I’m new, and someone has probably said this all before, but I have some thoughts about Jester in light of recent episodes.
There’s a moment I’ve been considering for a while now. It’s that moment when, after “cheerfully” enduring capture into slavery, upon gaining freedom Jester immediately pulls off an insane, chaotic act, specifically to regain the favor of the Traveler, who she thought had abandoned her. And he comes to her, and tells her this:
“As long as you remain that little seed of joy and chaos, I’ll be walking right behind you.”
In one sense, it’s an affirmation of Jester and her best qualities—the qualities she likes and admires about herself. But it’s also an enormous amount of pressure, because at its core, that is a statement of conditional friendship and support. It is a statement that implies that once Jester begins to fail to be joyful, fail to be fun and chaotic, she will be abandoned. So even though the Traveler said Jester did not need to prove herself to him through her temple prank, this statement only feeds into what Jester has always believed—she does need to perform, she does need to fill a certain role and be a certain kind of person in order to earn the companionship and affection that she so desperately needs.
And this attitude towards her relationships extends beyond the Traveler. We’ve all talked about how Caleb views relationships as transactional, but in a way Jester does too. There is a reason, I think, that her attitude towards Fjord’s romance has at times been “How do I make him like me?” It’s not purely youth and inexperience that lies behind this statement, and it’s definitely not some dark manipulative impulse. It’s just that Jester genuinely feels like she has to constantly put in labor to earn people’s emotional investment in her, so she wants the formula that will make it easier for her to meet everyone’s needs. Jester was raised by a busy celebrity sex worker, and Jester uses the force of her personality to become a working girl in her own right—the only difference being that what she grasps at isn’t money so much as time, and attention, and affection. These are things Jester should feel she has an unconditional right to—but to her, they are limited resources that she receives in exchange for her efforts to be emotionally present for everyone, for healing minds and bodies and providing entertainment through jokes and pranks.
And unfortunately, the effectiveness of her efforts feed into her addiction to the performance. She’s rewarded by laughter, by affection from her friends. She is rewarded by the Traveler when she does something chaotic—so that she’s always seeking that reinforcement, that assurance that she exists and is valuable because other people tell her she is. She is the quintessential artist—she lives to see her audience appreciate what she puts out into the world.
But what happens when she can’t keep up the performance anymore? What happens when she’s tired, and sad, when she can’t bring people joy and cannot muster the mood for pranks? What happens if, heaven forbid, she is needy? When she has to ask for attention and support without being able to immediately return it? Does Jester believe she will be supported, loved even then? Or does she think she will be abandoned—the one thing she fears most, that she would do anything to avoid?