I am re-reading this series and I figured I would finally draw my headcanons for them. John, my beloved <3
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Reread John Dies At The End this weekend, and there’s this one bit that I think really encapsulates the whole vibe of the series.
In the scene in Las Vegas, when they’re running from the teleporting wig monsters and the group has barricaded themselves behind a door while trying to work out a plan with Marconi, John offhandedly asks why the monsters are bothering to try and brute-force the door when they can just teleport instead. After he says this, the monsters outside stop pounding on the door and are heard murmuring amongst themselves, and the gag is that the monsters themselves didn’t even think to try that until they overheard John. This is actually a fairly boilerplate gag. I’ve seen gags along this line- the heroes accidentally reminding the monsters they’ve got an easy way in- multiple times.
Then one of the monsters immediately teleports in and kills Big Jim.
That’s not an incidental death. Over the course of the novel, Big Jim is revealed to have been one of the first people to figure out the full extent of what’s going on with Korrok’s invasion, he’s revealed to have stunning levels of insight into, and practical experience using the Soy Sauce, and his sister Amy- the last surviving member of the family following his death- is left vulnerable to exploitation by Korrok’s forces at least in part due to his absence, which forms the whole back-half of the novel. Even outside of plot relevance he’s a pretty fleshed-out figure in terms of how he relates to the community of Undisclosed and in John and Dave’s lives specifically. And now he’s dead. The one-off Scooby-doo style whacky-chase scene gag gives way to a genuinely colossal fuck-up on John’s part, a fuck-up with far-reaching implications that get brushed over in the heat of the moment because of the, you know, the incipient hell-fountain. But the innocuous gag mattered! John was careless and it bit him in the ass immediately. And all of the books are threaded through with examples of stock gags that abruptly mutate into something serious, or with heat-of-the-moment, easy-to-overlook fuckups by the protagonists that ripple forward and make the situation even harder to handle. This is such a good series
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honestly one of the best parts of the jdate series is amy. she so easily could have been a manic pixie dream girl but she's so firmly not (to everyone but dave).
dave will literally be like "she's a perfect angel and she saved me and i will protect her with my life," but amy and john both are like, "we aren't sure who you're talking about but anyway while you were over there moping we made a plan. go get the flamethrower."
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