I had to reread the oc tags for a bit just to refamiliarize myself with the lore, but I think I need to ask the barebone question: who is Jay and is the staying alive wrong post related to him being your favoritest boy. was he born in the blender
I'M SORRY THAT I TOOK SO LONG TO ANSWER THIS I just. Hoo boy. Where do I even start.
SO basically Jay started as an OC named Jaz for the original story I've been writing (and now co-writing) for a While. A hot minute, if you will. Since 2019, perhaps. He was born in the blender from the very beginning, as you can see:
Oldass art. Ough agh. This is from... idk, 2021 maybe? Ancient. Dusty.
Anyway, Story has been reconfigured a ton by now, and when I joined a TMA rp group way back in ye olde 2022, Jay was split off from Jaz (who later became his own character. Mitosis) to be used in said RP.
TMA!Jay... well, he's been through the trenches. No lost limbs (except for one particular AU and the several branching off of it in turn), but he's just so tormentable, my favourite little guy to throw into blenders of different varieties with any assortment of ingredients. Mmmm angst smoothie.
His canon iteration was Marked at a very young age by the Fault, a Fear that I defined as part of my alternate classification system, Birde (lmk if you're curious about that!). It's essentially the fear of something gone wrong; an unseen fault, a weak point that will split open at the right touch, at being the one at fault for some horrible event (being that weak point, in a sense). It is the sense that something, instrisically, isn't right and can never be fixed.
You can find his Statement about the event in our TMA fic here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/41149674/chapters/138305530
It's not fully accurate to his canon, given that the Mothverse's tma canon is different than our RP's, but the backstory bit is more or less the same!
Anyway, his older brother Castor, mentioned in the statement, was eventually taken by the Eye in the process of being installed as the emergency Head of the Usher Foundation after the last one died. The circumstances surrounding that event were always weird, and as soon as Jay had graduated secondary school, he ran away from home to go find his brother.
This ends up fundamentally changing the course of his life; though when the Web gets involved, was there any other possible course? Hard to say. In any case, he finds his brother at the Usher Foundation, and there he meets Devon, a dual Avatar of the Stranger and the Web who is definitely not up to no good, no siree. Jay immediately latches on to him, partially due to a shared interest in machines, partially because of his brother's Eye-induced distance, and, well... with the Web, who knows? Maybe Devon had planned it that way. Maybe every interaction had been carefully crafted, the inciting event that caused Jay's death and full Becoming almost immediately after meeting Devon orchestrated to the last bolt of electricity coursing through the young Fault-marked boy's veins.
Or maybe it was all just coincidence. Maybe it was just friendship, and accidents, and a seemingly harmless crush. Willing ignorance to the true dangers at hand.
Over time, Jay dives headfirst into supernatural experience after supernatural experience, collecting Mark after Mark, retreating beneath Devon's comforting hand after every one. Over and over he puts himself through the blender, because it's easier than thinking about... anything, really. About how much more distant and unstable his brother gets by the day. About the countless scars lacing his skin, until he's more scar tissue than boy. About the fact that no matter how he lies to himself, he can't recognize his best friend's face, and never has, and while the Webs are comforting against his skin, they're hooked so deep that he could never tear them out again.
Not that he'd want to.
It all comes to its inevitable culmination of course, something I won't get into here because thar be spoilies for some; but that's far from the only story I've tossed him into. Oh, no. He and Devon turned out to be an extremely compelling duo to write, and thus our dozens upon dozens of AUs, and AUs of AUs, and AUs of AUs of AUs-
We're normal. Trust. ('We' being myself and @v0idspeak, who owns and writes Devon). (Jay and Devon's duo name is Techduo; you've probably seen it plenty if you've been looking through my OC tags).
He's even been put into fandom crossover AUs cowritten with another close friend of mine, @freshlypickedmint. (These AUs referred to as PJayO, if you've seen that). What can I say, I like finding new and interesting ways to torture my little guy <33
Ahem. So. That's the Jay I'm generally referring to if I'm talking about Jay. But after going through a lot of character development through TMA, Jay was injected back into my original story, and he gets tormented plenty there too <33. If I start yapping about that we'll be here for days, but I'll hopefully start making character posts for that at some point, and you're free to send in a second ask or reblog this one again if you've already read through my story tags and have the necessary context!
Let me know if you have any more questions :] I'm sure the peeps I tagged would also be so very happy to answer any as well. They’ll almost definitely be yapping away in the tags 5 seconds after I post this so definitely check those for extra details.
