Let's Talk About Jacks's Apples
...and especially their COLORS. I wanted to figure out what they could mean, so I made a spreadsheet!
First, DISCLAIMERS:
MAJOR spoilers for OUABH and TBONA + the Caraval series!
This post was written BEFORE ACFTL and does not contain information or spoilers from it.
This post is based on my interpretations and observations, all of them may not be perfectly accurate. The conclusions I make are my theories, not necessarily canon information.
When I reference page numbers, they're from my OUABH UK paperback and TBONA UK hardcover - it's possible they're a bit off for you if you have different editions of the books.
This is a long post, so grab a snack and get comfortable!
I hope you enjoy reading! 🍎
Table Of Contents
Introduction
Why Apples?
A Detailed Look Into The Apples (= explaining everything I say I'll explain later)
The Colors
Where Do The Apples Come From
Conclusions/TL;DR
This is a long post, so here you can see what's coming and skip over to what interests you most :)
Introduction
Throughout the OUABH series, there are 14 scenes in total where Jacks is holding an apple in his hand (sometimes eating them, sometimes not) while Evangeline is there to witness it. All of those apples are unnaturally colored. To look for connections between them, I made a spreadsheet:
For sake of clarity, I will be discussing 13 total apples instead of 14 - I believe the "undescribed" apple (its color is not explicitly stated in the scene) is the same as White Apple #5, but it appears in two separate scenes, so both are included here. I will get into this later.
The spreadsheet contains various details about the apples, such as what Jacks does while holding them, when he picks them up (or if he's already holding them when they're described), what happens to them (dropped somewhere etc.), how he feels during the scene, etc. I will discuss these later in this post.
Then I realized he also has some apples in Legendary and Finale, so I made another list of the ones he has while Tella is present:
Here's a summary of all the apples:
That would make 20 apples in total, half of them being white.
Now let's go over some relevant context! Then I will get to analyzing what these colors mean and what kind of connections I found between the apples, I promise.
Why Apples?
Before we do a deep dive into the details, let's go over the basics on why Jacks keeps eating the apples. The most popular theory (if it can even be called a theory, it's basically canon) is based on what LaLa tells Evangeline in OUABH:
"When we [Fates] feel, it's intense and consuming. It devours us and drives us. And the strongest of our feelings is always the urge to be that which we were made to be." –OUABH page 270
She proceeds to explain that when she sews wedding dresses, it helps her with that urge, and to say that for Jacks it's similar – he has the desire to find his true love, and supposedly that's the one person his kiss doesn't kill. So, according to LaLa's logic, the apples help him with that. It makes a lot of sense, and everything he physically does with the apples makes more sense in light of it.
When Jacks is first introduced to the Caraval series, he is described eating an apple. While I believe the theory above is true, it was also interesting to notice that he seems to already be holding the apple when he meets Tella practically by chance. In fact, there are only four times he ever picks up an apple during a scene, and they are all during the OUABH series. I will get more into it later.
In OUABH, Jacks is described to have countless apples and apple cores in his rooms and offices, so we don't know how many he eats and why when Evangeline isn't around him. However, I found that he almost never touches Evangeline while holding an apple. (With sort of the exception of the silver apple, where he touches his dagger to her lips, and the blue apple, which he was holding before stopping Evangeline from taking the luck stone back from Chaos.)
Now, this could just be for practical reasons, but he touches Evangeline in about 21 of the 25 (I focused on the apples so this may not be the exact count) scenes where he doesn't have an apple and only in 6 of the 14 scenes where he has an apple, and in 2 of them the touch is barely there or brief and initiated by Evangeline.
An interesting comparison is how he does touch Tella while holding an apple (like Blue Apple #1 and White Caraval Apple #2), so it definitely isn't purely about logistics. Maybe it's related to him thinking she's his true love, that's the greatest difference I can think of. It is also noteworthy that he doesn't eat any apples while in the Hollow, which Evangeline also notices (TBONA 284).
With the theory above in mind, the way Jacks touches his apples is pretty straightforward:
He tosses them when he's in a good mood or needs to distract himself
Him biting them is practically his version of self-control
He drops them when things aren't so fun anymore or there's a clear mood shift (I will discuss this a bit more later).
He stabs two apples in total: the Silver Apple and White OUABH Apple #4. the first time he tells Evangeline how Apollo would be eternally heartbroken if she called off the engagement, the second time he tells Evangeline that the Archer ends up killing the Fox. And what unites these? Great heartbreak.
A Detailed Look Into The Apples
Or in other words, let's get into everything I said I would discuss later. After this, we'll look more into the apple colors.
The Undescribed Apple
I believe that White Apple #5, the apple Jacks holds in his hand before he and Evangeline leave to LaLa's engagement party, is the same as the apple that he picks up in the next scene, in the carriage as they travel - its color is not described, but the narration leads to the assumption that this apple is already familiar to the reader:
"Jacks leaned back in his seat and picked up his apple" –TBONA page 184
13 is also a more meaningful number than 14 (and the total count of all apples would be 20 instead of 21), so even though the total number might be purely coincidental, it also could be a fun intentional detail.
Caraval vs. OUABH
There are some very interesting parallels between apples in Legendary/Finale and apples in OUABH/TBONA.
First, we have the blue apple (in Legendary) that Jacks ends up dropping into a fireplace (see chart below). The only other apple that he specifically drops into fire is the very last white apple in TBONA. Before he drops the blue apple, Tella says that nothing could make her fall in love with him. Before he drops the white apple, Evangeline suggests that maybe Jacks could find another true love.
Second, every apple is either last seen still in his hand or dropped on the floor/ground (or fire), except for two: the sparkling white one in Finale (in Tella's dream again) and the pink one in OUABH, which he tosses to Tella and Evangeline. He directly encourages Tella to taste the white apple, and he tells Evangeline that she might need a snack. In terms of color, the sparkling white apple is especially interesting – I will look into the sparkling later along with the colors.
"Jacks picked up his apple"
The main difference between the Caraval and OUABH apples - and the one thing that keeps messing up my theories - is that during the Caraval series, Jacks never picks up an apple during a scene, he is always already holding one when the scene begins (see chart above). However, during OUABH and TBONA, he picks up four apples in total. And they are all white.
White Apple #1: Meeting Evangeline for the first time
White Apple #3: Evangeline says she'd stab Jacks if she got the chance to
White Apple #5: Evangeline forbids Jacks from killing people at LaLa's party
White Apple #7: Jacks lets go of Evangeline and shuts off from her, he's about to tell her the truth about planning to go back in time
All of them are different in terms of why exactly he picks up the apple, but there is more or less a shift in tone/topic of their conversation during all of these scenes.
The Colors
White Apples
I think that white apples are the "default" color, and/or they represent focusing on what's important.
They make up half of the apples Jacks has, and all of the apples he spontaneously picks up are white. So, if something like his emotions or circumstances affect the apple colors (which I think is at least somewhat the case), it makes sense for white to be the basic color – and what would be a better "default" apple than the one who reminds him not to get distracted.
Even though the apple he tosses to Tella is sparkling white, I don't think the color represents her because he was holding a white apple before he met Tella. He couldn't have been thinking of her, but he most likely had plans that he was thinking over as he was hoping to take the throne from Elantine.
Black Apples
I originally thought the black color could mean bad intentions or regret, but I'm now quite sure it represents doing whatever it takes to get what he wants. The context surrounding the black apples highlights this:
Black Apple #1: Jacks offers his help in exchange for controlling Tella's emotions. He wants to find true love more than anything, and this is his last attempt to make Tella fall for him.
Black Apple #2: He's controlling Apollo in order to make him propose to Evangeline. He needs it, again, in order to reach his goal – only this time he's planning to go back in time. Still to find true love, though.
Black Apple #3: This one stands out a bit from the other two. Jacks brings Evangeline to Chaos' castle so she can be healed after Apollo shot her. Here the black apple might symbolize doing anything to keep Evangeline alive (he also needs her alive, so that checks out, but at this point I don't think it's just that), and possibly his reluctance to either ask Chaos for help or put Evangeline through being infected with vampire venom.
Blue Apples
Blue apples seem to represent happiness and success, because we tend to see them after something went just like Jacks wanted. This could also be connected to his eye color.
Blue Apple #1: It's the first apple we see after Tella didn't die of his kiss, and he's obviously more than happy about that.
Blue Apple #2. He got into Tella's dream, for the second time, and he had successfully tricked her into the "marriage thing" before.
Blue Apple #3. He is holding this one right after Evangeline agreed to open the Valory Arch, while the apple he held in the previous scene (only five pages earlier) was white.
The Golden Apple
The apples that there are just one of are the trickiest because there's less context to go by, but I think the golden apple represents Tella. It's the first one we see in his hand after the events of Finale, and Tella's hair color is close enough to it. She is also a princess now, which the color gold could also represent.
It's worth mentioning that it could also be tied to failure, heartbreak, or Jacks's own hair color (as it is often described as golden). He also lives in the North now, known as Lord Jacks, and he's "friends" (?) with Apollo, a prince, so it could be related to that as well.
The Silver Apple
I think the silver apple is like a "milder" version of the blue apple, in which case the apple representing happiness would definitely be intentionally the same color as his eyes: The Caraval Wiki describes his eye color as "silver-blue".
When Jacks has the silver apple, Evangeline has got married to Apollo just like he wanted, but everything isn't perfect yet. He's quite content, but it isn't quite as big satisfaction as when he has a blue apple. However, because Evangeline asked him to meet, the apple's color could also represent for example curiosity.
The Pink Apple
Because of Evangeline's hair color, the pink apple seems to intuitively represent her. Not only that, he's just spent the night holding her before he appears with the pink apple in hand, so it just makes a lot of sense to me. This is also the apple he tossed to her.
The Purple Apple
I've had the most trouble with the purple apple. It being the apple he holds after talking with Scarlett and the scene leading to Tella's discovery that his heart beats, and the only purple apple during any book and scene, I don't even know where to start.
While basic color symbolism is connected to the apple colors loosely at most, purple as a symbol for royalty, nobility, and power could make sense if he wanted to emphasize those qualities while talking to Scarlett. Purple is also associated with mystery, and with us and Tella not finding out immediately why he met with Scarlett, it could also be a storytelling element.
Bonus: Sparkling/shimmering Apples
There are some apples that deserve a special mention, and that's the ones that are described as sparkling or shimmering.
White Caraval Apple #3, "sparkling white": This is the apple that Jacks gives to Tella (in her dream), urging her to taste it.
Black Apple #3, "shimmering black": And this apple is in TBONA, when Jacks brings Evangeline to Chaos' castle to be healed.
The only similarity between them that I've found so far is that they both stand out from the other white and blue apples: the sparkling white apple is the only white apple that Jacks gives to someone else, and the shimmering black apple is the third one that stands out to me (see "Black Apples" above).
Where Do The Apples Come From
A very good and for now unanswered question is where Jacks gets the apples from. Does he pick them from a tree? What tree? What color are they, do they start off as natural apples or maybe white? What makes an apple something other than their default color? For these questions, I don't have solid theories yet, only speculation.
We're all obsessed with how intensely Fates feel when they do feel something (*cough* the end of TBONA *cough*), but I also think that it could have something to do with the apples, at least some of them. When Jacks feels something or spends a lot of time thinking of something, maybe it could somehow affect the apples' colors? Some of the apples seem to be connected to his emotions, such as the blue ones. No apples are seen changing colors and some apples seem to not have a direct connection to his emotions, though, so there is little evidence to support this.
Conclusions
To summarize everything I went over above,
There are 20 apples in total that Jacks is seen holding throughout every scene he is in, seven of them during the Caraval series and 13 during OUABH and TBONA.
What Jacks does with his apples (tossing, biting, picking up, dropping) is connected to his emotions.
The apples have different colors that I believe represent different things: white (10 of 20, focusing on what's important), black (3 of 20, doing whatever it takes), blue (3 of 20, happiness), gold (1 of 20, possibly Tella? multiple possibilities), silver (1 of 20, possibly happiness mixed with something else), pink (1 of 20, Evangeline?), and purple (1 of 20, power? nobility? mystery?).
The origin of the apples is for now unknown, as is the reason for each color (both the colors' meanings and how they take on the different colors).
With all that said, there is quite much room for interpretation, especially in terms of the apple colors. My theories aren't the only correct ones, and I do not wish to present them that way. As I stated in the beginning, I might have overlooked details or noted some down inaccurately. The purpose of this post was to share my findings and to have fun theorizing!
Let's hope that we get some actual answers for these in ACFTL and that the books treat us kindly <3 Please do not give me any spoilers, not on the topic of apples or anything else, I'm actively trying to avoid them!
If you read this far, THANK YOU SO MUCH!! I poured my heart into this research and this analysis, and I'm so happy if at least one person besides myself enjoys looking at my little findings. <3 Here, have an apple as a reward: 🍎
