I’ve been on TikTok a lot because my FYP has been infiltrated by SPN and most people on there think he has the mental mind of a 3 y/o or a baby. How is this possible to think with his storylines? It doesn’t make sense to me. I wasn’t in the fandom, just an avid show watcher, and I saw him similar to Amara and how she’s an adult that grew up fast except he was just born grown but naive because the world is complex. So how do people get to him having a baby mind? It feels ableist to me but I can’t figure out how to articulate why (like when someone has developmental disabilities and someone says, “They have the mind of a _y/o,” when that person’s needs/skills/etc are more complex) and I was wondering if you could shine some light on why you think this happens. I don’t think people understand why other people have uncomfortable feelings surrounding baby/toddler/kid!Jack but I can’t remove it from accidental ableism. I’ve tried talking to people about it on TikTok but they either double down or say that it’s my opinion. However, I don’t feel like canon supports theirs. Thank you. I love you your posts about Jack and your insight. Good work.
hi, thanks :3
genuinely I don’t know, and I ask myself that every single time I go through spn tiktok lmao. the best I can figure is, for one, TikTok is the app where media literacy and nuance go to die like dogs. there’s no arguing with anybody there unless you get lucky (source: I’ve argued).
two, I think genuinely it comes from the over-saturation of baby!jack content in the fandom, both in and out of tumblr, and the extremely minimal amount of content where he’s actually treated with nuance and complexity. like, it exists, but only in very small circles that the majority of the fandom clearly ignores. from what I’ve seen most of spn-tok is focused on TFW or Dean or Destiel and don’t generally care about Jack that much, so it kinda makes sense that they’d just run with the most prevalent idea of jack and not really think about it in the long run, or when they watch the show.
a lot of the arguments I’ve seen literally boil down to “he wears Velcro sneakers” and “he doesn’t know [insert thing]” or just his general social awkwardness/unawareness (which Cas displayed all the time in the early seasons but never got outright infantilized for). like look at this:
and there’s millions more comments like this, unfortunately. I don’t mean to speak for everyone, but at least for me, the body language and specific mannerisms Alex put into his portrayal of Jack is what resonated the most as an autistic thing, naïveté and poor social skills aside of course. Like, he fidgets/stims constantly—
and none of this is scripted for him to do, either! Alex just decided it worked, and he was right!!
—and to see these very blatant autistic traits be reduced down to “portrayal of a child/toddler” is downright sickening, especially when plenty of other autistic fans have pointed it out and expressed to Alex that they relate to Jack and even asked if he had done it on purpose because it was so well done.
what I’m personally confused on is how many people will double down on jack being a child like it’s driftwood in the ocean. like, going back to my argument, I gave the other person multiple points in the show that make it obvious jack is intended to be an adult. Harper, the beer, any of the trauma he’s endured; the works. and all they had to say to that was “you do you I guess.” and it’s like what do you mean, ‘you do you’? I’m giving you actual examples that happen in the show, and I’m asking you to think ‘hey, maybe if jack flirted with a girl and talked nonstop about what it’s like to fall in love and have sex for an entire episode and had his dad offer to go to a dive bar for bucket-list hookups in the episode after, maybe he isn’t a child.’
but again, this is TikTok, so asking for any kind of self examination is asking for too much.
it just strikes me as odd. it’s odd and confusing and horribly frustrating that people are dying on this hill like it’s some kind of civic duty. like, why does it matter to you so much to see Jack as a child? why is it so important for you to think of him that way, that you just ignore canon evidence and autistic voices to make yourself feel right? what was even weirder was they were autistic themselves, and said they wouldn’t dream of infantilizing him, but here we are. their reasoning was “he’s literally 3 by the end of the show,” and that was it. And of course they weren’t wrong, but if you look at every time Jack or anyone else acknowledges his age:
D: “how old do you think you are?”
J: “3 days, 17 hours and 42 minutes”
Dean shrugs and lets him drink beer.
M: “You should be six months old.”
J: “I am…sort of.”
Mary shrugs and treats Jack like a teenager from there on out
M: “Do you ever hang out? I mean, with kids your own age?”
J: “Well, I’m two…enty. I’m twenty…two. I’m twenty-two.”
While the show acknowledges Jack’s actual age, it’s arguably on the same level of acknowledgment of Cas being literally older than time, because what people strangely fail to remember is that Jack is not completely human and doesn’t have the natural aging or developmental process that humans do. He’s three in the same way Vision is three, and Vision is already married with children. Beyond that, there are plenty of times when Jack is referred to as a teenager or treated like one, like Dean’s “he’s a millennial” joke in Last Holiday (wrongly termed but the intent is still there). Hell, even in the scripts they’ll directly say things like:
“Jack is spiraling out, a teenage powder keg,” (13x06 Tombstone, deleted writer’s draft)
“Kelly can’t help but smile, so impressed by the man he’s become, but not about to let him out of her sight,” (14x08 Byzantium, prod. draft)
that make it pretty clear Jack is functionally an adult despite his unnatural age, just like Cas or Amara or even Emma (also the added bonus that Jack explicitly hates being called a child or treated like one, but people literally reacted to that like “oh silly baby wants to be in charge like a grownup” so, like, I don’t even know what to do with that) (and banking off of that, every other time Jack is explicitly put into an adult situation, like flirting with Harper and literally asking Dean how to have sex, sooo many notes on that gif set were the same parroted “nooo baby boy don’t corrupt your innocent mind!! dean is such a bad influence 😂😂😂😂”, so the obtuseness is very intentional). I try not to be accusatory when I talk about the way Jack is treated in the fandom, as a general for online discussion and because I know it’s largely unintentional, but I really do think Destiel (and Sastiel) have some hand in it.
If you look at the majority of Baby!Jack content, it all centers around how domestic either ship is with baby!jack, how good Dean is with kids (baby jack) and how much of a sweet older sister Claire would be, etc. It’s all for the sake of domesticity. It’s the white picket fence family dream that canon TFW2.0 doesn’t really quite have. It’s to make Dean and Cas and Sam and Cas and Claire and Rowena and whoever else, a softer version of themselves. It’s never actually about Jack. He’s just the cannon fodder; the prop; the dress setting; the accessory. He’s there to make everyone else look better and to fuel them forward. No matter how much people want to argue that it’s “giving Jack the childhood he should’ve had,” we both know it’s not actually about him, because canon coming in with the steel chair again: Jack literally chose to be an adult. He hates being considered a child and has never expressed anything more than wanting to be a regular teenager. And like I said, people on spn-tok are naturally Destiel centered, so it’s honestly not very surprising that they just can’t let go of this content cow because it’s just too cute and wholesome and precious of course, despite it being rampant ableism and just generally annoying to people who actually do care about Jack in a deeper sense. Gag me. So maybe that explains the doubling down, but then what gets even more confusing to me is, like, you can have a domestic family AU that doesn’t rely on erasing a character to fit a specific image. You can have a domestic family AU without being ableist about it. You don’t have to do any of the things you keep consistently doing. You even fucking already it in the show! Canon TFW2.0 is dysfunctional on various levels, but so was TFW, and so were just Sam and Dean. It’s simply their dynamic, and it’s what adds to their family bond being what it is to begin with. Nothing you’re doing is something you need to.
I wanna stop before this gets longer than it has to be, but for one final thought I think the general lack of care for autistic people in any space is part of it, too. It’s why half of our representation is painfully inaccurate or egregiously offensive; it’s why fandoms of media with autistic/autistic-coded characters almost always rampantly infantilize them (cough cough SheRa). And like with Alex’s mannerism choices, it’s the distinct yet subconscious connection between autistic behaviors and childlike behaviors, because autistic people are so largely treated as incapable innocent children and cannon fodder for their autism warrior parents; both of which reflect like direct sunlight in Baby!Jack tropes. And it’s why people just don’t care enough to do anything about it, to heed any criticisms about the harm they’re doing, because to them it’s not harmful. It’s not a problem that’s doing any perceivably “real” damage because they haven’t been personally hurt by it (except when it comes to unfair Dean criticism or Sam or Cas criticism, because that’s clearly more important than ableist rhetoric and representation erasure), and probably because they already hold those views to autistic people in the real world.
The world at large does not care for autistic people, or disabled people in general. Nothing that hurts us is considered anything serious. Nothing that matters to us is considered valuable or worth respecting. And because of that, we already struggle in the real world day by day, so we turn to online spaces for connection and sharing our interests safely. We turn here for community, only to be met with the same indifference and rejection as the real world, because the same people we’re trying to avoid are here too, and then we have nowhere else.
•••
**im probably going to make this a separate post but I also want to talk about the weird cognitive dissonance that the fandom has with babyjack and how it’s pretty much considered “acceptable infantilization,” and how so many people in the fandom have said they want more complex jack but still engage with content that actively erases Jack’s complexity and relies on that erasure to make him what he is).
***edit: tags 4 reach, absolutely feel free to ask for removal! ik it’s out of the blue but you guys have had some of the better takes on jack lol @angelsdean @hauntedpearl @uh-ohspaghettio @queermania
