all things considered.

From the Just King Things Bonusode ep 58, "Firestarter (2022)," originally uploaded on 4/14/25. Slightly edited for clarify & grammar, with anything in [brackets] added by me. This excerpt is from approx 0:20:20—0:22:42.

CAMERON: So that's all to say... the through-line that I do find interesting, they're two. There's the one that you just mentioned: what will this super-powered girl do with her rage, which is fundamentally way more interesting than anything Stranger Things ever showed me in the 3 seasons of that show I watched when it was coming out. And that's the place—that's the power of X-men, right.

MICHAEL: Mm-hmm.

CAMERON: In X-Men 2, the fact that Bobby doesn't obliterate his parents in that scene—

MICHAEL: Yeah!

CAMERON: Oh, so I'm gay? You know, the fact that he doesn't turn them to ice statues with his rage, that is an interesting part of how X-Men works, which is: you are different from the people who came before you, [so] what will you do? And some people do good stuff, some people do bad stuff. There's all this stuff, that [kind of] ethical question. But the other one that doesn't often come up in X-Men—although I got to be honest, when it does come up in X-Men I like X-Men more—is: would you kill your own kid?

MICHAEL: Mmh-hmm, yeah.

CAMERON: You know what I mean? Your child is a super-powered creature. She can harm you. Will you kill her? And even more than that, will you defy her agency as a person, and that's also the other through-line through this movie, and that's—that's interesting. I've said very many times on these shows, on our Ranged Touched properties, we live in a time when The [Child is the fulcrum through which all politics happens. There's no political discussion in our current moment that is not using the figure of a child as a lever to enact horrifying policy, for the most part. And so I kind of like that a movie brings up these kinds of knotty, difficult—knotty like k-n-o-tt-y, not naughty like what Santa Claus would call you—these difficult questions about this stuff. Because I don't think Zac Efron is great in this movie, but I do think he's pretty good at being a dad of a superhero.

Listening to this Bonusode and wow does this conversation sound similar to the writing around Jack & his overall arc and esp in S14, with its 'would Jack kill Dean, would Dean kill Jack' plot.

Jack isn't literally a child, but he does fit the narrative role of The Child: a young person who needs guidance from the adult protagonists. He's really more accurately described as a literal young adult. Irl, the actor playing him was 26 or 27 in S13, and within the narrative, Jack's age is given at 18 or 19 in S14, so Jack has a body & mind of someone in early adulthood… with emphasis on the early: after he’s born, Jack struggles with his lack of emotional, relationship, and self-knowledge, which he then gains over his 3-season arc.

It also puts fandom discussion of Jack in perspective, with how common Jack-as-a-literal-baby is in fic, the distaste at his ending in taking on the responsibility of being God (plus how fix-its often have Jack turning into a literal baby or child as a better alternative), how people freak out about "Moriah” versus enjoying the melodrama of it all, and even how Jack differs from Amara (both of them are supernatural being who quickly grew up into adults, but Amara, despite being in a pre-teen body at one point, is not framed as A Child narratively like Jack is; potentially a question of who gets to be A Child, how gender plays into it). So fandom, to generalize, looks at the role of The Child thru a predominant lens that it wasn’t fair Jack had to grow up fast / take on responsibility, which is fixed by him literally becoming younger or a child-character within an AU. And I get it, esp in the narrative context of Sam and Dean as kids who were forced to grow up too fast, but there is something quite personally discomforting about a character “deserving” to become someone who doesn’t have to make choices or have responsibilities. This attitude also contrasts with how Jack is handled within the show, as his arc ends with Jack taking on God’s power and becoming the good foundation for the whole world. With great power comes great responsibility and all that (if we’re thinking of how superhero stories clearly influenced the writers).

But because fandom focuses so much on characters & character inferiority, people downplay how Jack’s ending fits into his character thematically, which does feel like throwing the baby out with the bathwater, pardon the pun. Maybe it’s that no shit, life isn’t fair, and it can be tragic and horrible and painful… but you can’t go back in time, and if you stay caught up in the dream of returning to your “sunlit garden” (can’t believe it took me this long to make an Utena reference), you’ll miss what life can be, the life you can make, in the present. Even if I don’t think the writing did a good job at conveying this message—I’ll save that rant for another day—it is very much in the narrative and esp in S15, like in Dean & Amara’s exchange in 15x15:

AMARA: I wanted two things for you, Dean. I wanted you to see that your mother was just a person, that the myth you'd held onto for so long of a better life, a life where she'd lived was just that, a myth. I wanted you to see that the real complicated Mary was better than your childhood dream because she was real. That now is always better than then. That you could finally start to accept your life.

In that context, baby!Jack becomes something much sadder, and more like… a refusal to consider the difficulties of becoming an adult, or an impossibility of imagining a way forward for a character who didn’t choose the burdens he was born with but has to figure out how to live with them anyhow. (But maybe that's too cynical of me? Or more reflects my own attitude towards adulthood, ha.)