Its Sad To Me How Directdogman Had To Take Down The Post Saying Henry Was Bi Because Of The Sheer Amount

its sad to me how directdogman had to take down the post saying henry was bi because of the sheer amount of hate he got on it. yall wanted henry to be homophobic that badly huh well too fucking bad he will forever be bi in my mind

cracks open my mountain dew. sighs. hello chat. note that this pulls from personal experience and is not a judgement being passed on all christians -- it's just my personal anecdotal evidence from me and my friends.

my long and weird ass rant on why jack kennedy is a really interesting parallel to trauma resulting from christianity

SO. first and foremost a major facet of jack's character is that he's chained to this duty. this responsibility for something that he ultimately had very little if any control over. yeah in hindsight he could've watched over dee better and came back for her sooner, but hindsight is 20/20, and the promise that jack makes isn't even about dee in specific. it's about every single child hurt by fazbender's! jack is taking on the responsibility of someone else's sins and burdening himself with repenting for all of it. he outright calls it his last chance at redemption when he approaches the arcade machine in his workshop in dsaf3. to him, this is repentence for his misdeeds, but in actuality he had SO little culpability in anything before he died.

this parallels experiences in shitty christian groups quite a bit. effectively you are told that you alone are responsible for the sins of the entire human race and no matter what you do you will always be inherently flawed, but if you give yourself up to a religion and just conform to all these rules to prove yourself and never let yourself stray (lest you have to repent again), then you can be good again. you just have to promise. fittingly, jack is outright told when making the promise that it's gonna suck! it's going to suck so, so bad, and be painful, and he's going to constantly be seen as grotesque, but he still has to keep going. he has to save everyone. and he gets nothing from this besides the comfort he won't be guilty anymore.

and this comes into one of my main points! both religious trauma and jack's existance with the promise come with a sense of guilt basically built into your core. you feel shame for a lot of normal human desires and wants because you're not "supposed" to feel them, and the fact you do is "proof" that you're wicked and evil. this can lead to paranoia and a general sense of dread when it comes to just living your everyday life which i think can be seen in jack's behavior about the promise. he's constantly working towards the promise, and whenever he doesn't have work in some fashion, he literally just sits in bed -- in the marionn-ending when you skip work, jack comments that he plans just to sleep for 16 hours. he doesn't actually do this but he does very little the entire day so it's not unlikely he spent most of the day in bed regardless. plus, well... we know how devoted good ending jack is to fulfilling the promise, and hell -- he even feels responsible for saving people who aren't related to the promise, such as dave, peter, and steven!

there's a couple other major things, too. another thing with those who were really fucked up by the church is that they can sometimes go the complete opposite direction and basically do anything and everything that the church would hate to feel some sense of control. that then loops back into the guilt once the (literal or metaphorical) "high" is over with the need to compensate and rid themself of this sin. this causes a cycle of "do something 'sinful'" -> "feel immense guilt and shame and a need to repent" -> "do something equally self-destructive to compensate" -> spiral and repeat

i think a parallel can be drawn there with jack's actions, in particularly the evil routes. in defiance to the root intention of the promise, whether or not he plans on fulfilling it still, he chooses to kill with dave and shut down fazbender's that way. this is all fun and games and vegas is a great time, but especially near the end of dsaf2, we see jack is heavily haunted by his own actions and how he died and the circumstances of the promise, which eventually leads to him (depending on dialogue) literally asking blackjack to turn back time all to "repent" again. plus, in the 35 year gap between dsaf2 and dsaf3, judging by some various dialogue choices (the main ones coming to mind are during his neutral end rant, during a couple talks with the phoneys at the starts of the restaurant segments, and one where he mentions being shitfaced while working on the springlock suit training tapes), jack has become actively an alcoholic (+ a smoker, somewhat optionally) and living off of frozen dinners. as you can probably tell, he's pretty actively self-destructive, and in the soapy ending v3 he even brushes off an insane reaction to cocaine and inevitably being killed with "i always come back."

he doesn't care what happens to him. maybe, in a way, it feels like repentence. divine justice.

and looping back to the feeling of no control or a need for help making decisions, well... we see how easily jack slips into dave's plans and how he takes to henry's influence. jack is headstrong and stubborn when he wants to be, oftentimes when affirming things that feed into his self-loathing and isolation (i'll touch on that in a bit), but he falters very easily under pressure if he thinks it will bring him some kind of closure and safety and catharsis, be it closing down fazbender's, saving the kids, or something more. it's likely why henry can egg jack into killing dave in dsaf3's legacy route. the promise's guidelines dictate jack's actions just as much as a god might in religion.

last but not least, that self-loathing thing! a lack of self-worth in a big thing in religious trauma, since you're often told your worth is defined by how well you can fall into this mold that is, typically, impossibly and unrealistically perfect. when you fall short, you are told you are the thing that is inherently flawed, not the standard, and so you come to believe there is just something fundamentally wrong with YOU. jack also clearly has a super decreased sense of self-worth and confidence in his own identity for a similar reasoning! his entire sense of being depends on fitting the mold of this promise, and if he fails it or completes it -- whichever comes first -- he loses any reason to live. probably why in the evil endings, he hogs the drugs and alcohol. don't have to remember how little of a purpose you have if you're having such an adrenaline rush, eh? plus, dave is kind of the first person to not expect anything good out of jack and see jack as a person. even peter admits that jack is a monster and uses his scars as reasoning in the pure evil route, not just jack's terrible actions, while dave embraces this and doesn't seem to look down on jack. dave is only ever frightened by jack when jack acts wrong. acts like henry. it's interesting but that's another rant.

the point is that jack defines his own worth by how he completes this promise, and very clearly proclaims that he thinks of himself as a husk and a meatsack. his own soul calls him an abomination just pretending to be jack. for all jack has heart, for all that jack clearly cares and tries so, so hard, he fundamentally doesn't think he's worth anything beyond this obligation, and even when he does meet the bar... it's just what's expected for him to reach redemption. just like how someone with religious trauma believes that ripping themself apart is just what needs to be done to repent.

god is watching.

my insane henry hot take of the day is "what if he was asexual". he genuinely believes that sex only serves the purpose of having kids and is inherently unpleasant. he's insistent that breaking the barrier between life and death means nobody will ever have to again. he's such a good person.

DSaFTOBER DAY 7: STEVEN

I have some catching up to do, huh

Timelapse below vv

It makes me happy when they listen