The curse of thinking jasper is super interesting is that either ppl are cowards and shy away from his history with the confederacy to make themselves more comfortable with liking him even tho it’s more honest and interesting to work with it, either to deconstruct it or to punish him or they latch on to the “god of war” line/concept and make him too impressive/well known/badass/whatever imo. I too am insane about his history, the implications, the horror elements and how cool/insane it is to have this like, mild ass mormon vampire family + their son-in-law John Fucking Wick From Hell but sometimes i think people get stuck on it in the wrong ways…
Like i keep his confederate history because it's part of the larger questions/themes of the series around agency and bodily autonomy. i went i write him i write him as someone who was young, on the poorer end and believed the propaganda -- until he started to see the realities, but by then his family's relying on the money and he'll be shot for desertion. but that adds to the ways you can work with the story and talk about different things, does he realize the horrors and stay true to the cause or does he try to do what he can to mitigate the harm he now realizes he's causing?
either way his transformation into a vampire and subsequent grooming and servitude to maría can be seen as a kind of divine punishment. same with his empathic abilities, there is now no escape from the harm he perpetrates or allows to be perpetrated. which is endlessly fascinating since he's the least human of all the cullens despite his empathy powers, how much of that is maybe learned disassociation to survive his early years? either way it's just good storytelling that a guy who was on the side of enslavement is later subjected to similar indignities/denials of autonomy.
his empathic abilities are also a kind of violation too. when people think about powers like jasper's and edward's they tend to fixate more on the violation of their own privacy but they rarely consider the other side. if you don't like edward or jasper knowing things about you you can leave, only communicate over the phone, etc. but unless they live in total isolation they can never be alone in their own bodies, edward will always hear other's in his head, jasper will always feel the emotions of others. which is part of why i get iffy about jalice, it's explicitly stated that she was already very enamored/positive towards him before even meeting him and he was cautious of her when they met, but that her feelings got inside him and affected him. Which considering we also see him do things like hang around lovey dovey bella/edward to soak up the happy vibes like a free buzz makes me iffy about how these two got together. another addition to the themes of autonomy or lack there of with jasper.
given how so many stories in this series hinge on a loss of autonomy i think it's important to keep the murkiness of jasper's own relationship with it. it just allows for more complexity in the writing and it fits very well with the conversations already going on.
i also think people tend to forget that element with him when they hype him up in their writing as "the god of war" or "the major" -- for one, if you ARE writing a jasper who's still from the confederacy but regrets that now, he would not want to be called the major. that's something that maybe maría and contemporaries from that time in his life might call him but like... he would not willingly have that be his Cool Guy Nickname. also it sometimes feels like it gets a bit too jekyll/hyde for me... like unless we're insinuating "the major/god of war" persona is something he adopts in the process of disassociating himself from the horrific violence he's forced to inflict.... like why are we talking like he's in any way significantly different from his normal just because we're using a nickname? john wick is called the baba yaga, he's also just fucking called john wick -- he kills hundreds of people each movie either way.
and i think titles like "the god of war" and "the major" also make it easier to forget there was no dignity in this life for him. jasper might have been decently ranked in maría's army but he wasn't there by choice, he didn't know there were other options and he was manipulated for decades. by the time he finally leaves her he's deeply depressed, likely suicidal, it's only when he learns he can survive on animal blood that the dude has a chance at mental stability. those titles to me ring too much of a glorification, they make him out to be too large, too impressive. when i see people writing that even the volturi are like "~ooo the major ooo~" i'm just like, no absolutely not. and this is coming from someone who LOVES to pad the resumes of my faves lol.
but in this case i think it's a real disservice to not really engage with the fact that the reputation jasper has, no matter how big or small you make it, was gained while being the violent dog of another. he might've been maría's general but it was her war and she forced him to her be her executioner for their own men. jasper was groomed from his first days as a vampire to do one woman's bidding, she knew about his empathic abilities and then made him kill hundreds. for decades. i do think jasper should have a reputation in the vampire world, it just makes sense. i think it's accurate when edward calls him "forgotten god or incarnation of war" but i also think it's important to remember that most of those who fight wars are regular people who then come out of it endlessly fucked up. jasper is fascinating because he's a traumatized soldier and a vicious guard dog trying to relearn civilization. like... idk i think that making him somehow sleeker to make him "cooler" is just not as good.
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