yknow one thing that imo is fundamental to jake as a character and which i dont see people talk THAT much about (maybe im just not looking in the right places idk) is how the entirety of his character and the way he's written snaps into place when you realize he's basically a Token Female Character, except a guy
like, he's THEORETICALLY a very competent and badass guy in his own right, fighting off monsters on the daily and dual wielding guns and whathave you, but the comic never really affords him any meaningful sense of actually BEING badass; it's mostly just informed attributes, the notion that this character isn't just a helpless damsel because technically he's just as competent as the others...! but he never actually IS.
and instead, all plotlines involving him end up inevitably revolving around romance and Will They Or Wont They and everyone crushing on him despite the work never bothering to really establish WHY everyone is into him, because... i mean, he's the Token Team Girl, of course he's attractive, what else would he be for?
This is kicked into overdrive after the god tiers: Jake gets a noticeably skimpier outfit compared to all his peers, for absolutely no reason; he gets kidnapped and damseled by Jane, explicitly for his good looks, and sentenced to a fate of standing around in sexy clothes as the villain's husband. Even his powers are a very tied to common tropes of tragic female characters who supposedly wield great power, but are never empowered as characters by it; instead, Jake's ~amazing unstoppable hope powers~ are utilized by others through him, reinforcing his role as a sexy lamp macguffin rather than a character with agency: you could replace Jake's entire role throughout most of that sequence with, like, a magical necklace everyone really wants, and very little would actually change.
I find this fascinating because while I've seen a couple of instances of characters who are supposed to be a subversion/gender flip of the typical badly written female character tropes, Jake feels like the one instance where the story really commits to the bit, showcasing the exact glaring flaws of this type of writing and how it impacts the character, and pointing out the dissonance between the character the story SAYS it's presenting, and the character it's ACTUALLY presenting... and Jake himself is aware of this dissonance.
I even believe that the reason he's Like That as a character in the alpha universe is because of the way he was originally presented in the beta timeline. Like, the alpha kids are all very much examinations of the guardians and their relationships with the beta kids. the struggle of communication between rose and roxy and the isolation caused by it, the twisted imageboard culture reflected in dave and dirk's home life, etc
but in the case of grandpa harley... the guy is ENTIRELY informed attributes. he is a literal inanimate object, long dead- and yet he seems to hold the exact same presence in jade's life as he would when he was alive. he is, in a more literal sense than the other guardians, defined entirely by the reading of their relationship jade formed, her IDEA of what her grandpa was like, and the original signified object behind those signifiers is absent, no longer necessary in the equation.
what better way to translate this dynamic, the literal objectification of a character whose influence is limited entirely to other people's idea of them, than to write him as a Token Female Team Member?
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