hi!! i’m moony, he/bee, disaster of an adult— and my madness clearly knows no bounds.
you might know me from my main blog, where i frequently yap about my special interests. this is my jack-marston-specific side blog, which is just for him, because i finally played red dead redemption several years late, and it promptly took over my brain.
do i know what to actually do with a side blog? no. is this a wise decision? also no. but the hyperfixation has gotten to the point where if i don’t devote a significant amount of my time and effort to it, i will explode. thus, This Fucking Thing was born.
(i blame other jack marston enthusiasts for enabling and encouraging my insanity. you could have stopped this. my yapping is about to get astronomical and it’s all your fault.)
so, in summary: i can’t wait to be even more utterly insane about my favorite character in the red dead series. consider this utter madness a tribute to jack marston my beloved. put your seatbelt on and have fun.
guess who’s replaying red dead redemption(s) again and needs to make everyone else sad too?
anyway. can we talk about jack and the love he shows for his mom in increasingly devastating ways through the years? it isn’t surprising to me as she’s the one constantly present person in his life up until 1914, but listen. listen to me. he was sixteen. he was sixteen and his home just got shot to hell, he watched uncle die in front of him, he watched his father send them off with the intent to sacrifice himself so they could get away safely— and the first thing he does when they ride back and find his body is hold abigail while she cries.
he was sixteen years old and instead of having any sort of big reaction himself to what you could argue is the most traumatic event of his life, he immediately goes to console his mother. and we Know how bitter and angry sixteen year old jack is, but he doesn’t go after ross until abigail is gone. he doesn’t throw his life away and become exactly the man she did everything to save him from being until she doesn’t have to see it.
his thought process just breaks my heart there. he was only a kid but he saw his mother was heartbroken and he pushed aside everything he must’ve been feeling to take care of her. and if in littler ways, he’s Been doing that since he was a kid. jack’s nearly unrecognizable from his 1899/1907 self in 1911, but i see him hugging his mother while she cries over the death of her husband and i can’t think of anything but that little boy that made her a flower necklace just because he found some pretty flowers.
yes, this was prompted by me playing that fishing mission again and genuinely bursting into tears at tiny baby jack marston making a flower necklace for his momma. but can you blame me. i am in shambles.
i can’t think about jack marston without nearly crying over just how sorry i feel for him. like, i’m sorry you were only four years old when the admittedly unstable support system you had fell apart. i’m sorry you didn’t have a real, permanent home until you were twelve, and i’m sorry you only got four years before that too was ripped away from you. i’m sorry you felt that you had to prove yourself otherwise your father would leave again like he’s done multiple times before. i’m sorry you felt so inferior you were unable to believe that your parents loved you so much and would have done anything for you. i’m sorry you had to pick up a gun and shoot at people at sixteen and kill a man for the first time at nineteen. i’m sorry you watched uncle die then watched your mother lose herself to grief over your father’s corpse, riddled with bullets in front of your home. i’m sorry you had to bury your mother only three years later. i’m sorry you lost your family and yourself and willingly threw your life away so young in the name of revenge no one wanted you to seek. i’m sorry you ended up all alone and grew up to be exactly the man your family did everything to save you from becoming. i’m so sorry jack marston.
The way they handled Jack's character is soo interesting to me because while he's mostly a side-character in both RDRs we still get to see him grow up and develop in 4 stages of his life. As a 4 year old, then 12, then 16, and finally as a 19 year old. He's as much of a main character as does John and Arthur (I mean we even get to play as him in the epilogue of RDR1). He's the sole survivor of everything that happened through these two games and it's so fucking tragic when we give it a deep thought.
i think a lot about jack and stranger missions (i’ve written about it too, and i’ll do it again) but i was dicking around in my 94% save and had a thought. if encountering algernon wasp (the “Duchesses and Other Animals” guy— also the guy arthur can save from choking at the party during “The Gilded Cage”) in the epilogue, john introduces himself as “jim milton,” for obvious reasons. the next time they meet, algernon will greet him as “james”— likely because he’s very formal, and “jim” is a nickname/diminutive form of “james”. still with me? see where this is going?
anyway, could you imagine the crashout if jack met algernon and was promptly called “john”?
where you the person who had the idea of john being the one to die instead of arthur, and later when jack is all grown, he meets arthur in a bar, where arthur is in denial about knowing john ??
i am desperately trying to find the person who had the original post,
@lone-cowboy
sorry, no, and i don’t think i’ve heard of that post either? but hopefully this helps u narrow it down :)
hi, i’m alive! in the process of a huge amount of projects and life things at once, which is why i haven’t been gracing your dash with pain recently, but i have this as a substitute. i think i linked it somewhere in my ao3 notes a while back, but never here, so. woe, marstonings be upon ye.
I ACCIDENTALLY UNF9LLOWED YOU FOR A MIN IM SORGY CUZ I DIDNT KNOW I WAS FOLLOWING YOU AND SO I WENT TO FOLLOW YOU AND I CLICKED BEFORE I COULD NOTICE I ALREADY WASS 💔 waah
oh, absolutely, and he genetically inherits it from john. i’m projecting because i’m autistic, and i see a lot of traits in both of them, but even if they weren’t written with asd in mind their behaviors are still pretty clear if you know where to look. specifically i’d like to note that jack has moments of going semi-verbal or non-verbal when he’s upset, and both him and john have problems with emotional dysregulation. i also happen to think quite a lot of the vdl gang could meet the qualifications for c-ptsd, but that’s another rant entirely.
nooo. perish the thought! these allegations! i actually can’t stand that guy. that’s why i think about him all the time and am brought to tears by the mere mention of him. and by the way since you brought him up i’m obligated by my special interest to yap at you in an increasingly insane fashion about him. because i don’t like him so much.
there’s a bunch of campfire songs you can stumble upon at beecher’s hope after the sunset. most of the time it’ll be uncle leading the chorus, either with his banjo or without, and abigail and jack singing along. other times it’s abigail singing by herself, but jack will accompany her by playing the harmonica as a backing track.
as far as the ones i’ve seen, i’m fairly certain that none of these are songs you can also see at the various campsites during chapters 2-4. but as they have remained stuck in my head, i like to think jack remembers some of them too. he can still be found playing harmonica in 1911, and i like to think he still would in 1914, if less often. it probably makes him sad to do it, without his momma singing along to her favorite songs that he learned to play for her, but sometimes a tune he heard years ago will pop in his head, and he has to play it to start remembering the whole thing.
a couple times in mexico it’s a handful of words that triggers it. he doesn’t remember all of them, or the order they go in, and lord knows he isn’t good enough at spanish to try and execute it, but it dredges up a very fuzzy, distant memory. one of his uncles playing guitar and singing confidently, while the rest of his family shouted along to the chorus and fumbled their way through the parts they didn’t know.
some dirty joke uncle told him pops in his head, and he laughs at how it would surely disgust both of his parents to hear— and just for a couple seconds, the strings of a banjo. a group of his uncles by the fire, loudly hollering out the words to a song jack was not allowed to hear, as his momma was very quick to put her hands over his ears and yell at them, which only made them laugh harder.
just once, when he’s twelve, he’s reading in the family room at just the right time to hear momma playing something on the piano. it starts off as nothing he recognizes, when she presses the keys experimentally, but soon starts taking shape into something that, for some reason, makes him feel a little nostalgic and a little sad. he hums along unconsciously, just barely loud enough to vibrate in his ears but low enough to not be heard beneath the sounds of the piano.
but he hums a little louder for the chorus, the notes falling into almost the right order in his head as she plays them, and momma stops so abruptly that a noisy wrong note makes him wince. she turns around to look at him. jack tenses, book in hand, afraid he’s done something wrong when momma’s eyes look a little shiny, but she doesn’t look mad.
instead, she smiles. and when she sniffles a little, and when jack asks “are you feelin’ alright, momma?” she just shakes her head, half turned to face him.
“mhm. i just love you so much, you silly boy.” she tells him, and a little embarrassed, jack nods silently and buries his head back in his book.
but after a few seconds, the piano starts up again, and this time momma’s voice accompanies it. halting and hesitating every few lines, like she isn’t certain she remembers all the lyrics, but in the back of jack’s mind he hears a bunch of other familiar voices singing along with her. “jack o’ diamonds, jack o’ diamonds, i know you of old, you rob my poor pockets of silver and gold...”
I just realized I don’t think Jack ever had friends 😦 except for Rufus
i made a joke via uncle referencing this in a fic once. yeah, it wasn’t enough that he lost his entire family and everything he knew, the poor kid was also lonely as hell. petition to give jack marston one singular friend actually. it doesn’t count if they’re 20 years older than him minimum and also family.
but no if we’re counting animals, he had cain too, but we know how that ended. some idiot who should absolutely not be within 30 feet of children or animals, like, killed him. we don’t get told what happened to rufus, but i assume he died at some point. he seems pretty young in 1907, but we’re probably just meant to assume he dies offscreen somehow. another snake attack gone wrong, maybe. sidenote, which isn’t relevant, but this is my blog and i do what i want, sucking the venom out will technically work in a pinch, if it’s your only option available at the time, but like. still go to a doctor.
anyway. in 1914, you can still hear rufus barking around beecher’s hope very clearly, but never actually find him, like the ghost of one of the only friends jack marston has ever had (a dog) is haunting him along with like every other horror he’s had to endure. kind of fucked up, now i think about it. no wonder he’s messed up when, on top of everything else, he spent his entire childhood not having one friend his own age.
Just wanted to say that I read a fic on AO3 where Jack was dying and John's soul came to comfort him, Jack then survived and woke up to a deer. Awesome fic, though I forgot the title.
Really wanted to see your take on the prompt!!
alright, so i saw this just as i was about to go to bed and thought “okay ow, what the hell.” i don’t necessarily feel comfortable writing about or expanding a prompt of someone else’s, or something that i’m aware someone else has already written— but i have written about a similar concept near the end of my own fic, god help you if you ever need a friend. if you’ve read it, you might remember what i’m talking about.
i think the idea of jack’s death is, of course, extremely depressing. mostly because, as i’ve mentioned in a previous post, i personally don’t believe he’d live especially long after killing edgar ross for a lot of reasons. there’s his own suicidal behavior regardless of honor level, the general message of the rdr games, and the fact that he ends up an outlaw that’s almost constantly moving and on the run. i’ll always think the theories (and they are theories! btw! i’ve never actually found a source that Canonically Confirms jack living to like the 80s or something) that he got to see the moon landing on tv or other historical events are cute, but i’ve never thought they’re very plausible.
all of that being said; it’d be hard not to think about your family while dying, i think. in jack’s case, it’s not in the context of people he’s leaving behind, but rather people he might be able to see again. as much as he misses his family, i don’t know that he’d want them to see him the way he is now, exactly what they always told him not to be. he’d probably be afraid of their disappointment. he always felt inferior to john in his childhood, trying desperately to please him, but what about abigail? his mother, that wanted him to be a lawyer and always wished he could be better than them?
for jack, who very much loves and misses his parents despite his complex relationships with them both, and who very clearly hates himself, the idea of disappointing his parents must haunt him. he made his choices, expecting to pay the price for them. what he doesn’t seem to comprehend, as evidenced by some of his lines to john in rdr1, is that his parents love him more than anything, and would continue to love him regardless. both john and abigail make plenty of mistakes, and neither are perfect, but that much is obvious.
Yep, I was the anon that has been pestering you for the past something amount of days :))
If I'm going to suffer with my thoughts, why not take you down with me? LOLL
Anyways I was just going to as you if you'll be writing a fic of the previous ask I did, the one where the VDL gang meets adult Jack. I've read all your fics on AO3 and never stopped rereading them.
Would really love to see you turn it into a fic tho!! Only if you want to ofc. I'm not gonna force ya into it. :)
i may have outed myself by having so many thoughts about it just ready to yap about lmao. yeah, i do have a concept in mind about that! not quite what you’d expect, probably, but i do intend to write it— preferably, after i finish my latest wips, because i have too many going on and starting another might drive me insane. short answer, yes, i will be writing a fic with this concept, just with a slightly different execution :)
Ily too haha!! <- replying to the tag from your previous post
Anyways, how do you think the gang members would react to adult Jack? They will be given context that they'll be meeting little Jackie from the future. I think they would go like "Oh wow we're gonna meet a lawyer!" or smth but then get jumpscared by a duplicate of John Marston. Would they feel disappointed? I think Abigail's heart would break at the sight.
ily! and if you’re the same anon that’s been sending me asks like this which keep me awake at night staring at the ceiling in quiet horror, congratulations! now i’m thinking about this and unbelievably sad. once again, you brought this upon yourself.
because yeah, of course that’s heartbreaking. it was heartbreaking for me, playing the games in canonical chronological order. one minute i was watching arthur teach the sweetest little four-year-old in the world how to fish, and the next that same little boy is killing a man in cold blood and i know i can’t do anything to stop it. now if i wept substantially at that, can you even fucking imagine how badly that would affect his parents?
you don’t have to. i can. again, a hearty “you asked for this” to you <3
i suppose it depends just a little on where exactly we’re at in the game, given john’s idiocy for, like, the first three chapters. from ~1895 to ~1907, if we’re being honest, but i’m specifically talking about in relation to how he treats jack. so, for the sake of me not having to delve into something Too complex right this minute, let’s say they’re in ambiguous chapter 4. not too long after john starts getting off his ass and working to be an okay husband and father, but a little before literally everything starts going to hell.
with that out of the way, emotional hurt incoming.
for people that don’t know, there’s a random camp event encountered in chapter 2 (horseshoe overlook), where hosea is teaching jack to read— or attempting to. this interaction prompts the famous back-and-forth between abigail and jack: “but i wanna be a gunslinger when i grow up.” “over my dead body! and you will be a lawyer - you do the hanging, not the swinging, you hear?”
i think for freshly orphaned 1914 jack, this scenario might be some form of hell. while he did hunt down and kill edgar ross, he only did so after abigail was already gone— ie. when his mother wouldn’t have to watch him throw his life away and repeat his father’s mistakes. he still cares deeply for his family, enough that he won’t seek revenge while abigail can still see what he’s becoming.
and abigail, in 1914, probably saw it coming. she was grieving, and likely not very well if she followed john into the grave after just a few years, but jack is still her son. she knows him. abigail in 1899 is another story. her son is four years old, a sweet little boy that picked flowers just to make her a necklace and wants to bond with his pa even though the man hardly pays attention to him. nineteen-year-old jack is a sharp contrast and, in comparison, almost unrecognizable.
almost. he’s still got her freckles. he has the manners she made sure to drill into him young, not wanting him to take after all the degenerate outlaws he grew up surrounded by. he’s as tall as his father, the man’s spitting image to an unsettling degree— which would give john, perhaps still uncertain on the topic of jack’s parentage, a rather rude awakening. when he cries, as he is almost certain to do upon seeing his parents again at a moment in his life where he would never, ever want them to see him, he looks just like his momma.
but there’s more than just his uncanny appearance that ties him to his parents. for example, he’s angry. so, so angry— at the government, at himself, and sometimes at his parents. it’s hard not to blame them for how he ended up, or how everything in his life went to shit, but it’s also hard not to blame himself for thinking that way. he loves them, misses them more than anything, but it’s complicated. there’s a whole lot that’s too complicated to explain about jack marston, it seems.
his momma is confronted with the fact that her son grew up in pain, consumed by hatred and grief, and went down the path of picking up a gun to cope that she desperately wanted him to escape. his pa sees himself reflected in the young man’s eyes, his anger and dozens upon dozens of stupid mistakes. his aunts and uncles see a killer made out of the little boy they tried so hard to protect from the worst of this life, doomed from the beginning.
and maybe the worst part is that they’re witnessing the aftermath. tragedy upon tragedy has been heaped upon his shoulders over fifteen years, losses that he can’t even begin to explain, as he doesn’t know where to start. there are so many parts of it he doesn’t even remember, blurred out by a young mind that wanted to protect him from the worst of it. what do they have to do to prevent this? is there even a way to do so? the harder question: do they have the right to do so, or to change the person he’s become?
because there’s little worse, i think, for john and abigail to see their son at his lowest. an orphan, a killer, an outlaw on the run. no better than either of them, or anyone else in the gang. all sharp edges and gnashing teeth, a finger on the trigger. worse than that? their son, so much older than that little boy they’re working to protect but far too young for so much pain and loss, truly has nothing more to live for. he’s all but given up, and he might have if it weren’t for spite keeping him going.
maybe they almost don’t want to accept it, to recognize him. to do so would be a heartbreak they might not recover from.
oh hell yeah. i’ve got a whole section in my ao3 bookmarks dedicated to this. be warned, most of them are sad because i am a wretched little angst appreciator <3 here u go, have my personal favorites under the cut so i don’t flood your entire screen:
Tearful Reunions by agoldengalaxy
Summary — “Now that he's on his own, Jack stumbles across people from his parents' past and gets a little comfort along the way.”
(exactly what it says on the tin. post-canon family reunion time, with all the expected grief and pain that comes with post-canon jack)
Where the Wild Things Were by pipdepop
Summary — “Jack isn’t a baby anymore. He notices things. Notices how worried Momma always looks. Notices how tired Pa is at the end of the day. Notices how they take turns in not having dinner, saying things like ‘I’ll eat later with your pa’ or ‘I had a big lunch’ or ‘I had dinner with the fellas at work’. Notices how thin they’re getting.
He decides to do something about it.
(Or: years after the events at Beaver Hollow, Jack wanders into the woods, and meets someone oddly familiar.)”
(if you like supernatural elements, in-between canon stuff, and something a little more bittersweet than just repeated psychological torment, you might like this one :3)
The Gift of Giving by fleet_of_red
Summary — “Jack Marston is an inquisitive four-year old who observes more than his parents and all the aunts and uncles around him give him credit for. He notices how his Uncle Arthur tries to raise morale around the camp and decides to return the favor.
Inspired by the camp companion item requests and told from Jack's viewpoint.”
(rdr2 jack centric! also exactly as it says on the tin. it’s cute, made me more than a little sniffly, though i suppose that applies to a lot of the recs on this list.)
Echoes of Vengeance by dearnostalgia
Summary — “Jack Marston, just nineteen and newly orphaned, has lost everything in the span of a year. When he finally decides to end it all, fate intervenes—offering him one last chance.
Or: Time Travel Fix It AU, where Jack chaotically tries to safe everyone from their fate”
(this one ACHES. time travel fix-its often do, but this one’s my personal favorite. in progress as of posting this, but i promise it’s worth it. it made me go “oh noooo” in agony several times.)
ever welcome with me by TheTenthSunrise
Summary — “Perhaps it is some ill-begotten and twisted loyalty to his old man. Remembrance for a man who they all remember fondly but have not seen in so long. Penance for mistakes made years ago, forgiveness for how it all ended. Or maybe just some love for the little boy they all knew.
Mary-Beth Gaskill finds Jack Marston in a cell in Rhodes. The last remnants of The Van der Linde gang converge.”
(oh yeah. more post-canon reunion shenaniganery that made me weep an ocean. if you wanna get technical, this focuses more on the other former members of the vdl gang for about half the fic, as jack is unconscious for a bunch of it, but y’know. he’s still a big part of it, and like all of the hurt and family stuff is centered right on him. one of my favorite jack fics by far!!)
and there’s more, of course, but these are the ones that have been rattling around in my head lately. plus, i didn’t want to shamelessly self-promo too blatantly. you can find my jack fics on my ao3 if you wish. i’ve got four atm, three of which are jack-centric, and the fourth which is more arthur-centric, though jack does play a large role in it. more to come as well since he keeps plaguing my mind (as evidenced by my entire blog dedicated to him). i hope these fics emotionally curbstomp you as much as they did me :)
What do you think Jack would do when he somehow meets his child self from 1899?
if we’re talking 1914 jack? honestly, with how little he seems to remember of his childhood, i think he’d find it hard to believe that the four-year-old boy he was in 1899 is the same person that he is now. maybe they aren’t, in a way. jack has been through a lot of hell, to the point where even his sixteen-year-old self is hard to reconcile with the little boy from the prequel.
on one hand, there’s him: jack marston, orphan, outlaw. the man who buried his mother, then put the man who killed his father and uncle in the ground when she wouldn’t be around to see it. regardless of what way he lands on the honor scale, he’s lost every reason, every person he had left to live for.
on the other, still jack marston: four years old, surrounded by family that love him and would do anything to keep him safe and shield him from the worst of their crimes, even though jack himself is smart enough to draw his own conclusions. blissfully unaware of the fact that almost everyone he knows will be gone in just a handful of months.
he might feel jealous of that boy, to be able to live in that kind of innocent ignorance. or he could pity him. maybe he’s even angry at his younger self, for not spending more time healing his relationship with his pa before he lost him, even though he knows why he was reticent to do so. i think, regardless, he’d have a bit of a difficult time believing he used to be the kind of kid that made flower necklaces for his momma and play-fought with his pa like characters from his favorite books. the idea that he’s changed so much from who he was as a child that even jack himself can scarcely draw a connection between them is depressing, but not unlikely.
doing my duty of obsessing over tiny details again: idk how many of you have played undead nightmare, but if you haven’t you should, since i’m about to spoil it a little.
when jack is younger in rdr2 (aka the ages we see him at, 4 and 12 for the main story and the epilogue respectively) he tends to call abigail “momma”. he also has a couple lines around beecher’s hope where he can call her “ma’am,” similarly to him calling john “sir,” but that’s a different rant altogether. in rdr1, at 16, he’ll almost exclusively call her “ma”. i’m assuming it’s supposed to show that he’s grown up, and isn’t really using the slightly more childish term of address for her anymore. for a couple lines at the very start of undead nightmare, jack calls her “mother,” in a teasingly chiding tone as well after she stabs herself with a needle and curses.
but a little bit later, (though still in the opening cutscenes of undead nightmare) after uncle attacks the family and abigail gets bitten and subsequently turned, jack runs to check on her. he’s understandably distressed by, you know, the sight of his mother bleeding out on the ground. he panics and calls her “momma,” like he hasn’t done since he was much younger, probably because he’s scared and confused— and hurt, since he does the same thing after she bites him a couple seconds later. it’s just the first time i’ve heard angry 16-year-old jack sound like a little boy, or anything like the boy he was before all the effects of the trauma he’s endured really started making themselves clear, and it kind of breaks my heart.
on top of that, undead nightmare isn’t even canon. now i’m just sad over something i know didn’t actually happen, except the existence of it is giving me ideas. maybe, when abigail died in 1914, a 19-year-old jack called her momma for the last time, because he was scared of being alone. maybe he didn’t even get to, because she was gone before she heard it. maybe i should stop making the sad game even sadder, but we all know that’s not gonna happen.
Do you ever think of Jack just out there and he sees a wolf who somehow feels close yet distant and he gets startled at himself for thinking "Hi, pa"
Because I do :')
oh!!! why did you say that to me.
ok. fine. you asked for this. retaliatory devastation incoming.
there’s a random event at beecher’s hope where you can find charles talking to jack, where he implies he’s been teaching him to track animals, and remind him you can tell if a set of bones belonged to a bird because they’re hollow. it’s kind of cute and a little silly, since charles pulls a piece of wolf dung out of his pocket (?) to show jack, and the kid asks if he can keep it— if john is nearby, jack will ask if he can take him hunting sometime.
so maybe, years later, he finds tracks around the beecher’s hope land leading back to tall trees, and recognizes them as wolf tracks. he never finds any traces too close to the house, and it’s just the one wolf as far as he can tell. odd, as wolves usually travel in packs.
and he’d know it doesn’t make sense, and his ma would tell him he’s being silly, but it makes him feel almost at ease. there’s a dangerous predator prowling about, and it could hurt the livestock or rufus if he isn’t cautious, but something about it feels familiar. safe, even.
he doesn’t tell his ma, so as not to cause her any more worry than she already has to deal with, and he doesn’t engage with the wolf either. it doesn’t come any closer, but he can tell it’s still there. there are tracks left just outside the fences. scraps of fur, sometimes dung. rabbits, beavers, and deer carcasses found further into the trees.
one day, nearly two years since pa’s been gone, he sees it. he’s hunting for dinner that night, since ma has been too lethargic lately to go into town, when a lone howl alerts him to its presence. it’s standing in the snow, at the foot of nekoti rock, staring at him. it doesn’t move to come closer. jack lifts his rifle, but the wolf gives no indication that it plans to attack, or even to give him the time of day. instead, it turns away and stalks off leisurely into the trees, searching for its next prey elsewhere.
if this were any ordinary wolf, jack might track it and put it down now, just to prevent any future incidents— but it doesn’t seem like one. there was something in its eyes, something in the way it held itself. something he hesitates to give a name to.
but he could swear, the presence of the wolf— even at the times he can’t see it— makes him feel the most at ease he’s felt since beecher’s hope was attacked. it’s not enough to fill the hole left there in the aftermath, and it never will be, but it’s enough. for now.
