#marstonsboy asks

oh!!! why did you say that to me.

ok. fine. you asked for this. retaliatory devastation incoming.

there’s a random event at beecher’s hope where you can find charles talking to jack, where he implies he’s been teaching him to track animals, and remind him you can tell if a set of bones belonged to a bird because they’re hollow. it’s kind of cute and a little silly, since charles pulls a piece of wolf dung out of his pocket (?) to show jack, and the kid asks if he can keep it— if john is nearby, jack will ask if he can take him hunting sometime.

so maybe, years later, he finds tracks around the beecher’s hope land leading back to tall trees, and recognizes them as wolf tracks. he never finds any traces too close to the house, and it’s just the one wolf as far as he can tell. odd, as wolves usually travel in packs.

and he’d know it doesn’t make sense, and his ma would tell him he’s being silly, but it makes him feel almost at ease. there’s a dangerous predator prowling about, and it could hurt the livestock or rufus if he isn’t cautious, but something about it feels familiar. safe, even.

he doesn’t tell his ma, so as not to cause her any more worry than she already has to deal with, and he doesn’t engage with the wolf either. it doesn’t come any closer, but he can tell it’s still there. there are tracks left just outside the fences. scraps of fur, sometimes dung. rabbits, beavers, and deer carcasses found further into the trees.

one day, nearly two years since pa’s been gone, he sees it. he’s hunting for dinner that night, since ma has been too lethargic lately to go into town, when a lone howl alerts him to its presence. it’s standing in the snow, at the foot of nekoti rock, staring at him. it doesn’t move to come closer. jack lifts his rifle, but the wolf gives no indication that it plans to attack, or even to give him the time of day. instead, it turns away and stalks off leisurely into the trees, searching for its next prey elsewhere.

if this were any ordinary wolf, jack might track it and put it down now, just to prevent any future incidents— but it doesn’t seem like one. there was something in its eyes, something in the way it held itself. something he hesitates to give a name to.

oh hell yeah. i’ve got a whole section in my ao3 bookmarks dedicated to this. be warned, most of them are sad because i am a wretched little angst appreciator <3 here u go, have my personal favorites under the cut so i don’t flood your entire screen:

if we’re talking 1914 jack? honestly, with how little he seems to remember of his childhood, i think he’d find it hard to believe that the four-year-old boy he was in 1899 is the same person that he is now. maybe they aren’t, in a way. jack has been through a lot of hell, to the point where even his sixteen-year-old self is hard to reconcile with the little boy from the prequel.

on one hand, there’s him: jack marston, orphan, outlaw. the man who buried his mother, then put the man who killed his father and uncle in the ground when she wouldn’t be around to see it. regardless of what way he lands on the honor scale, he’s lost every reason, every person he had left to live for.

on the other, still jack marston: four years old, surrounded by family that love him and would do anything to keep him safe and shield him from the worst of their crimes, even though jack himself is smart enough to draw his own conclusions. blissfully unaware of the fact that almost everyone he knows will be gone in just a handful of months.

hi!!! i’ve yapped about this a little on my main blog, but thanks for the excuse to talk about it here :3

so the animal symbolism in red dead redemption is fantastic, with two distinctive animals used to signify high and low honor in arthur— a buck for high honor (prey animal, usually symbolically associated w the cycles of nature and rebirth, as deer shed and regrow their antlers as seasons go on), and a coyote for low honor (predatory animal often associated with cunning and trickery, but also curiosity).

with jack, i like to think his high honor animal is a maned wolf. further explanation under the cut :)

nooo. perish the thought! these allegations! i actually can’t stand that guy. that’s why i think about him all the time and am brought to tears by the mere mention of him. and by the way since you brought him up i’m obligated by my special interest to yap at you in an increasingly insane fashion about him. because i don’t like him so much.

there’s a bunch of campfire songs you can stumble upon at beecher’s hope after the sunset. most of the time it’ll be uncle leading the chorus, either with his banjo or without, and abigail and jack singing along. other times it’s abigail singing by herself, but jack will accompany her by playing the harmonica as a backing track.

as far as the ones i’ve seen, i’m fairly certain that none of these are songs you can also see at the various campsites during chapters 2-4. but as they have remained stuck in my head, i like to think jack remembers some of them too. he can still be found playing harmonica in 1911, and i like to think he still would in 1914, if less often. it probably makes him sad to do it, without his momma singing along to her favorite songs that he learned to play for her, but sometimes a tune he heard years ago will pop in his head, and he has to play it to start remembering the whole thing.

a couple times in mexico it’s a handful of words that triggers it. he doesn’t remember all of them, or the order they go in, and lord knows he isn’t good enough at spanish to try and execute it, but it dredges up a very fuzzy, distant memory. one of his uncles playing guitar and singing confidently, while the rest of his family shouted along to the chorus and fumbled their way through the parts they didn’t know.

some dirty joke uncle told him pops in his head, and he laughs at how it would surely disgust both of his parents to hear— and just for a couple seconds, the strings of a banjo. a group of his uncles by the fire, loudly hollering out the words to a song jack was not allowed to hear, as his momma was very quick to put her hands over his ears and yell at them, which only made them laugh harder.

just once, when he’s twelve, he’s reading in the family room at just the right time to hear momma playing something on the piano. it starts off as nothing he recognizes, when she presses the keys experimentally, but soon starts taking shape into something that, for some reason, makes him feel a little nostalgic and a little sad. he hums along unconsciously, just barely loud enough to vibrate in his ears but low enough to not be heard beneath the sounds of the piano.

but he hums a little louder for the chorus, the notes falling into almost the right order in his head as she plays them, and momma stops so abruptly that a noisy wrong note makes him wince. she turns around to look at him. jack tenses, book in hand, afraid he’s done something wrong when momma’s eyes look a little shiny, but she doesn’t look mad.

instead, she smiles. and when she sniffles a little, and when jack asks “are you feelin’ alright, momma?” she just shakes her head, half turned to face him.

“mhm. i just love you so much, you silly boy.” she tells him, and a little embarrassed, jack nods silently and buries his head back in his book.

i’ve heard it!!! and i think you’re right. compared to his high honor behavior (depressed, openly lacking purpose and reason to live), low honor jack is much more sadistic and cruel. he’ll often taunt enemies, people he’s dueling, or lawmen with lines that i personally would expect to hear from john rather than him (ie: “Yeah, I killed your father. He was crying like a girl if I remember correctly.” / “You got me one of them annoying faces... Now move before it annoys me more.” / “Why don’t you shove that badge up your ass? See if it makes you smile!”), or make those infamous gross comments towards working girls in the street.

still, despite this, as you pointed out, jack does feel some kind of remorse even with low honor. he expresses disgust and loathing with himself and his behavior multiple times, but won’t actually rectify this behavior unless the player character decides to get his honor back up. he still apologizes when looting bodies, (“I’m so sorry, miss,” when looting a woman and “Sorry, mister,” when looting a man) or says things like “It’s no wonder I’ve got problems.” which, fair enough.

regardless of honor level, he’ll often mention his family’s legacy in combat, including one (fairly rare iirc) line where he yells out “I’m John Marston - Jr.” he clearly has the presence of mind to understand that he’s repeated the cycle and grown up to be just like his father in exactly the ways his parents didn’t want him to, but while high honor jack will retain the values his parents taught him (ie: turning down working girls by citing that his mother would “turn in her grave”), low honor jack reacts to all the trauma he’s endured by externalizing his anger, hurting people just for the hell of it, and he hates himself even more for it.

i am desperately trying to find the person who had the original post,

@lone-cowboy