#jeromiah

Jerome and Jeremiah Valeska

What made me ship it? I’m not exactly sure.. like I read a fic on the ship by error and got curious of the dynamic.

What are my favorite things about the ship? It’s just one thing and it’s exploring how different the dynamic between the characters would be. Either considering the canon relatioship of the twins, or in an AU were they grew together and didn’t hate each other.

Jerome: His dog’s name is Misstress Buttercake

Jeremiah: That’s- That’s not what i want

- Despite spending most of their childhood apart, Jerome and Jeremiah can still perfectly minimic each other’s mannerisms and speech to the point where no one can tell the difference. Jerome does this in his first appearance where he’s trying to appear an innocent, loving son (i.e Jermeiah) and Jeremiah of course pretends to be Jerome as part of his first plot post-gas. This shows how vividly they still remember each other.

- We never see Jerome more emotional than when he is confronting Jeremiah about leaving him, it’s clear that more than the horrific physical abuse and more than having to murder his own mother (who he didn’t love and for good reason) - Jeremiah leaving him was the worst thing that has ever happened to Jerome and I don’t think it’s just because the abuse probably increased in severity after that (although Jerome’s abuse is NOT Jeremiah’s fault and I made a post about that on my old blog*). I think it’s also because Jerome lost the only person who was ever on his side and who understood him. I firmly believe that Jerome did do something that made Jeremiah genuinely afraid of him (also explained *) and I imagine he probably behaved aggressively or even possibly abusively towards Jeremiah because he was desperate to hold onto the only person that he actually loves (similarly to how Jeremiah ends up behaving towards Bruce, he picked it up somewhere).

- There’s also the fact that they don’t want each other dead. Jeremiah cries when he sees his brother’s body. As for Jerome, yes he says that he’s going to kill Jeremiah “of course” but I am 99.9% certain that he didn’t mean that and was just fucking with Jeremiah because he’s spiteful about the attempted murder stories. Jerome planned for Jeremiah to get sprayed and become like him, you could argue that he planned to drive jeremiah insane and then kill him but that doesn’t make much sense. See, Jerome doesn’t see “driving Jeremiah mad” as a punishment, he thinks being insane is a good thing (and post-gas, Jeremiah sees it as “the gift his brother gave him”) so no I don’t think Jerome meant to punish Jeremiah then kill him, he meant to make Jeremiah see the world the way he does and by doing so permanently bind them together. Sound familiar? Oh, it should 😉

- Jeremiah is a person who needs an obsession to survive, we never see him without someone that consumes his life and drives his every move. It’s quite clear that Jerome was Jeremiah’s obsession at least from the time he left to when he meets Bruce (who replaces Jerome in Jeremiah’s life after his death) but it can be inferred that they were obsessed with each other as children too.

- I’ve been alluding to it but yes, Jeremiah’s obsession with Bruce is an attempt to recreate (and by proxy, fix) his relationship with Jerome. How do I know that? Because Jeremiah explicitly says so multiple times!

“You’ll be the brother I never had, the one Jerome never could be.”

“If I can’t have you as a brother bonded by love...we’ll just have to be bonded by hatred.”

The second line in particular: brothers failing to bond through love so becoming bonded through hatred. That is literally Jerome and Jeremiah’s relationship in canon! Meaning that Jeremiah’s love for Jerome is the only source of reference that he has to love Bruce (because that’s the only other person he’s loved, Ecco was a favored tool and his mother was a delusion).

As I said earlier: Jeremiah tries to force Bruce to see lose his mind and see things the way Jeremiah does because he’s convinced that will bond them together because that’s what bonded him to Jerome.

It’s clear that Jeremiah has non-platonic feelings for Bruce, he wouldn’t see Selina specifically (more so than Alfred or anyone else Bruce loves) as competition if he didn’t. So, it follows that Jeremiah wouldn’t be making references to his relationship with his brother unless he had some level of non-platonic feelings for Jerome as well.

So, Jeremiah tries to force his worldview onto Bruce the way that Jerome probably did to him when they were children and the outcome is the same; Jeremiah scares Bruce into abandoning him and falls even deeper into insanity when he “loses the one, the only thing he loves”.

* https://jrluthor.tumblr.com/post/187669992458/im-so-done-seeing-people-act-like-jeremiah-lying