“You weren't trying to kill me Jack, you're Jack Manifold.”
Tommy is treating Jack as his baseline, his anchor. Jack is (in Tommy’s mind) the one thing that has remained constant in his life, and he’s happy to completely ignore any and all changes that Jack might be going through.
Tommy is a character that thrives when the things around him have a degree constancy, – and the world seems intent on making sure that isn’t the case, for better and for worse. Tommy has had a rainbow of different when dealing with change; from failure to process and shutting down, to begrudging acceptance and growth.
The bench is a good example of this – Tommy’s main goal throughout s2 was getting that feeling of simplicity back; when he and Tubbo sat on the bench and listened to music discs together. The discs as physical objects were never important, it was about the sentiment behind them.
It’s worth stating that Tommy can adapt to change. His sacrificing those very discs during the first L'manberg war proves it. He was willing to sacrifice a precious sense of constancy to risk everything for someone else’s (primarily Wilbur’s) dream of change because he loved Wilbur and believed in L'manberg.
But there are changes that Tommy is forced to accept, and ones that he can avoid confronting. His rationalization of Pogtopia Wilbur and the “real” Wilbur as different people being a good example of the latter.
Through this lens, Jack Manifold as a person also falls into the category of “avoidable change” I believe largely because he didn’t see Jack develop as a person; he did it mostly quietly, during the Manberg war, and then further when Tommy was in exile and not in a situation where he was able to see outside himself and his own pain. In both cases, Tommy wasn’t present physically or emotionally to adjust to his friend growing up.
On the other hand, someone like Tubbo is so inextricably tied to Tommy that the changes Tubbo went through are impossible to ignore. Even then, he was still blindsided when Tubbo chose to try and protect the nation he had been saddled with over Tommy, a choice that would’ve been obvious to someone more perceptive of such things.
Tommy doesn’t do this maliciously – on the contrary, he seems to imagine an idyllic “before time” where there was no conflict and everyone was happy. Of course, we the viewers know that this time never existed and the peace that Tommy remembers was never built to sustain a, well, changing world. There is of course an irony to this, as Dream wants a twisted version of this very same thing. They aren’t comparable morally, but there is an almost tragic note to this shared desire to go back to simpler times that, really, didn’t exist the way they remember.
Meanwhile, Jack has also been through the ringer. Like Tommy, change has been forced upon him, and he’s fought to keep things the same. However, instead of bullheadedly trying to force things to stay the same, Jack has adjusted – badly, in some cases, and in others, he’s outright destroyed the option to go back, like with Manifoldland, and in some ways, in trying to make himself the Villain in Tommy’s story.
Jack isn’t the person who Tommy thinks he is anymore. He’s scared, pissed off, and lonely. He can’t be Tommy’s sidekick anymore and he isn’t the same – Tommy treating him like is part of why Jack hates him so much.
Back to the interaction they had in the hotel: Tommy refuses to listen when Jack tells him the truth and he refuses to believe it when he can’t deny having heard it. Tommy can’t accept that Jack has changed, because that means that he has to accept that he can’t ever go back.
Jack literally told Tommy that he tried to kill him. He told him about the nukes! Tommy has been suspicious of Jack in the past, he’s not an idiot. But he is intentionally ignoring the warning signs (something he did with Technoblade) even when they’re blaring red in his face, because it would hurt so, so bad, and he would likely interpret it as himself being “worse than everyone he hated,” if he accepted the whole truth, and that’s terrifying.
I think this reflects on what i perceive as Tommy’s biggest character flaw: Stubbornness.
And it’s a boon as much as it’s a flaw; It’s what has allowed Tommy to continue persisting even when the world seems intent on wrecking him and everything he loves. But the same thing that kept him alive through a string of horrific occurrences also makes him resistant to change - because when things have changed for him in the past, they’ve often been for the worse.
I could say more but i’d run the risk of rehashing my other “Jack Manifold and Tommy should reconcile” post lmao
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