Tbh I think the pills are blue to make them stand out against the white tile. Since this particular strip is more representational and symbolic than literal (like I doubt he was actually clutching his hockey stick in bed every night or that he traveled on foot around the lake to get to Samwell) it doesn’t really bother me at all.
I also think it’s interesting how Bob’s shoulder is literally blocking the cameras and crowd from Jack’s view; he is literally walking between Jack and the voyeurism of the crowd, creating a barrier with his body (it’s the only gap in the trophy-columns where none of the crowd is visible), and it’s the only panel in this strip where Jack actually appears happy. He’s looking up at his dad and smiling. So my read was always that the expectations/pressure were imposed by the culture and Jack’s relation to it moreso than by Bob himself. But if Jack experiences anxiety to the level that it’s pathologized, of course he’d wonder if his father secretly was disappointed the way everyone else seems to think. I think the idea that this alone isn’t enough to trigger the level of anxiety Jack had surrounding his father downplays the structural and cultural function of parental expectations and the fact that they serve as an extension of the way society pressures people to conform to hegemonic cultural standards.
Kind of tangential to the current strip, but I remember reading a fic where “ugly baby Jack Zimmerman,” which is played for laughs in the comic, was instead taken at face value, and the author had articles about it showing up in tabloids that were ultimately used to fuel plastic surgery rumors about his mother. I think it’s worth noting that Jack’s mom is also famous, and in a career that invites its own level and brand of (highly genderized) media attention and speculation. Of course he’d conceptualize all the pressure on him through the lens of hockey, and therefore focus his interpretation of his own reactions around his father and their relationship, because hockey is what he ultimately defines himself by, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t being reinforced through other things that may have been less obvious. Like I definitely think Bob would have had a learning curve with Jack’s anxiety/sexuality/arguable autism, but I’ve never really read disappointment or shaming there.
I also think it’s easier for kids to interpret pressure being placed on them through the lens of their family rather than through larger societal structures that they don’t really understand, especially since those structures both perpetuate and are perpetuated by the nuclear family as a construct. I think children understand their positionality in relation to their parents much more intuitively than their positionality within the larger cultural context. I also think people tend to assume that family is some fixed, innate thing that exists outside and irrespective of social and economic structures, and therefore any kind of family-based trauma must always come from some very specific and situationally unique interplay within the relationships between family members (which obviously plays a part in many situations) rather than problems with the family structure and its function in society that make it inherently traumatic even to well-treated children with well-meaning parents. So I don’t actually think Bob being actively mean to Jack is necessary for him to form the impression he had of him, and to me in some ways it’s *more* interesting if Jack’s view of his own childhood/history is warped out of line with what was actually happening because it begs the question of why he feels that way without immediately imposing the obvious answer of well, Jack saw him as mean because he was mean to him. Part of what interested me so much about this relationship when I first read the comic was that seeming disconnect between Jack’s view of his father and the view we get as the audience, because I think the straightforward daddy issues narrative has been strip-mined to the point of becoming kind of boring and repetitive, in addition to being from the get-go a sort of misleading framework, because I think the root of the problem actually lies within the role of fatherhood, at least as constructed and positioned the way it is in western society. So what interests me more are questions like, how was the concept of daddy issues constructed and who benefits from its continued use as a paradigm? And how can we position Jack in relation to that paradigm? In what ways does and doesn’t it provide an effective framework for interpreting his character? Can we create a better and more holistic framework?
I also think with anxiety in particular, there’s this general narrative that anxiety/depression/etc are caused either by individual brain “abnormalities” or by a “bad childhood” in a way where individual bad actors are blamed for the thoughts/behavior, instead of actually looking at how anxiety and mental “disorders” are socially constructed, the function that pathologization of thoughts and behavior serves culturally, and the ways in which the onus is shifted away from anything that might require systemic change to a very individualized failure in either the biology of the individual or their specific life circumstances. I think these narratives not only protect from scrutiny those systems whose failures result in continuing instances of these common experiences of structural violence and violation, but actually end up perpetuating them by forcing people to submit to the authority of the state and the psychiatric apparatus (which, in the same vein as the family structure, positions certain persons in authority who, even when well-meaning, still have the systemic power to enact state-sanctioned violence and control against a person’s will, the mere fact of which I believe is inherently traumatizing—even if wealth and fame are strongly protective against this violence due to the fact that it’s used to uphold the structures that created the categories of wealth and fame in the first place). Ultimately, I think there’s this false wall erected between psychology and sociology that is inherently and deliberately limiting, and I think it’s very interesting to interrogate that through fiction.
Anyway, that was just a very long way to say yeah, Bob and Jack’s relationship is fascinating to me, but maybe not for the same reasons that it is to others, lol.
Upon first reading this strip, I didn’t think Bitty’s lack of skill or a relationship between them would derail Jack’s plans; I honestly kind of assumed that Bitty would ~change Jack~ enough that he was able to reconstruct an identity that didn’t center around hockey and ultimately let hockey go and pursue something else that wasn’t so dangerous and damaging to him, but obviously that didn’t come to pass, haha
Quickly on the glossing over of Bitty’s closet incident, I do think that if we see the vlog entry comics as being framed as a visualization of Bitty sharing anecdotes with his online audience, it makes sense that he would gloss over that. I think part of the reason why his self-image is so at odds with his actions etc is that he just ignores things that don’t fit within the image of the person he wants to be, and I honestly think he would see airing his trauma on the internet outside the context of a joke as gauche/tacky/etc.
I GOT BUSY AT WORK AND I FORGOT TO POST!!! HERE IS ANOTHER EXCELLENT ESSAY
