What Happens Next: A Gallimaufry

melancholic romantic comic cynic. bi & genderqueer. fantasy writer. sysrae on ao3.

Rumours About Rumours, or: The Kent Parson Meta That Nobody Asked For

porcupine-girl:

fozmeadows:

As is well-documented by this point, I’m a hopeless fan of @omgcheckplease, to the point where a gay hockey comic has turned me into an actual fan of ice hockey, dear god, I’ve become invested in a sport that’s barely even fucking played in my country, what is this even?? Naturally, this means I follow a few CP-heavy blogs on tumblr, and recently I’ve noticed a few people expressing confusion about why so many people like Kent Parson, given the fact that, canonically, his big introduction involves him being goddamn awful to Jack.

Now: straight off the bat – and I’m saying this, obviously, as someone who finds Kent Parson a fascinating character – I want to acknowledge that fandom, as a general entity, is heavily biased towards white guys. It’s one of those raindrop-in-a-storm problems where, at an individual level, everyone is entitled to their own personal preferences (always bearing in mind that said preferences can be influenced, either consciously or unconsciously, by cultural bias), but where the cumulative, collective effect of those choices amplifies the effects of cultural bias. It would therefore be disingenuous to deny that, whatever my thoughts on or interest in Kent as a character, there’s still a collective issue with how much more attention he often receives than more canonically prominent – and non-assholish – POC characters like Ransom, Chowder, Nursey and Lardo.

(Sidenote: as part of various race-oriented meta about CP, I’ve seen it pointed out that, in fanworks, the POC characters are most often romantically paired with white characters rather than other POC, and that this is a worthy point of investigation and criticism. I agree on both counts, but also feel that, in this specific instance, it’s important to note that, in canon, all the POC characters are primarily – either romantically or platonically – paired with another white character, and that these pairings dominate their appearances in the strip. (Ransom and Holster, Chowder and Farmer (or Chowder and Bitty, platonically), Nursey and Dex, Lardo and Shitty.) So while that doesn’t excuse the comparative lack of creative licence taken in moving beyond those pairings, as is common fanwriting practice, it does explain their existence as a non-trivial narrative baseline. ANYWAY.)

As to why Kent himself is interesting - well. There are, I think, two main reasons for this:

1: He’s Jack’s most significant ex; and

2: He’s presented as an antagonist.

If only the latter point was true, then I’d be much less inclined to invest in him emotionally. What matters is the fact that, despite all the wonderful shipping opportunities afforded by CP, Kent is one of only three (thus far) canonically queer characters – and not only that, he has an existing, complicated backstory with Jack, which therefore connects him emotionally to both Jack and Bitty. Any canon-compliant take on Jack’s romantic history must therefore feature Kent, and with that particular speculative door cracked open, it’s natural to wonder about Kent’s version of events.

Which is where my personal interest in Kent comes in. Because Jack Zimmermann, despite being our noble hockey hero and the protagonist’s love interest, is, by his own admission, an unreliable narrator of his own emotions. And as Jack’s narration is the only insight we get into his and Kent’s relationships, it’s not unreasonable to wonder what we’re missing out on – to say nothing of the possibility that Jack, historically, might not have been great for Kent.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then we’ll begin.

Keep reading

*sigh* I’m trying to decide if I have the emotional wherewithal to reply to this fully… (That’s a sigh of me just being not in a good place and Kent Parson Discourse requiring a whole fucking lot of emotional energy for me, not a sigh at this meta.)

I think you make a lot of really good and valuable points connecting Jack’s cluelessness about Bitty to his cluelessness about Parse and how that hurt Parse.

But I also think that Parse’s behavior that we’ve seen is far more manipulative than you’re giving him credit for. I’ve made an enormous post about this in the past, and I don’t want to basically repeat every word of it there, but the gist is, pretty much every move Parse makes - starting from the moment he corners Jack at a party unannounced and continuing with practically every word he says - is a classic manipulation technique. You say he doesn’t lash out until later in the discussion, but he doesn’t have to be “lashing out” to be acting in a toxic manner.

You point out that we can’t trust Jack’s self-perception or his narration of their relationship, which is totally true, but similarly I would argue that we can’t trust anyone’s perception of Kent Parson who hasn’t seen what he’s like alone with Jack. Why? Because manipulators are really, really good at making people like them. It’s why so many people don’t believe abuse victims - because the abuser is so well-liked by everyone other than the person who has to deal with them behind closed doors. Manipulators are charismatic, and they know how to manipulate people into liking them just as easily as they manipulate their victims into feeling like shit and being dependent on them.

Now, that paragraph was super harsh toward Kent - I am NOT saying that he has always manipulated or abused Jack. But I am saying that the one conversation we see at epikegster is so very classically manipulative that he clearly is a skilled manipulator and can use that whenever he wants. Maybe he would never purposely do that to someone he’s actually in a romantic relationship with. Maybe he only uses his powers for evil when he’s pushed into a really, really bad place emotionally, when he “lashes out” (by this definition, btw, his lashing out starts the moment he walks into epikegster, having been pushed by all of Jack’s past behavior - it’s just a very smooth, pretty lashing out at first).

Either way, though, I don’t take Shitty’s or Bitty’s pre-epikegster-conversation perceptions of Kent seriously for a second. Because I’ve seen guys do the exact same thing, and I’ve heard their friends and acquaintances say what a great guy they are. Shitty thinks Jack had no reason to be pissed at Kent; you say that we have no evidence that Kent was ever bad to Jack to deserve that - I say, the only canon evidence we do have of Kent’s behavior fits perfectly into manipulative behavior patterns, and so we can’t possibly know that Kent did nothing to make Jack angry the last time he visited. He just hid it so that he looks good to the rest of the world, just like this time. Nobody but Bitty knows what happened to leave Jack a quivering, crying mess upstairs, after all.

Tempting as it is, I’m not going to go through and argue about the specific things Kent says at epikegster, because every one of those points is covered in my post linked to above. I’ll just sum up by saying: Yes, I think you make excellent points about Jack’s emotional constipation and how it affected Kent back then, when they were teenagers, but I think that you are severely underestimating the toxicity of Kent’s behavior since then, as an adult.

(I want to note one thing that I mentioned in the long post that I’d like people to know if they read this but not that - I absolutely did not go into my first reading of epikegster expecting to dislike Parse or to think he was manipulative or abusive. But I was basically the same as Jack by the end of it. Literally shaking and crying. It was a long time before I could even reread it to make sure it was as bad as I’d thought it was, let alone dissect it and explain to others what was wrong with it. So just - Parse fans try to say sometimes that people go into this wanting to hate him and looking for ways to twist his words, and no, I really, really did not do that. But then every single damn thing he did and said rang alarm bell after alarm bell in my head and left me really fucking freaked out. And that’s why responding to posts like this takes a lot of emotional energy for me.)

I’ve read your meta about Kent being emotionally manipulative, and I think you make some excellent points. It’s a completely valid interpretation of the text. I just don’t think that it’s the only valid interpretation of Kent’s behaviour, given that:

1) We don’t know what happened the last time Kent saw Jack;

2) The majority of their Epikegster interaction happens out of sight; and 

3) The dialogue is written, not spoken, which gives huge leeway re: tone.

To be clear: even in my version of events, I don’t think Kent is a perfect person who’s done nothing wrong at all. Clearly, what he says to Jack at the end is awful. But the events that get them to that point are heavily dependent on interpretation, and on the basis of the canon thus far, I don’t think we’ve got enough information to say, definitively, that Kent’s motives and actions are entirely sinister and manipulative.

For instance: when Jack is shocked by Kent’s arrival, the Kent-critical assumption is that Kent knew Jack wouldn’t be happy to see him. But where’s the proof of this? The problem is, we don’t know how things ended between them last time, because we know literally nothing about Kent’s previous visit except what Shitty tells us. Yes, showing up unannounced is a potentially dick move, but consider: did Kent even know there was going to be a party happening? I doubt he did, given that, IIRC, he’s meant to be coming last-minute from a nearby game in a rental car. Maybe he saw about Epikegster on Facebook or whatever, but that’s pure conjecture. The more logical assumption is that he just wanted to talk to Jack, and rolled with it when he came and found a party happening. In which case, he’s not deliberately trying to catch Jack off-guard in a crowd. If there hadn’t been a party, he wouldn’t have been able to just walk into the Haus in the first place.

By the same token, the fact that Kent schmoozes people at the party is only sinister if you assume he’s insincere and not just an extrovert. Yes, it’s a classic aspect of manipulation and emotional abuse that a person who’s charming in public becomes cruel in private, but non-abusive people can be polite and charming, too! In fact, the time Kent takes to talk to other people at the party is significant, especially if he drove down unaware that Epikegster was happening. He doesn’t immediately drag Jack aside for a private talk; he spends time socialising first. Again, we’re missing a crucial scene: we don’t see how the two of them get to Jack’s room, whether Jack asked him up to talk or Kent requested privacy, and without knowing that, it’s difficult to claim that Kent twisted his arm.

But for me, the biggest issue here is still Jack’s past treatment of Kent. As far as we know, Jack and Kent have only met in person once since the draft – Kent’s previous visit to Samwell – where, if we believe Shitty, Jack behaved antagonistically to Kent. Now, if that was genuinely the first time they saw each other since Jack overdosed, and Jack not only bit Kent’s head off about his success, but shut down any conversation about their relationship – as suggested by Jack dismissively saying “you always say that” when Kent says he misses him – then Kent, I think, is well within his rights to be really fucking upset. Despite this, he waits literal years before contacting Jack again, and when he comes, it’s because he knows Jack is choosing an NHL team and he has a really narrow window of time in which to discuss where Jack goes.

To me, Kent at Epikegster reads as desperate, angry and insecure: an extrovert who projects confidence to disguise his vulnerabilities. I think he waits to tell Jack he misses him, not because he’s saved it up as ammunition for when he’s losing, but because he hates to admit his weaknesses, and missing Jack is a weakness – which is why, when he first comes in, he projects that insecurity by asking Jack, “Didja miss me?”. Similarly, when Jack tells Kent to stay away from his team, and Kent says, “Why? Afraid I’ll tell them something?”, I don’t think it’s a threat: I think it’s bitterness. Jack chose hockey over Kent because he was afraid their relationship could fuck up their careers, and Kent is hurt by that. Kent is willing to risk his career to have Jack in his life, but Jack won’t do the same for him, and Kent is flinging that back in his face.

As a character, Kent hits a lot of different buttons for different people, particularly those who’ve experienced emotional abuse – which, for the record, I have. But the thing is, there’s more than one type of emotional abuse: what I experienced was gaslighting, a continual assertion that my feelings didn’t matter, that my being upset was irrational, and that the person who hurt me hadn’t actually done anything wrong, in a context where that person’s friends repeatedly saw him treat me badly, but handwaved it because “he’s just like that”. Now, to be absolutely clear: I love Jack Zimmermann as a character. But it’s a fact that, historically, he takes his issues out on the people around him, to the point that, when he repeatedly goes off at Bitty, nobody calls him out for it, because they accept Jack as “bitchy”. We also know that Jack is terrible at expressing himself in relationships: as another commenter on this post pointed out, he broke up with Camilla Collins because he didn’t actually realise he was dating her, even though she clearly thought he was. This is a pattern of behaviour on his part that negatively impacts other people, and while being with Bitty helps him to improve enormously, his past actions still have consequences. That being so, I deeply sympathise with Kent’s frustration about Jack’s dismissal of his feelings. He’s not crazy to think that what he had with Jack was meaningful, that Jack treated him like a boyfriend when they were together, acting as if he cared about Kent right up until he cut him out, but Jack keeps acting like Kent’s distress is irrational. In telling Bitty what went wrong between them, Jack waives all personal responsibility: it’s Kent who was bad for him, Kent who didn’t get over it. And maybe we’ll eventually get more details showing those things are completely true. But on the basis of the evidence, I don’t think Jack was good for Kent, either, and his refusal to admit that raises a flag for me.  

Here is what I think of Kent:

Imagine you are a teenager, younger than eighteen, in a secret relationship that could potentially ruin your future. You’re in love with a boy who’s anxious and under pressure, and you try to reassure him – though maybe you’re not always great at that; you’re being pit against each other as draft choices; there are parties and expectations and you’re not an adult, and there’s no one you can ask for advice – and then he nearly dies. He goes away. You get the job he wanted. (The job you both wanted.) And maybe you reach out to him, but he doesn’t reach back, and you think, okay. He needs space. You try to be an adult. You wait until you’re secure in your achievements – secure enough, maybe, that the old rumours you had to deal with, the rumours that were actually true, can’t hurt your career any more – and you go to see him. But the boy you loved is angry at your success. He won’t talk to you, won’t admit that what you had mattered, even though it did. And so you wait, and only come back again when you have something to offer him that he can accept: he was jealous of your success, and so you offer to share it with him. He can have what you have, and then he won’t be angry at you anymore.

But of course, it doesn’t work like that. You do everything wrong; you turn into the worst version of yourself, and leave in tears with everything broken between you.

I don’t think that Kent Parson is a saint. But I do think he’s interesting, and complicated, and that – in fanfic, at least – he’s worthy of an emotional healing arc, just like Jack gets with Bitty in canon. Obviously, nobody else has to agree with that, and I completely respect the right of anyone to dislike him as a character, or to make their own interpretation of his actions and motives. I just get antsy at the suggestion that there’s only one valid explanation for what he says and does, that Jack is completely innocent, and that Kent must obviously have done something bad to him in the past, even though there’s more evidence to suggest the opposite is true.   

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