Can I just revive this situation and rub some more salt into the wound by saying that I would have given anything for Ressie to not exist and give the screen time spent on their relationship to only Jessie like please can we have new strong female characters whose existence isn't fueled by the purpose of finessing the existence of men? Just imagining how far she could've come and her improvement and how fun the interactions between her and team family could have been I'm ᵘʰʰʰʰʰʰʰʰʰʰʰʰʰʰʰ sad (1)
headcanon: nothing romantic happened between J and R, her screen time consisted in her eagerness to learn how to survive from team family along with her dealing with the Pete situation by herself after talking to Carol, and the feud between Ron and Rick gets passed to Ron, Carol and his mom. In nwo Sam becomes petrified in the middle of the walkers, the row stops when they notice what’s going on, Sam manages to break out of the row and goes wondering by himself and Jessie tells Ron to just (2)
stick with the row as she goes after him. Ron gets overcomed with anxiety after losing them out of sight and is convinced that they won’t make it and goes through an internal fight with himself for still caring for his mom after what she’s done but most importantly about what’s going to happen to Sam if he doesn’t go. Carl then gets shot in the eye in the attempt of getting into Ron’s way when he’s dissociatively trying to go after his fam. Ron, seeing Carl go down, blindlessly follows (3)
them as they get to safety. Denise is left supervising Carl and has to calm down Ron as he’s breaking down. Later on, Michonne spots Jessie making her way through the walkers while also trying to get Sam to move. She comes over and helps J, J is carrying S as M paves their way. The rest of the season and the rest of the season just emphasis on that. Imagine the impact throughout the rest of the series and the the character dynamics coming out of that I’m actually wigless. (4)
Getting to see Sam spend time with the right people and getting better. Carl seeing exactly the opposite of himself in him and helping him get trough it. Or how Carl and R would approach each other after that. How would Rick react to that ‘cause at the end R was just a troubled kid. Also Carol’s approach to Jessie that gets J to kill Pete if C wouldn’t had just passed it to Rick.
C telling her about what happened in her past and encouraging her to kill her husband and her persona projecting into J. And also while I’m at it: bisexual!jessie. Give Jessie Anderson a girlfriend. SORRY FOR BEING SO LOUD LOL BUT LIKE I REWATCHED THE SHOW AND IM????? I HATE THE FATE SHE GOT AND I WAS IN THE MOOD OF MAKING A HEADCANON ON THAT. I’VE GOT THOUGHTS™. Also sorry for any possible grammatical errors i havent slept in years. (6)
Hey, thanks for sharing your headcanon. I do however have some issues with it and things I disagree with.
I. I think Jessie’s romance with Rick was necessary. It got played out horribly because in the end it just gets treated as a stepping stone rather than an actual meaningful thing, but for Jessie, in those few episodes she was in, it was important. Jessie is an abuse victim. She’s not a strong female character when the show starts and that’s fine. She grows into that role, she becomes a strong female character, but at the beginning of her arc, she is not that. She’s an abuse victim. She’s been abused since she got pregnant with Ron, if I remember correctly from interviews that Alexandra Breckenridge gave, so that’s a really long time to live in an abusive relationship. Jessie’s abusive relationship is nothing like Carol’s though. Although there are similarities in the fact that they’re both mothers whose husbands were verbally and physically abusive towards them, they’re completely different. Carol and Jessie are very different characters, even before Carol became the person she is now, she was different than Jessie. So their abuse survivor story won’t follow the same path or turn them into the same type of person.
Back to why her romance with Rick was necessary… Jessie lived in the type of community where everyone knew about what Pete was doing to her, but it was okay because Pete was the town’s doctor. No one cared, not the strong female character who was running the town, not a single other one of the people she was friends with. Even when Rick offers to help, Jessie refuses him. It’s not until he tells her “I don’t want you to die. I wouldn’t do this for anyone but you“ that she accepts his help, still pretty reluctantly. It is because she hasn’t had anyone in her life, at least not for a long long time care about her, and only her. So Rick being in love with her and him coming to deal with the situation and him telling her that he cares about her so deeply and only for her, is what Jessie needed. It fits with the way her character is. She can be strong, she’s protective, she’s caring, she would give it all for the people she loves and she needed someone to reflect those attributes who could help her.
Before you say, well why can’t she just get out of it alone? It’s because most of the times abuse victims need help and they need support from others to see that what’s happening to them is not normal and that it needs to end. They need reassurance that they’ll be safe if they speak out against their abuser. Jessie needed all of that and Rick was the one who could offer her that better than other people from the group.
Jessie was attracted to Rick when she first met him. She liked him, she liked his kindness towards her. To her, Rick raising his kids and being a loving dad was probably what being a family meant. So it makes sense that he’s the one to lend her a hand and that she accepts his help, because he pretty much checks all the boxes of the things Jessie needs in her life. I agree that the trope of damsel in distress is cliche and we need ladies who can save themselves, but Jessie isn’t a damsel in distress. She’s an abuse victim and she needs help and she needs love. Like yeah, sometimes you need romantic love in your life. Sometimes you need someone to say “I love you and only you“ and that’s basically what she needed and that’s basically what Rick told her when he said “I will keep you and your kids safe. No, I wouldn’t do this for anyone else.“
II. Jessie should have not been the one to kill Pete and I’m actually glad the show didn’t go that way. It’s not in her character and it wouldn’t have been healthy for her, mentally or physically. We’ve got the scene where Jessie stands up to Pete and tells him to leave and that was amazing. Jessie going from being scared of him and always hiding from him to telling him he needs to leave and staring right at him and not flinching, that was incredible development. So it’s not like the show was just “Oh, Rick is gonna take care of Pete and Jessie will just stagnate to where she was.“ She got a ton of development starting right after her accepting Rick’s help. She stood up to Pete, then later on, we see her going to confront the Wolf rather than hide, we see her unleashing all those years of pent up anger on the Wolf, we see her decide she won’t be scared anymore. Killing Pete herself would have not done her any good. She would have most likely slipped down a dark path after that rather than get any positive growth. Despite Pete’s abuse, to her, he was still family and Jessie is all about protecting your family, not hurting your family, etc. Her killing Pete would have left her damaged, not only that, but it would have put strain on her relationship with her kids and it would have damaged her kids as well.
Also, I’m glad Carol didn’t approach Jessie about it and rather went to Rick. It would have been extremely weird after Carol mentally scarred Sam to go to Jessie and help her deal with Pete. Carol and Jessie also never interacted and it was also because Carol wasn’t interested to help or get to know anyone at the ASZ at that point in time. As Season 6 or 5, or whichever it was, went by, Carol gets more comfortable with who she is and is more open about helping out people and getting close to people again. But she wasn’t at that point when she found out about Pete.
EDIT: Also, also, Rick was the first person to notice there was something off with Pete and Jessie’s relationship, starting from the way he treated her at the welcome party to how she flinched when he went to put his arm around her when they were walking down the street the next day. Carol basically gave Rick the green light when she confirmed that Jessie was being abused and that Rick needed to take care of it.
III. I like your rewrite of how the escape from the hoard of zombies in ASZ should have went. I hated the whole love triangle between Carl/Enid/Ron and how the entire Anderson family had to be fridged to get Carl to lose his eye. I wish they could have developed a friendship between Carl and Ron. There’s no reason why these kids had to hate each other and adding Enid to the mix as a reason for them to hate each other just made it worse. I also wish, they could have kept the story from the comics where Douglas (or in this case Deanna) shots Carl by accident. There was no need for Ron to shoot Carl and there was no need for Michonne to kill a child. That was just the TWD writers being like “How do we kill all of these characters in the most meaningless way and all at the same time?“ I would have actually paid money to see the Andersons making it out and working together with the rest of the group to survive rather than them just being outsiders and the group having their fingers on the trigger or hand on the sword ready to kill them without a second thought. I would have paid good money to see Rick’s relationship with Ron being more than “I hate you you killed my dad.“ & “Shut up kid, you’re wrong. I’m right.“ Rick was a cop and a dad and Ron was a troubled child. I would have loved to see Rick’s instinct to protect apply to another kid other than his own. I would have loved to see Ron deal with all the years of abuse he suffered with Pete and have a meaningful relationship with a positive father figure. I would have loved to see Carl being a big brother to Sam, too. Like he’s a big brother to Judith, but it would have been a different dynamic with Sam and with him being older and understanding what Carl is saying and doing.
