- RotG - Of Contradictions and Chess: A Character Study - RotG -
The other Guardians don't get it. They're absolutists, people who see life like a game of chess, black and white with rules that are just easy enough to understand and can never, ever be compromised.
Jack has always hated chess. It's such a bad allegory for real life. Life is difficult and complicated and pointless and messy. There are no rules to make it fair and no two sides taking turns. No one is black or white, good or evil, not completely.
Sometimes Jack wonders how they could have lived so long yet still be so narrow-minded about it all. Even Pitch is to an extent, but Jack thinks that might just be the megalomania getting in the way.
It's only the right emotions that make the difference between funny and fearsome in dreams. The same memory can make you laugh and scream and cry depending when in your life you recall it. Hope is more painful than physical injury when you lose it and takes twice as long to heal.
Jack shakes his head when no one realises that the Guardians of Wonder and Fun are most prevalent when Mother Nature is at her cruellest (except for summer, but that doesn't count because warm people find it easier to ignore the fact the sun has a retinue of droughts and forest fires and monsoons). Jack is a spirit of wintertime first and foremost, and he thinks that's why he was put in charge of Fun.
The pragmatic part of him, the bit that turned his death into a game, so his sister wouldn't be scared, looked at the world and realised no one would ever make it through winter if they didn't have something to hold on to, to distract themselves with.
Fun isn't enough for everybody, but it's enough for the children, the small ones the cold might get to otherwise.
People still die from the hunger and the cold and the diseases that follow winter like an iced cloak. Jack accepted that a long time ago, after all cold and death walk hand in hand (schedules permitting, they are both very busy), but sometimes there might be a child who makes a miraculous recovery, sometimes they might not get as ill if they aren't worrying so much.
Sometimes, Jack thinks North gets it a little bit, or at least he would if he didn't cling to the idea that everything can be wrapped up in little square boxes and lined up neatly in a row with matching bows. But then again, North's centre is wonder and that is all he knows. He has never seen the true beauty and devastation of winter. You can't see it if you refuse to accept that something lovely can kill you without thought or regret. That North brings something for people to cling to, to distract themselves with, is probably, most likely, merely fortuitous timing.
North was wrong about Jack's centre that eventful Easter he joined the Guardians. The Man on the Moon gave Jack a centre of cold ice. Jack was the one to wrap it and smother it in fun and laughter.
Looking at the winter through the lens he did gave him something to hold onto, to distract himself with when the bodies piled up like snow drifts. It hurt less for Jack when they died smiling. It hurt less for them too.