Jeff Higgins from BBTW canon facts MDNI
Jeff is 26. Before everything went to hell he had the most aggressively average 70s suburban life imaginable. Mom, dad, little house, neighborhood streets, probably a lawn nobody cared about. Nothing about his upbringing explains what he became because not every monster needs a tragic backstory, he never needed an excuse.
He and Isaac Wight practically grew up attached at the hip. Pool tables, cheap beer, poorly talking to girls, and wandering around town with absolutely no plans and too much time. If there was a window broken, a mailbox stolen, or one of the many petty crimes committed by two teenage idiots with inflated egos, there was a decent chance it was them.
They enabled every ugly thing in each other in a pathetic way. One had a bad idea and the other went "yeah actually that's genius."
Jeff had a girlfriend named Lilly before Vietnam. Lilly stayed because Jeff was intimidating and overbearing, not because she was deeply in love with him. Jeff had an obsessive fixation on a girl named Jane Vuong and constantly tried forcing Lilly into that image.
Lilly left town while Jeff was overseas and never came back.
Jeff is very competent with handguns. Genuinely scary levels of competent. Military discipline stuck to him in weird pieces. He can clear rooms, follow routines, and listen to orders from those he respects, and stay focused under pressure.
Then his ego kicks in and suddenly every plan falls apart because Jeff believes Jeff is the smartest guy in the room.
Which means fighting him sucks. Because unpredictability is somehow worse than intelligence.
He isn't fearless. Napalm changed his understanding of pain permanently.
He treats injuries with this gross mix of annoyance and excitement. Missing teeth? Fine. Broken ribs? Walk it off.
He drinks constantly. Full blown angry alcoholic. We all have our vices.
He smells like cigarettes, old sweat, gasoline and cheap liquor roughly 90% of the time. This man stinks and does not know what soap is.
Jeff has the emotional maturity of a fourteen year old boy who got trapped inside a grown man's body.
He sulks. He pouts. He throws tantrums. He gets weirdly competitive over things nobody else knew were competitions.
If someone ignores him too long he starts acting out. Attention, positive or negative is still attention.
He likes authority right up until someone tells HIM what to do. Then suddenly rules are oppression. He constantly tests boundaries just to see where they are.
If someone says "don't touch that," Jeff immediately wants to touch it.
Jeff both hates and loves Tyrant. Tyrant is the closest thing left to Isaac and Jeff absolutely resents him for that.
He also spends most of his screentime getting in Tyrants way almost out of a need for approval of his strength. Because grief sucks and Jeff has never handled it appropriately. Jeff believes that he survived, he endured all manner of hell so why cant Tyrant look at him? Why cant he see his friend? Why isn't Jeff strong enough for Tyrant... for Isaac to approve?
Jeff is deeply insecure about his gender identity in ways he doesn't understand how to articulate. Half of his anger comes from feeling fundamentally wrong and never having language for why.
He spends a lot of his life harvesting things he wishes he could've been. Even now he still doesn't fully understand what he's looking for.
His obsession with Jane Vuong was never about HER, it was about what she physically represented, which was what he can never be.
As a Legion soldier, he eventually found 2 doubles of Jane. R and A.
He keeps them locked up where he lives as his playthings.
To Jeff, A and R are replacements. Props. Attempts at recreating something he lost and never actually had in the first place.
Jeff calls them "My girls".
He just knows something has always felt missing.
Underneath all the violence and ego and Legion rot is still the same suburban idiot standing beside Isaac at a pool table thinking they'd live forever.
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