#manimal jacks

Oh, you have come to the right place for this. As one of the bad influences that convinced @nanuk-dain to write Garza/Chaffin, and as someone who has written Manimal/Garza/Chaffin before, I have had many thoughts about them.

The vibes to me are this: the worst, most fucked-up people you know got together and somehow it's working?

One of the key bits for me is, you have these three guys who in civilian society you would expect to be at each other's throats, considering the extreme racist/xenophobic slurs and comments they make at each other.

And yet, this is not what we see in the show. In fact, they seem to bond through their shared love for saying the worst, most offensive combination of words imaginable.

There's a scene in Get Some with the Reporter and T which establishes that while that kind of talk is part of Force Recon and wider US military culture, there are still unspoken boundaries between men (which is why Trombley annoyed people so much, but that's another topic).

Which begs the very enticing question of how Manimal, Chaffin and Garza built that type of relationship, and how can we writers take that dynamic further, ship-wise?

Another key bit for me personally is the love for making these hyper-to-the-point-of-toxicity masculine, presumably heterosexual men, come face to face with a sexuality and relationship crisis, and the idea of true emotional and physical intimacy with other men.

Lurking in the back of my head is the rough outline for a post-canon get-together fic where, after accepting that he and his wife are divorcing, Manimal moves in with Chaffin and Garza, and is hit with a bit of an identity crisis because he is no longer fulfilling the ideas of what a man's life should look like set out by his father, and his father before him.

He'd had his own co-dependent, vague homoerotic thing going on with Chaffin anyway, but now that he's living with them, he gets to observe Chaffin and Garza's unique relationship and ends up getting closer to Garza.

There's a flashpoint of some kind: Manimal's dam breaking due to the emotional toll of the divorce, the shame of not being the kind of father he'd thought he'd be, a sexuality crisis now that he's not locked in 'the right way to do things' or something else. And, boom! this mess of a throuple situation in which none of them really know what it is or if it makes them gay, etc, but eh, who cares, they're not officers, they're not paid to think about shit.

(Rudy and Pappy are like a side pairing and end up giving the kind of advice and support you'd expect from them)

“So, sir, what do you think is going to happen?” Jacks asked the question, but he spoke for the other, and all eyes settled on me. Sitting around and talking with the platoon was my favorite pastime in Iraq. Sometimes I’d come up with new topics because I didn’t want the conversations to end.“

This is my new account @military-bluebells, I've sorta abandoned the other one 😭

THE CHEMISTRY all of them have with each other made the whole show perfect, it's impossible not to ship them. I have a couple tiny little snippets of writin on the account I abandoned here! Dude, they live rent free in my head and refuse to clean the place-

It's extremely messy and they all go to Rudy for relationship advice for suuuure. Or they go to Ray if they need to settle a small argument, like if butter belongs in the fridge(Gabe says no, the other two say yes), or how long a shower should be (Anthony says a minimum of 13 mins, Chaffin says that 13 mins in the max, Gabe is just happy those white boys shower in the first place).

Stafford: Yo, Manimal, got the maz 40 from the Lt. Screwby.

Jacks: Dammit Stafford, don’t call me ‘Manimal’, fuck, it’s just a name Rudy made. Fucking Rudy, fucking around. 

Stafford: A-frim, Corporal Jacks. 

Jacks: I’m gonna get my teeth fixed I just didn’t have time to get the new teeth made before we stepped off. Fuck you man, it’s not like I wanna walk around without teeth.

Stafford: How did you fuck up your grill, man?

Jacks: Brother shot ‘em out with a BB gun when we were playing.

Stafford: Screwby.

Jacks: You know man, I don’t know we’re gonna make it out of here. I don’t know, I just got a really bad feeling about this. 

Stafford: Way I see it, I’m gonna be the last motherfucker breathing. I mean, I may go down but, I ain’t going down without my GAT in hand taking out as many motherfuckers as I can. 

Jacks: Yeah seriously.

Stafford: No man I am serious.

Jacks: If I get killed over here my wife will win the fucking lottery. Damn sure of that. Signed on the dotted line every fucking policy they got.

Stafford: She still back in Reno?

Jacks: No man, I finally got her and the boys up to oceanside. Told her I’d get some decent housing, they put us up in the fucking ghetto base houses. 

Stafford: That shit is all jacked up.

Jacks: I’m telling you, man my wife is gonna leave me, she’s gonna take my boys and she gonna fucking leave me, I know it.

Stafford: Man that’s just, that’s just screwby.

Jacks: I’m telling you the only thing out here that’s motivating me out here is I just want to see my boys one more time. That’s like the one good thing about getting a girlfriend pregnant in high school, I’m going to be able to sit down and legally drink a beer with my oldest son before I’m forty.

Stafford: That’s screwby, dawg.

Jacks: Yeah, I guess so. 

Stafford: Shit, I’ll tell you what motivates me.

Jacks: What’s that? 

Stafford: Fucking doing that hard shit man, I just want to do the hardest shit, see how far I can get. That’s why I joined the Marine Corps. I was sitting home in Florida working as a cook, watching all the bullshit people from my high school doing the same old same old. That’s why I wanna do something hard, fuck, like motherfucking hard, you know? 

Jacks: Fuck man, we are in it right now. 

Stafford: Yeah, but that’s not what I’m saying, man. Ain’t like it’s supposed to be, doing fucking ‘drive-bys’ from our trucks that shit ain’t what I signed up for. 

Jacks: Shit, I signed up ‘cause I like being outdoors. Like working with my hands.

Stafford: You like that?

Jacks: Yeah, back home I was a tree-trimmer around powerlines. It was good, I’m telling you. Fuck it, signed up. 

Stafford: Had to be a warrior.

Jacks: No, it was the health insurance. I couldn’t get health insurance for my tree-trimming job. I was delivering pizza’s too, you know you can’t get injured doing that shit. Nah, Marine Corps. was the only one that let me enlist with my wife and kids, and still able to get full health benefits. 

Stafford: Hold Up. You came all the way out to Iraq, for health insurance? 

Jacks: Yeah. Fucking screwby, huh?

Stafford: (wheeze) 

Abby: You have a few too many teeth

Me: Boy you have too much hair.

Abby: And shirts. Manimal never wear shirts.