Gotham never treats Jerome Valeska as a normal gangster who happens to laugh a lot. From his first appearance, he feels performative, hungry for attention, and disturbingly comfortable turning his own pain into a spectacle for everyone else. The show introduces him as the son of Lila Valeska and Paul Cicero, later reveals him as Jeremiah's twin, and builds him through repeated cycles of murder, public theatre, death, resurrection, and imitation, which matters for how he functions in the series; Jerome isn't only a killer inside Gotham's chaos, but one of the people teaching Gotham how to enjoy chaos as entertainment.
He becomes especially important because his violence is contagious in a cultural sense; Theo Galavan can use him, the Maniax can follow him, Dwight Pollard can worship him, and random civilians can start copying his laughter after seeing him on television. The show keeps returning to the same idea - Jerome isn't just dangerous because of what he personally does, but because he gives other people permission to let go of restraint and call it liberation, which is why his death never really ends his presence. Gotham keeps treating him as an idea that other people can inherit, distort, or continue.
What makes him more than a stock anarchic villain is how specific his pleasure is. Jerome likes fear, humiliation, spectacle, and the feeling of forcing everyone in the room to react to him. He doesn't want quiet control, but audience, escalation, and the emotional shock of pushing things further than anyone else will. Even when the show later gives Jeremiah the colder, more architectural version of Gotham's nightmare, Jerome still feels foundational because he's the one who turns destruction into a public mood.
Psychology
Antisocial Personality Disorder/ASPD fits Jerome very well. He's deceitful, aggressive, callous, thrill-seeking, and repeatedly violent without anything resembling stable remorse. The series begins with him manipulating the police investigation around his mother's murder, then expands that same pattern into serial killing, hostage-taking, terror campaigns, cult leadership, and the use of other people as props in whatever scene he wants to stage next. He understands fear perfectly well - he just experiences it as leverage and amusement rather than as something that should stop him.
ASPD also fits the way Jerome relates to his own life. He isn't suicidal in the ordinary sense, and he doesn't seem driven by despair or self-hatred, but what stands out is how little intrinsic value his own survival seems to have for him once spectacle, revenge, or emotional impact are on the table. He treats his life the way he treats almost everything else - as material. If staying alive gives him another audience, he'll keep going; if dying creates a bigger scene or wounds someone more deeply, he's perfectly willing to let that happen too. His lack of ordinary self-preservation is interesting - most people's aggression still runs alongside a basic instinct to keep themselves intact, but Jerome often seems detached from that, to the point that death becomes just another dramatic move he can make. Season 4 pushes this especially far, since he's willing to let himself die if that death will spite Jim Gordon in exactly the way he wants.
Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder/ADHD is a more tentative secondary lens, but there's enough there for it to be worth naming. Jerome is highly impulsive, attention-seeking, distractible in the way he keeps chasing the next larger thrill, and visibly energised by novelty, escalation, and immediate reaction. He struggles with restraint, gets bored with ordinary limits very quickly, and often seems to need bigger and louder forms of stimulation to stay engaged. None of that explains the cruelty, but it does fit the restless, hyperstimulated quality of how he moves through the show.
His backstory gives his cruelty a shape without softening it; the show presents an abusive mother, a circus environment full of distortion and spectacle, and a verbally cruel, distant father. Jerome carries a huge amount of rage and turns it outward with extraordinary speed, but what's most striking is how much pleasure he takes in performance once the rage has an audience. He doesn't only want revenge on particular people, but to make everyone watch.
There's also a sharp difference between Jerome and the more tragic damaged-villain type; he has pain, yes, but he doesn't build an identity around injury in the same way characters like Oswald or even Jeremiah do. Jerome is much more interested in what pain entitles him to do now. He uses trauma as fuel, not as something he wants understood, which is one reason he can feel so exhilerating and so empty at the same time - the emotional content is there, but it's all been routed toward appetite, attention, and domination.
Strengths and Flaws
Jerome is highly intelligent, and the show is better when that's taken seriously. He isn't just loud or unpredictable - he reads rooms well, understands what frightens people, knows how to turn public attention into power, and can shape a whole event around emotional effect rather than simple body account. The magic show, the carnival, the blackout, gas plot, and even the way he handles television all show someone who understands theatre as strategy. He knows that panic spreads faster when it's memorable.
He's also charismatic in a way Gotham's underworld finds very difficult to reject. Jerome can be funny, magnetic, and weirdly energising even when what he's offering is obviously terrible, which is why Theo can use him, why Dwight's cult forms around him, and why so many later villains or followers feel touched by his style. He has the kind of social force that can make insanity look like momentum for just long enuogh that other people start to join in.
Another major strength is nerve. Jerome will keep escalating when most people would stop, and he can act decisively in situations that would make more ordinary criminals panic or retreat. He handles violence, improvisation, and personal risk with an ease that makes him extremely hard to contain once he has enough room to perform. It doesn't make him disciplined in the colder Jeremiah sense, but it makes him dangerous in a much more volatile and contagious way.
His worst quality is sadistic theatricality. Jerome doesn't only want to hurt people or remove obstacles - he wants them frightened, destabilised, humiliated, and fully aware that he's the one doing it. The killings are scenes to him, the hostages are audience, and the city is a stage large enough to prove that his feelings should become everybody else's problem too.
He's also consumed by escalation. He rarely leaves anything at the level of ordinary vengeance or ordinary mayhem; once he has a grievance or target, he keeps widening the frame until it becomes a citywide, media, cult, or symbolic event, which makes him exciting to watch but catastrophically unfit for any stable alliance. People can use him briefly, but nobody sensible could ever trust the scale he'll choose next.
A third flaw is that he mistakes emotional intensity for truth. If he feels something strongly enough, he treats that feeling as revelation, permission, and proof all at once, which is why he can speak so convincingly while being so obviously insane. He sounds certain because he has almost no inner brake between impulse and conviction.
Relationships
BRUCE WAYNE
Jerome sees in Bruce a perfect audience and a perfect opposite; Bruce is wealthy, serious, self-controlled, and still clinging to the idea that Gotham can produce something better than spectacle and cruelty, and Jerome keeps trying to break that certainty. Their confrontations have a strong theatrical edge because Jerome doesn't just want Bruce dead, but destabilised, fascinated, and emotionally marked by him. Bruce's refusal to kill him and refusal to become similarly demented gives their relationship its shape - Jerome keeps trying to prove that Gotham's truth is chaos, and Bruce keeps surviving as evidence against that claim. On a more personal level, it's also quite interesting to me that he confesses the truth of his abuse at the hands of his uncle to Bruce in their diner encounter - Jerome is typically one to turn his trauma into a joke or avoid discussing something so personal entirely, so it's telling that he does it there.
JEREMIAH VALESKA
Jeremiah is the relationship that makes Jerome feel most personal. Whether you take Jerome's version of their childhood or Jeremiah's, their bond is built on obsession, rivalry, injury, and an almost ecstatic desire to drag the other brother into his own worldview. Jerome doesn't want simple revenge on Jeremiah, but transformation; his final "gift" to Jeremiah is the clearest expression of that - a post-mortem attempt to make sure his legacy continues through his brother's psyche and Gotham itself. Their relationship is grotesquely intimate because Jerome treats identity as something he can infect.
JIM GORDON
Jim is one of the few people in Gotham who keeps meeting Jerome with blunt opposition rather than fascination, which makes him useful to Jerome in a different way. He's the lawman Jerome can mock, outplay for a while, and force into increasingly absurd situations, but he's also one of the people who keeps cutting through the performance enough to treat Jerome as a real civic threat rather than a glorious symbol. Jerome's last words to Jim are about legacy, contagion, and return, which says a great deal about what Jim represents to him: the institutional face of Gotham that he keeps trying to humiliate by proving it can never truly contain what he's unleashed.
JERVIS TETCH / JONATHAN CRANE
Jervis and Jonathan show what Jerome looks like around other theatrical, psychologically driven villains rather than around frightened civilians or rigid authority figures. With them, he becomes less singular and more obviously a ringmaster, the one assembling a style of villainy around spectacle, mind games, and fear. Their alliance works because all three understand performance, though Jerome remains the most openly anarchic of the group; Jervis brings control and obsession, Jonathan brings fear as method, and Jerome turns the whole thing into a louder, more contagious event.
OSWALD COBBLEPOT
Oswald is useful because he shows where Jerome's appetite for chaos clashes with a villain who still cares about survival, territory, and continuity. Oswald can be theatrical too, but his ambition has a much more practical spine; Jerome keeps threatening that practicality because he enjoys disorder far more than he enjoys holding anything together. Their overlap in the Legion of Horribles puts that contrast into sharp relief; Oswald wants advantage, while Jerome wants the kind of atmosphere where advantage stops mattering because everyone is reacting to him instead.
THEO GALAVAN
Galavan is one of the few people who successfully uses Jerome's energy for a larger political plan. He recognises Jerome's charisma and volatility, helps elevate his scale, and functions as a father-figure-meets-handler in a way that gives Jerome more room to become publicly mythic. At the same time, their relationship also shows Jerome's limits as a subordinate; he can be directed for a while, but only by someone willing to flatter the performance and weaponise it. Galavan's betrayal and murder of him makes perfect sense inside that dynamic - he never saw Jerome as controllable forever, only useful until the spectacle had served its purpose.
Just for Fun / Typology
MBTI - ENTP
What stands out first is how aggressively he uses Ne. His mind keeps pushing outward toward bigger spectacles, stranger jokes, wider chaos, and more theatrical ways to turn a situation. He's constantly reframing the moment, destabilising the social rules around it, and looking for the next escalation that will make everyone else react harder. His energy is expansive, provocative, and restlessly inventive.
Ti fits the colder structure underneath that frenzy. Jerome isn't morally grounded, but he does operate through a private logic that lets him justify what he's doing and talk about it with unnerving clarity. He's very good at turning instinct into argument, cruelty into principle, and performance into something that sounds almost philosophical, and that combination (wild outward invention with a sharp internal logic serving it) lands much more cleanly as ENTP than as a more purely emotional or sensory type.
MORAL ALIGNMENT - Chaotic Evil
He has no real loyalty to order, hierarchy, or code beyond whatever lets him seize attention for another scene. Alliances, institutions, and plans are useful only as long as they can be bent toward wider panic and spectacle. The moment structure becomes limiting instead of useful, he turns on it or blows through it.
He also lands very cleanly on the Evil side. Jerome murders for pleasure, humiliation, publicity, revenge, and the thrill of making other people emotionally collapse around him. He's capable of charm and pain, but neither of those things slows the cruelty down - they only make it more vivid.
Conclusion
Jerome works because Gotham lets him be funny, magnetic, damaged, theatrical, intelligent, and appallingly cruel all at once. The show never asks you to confuse his pain with innocence, and it never tries to flatten him into a brute who just happens to laugh - he's much more dangerous than that. He knows how to turn his own fury into a public event and how to make a city remember him even after he's gone.
He also feels central to Gotham's whole proto-Joker mythology because he makes madness look like participation rather than isolation. People don't just fear Jerome - they copy him, inherit him, react to him, and let him reorganise the emotional climate of the city, which gives him a bigger presence than his screentime alone would suggest, and it's a huge part of why he's so memorable.
thought i was actually losing my mind going genuinely fuckign insane but turns out the problem is i just keep getting into relationships with allistic people
thought i was actually losing my mind going genuinely fuckign insane but turns out the problem is i just keep getting into relationships with allistic people
if the entire cat race evolved on red dwarf the whole time they surely wouldve seen lister all the time through the window in the stasis booth?? like how didnt the cat ever see him and go "ohhh wait ur the guy that was in the window in that little room!!"
and plus they had holly there the whole time aswell so its on my mind sometimes how they never actually were just told "yeah that guy in there is the guy that got froze in time, frankenstein was his cat, his names lister not cloister", holly just let them ignore the guy in the stasis booth & start a whole religion full to the brim with misinformation and just never bothered to correct them once
like they all left red dwarf after already having been there for 3 million years bc it was after cat was born they all left him behind, so theyve like been on the ship that whole time & hollys also been there the whole time to watch them evolve and start religions and wars and somehow never notice the guy stuck in the stasis booth and he js never said a thing about it
back to earth gets a lot of hate compared to the rest of the show but i think theres something interesting to be said about the lack of laughing in it due to the lack of live audience
noticed this within the first scene between rimmer + lister in their sleeping quarters, it was the same kind of conversation theyd have at any other point with the same kind of comedic moments/quips between them & there were several moments where i can hear where they WOULDVE had some laughs from the audience, but there was just silence
& i just think its such a subtly interesting little insight into what life on the dwarf is actually like for THEM from THEIR perspectives, they dont find each other as hilarious as the rest of us do from the outside bc they generally just dont get along most of the time, they have no one other than each other for laughs or entertainment
lister & rimmer arguing or the cat being egotistical or literally any of the comedic interactions the live audience wouldve laughed at were just met with complete silence or frustration from the others, they cant see in from an outside perspective thats literally just the way they live alone with no one but each other for their entire lives
idk its just like an interesting little thing i noticed while im at this point in my rewatch n js started to think about
not to dsmp post in the year 2025 but ive been sitting on this take for 4 years and i have to get it out of my system. i never joined the fandom online back then when it was all happening bc of how wild the community could be sometimes but ive been sitting on this for SO long n its been long enough i think
c!ranboo was one of my absolute favourites and i loved him SO much but heavily disagreed with one thing from him
on doomsday (one of the doomsdays bc there were like 3 or something) he had that moment where he ended up yelling at everyone over taking 'sides' and why they all had to be fighting & why couldnt we all just be neutral and peaceful instead of splitting into separate distinct opposing teams etc etc etc and i can almost kind of see how hed have a point - however there are issues with that standpoint SUCH AS -
lets look at the two sides: on one you have the strongest most skilled people decked out head to toe in the most absolute top of the chain gear - c!dream, c!techno & c!phil, whose aim is to absolutely and completely decimate l'manberg with their withers and obsidian bomb dispenser they have spanning across the entirety of the whole place
on the other side you have the people who have nothing. those were just kids trying to keep their homes, and they had nothing to fight with after the other side raided all their gear and got rid of it all. they fought tooth and nail to keep their homes time and time again with the odds stacked higher and higher against them each time
imo l'manberg had 3 main people involved that really contributed to its downfall, & only one was there on doomsday - c!dream. the other two were c!wilbur & c!schlatt. they were the big 3 involved in the l'manberg politics who were adults & not children following orders/defending themselves (which is why i dont include c!tommy/c!tubbo etc in that list). they were the corrupt power hungry quote unquote "politicians" (for lack of a better word) that projected all their issues onto everyone else and dragged them all into it
(if you squint you could technically include c!eret in that list, but imo in reality they were really only just another pawn for c!dreams big game of chess as a way to pitt the opposition against each other & gain power over them, c!eret never really had actual power/rule over anyone or anything they just lived in a castle and took c!dreams word for it. also they redeemed themselves and rejoined the freedom side anyway)
lets start with c!wilbur - he was very manipulative, he liked having control & he craved power but there wasnt really an opportunity for it, so he built the van and attempted to start a potion 'empire' by seizing control over a commonly used item (brewing stands) to gain leverage over the more powerful players. he dragged other vulnerable & generally powerless people (yknow, like children) into it & used them as his building blocks to the top. c!tommy is the biggest victim of this from him. once the potion empire thing stopped working out because the other power-hungry-control-needy ones on the server (c!dream/c!dteam by extension) stepped in to take that control away from him, thats when he shifted the narrative to the freedom-fighting-rebellious nation we came to know l'manberg for. the authoritative facade he attempted to take charge of wasnt working on the vast majority & thats when he became the 'victim' of unfair policing from the opposition, who were objectively more powerful than him (mainly just due to having been on the server longer lol) so the underdog-freedom-fighting-hero-leading-his-freedom-fighting-employees-underdogs-to-freedom-from-tyrannical-rule role was very easy to shift into. he sparked that (he sparked it & the others kept it alive because they really believed in it and really believed in him) and at first i think he to an extent genuinely did believe in it & maybe to an extent managed to detach somewhat from the reasons the nation actually started and really did want freedom for him and his people with little to no other conscious intentions, but ultimately the underlying subconscious cause/reason for that desire & want for power was always there and bubbled to the surface as he spiralled really far into corruption in the pogtopia arc when the power was taken away from him & he was no longer in control of l'manberg (what started as "a special place where men can go and emancipate the brutality and the tyranny of their rulers" while he was in power/in control became "IF I CANT HAVE L'MANBERG NO ONE CAN PHIL" when he lost that power/control)
then c!dream - even from before l'manberg he was fighting c!tommy over his music discs, & i guess that just cemented c!tommy as the no1 enemy in his brain for the rest of time even though c!tommy was really just a loud kid trying to get by. he was also power hungry and wanted to keep all the power he had so he felt threatened by the formation of l'manberg. other less powerful people taking some level of control & separating themselves from him startled him, especially with c!tommy involved in the opposition. he knew he was the most powerful on the server & didnt want anyone else to forget that so he consistently used fear and force to remind the others how much stronger he was than them, the main victims being l'manberg and its citizens as they were the first and biggest group to rebel against him (and the group with c!tommy in it but thats neither here nor there). he struggled to accept the idea of people having some kind of autonomy to lead a life separate from the server he ruled over (he even said blatantly he would never think of l'manberg as free, only that he would let them delusionally believe they were free in his discussion with c!tommy)
and c!schlatt was just your run of the mill big bad in your face power hungry corrupt politician. he wasnt super manipulative or anything similar to the other two, he was just an evil dude that, again, was power hungry and corrupt like c!wilbur and c!dream. he dragged others into it by using c!quackity to gain leverage in the election via votes, and by keeping the citizens of l'manberg manberg under his crazy authoritarian control and he did that pretty much mostly out of enjoyment and greed. he liked that he intimidated the people around him and frequently used that to his advantage because it amused him
it was those 3 that created the us vs them dynamic & pitted everyone else against each other by creating 'sides' because they were the ones who wanted the power, and they were the ones who dragged everyone else into their conflicts. they were greedy and self centred and made that everyones problem
ones like c!techno & c!phil arent included in that list because they were never greedy for power over other people, they were just people who happened to be powerful. they mostly just kept to themselves in their little cottages but because of the perceived rivalry that was created by the Big 3 and then projected onto everyone else, they declared l'manberg to be the problem. even though c!schlatt and c!wilbur were out of the picture by that point, their actions had left the repuatation of l'manberg tainted from the perspective of those outwith the country itself, whereas the people left behind in it (like c!tommy & c!tubbo etc etc) just saw it as their home, just the place that they lived in and had built their lives. the others outside had grown to view l'manberg as the cause for all the servers problems because of the way it separated itself from the rest of the server and was another thing, and because of the actions of the corrupted leaders itd began with (and also - l'manberg was really the only place for people to fight for power over with the political system it had set up, no one really ever challenged c!dreams position of power over the rest of the server, only within l'manberg at least until that final disc battle)
it was very much a punch up vs punch down dynamic that people like c!techno and c!phil and even c!ranboo couldnt really see, because they all lived comfortably with powerful top of the chain gear far away from all the main conflict, and none of them were actually present for the beginnings of the conflict. none of them were present to witness the disc war or the formation of l'manberg, they were never there to hear c!dream tell c!tommy that hed never see them as free from him as c!tommy handed him the disc. they joined at the height of it all where the two "sides" were already very distinct and at war with each other
c!techno joined at the point of c!schlatt being in charge of l'manberg and at that point he was helping the underdogs because in that moment c!tommy and c!wilbur asked for his help and shared his goals - to overthrow a tyrannical corrupt government. then c!wilbur, knowing full well he was right about to blow up the country within the next few minutes, shoveled all the power and responsibility of the country over onto a kid (c!tommy, who then immediately handed it back to him & then he immediately handed it over to c!tubbo). by the time c!phil joined c!tubbo was already president (& had only been for like five minutes) and c!wilbur was in the midst of blowing up the country (note - c!wilbur had the presidency and had l'manberg under his rule again, he chose to hand it off to c!tubbo and then carry out his plan to blow it up while telling c!phil "if i cant have this no one can")
c!techno was never there to see the way l'manberg itself began as a challenge to a tyrannical rule (because although c!wilbur was manipulative and corrupt and power hungry, ultimately he did have a leg to stand on with his methods which is why it worked so well for him and why he was so easily able to paint that picture of oppression - the canvas was already sketched and lined) and continued to exist as a rebellion against an even worse system than itself. at that point c!wilbur was still seen as the 'good guy' who just wanted freedom for his nation from the tyrannical authoritarian rule of c!dream, so c!schlatt suddenly coming into power was a sharp left turn government wise, and c!techno just joined right at that sharp left turn moment where the big bad evil government had just came in and made some significant differences. differences not only in the economic system of l'manberg but also tainting the core values that once held the citizens of it so high and hopeful against corruption. so c!techno never saw that rebellious freedom fighting nation that l'manberg started off as and was supposed to always be, he only saw it as the nation with the corrupt government
c!phil was in a similar situation, he also never saw it as that rebellious freedom fighting nation and only saw the damage that the power hungry corrupt people had done to it. he joined right at the crucial moment and only saw the conflict and damage surrounding the country of l'manberg. because of this he ended up adopting the perception that the place itself was the problem if it was causing this many issues this severe. he failed to notice that after c!wilbur and c!schlatt were both out of the picture the problems between l'manberg specifically and the rest of the server were only being revived on c!dreams end, and c!tubbo as the new leader of l'manberg did not start conflicts (although the butchers army is a whooole other ballgame but thats not what this post is about - that was mainly spearheaded by c!quackity- who is again a whooooole other post)
if c!tommy hadnt declined the presidency then c!dream wouldve been slightly more justified in having a go at l'manberg as a whole for the whole burning-down-c!georges-house-thing, but ultimately it seemed more like he just wanted to flex his power over them even more. just as another reminder he could tear them down any moment he wanted to without a single second thought- he used it as A. another opportunity to keep the citizens of l'manberg fearful of him (almost like a kind of "remember whos really in charge here" type deal - again think back to he & c!tommys original negotiations of freedom in the og revolution) and B. another opportunity to punch down on c!tommy specifically (exile arc is another whooooole other post), he was given an inch and he took a mile. c!tommy explicitly stated that the reason he did not take the presidency was specifically so that any business/issues with c!dream would stay exclusively between him and c!dream without dragging the rest of l'manberg into it but c!dream ignored that entirely
c!ranboo joined right at that moment, of c!dream enforcing his power over l'manberg, but he saw c!tommy technically strike first with burning down c!georges house. he didnt see all the previous strikes c!dream had made on c!tommy & l'manberg. he just saw c!tommy make a move and then saw c!dream make a move back, therefore creating a back and forth rivalry dynamic which, in his eyes, could easily just cease if theyd stop pitting against each other and lived peacefully. he doesnt seem to notice just quite how corrupt and power hungry c!dream really is especially when it comes to c!tommy and l'manberg, he only notices different people teaming up to fight against each other & not a case of oppressed vs oppressor. c!ranboo, like c!phil and c!techno has never really had too much of an issue with getting a hold of good armour and weapons and equipment, and hasnt really had anyone like c!dream stand in his way to take everything from him the way everyone in l'manberg has. c!ranboo has had issues with c!dream and has been used by him (another whooooole separate post), but he seemed to focus slightly less on the 'c!dream using any tactic available to him to enforce his power on everyone' side of things and moreso the 'what is wrong with me i need to figure out why this is possible for him to do this to me' side of things
theyve all heard about all the wars and conflicts etc from before they all joined, but they struggled to fully really empathise and actually see it from the others perspectives. this is why c!ranboo was wrong in his view on 'taking sides' on doomsday
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