wolf 359 spoilers (brave new world)
i have so many thoughts about this silly little audio drama and i will be making it everyone’s problem.
jacobi’s relationship with kepler is. so interesting to me. from the moment we meet the si-5 crew, we can see how devoted jacobi is to kepler, and how he so deeply and blindly trusts him. like, of course, kepler was the man to drag him out of rock bottom and give him a job. he gave him his life back. it’s understandable that he would be so devoted to kepler. and we never see that trust and adoration waver, until desperate measures, when maxwell dies. when he loses his best friend and other half. his platonic soulmate (bc Duh). and kepler does nothing to prevent minkowski from shooting her in the head. he even taunted her about it. and this is definitely such a turning point for jacobi’s mental image of kepler. the guy who could do no wrong, and who had saved his life countless times, let his best friend die. and then!! he’s so blinded by grief that he stages his own mini mutiny. he nearly makes minkowski shoot kepler. not only does this drastically affect their relationship, but almost directly after this, the goddard crew takes over. jacobi is put under pryce’s mind control, and kepler doesn’t do anything. granted, it would have been such a bad idea for him to intervene, and it would likely have made things worse. but jacobi clings to that image of the shiny, perfect, and stoic man that has saved him so many times, because kepler and maxwell were his family. he spent so many years with them, and they are such a tight knit group, and it all gets torn apart, and kepler doesn’t do anything to try to fix it. “oh well, it’s all a part of the big old chess game!” and that turmoil within jacobi makes my heart fuckin hurt because all he wants is his family back.
and fucking hell. brave new world. jacobi, who has been put through hell and back, who has lost literally everything that was important to him, tries one last time to get his stoic leader back. he begs kepler to join them, take the sol back to earth, and maybe things can be a small semblance of what they once were. jacobi tries so hard to get him back. and he watches kepler leave the room with rachel. with the evil guys. and then he loses that last part of him. in my opinion, that’s the final nail in the coffin for jacobi. the man who he thought could do no wrong, the man who he would do literally anything for, chose the side of the “bad guys” despite knowing exactly what cutter was planning on doing with decima. the kepler he knew was officially gone, in his mind. and jacobi never finds out that kepler stopped it. how could he have?? rachel killed him immediately after finding out what he did. after finding out that he redirected power from that pulse beacon relay to hera. kepler likely died thinking that jacobi hated him for what he had done. for going to the “dark side”. he was always on jacobi’s side, though, through the end. and jacobi leaves wolf 359 thinking that he’s lost everything and everyone that was important to him before the mission. and sure, he’s warmed up a bit to the hephaestus crew, but it’s not maxwell. it’s not kepler. they’re not his family. everything that he had dedicated years of his life towards is gone. he has to rebuild completely from scratch, left only with the memories of the family that once was.
