i have a powerpoint

gonna answer these in reverse order, just because i have a LOT to say about #1:

2) not sure i really understand the question—i guess if you mean ‘what would happen if jack decided to move back to chicago without alex’ and scorpia rising never happened, then i think alex would be angry for a very long time…but i think as an adult, he would learn to forgive her. (after all, jack was only in her twenties when ian died, and suddenly she’s trapped in a foreign country with guardianship of a teenage boy—you’d reach a breaking point once MI6 got involved, too). i suppose the real question is what happens to alex in a world where jack leaves of her own accord; the ‘good ending’ would be him getting adopted by the pleasures anyway, although he’d likely still have some of the same teething problems we see in never say die, and the bad ending would be mi6 further tightening their grasp and using jack’s departure as a way to isolate alex even further. in which case, alex would be way more messed up than he is in scorpia rising. lol.

1) i think ian wasn’t a very good guardian (i hesitate to call him a ‘parent’) for a variety of reasons that have little to do with jones’ claim that he was training alex up deliberately; i concur that jones is unreliable and was probably just bullshitting to get a reaction. for one, there’s the fact that ian stayed working for mi6 at all once he became alex’s guardian—sure, ian loved his job, but he also knew the risks of it, and it’s ultimately an act of supreme selfishness to continue working in a field like that when you have a child at home (one who has already been orphaned as a result of this same career, mind you!). you mention the private school thing, but ian’s reasoning for sending alex to a state school isn’t ideological—it’s purely to ‘toughen him up’ (and alex was bullied his first few weeks at brookland for the way that he talked) which, idk, is not the best reason to pick a school for your child. i mean there’s a million reasons to send your child to a state school but that’s just a very weird one. and on the very few occasions we do hear anything concrete about ian, he comes off as very cold and distant; #neverforget that the american edition of stormbreaker had to insert some extra lines about ian and how he’d help alex with his homework because of how stony he comes off in the uk editions. but this is all circumstantial. there are two big smoking gun pieces of evidence that prove to me ian was a shitty guardian, and they both come from alex himself:

SKELETON KEY:

while ruminating on what his life might have been like were he raised by his parents (family is The theme in skeleton key), alex comments ‘he might have been a softer person. he probably would have had more friends’. this is, i think, pretty damning, because the implication here is that being raised by ian made alex into a harder person with fewer friends, and this is coming from alex himself. it’s also worth pointing out that alex is exceptionally bad at playing into the happy families ruse throughout the novel—he playacts at being part of a nuclear family with the pleasures, troy and turner, and sarov, and all three of those attempts crash and burn (the only one that comes close to success is alex’s holiday with the pleasures, which is a neat bit of accidental foreshadowing for the adoption). it’s not exactly a great indicator of ian’s parenting if alex can’t even pretend to be part of a regular parent/child dynamic.

SPY TRAP:

don’t get me wrong, spy trap sucks when it comes to breaking continuity, but alex’s monologue about ian in this short story is absolutely gutting and i think probably the most damning thing. alex claims he was never afraid of ian, but admits he ‘never really knew him’. he says that ian ‘was preparing me. he wanted me to be like him’. and then there’s this whole speech:

I wish he’d talked to me. I know he couldn’t tell me about his work but after he’d died, after I found out the truth…it made me sad. We’d had all these great times together. Sometimes, when he took me away with him, I thought I was the luckiest boy in the world. But, in fact, he was manipulating me. What gave him the right to decide what I was going to be? I suppose all adults—mums and dads—have dreams for their kids. But that doesn’t mean they have to trick them and lie to them and hide things from them. I don’t even know what Ian really felt about me. Did he like me or did he just want to use me?

yeah. needless to say this is not exactly a ringing endorsement of ian’s parenting skills—bear in mind spy trap is allegedly set post skeleton key, so well before jones ever raises the idea of ian deliberately grooming alex (i say allegedly, because i suspect that over the years ahorz has gradually moved towards making the ‘ian was training alex on purpose’ theory canon and spy trap’s whole purpose was to solidify this retcon, but whatever). but even if we take out the implication that alex himself believes ian was forcing him down a path he didn’t want to be on, the rest of ian’s characterisation here—opaque, unknowable, apparently cold to the point where alex wasn’t even sure if he liked him—is very damning as a parental figure.

LOL okay maybe i went a little far in my last alex rider post when i called john a ‘bad person’, but i do stand by the fact that i don’t think he’s all good. the one scene we have of john rider pov is in snakehead’s bonus coda chapter, and maybe it’s just me but i’ve always been struck by how…callous he seems? certainly he appears very cold; he doesn’t spare a single thought for ian (who, even if the plane hadn’t been blown up, john would’ve never seen again), and he expresses a distinct lack of sympathy for ash. it’s easy to look at russian roulette and brush off john’s cruelty (because he can be exceptionally cruel in that book, including towards yassen) as ‘he was in deep cover’, but the best lies always have a degree of truth in them—i think for john to have fooled scorpia for so long, and to be capable of doing the kinds of things that cover required him to do, some kernel of ‘hunter’ must have been real. we’re told by ash in snakehead that it wasn’t really clear if john ever (ever!!!!) told helen that his scorpia cover was faked or if he really did just let her believe that he’d suddenly turned violent and distant for real, and, for all that ash is an unreliable narrator, i think the fact that that ambiguity is even pointed out to us is probably proof that john didn’t tell her. it’s certainly never debunked, anyway, and it’s one of the very few things we’re told about helen at all.

but to cut a long story short: for all that john and ian appear to have been estranged by the time of john’s death (i have a separate post on that), i think they were probably cut from roughly the same cloth. and while there’s a million different interpretations of ian, 99% of them do agree on the fact that, whatever kind of man he was, it wasn’t an uncomplicated, 10000% morally pure one. i think the same is true for john. did john do great things for his country? yes. but it doesn’t make him a good person, or a good husband, or a good father. the big lesson alex learns in scorpia (or is supposed to learn) is that he doesn’t need to follow in john’s footsteps; he can be his own person. it takes him nearly 400 pages to come to terms with that. even though blunt and jones make a pretty good attempt at convincing us that john was an angel, i think john being a good person always and forever undermines that fundamental message of adults, even idolised dead parents, not being perfect, and that alex needs to be his own man. and i also don’t trust a word out of blunt’s mouth, tbh—doesn’t it seem a bit like he’s going too hard on evangelising john’s virtues?—but that’s by the by.

like MI6 recruits you twice. sends you off to the CIA bc they bragged about you

and the minute you ask for ANYTHING (which involves you seeing the very assassin they told you to avoid) they gaslight the shit out of you and barely apologize for it

Being with Freddy is quiet understanding. It's safety. It's trust.

Their stories are different, but Freddy understands coming out of a life of spying and violence.

Freddy is strong on his own. Still unsure of himself and his place in the ordinary, but deadly and trained. Someone important to Alex who doesn't need his protection. Not like Tom. Not like Sabina. Not like Jack. He's someone able to protect himself.

Someone able to destroy Alex. Who had the chance to. The time Nightshade swore revenge. And yet Freddy wanted to be with Alex, protected Tom cause he mattered to Alex.

Alex can trust Freddy wholeheartedly. To make a plan for both of their good. To take care of himself. To listen to what Alex says.

To like him.

Like, obviously Scorpia is the plot hook for the next book so maybe that's why it's not mentioned more in Eagle Strike itself, but in Scorpia there's still no mention of the Damian Cray thing being a Scorpia operation. Mrs Rothman says she 'heard about Yassen' and mentions Cray casually as one of the people Alex killed. There's every implication that this is the first they come into contact with Alex, barring the John Rider connection, and that Nile almost killed him simply for sneaking into the Widow's Palace and asking questions. Even at the end of Scorpia, Mrs Rothman wants him dead for what John did, not any of Alex's own previous interference. MI6 in the same book talk about how Scorpia hasn't been very active recently, and at no point link Yassen to Scorpia's recent actions.

In fact, it's not until Snakehead when the Sayle job gets retconned to have been linked to Scorpia with them supplying the virus. The implication in Stormbreaker itself seems to point towards the Chinese government in a 'we can't say this outright but' kind of way, although fair on Ahorz for trying to retcon that kind of xenophobic plot.