like a year (or two?? time doesn’t exist) ago I made a post born out of a) frustration with people who specifically pointed to the worn down and unmaintained state of fjord and jester’s home in the first post-canon oneshot as some sort of indication of the state of their relationship b) my deep love for what is genuinely in my top 5 of fictional romances and now that we’ve gotten their wedding featuring vows from both of them that were both beautiful and pure vindication for me (a person with critical thinking skills and media literacy) regarding the healthy state of fjord and jester’s relationship, i wanted to revisit it a bit. (plus i miss writing my bad meta and have been too busy to really iron out any burgeoning thoughts i’ve had on c4 and its characters so far)
but one of my main things is that jester and fjord are pretty frequently cited as this uber performative dynamic, sometimes to the point of claiming jester is suffering from some form of comphet. and without getting into how illsuited the notion of comphet is for the world of exandria, this is also a very bad faith interpretation of what fjord and jester offer to each other. to be clear, i’m not saying they’re not performative, in fact i think out of m9 they’re probably the two who remain the most performative across the campaign, with jester’s unwillingness to linger on negative emotions in front of others for most of it and even in the later campaign struggling to do so and fjord’s entire shtick being that he acts far more confident than he is and even though he gets sillier there’s still an air of captainness that he doesn’t really shed around the m9 as a whole.
but when you actually look at the way their performances function for them, it turns out that they’re actually the least performative when they’re together, and that’s true from the start of the campaign to the post-canon oneshots.
before the timeline of the campaign, jester is already the only person who is in the know on exactly how performative fjord is since she knows his voice is one he’s put on. fjord is the first person jester allows to really see that she’s unhappy without them having made assumptions about her disposition. further, something that is maybe my favourite part of their dynamic is how seriously they both take all versions of each other and the performances they put on. to be clear, i mean serious in the sense that they take any version of the other to be genuine in a way that isn’t always granted by others in the group. like when jester affirms that whether fjord decides to continue filing his tusks or if he decides to let them grow, she thinks he’s great either way or how fjord doesn’t treat jester’s unrelenting joy as an act. because i think that moment post-abduction when caleb points out that he thinks jester’s disposition is an act while fjord doesn’t hold the same opinion is insightful. because on the one hand, sure it is a choice that jester makes to show her joy and hide her pain, but that doesn’t make the joy false. across the board, while we also see them obviously encourage each other to be more open and to love the versions of themselves they see in each other, i really like how much both fjord and jester care for one another’s choices in how they interact with the world.
and i think it’s largely because they each accept these versions of each other that they end up being such confidants for each other, eventually creating this dynamic where jester who is silly and loud and joyful always has space when she’s one-on-one with fjord to be more low-key and quiet and sad should she need to and fjord who is stalwart and certain and charming is given space to be uncertain and awkward and goofy when he’s one-on-one with jester. and of course they start to be those things around the rest of the m9 as the campaign goes on, but there’s an ease with which they reveal those parts of themselves when they’re the only ones in the room. one of my favourite parts of their dynamic is their little check ins with each other through the campaign, like fjord revealing that he’s interested in the wildmother and jester insisting this is their new mission but they can keep it to themselves for now, or jester going to fjord with her uncertainties about artie and the consequences of people losing their faith pre-travelercon and fjord reminding her that as long as she isn’t being forced to be something she doesn’t want to be then she’s got the nein beside her, or their convo pre-cognouza where they both discuss their uncertainty about their survival but certainty that they have to fight this fight before getting hyped up about destroying a god city together, or their conversation in front of a briefly sleeping orly post-ship sinking about how fjord is disheartened because jester almost died and jester reminding him that he still has to figure out what to do about uk’otoa, or the more recent with their conversation in the c3 finale where between joking about their wedding parties and after goofing around about their impending nuptials with their friends, they have a very grounded sweet moment where fjord tells her he’s genuinely very excited to get married.
the idea of choosing to be a certain way and deciding who you’ll be is a huge theme throughout m9 and all its characters, and it’s one that is extremely pertinent to both fjord and jester. fjord’s entire arc is about figuring out who he wants to be and determining who he should be and jester, though hers is more internal as is often the case with laura’s characters, is figuring out who she is when she is in proximity to others, initially trying to echo who her mother is but eventually letting that fade away. and what makes me personally go buckwild is that first caduceus brings up the perceptions that people often had about fjord and jester because of their performative identities—fjord as completely uncertain of who he is and jester as childish—which while grounded in the truth of their choices on how they present themselves, fail to capture their actual selves. and THEN. both of them putting such an emphasis on choice in their vows. what do you mean fjord said “you were there reminding me that joy isn’t something you have to earn, it’s something you choose” what do you mean jester said “you taught me that love isn’t about being swept away, it’s about standing solid, it’s about choosing to stay.” get me OUT OF HERE. anyway. fjorester wedding was a fantastic oneshot for all the production value and above table sweetness and the usual m9 sillies and the veth pregnancy reveal but it’s also such a fantastic like. exclamation point on the arcs of these two characters who started the campaign deeply lonely and struggling to figure out their place in the world. what if i lost my mind. what if i blew up.
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