#quadrants

the thing is that jade considers negative emotions themselves to be nonsense.

i think saying that jade is walked over by other characters would be a mistake. it's incredibly obvious that the one person who isn't letting jade talk about her feelings, is, in fact, jade. jade is holding herself to impossible standards, believing that the entire course of the game rides on her shoulders due to her skaian responsibility.

you can see it so clearly in how she talks to herself, and even in how she speaks to others-- despite her penchant for silliness, jade holds an unmistakable no-nonsense attitude when it comes to productivity.

emotions make her uncomfortable when they deter that progress... and this follows her into her relationships in a serious way.

we don't get to hear much about the specifics of how davejade fell apart. dave's gayness nonwithstanding, it's very clear from the dialogue that davesprite had extreme depression issues that jade was, understandably, not able to handle.

this isn't something that comes out of nowhere- it makes sense for jade to get awkward when situations get too mushy for her; even without knowing that grimbark jade was working off her real desires. jade dislikes discussing negative emotions because she thinks they're unbecoming, and that makes her red relationships fall apart.

this happens with "cheerful" characters too- jade has friction with characters too similar to herself, too "silly", who aren't taking things seriously enough.

overall, jade has a lot of difficulty with emotions and talking about them-- hers and anyone else's. so she awkwardly humors them, hoping that it'll stop, and slowly builds frustration, as seen with tavros (and maybe davesprite).

this brings me, finally, to the flipside of things: blackrom, and a jade who doesn't have to be mushy.

jade is at her best when she's 'allowed' to be an asshole to people without feeling guilty about it: most famously, towards karkat.

jade thinks of karkat of someone who deserves her ire; in fact, he might be the singular person in the world who she can be productively angry towards. telling karkat to fuck off is always the right thing to do to proceed to her goal- whether that be blocking an annoying troll or getting the frog timelines in order.

jade and karkat's relationship starts off extremely toxic. years of anger and bullying make it hard to believe these two could ever be friends, but strangely, something happens to tip those scales- two interesting scenes that i'll highlight here.

what's happening here is auspisticism, a blackrom relationship that diffuses a previously toxic romance. and that is not my theory, that is something explicitly pointed out in (and out) the text several times.

it seems jade harley's healthiest, realest relationship is a (strange, rotating, time-travel-based) auspisticism where she gets to cuss someone annoying out all the time.

she's finally free to bitch at someone. which is kind of adorable??

[i'll write a longer post about these two another time.]

but it's visible in all of the jade redrom attempts as well. what's clear is that jade needs to confront and express her emotions. what jade really needs is an outlet- jade needs to feel like her negative feelings are the goal, so she doesn't feel guilty for impeding one. this is why blackrom could be more healthy for her!

think of popular jade ships; jadekat, davejade, even jadenep. all of these characters deeply frustrate her. why bottle that up when she could make it a healthy romantic outlet instead!?

of course, jade was always allowed to boss her friends around- it was a pretty big part of her early character, in fact! (though she should learn to do it more!) but she was scared of the "immaturity" of involving negative feelings, and that was what she was missing.

she deserves to embrace and celebrate smacktalking people!

wtf how did i manage to draw this in under 2h wtfffffff