supporter of max's wrongs

thank you for your interest in my jeb i appreciate your question hehe

part of the problem is that i have perhaps painted too starry a picture of my jeb on this blog LOL. i find him comical and a bit silly at younger ages which makes it more fun for me to post about than The Horrors. and a lot of what i spend time writing and considering in my free time is the beginning of my prequel about him which is set when he's 15 and just kind of Some Kid. him at younger college age is also just kind of a guy. so yes.. they are more fun for me to draw pictures of etc etc.

but a lot of jeb's "corruption arc" ( is that how you use that phrase ? ) happens while he's in graduate school/an intern at itex, in his mid~later 20s. jeb is complicated bc there are things wrong with him that sort of... move forward this change in him tho those traits by themself do not a bad person make ( AT ALL ). namely, he's an alcoholic, he's incredibly isolated from other people, he has paranoia issues, and he dissociates A Lot.

the main driving force of my jeb is that his sister clyde, who he was very close to before she died when they were 16, died due to medical malpractice, lack of medical knowledge abt her condition, and inability to afford medical treatment. this death fucked up jeb irreparably for life... like... his brain soup was just permanently altered after that. [ dissociation, depression, maladaptive daydreaming, etc etc ]. for this reason, jeb starts pursuing an interest in genetics, the medical field, chronic and terminal illness, etc. he's a very smart guy. he gets super into that sort of thing from a young age.

i think what makes jeb ( or i guess my jeb ) interesting, is that at first, and then for most of the series, he thinks he's doing good. from his perspective he's doing the best for max that he can given the circumstances. he's improving medical and genetic research so that nobody has to go through what he went through. he's creating people that can not only survive an illness, but an apocalypse. he's helping to save the human race. he's mentoring their savior. its a HUGE case of a snowball that just gets bigger and bigger until he doesn't have control of it or his own perceptions any longer.

i think its important to add the perspective that a lot of manipulative or abusive people don't consider themselves to be that, and that's how jeb is. he doesn't necessarily consider himself the best father in the world. but he does think he's doing the best by max that's possible given the circumstances, because he prioritizes the world and his research over her life and self actualization. i think he's conscious of that. sort of a jeopardize one person to save everyone situation.

by the time jeb is in his early 30s and he's married to my oc dex who's ari's mom, and ari is born, he isn't necessarily at full evil mode yet, but he's on what i like to call auto pilot. he has very practiced things he does every day, every week. he goes to work. he comes home. he eats. he drinks. he goes to work. he spaces out. he does what he's told. he gets lost in the dissociation and monotony and overtime, being surrounded by other people who's morals are kind of fucked, he loses sight of himself. then it just gets worse, and worse, and he does more and more things he would never have thought himself capable of when he was younger.

but yeah TLDR; jeb thinks he is coming from a place of dedication and morality but he REALLY isn't and then he loses sight of where he was started and spirals into the sort of man who can do the things he's done. he's a tragic character bc he can't even see all of the devastation he's causing, and when he can see it, he says "oh well, that's necessary to the greater good". max didn't need him to care for the greater good, she needed him to be her dad.

interesting point that i will not extrapolate on bc i am writing too much: jeb didn't plan on becoming a parent ever, he had bad parents, this effects his parenting style

jeb and ari stuff under the cut sorry i am rambling lmfao