating alcohol with his abusive father.

But at some point, he tries it. Perhaps it’s after seeing how his friends all drink so happily, (a little indirect peer pressure, lol) or Garcia persuading him that he deserves to loosen up a bit after some training/exercises. Maybe it’s how that no one acts like his father when they drink. Garcia too, mentioning they’ll only have one drink a day and how it isn’t “manly” to get dead drunk must’ve also changed his perspective.

Alcohol is no longer something that simply makes people, his father in particular, violent. It has taken on a new meaning, a new taste for him as a result of meeting and bonding with his old friends and Garcia. It’s become part of a memory which is happy, yet most likely bittersweet for him whenever he reminisces about this time.

If it weren’t for Garcia and his friends, Gary may have never become the boozehound that we know him as.

There is also the detail of Charles discussing how he always ends up with Gary, making it sound like the latter has always loved alcohol but honestly I can't say for sure how early on Charles sent that letter out after being put under Garcia's command.

I might come back to this in the future, but as the answer of when Gary became known as a boozehound is always going to be murky I'll just continue on.

For now, lets go back to Gary's childhood.

There isn’t a lot we can gather unfortunately from that one panel. The best I can theorize is that the person who Gary’s father is trying to grab/hurt is perhaps one of his siblings. The person being grabbed by him also appears to be older than young Gary, as he seems to be somewhat around the same height as his father. So, perhaps he’s an older brother to our protagonist.

Why did Gary’s siblings abuse him when their father is already hurting them as well?

Despite the painful lack of lore, let’s go back to Gary’s mother for a moment. Unlike his father and siblings, Gary doesn’t mention her when talking to Garcia about his childhood. By all means, she may have been the only one to truly show Gary care and love when he was growing up.

Although her face is obscured by a speech bubble, it’s clear to see that she’s crying as she tries to stop her husband from hurting what I assume to be another son of hers. She clearly cares not only for Gary, but for all of her children. Gary, perhaps more so.

His siblings may have seen how their mother dotes on him and/or how their father doesn’t bring down his wrath on him as much as them. Maybe there was jealousy in how Gary was treated “better,” despite being abused all the same. And/or maybe Mrs. Hopper doted on Gary the most.

Stuff like this makes me wonder if Gary was one of, if not the youngest of his siblings. The youngest sometimes get more attention from their parent(s), making their older sibling(s) a bit jealous.

Let's move on to another line I've been thinking about:

"Well... I may have been like you for a time…"

(Now, I could’ve just cut out the panels after that quote but seeing Gary hug Mona and Paul like that is just too cute. I didn’t have the heart to not include it haha.)

Alright, so this kind of debunks my rambling from the beginning of this post but it's still something plausible.

Gary may could have well been referring to before his enlistment with that sentence. It's known that children who are exposed to the behaviors of their alcoholic parent(s) are more likely to misuse the substance themselves, so for all I know Gary may have also had alcoholism. On the other hand, this means that he was getting more drunk than he should be at a young age (20 and younger). Maybe it was when he enlists and meets Garcia and the others that he has a solid foundation keeping him afloat, preventing him from overdrinking and making the "one a day" rule a part of his doctrine.

Now if Gary was empathizing with Garcia about coping with the tragedies that occurred during/after the war, I assume that it may have been after Charles and the others died. His release and hospitalization delayed his return home, so maybe while he was in Europe he drank. At the same time, it doesn’t feel quite plausible when you read the first chapter and see how excited he is to drink. Unless idk, there wasn’t a place close to him during his hospital stay that had a bar/restaurant that served a whisky on the rocks.

For all I know the doctors around him in Europe probably stopped him from drinking anyways lmfao. (Or tried. Can't be too sure now!)

It's hard to get a conrete vision of what exactly Gary refers to when you don't have enough lore...

Another theory, though I'm not very confident in it: Gary perhaps answers Garcia's question not in the context of staying sober from alcohol, but from something else.

Perhaps it’s another drug that Gary got involved with, though I can’t really see it all that well. I imagine that maybe after experiencing the deaths of his friends, he must’ve sunk into a deep, dark hole. Depression, shell shock, what comes after experiecing such horrors. It would make sense that he'd be troubled. Maybe Gary’s “excess” was something related to his trauma. Something to make him forget such pain for a while that isn’t alcohol. Perhaps he even avoided alcohol for a while due to it reminding him of his old friends is possible as well.

In the end, there's so much and so little I could theorize about. Hopefully once vol 3 comes out, there'll be some extras/bonuses that talk more about Gary's past and more!

Footnotes: