so, i finished drawing this... honestly, this drawing kinda conveys my long-term state. a bit of hopelessness, a bit of resignation and so on... but enough about me, i dragged this drawing out pretty badly cause of personal issues and cause i wasnt home for a while, lol.
cw/tw for below : nsfw content, mentions of addiction like drugs, alcohol and smoking, abusive family and romantic relationships, and mentions of homophobia or sexism.
about the characters. this is jesse and oliver. jesse is 22 and oliver is 20. here i wanna talk specifically about their relationship, traumas and their family atmosphere, and later in other posts ill talk more about their personalities. oliver is a person who really values attention, but for jesse its sometimes the opposite and unwanted (towards her, but she herself likes giving attention to someone).
oliver grew up in a pretty peaceful family. but after his sister (sarah) was born when he was 6, his moms attention shifted to sarah. his dad became the first main parental figure for oliver, temporarily replacing the lack of his moms attention. but, four years later his dad dies at work from an accident (he worked as an electrician and got electrocuted), so his mom, whose untreated postpartum depression had quietly morphed into a chronic depressive state over those four years - falls into an even bigger depression, kinda forgetting about her son and fixating on the task of feeding herself and the kids, and taking care of her four-year-old daughter. so, this heavily influenced olivers future. basically, even after his mom got out of this tough state, she couldnt force herself to give him more than she was already used to, so everything just continued like that.
so, i told u this so you could roughly understand what exactly he was looking for in a relationship. a mother figure.
so, now the part about jesse. jesse, unlike oliver, was born into an abusive family. she has an older sister (ashley) and a younger brother (rocco) with not a very big age gap. and each of them had a different dad. jesse as the middle child, often watched her mom cheat on her first and then second husband, watched how her parents drink and fight often (especially when her mom got together with the third husband who she stayed with till now), and of course this affected her mental state. attention in such a family isnt a very good thing, but rather the opposite. long story short, this formed a certain picture of relationships in her mind. and no matter how much she promised herself she would never become like her parents, wouldnt drink alcohol, wouldnt do drugs, wouldnt smoke, she still became just like them.
when she grew up, she moved into a cheap small rented apartment. and then, she met oliver while she was drunk. he was a guy sitting by the entrance of her building in the rain (he wanted to bring some notes to a classmate, but they werent home at that moment). cause of her drunk state, instead of ignoring a stranger, she started talking to him like "boy, why are u sitting here alone, youll get beaten up just for looking like that, u look kinda like a girl...", and as a result invited him in to wait out the rain. and because in her eyes at that moment he was like a stray wet puppy, her caregiving instinct kicked in (and also, partially cause she has a younger brother rocco, almost olivers age, who she used to take care of). she made him some tea, smoking a cig at the same time. he looks at her like a savior, and she sees a safe "pet" in him, who wont hurt her, unlike the aggresive men from her childhood.
jesse and olivers dynamic is built on a perfect but at the same time catastrophic match of their childhood deficits. jesse grew up amidst chaos, screaming and cheating, where attention often meant danger. thats why oliver, who seemed defenseless and weak to her, became the perfect object. he couldnt harm her, couldnt show aggression towards her, which she was sick to her bones of. but instead of giving him pure love, jesse starts to dominate, realizing her hidden sadism through total control, moral and physical destruction.
for oliver tho, jesse became the embodiment of everything he was so desperately looking for after his dads death and his moms emotional distancing. her almost maternal care with the hot tea won him over. thats exactly why, when jesse starts doing emotional rollercoaster stuff, oliver doesnt leave. when she showers him with overprotection and passionate love, he gets that dreamed of, concentrated attention he lacked since he was six. but when she suddenly gets cold, pushes him away or starts showing cruelty and hate, a familiar childhood trigger turns on in his subconscious: "mom is upset and tired again, i need to be obedient and she will get over it.".
the scariest thing in this dynamic is how jesse purposefully and slowly "ruins" oliver, dragging him into her world of addictions. she looks at his past and simply doesnt believe he can be this good. getting him hooked on smoking and alcohol, she literally washes away this "purity" from him, bringing him down to her level of dirt so he could never leave her or realize how awful she is. jesse feels a sick, almost aesthetic pleasure watching how a once neat boy holds a cig in his fingers and looks at her with tired, clouded eyes.
oliver, having the "i can fix her" syndrome, takes this not as abuse but as a challenge. he sees her inner pain, knows about her terrible family and naively believes that if he endures enough of her bullying and toxicity, his love will be enough to heal her. he doesnt notice how he swallows insults, how he slowly adopts her bad habits, how he starts suffering both physically and morally. for him, ruining his own life becomes the price for those brief moments when she gently pulls him close again, showers him with her own kind of "sweet" words and takes care of him.
so, yeah kinda like that. exactly in this drawing i kinda tried to convey the atmosphere of jesses "resignation" with her own life. she accepted that shes an awful person and doesnt really see a problem with it anymore, while oliver is blind to it cause of his savior complex and is too needy in terms of attention and dependent on her. basically jesse is dragging him down to the bottom with her, which is pretty sad for me as the author. cause oliver deserves better, he just doesnt get it and doesnt even know that somethings wrong here, that this isnt normal. ofc he has friends who tell him "are u letting her dominate you? what are u, a fag?" like "hinting" that this isnt normal (though the version they often offer isnt normal either... but well, its 2008, what do u expect). they mostly expressed it just through mocking and contempt, but he lets these phrases go in one ear and out the other, pushing it all onto "they just dont understand me". oliver shuts down from such advice cause the form of this help is aggressive to him.
even when jesse moves on to physical violence, oliver in very rare moments wonders if this is normal. but then this thought gets covered up by another conclusion: "shes tired, she just needs time", and he stays anyway.
yknow, id hate less jesse if she was like my two other characters: lydia and Mezl. yeah, they also had a toxic relationship, but in the end, they ADMITTED it, and just ended it all, going their separate ways. they UNDERSTOOD they were terrible for each other, even tho they didnt admit it for a long time trying to save the relationship. but jesse admits that shes an awful person, especially to oliver, BUT CONTINUES to ruin him.
i wanna hug oliver and run away from jesse.
