John Egbert appreciation thread

[cookiefonster]

Guess it falls on me to be the first to start a thread appreciating the lovable, earnest, relatable dork named John Egbert. I'll start with a memorable endearing quote of his:

From page 6/005824, [o] ==>
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GT: i see. so it is not me who is jodie foster. it's more like you are jodie, because nobody believed her when she came home and had amazing tales to tell.
GT: except matthew mcconaughey.
AG: Aaaaaaaargh!
GT: but it's ok. i will be your matt mcconaughey.
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[calamityCons]

John is a sweet as fuck ball of sunshine who is smarter and more creative than people give him credit for. He is a lovable boy and I adopt him as my son.

[Darth_Energon]

John probably has some of the best character interactions in the comic.

[davesprite]

no homo but john egbert is a wonderful lil dork and i love him

[Pine]

I LOVE JOHN EGBERT SO MUCH!!!!!

he's my comfort character and i relate to him a LOT. He's super dorky and is just out here having a good time. He has a happy optimism to him that makes him really fun, and i like seeing his interactions with others. My favorite is how he helped change his friends for the better without even realizing.

[sigmatic]

Controversial statement: john did nothing wrong

jokes aside, john is one of my favourite characters and he's likeable and deserves the world and he's precious and

[Sahxyel]

John is probably my second-favorite kid. He's such a god damn dork and yet so wholesome and fun, and he is the glue which effectively holds the Betas firmly trapped in the room known as FRIENDSHIP. While Rose is the most cerebral, Dave the most ironic, and Jade the most friendly, John is just a simple kid with simple pleasures and simple wants. He's simple like vanilla ice cream but the great thing about vanilla ice cream is how WELL it goes with almost anything. John's chemistry with other characters from his friends to Vriska to even how he reacts around Caliborn is fun.

The kid is what I want my son to be like some day so I can shower him with Mom Lalonde levels of affection and set up the old VCR player so he can watch shitty movies from his grandparent's vast collection of vintage video tapes.

[MatthewHMay]

I know “John and Dave: Respond to Memo” is mostly Karkat and Dave shooting the shit, but man John is just outstanding as a straight man during the whole pesterlog. He’s just out there, asking those big questions we all want t know the answers to, shuch as:

karkat, is terezi really your girlfriend?

haha, dave you're hitting on terezi? really??

And what I’m sure is a fan favorite of some:

are you saying that vriska is interested in me? like, romantically?

[aspiringWatcher]

Controversial statement: john did nothing wrong

jokes aside, john is one of my favourite characters and he's likeable and deserves the world and he's precious and

It's not even controversial. John Egbert hasn't, can't and won't ever do anything wrong.

[cookiefonster]

I know “John and Dave: Respond to Memo” is mostly Karkat and Dave shooting the shit, but man John is just outstanding as a straight man during the whole pesterlog. He’s just out there, asking those big questions we all want t know the answers to, shuch as:

karkat, is terezi really your girlfriend?

haha, dave you're hitting on terezi? really??

And what I’m sure is a fan favorite of some:

are you saying that vriska is interested in me? like, romantically?

John has an adorably childish grasp over the concept of romance, I'm telling you.

[Sokota]

I don't know if it's just me, but when John told Jade in the ship that he didn't like Con Air anymore, that broke my heart

I still love and cherish him obviously. He's a true hero in so many ways.

[Wing]

John is just an extremely valid and good human being.

[BrobyDDark]

The biggest sin of the Epilogues was hurting the good boy like it did, in both timelines.

[Generalrabogolfo]

he doesnt deserve nothing that hussie & co throw at him. Why cant my boi be happy guys?

[rookie1978]

ok look. im NOT gay.
john kinda cute doe

[Flame_Warp]

They should have named him Jacknoir because John seems to believe a compound word killed his father

[power464646]

(First off: hey Cookie! Long time no see!)

Man, John Egbert is just such an enchantingly delightful character. Everything about him from his goofy demeanour to his selfless attitude to how unapologetically he just lets himself be himself (or at least, who he believes he might be) is a fucking blast to read! One of my favourite moments in the whole comic is back in act 2 where he and Rose teasingly one-up each other with progressively fancier language towards the end of a conversation, just because he knows she considers him a good enough friend to parody her penchant for verboseness. In fact, he'll match the tone of voice of pretty much everyone he talks to in one way or another - he typically tends to be more laid-back around Dave, excitable around Jade, snippy around Terezi, etc.

He's also almost like a foil to the majority of his friends - who all seem more battle-hardened, somewhat stoic, and, dare I say it, edgy - because their cynical worldviews are seemingly almost always met with John's unrelenting positivity and compassion. Hell, the only time I cried during the comic proper is when Vriska turned to him after killing Tavros, desperately hoping that he might forgive her and deathly afraid that she herself would be soon to die, and despite his obvious immense discomfort (and perhaps even well-disguised disgust, as later dialoglogs would reveal), all he sought to do was to ease her conscience.

But it's pretty much impossible to discuss this side of John without also discussing how he grows up in the act 6 intermissions? The longer he and all of his friends spend apart, the more they seem to come undone - particularly obviously with Dave and Karkat's rampant antagonism of one another, and Rose and Terezi's respective substance abuse - but John's gradual breakdown is troubling in a wholly different way, as he becomes more self-centred, less easygoing, and perhaps even a little arrogant as he's more or less left alone with his thoughts for three long years. This is especially apparent in his conversations with Jade (particularly the one where he insists she and Davesprite get back together. Yuck!).

In fact, I think it's almost safe to say that the character who bears the strongest resemblance to him is Vriska. I know, right? I sound totally insane right now, but hear me out. Both of them have a penchant for getting narrative relevance thrust upon them and stolen away again with upsettingly random frequency. Both of them are notably adventurous (to the point of claiming the first two God Tiers), unwaveringly bound to whatever they consider their duty inside the game (however flawed their reasoning may be), and dedicated to upholding a strong sense of right and wrong or good and evil (HOWEVER VERY, VERY FLAWED THEIR REASONING MAY BE). They're also both outlandishly mischievous, immature, and blunt, they share the same taste in terrible movies, have strong shades of CompHet cast over their respective narratives, and they're both really strongly autistic and transfem coded! So naturally, as one of the biggest Vriska Enjoyers(TM) in the world, I probably have some fucking obligation to like John as much as I do (hint: it's a lot).

What I really really like about John, though, is his development in Meat. Meat!John is an utter disaster, in a whole different way to whatever the fresh hell it is deadbeat dad Candy!John has going on (although I love him too, make no mistake). He's burned out, depressed, and rendered permanently cosmically irrelevant by age 23 (and dead, too. Really really bloody dead), but unlike his candy timeline counterpart, he doesn't make an effort to hide it anymore. He doesn't have anything left to distract him from the unfulfilled tragic that he is, due to the fact that the whole universe is just gone. And yet, in a sense, once we're offered the taste of both timelines we might be left to consider is that not, in its own sense, a sort of fulfillment? Is it not in his depression and loneliness and creeping death that we finally see the first hints of him pulling back the curtain just a little, seeing the John underneath, and accepting it?

I'm sure I've talked long enough already, but also I'm kind of a total bitch, so I'm going to spend these next paragraphs talking about how John is undeniably relatable to trans (particularly transfeminine) people such as myself. Throughout John's entire arc(s), there's a looming sense of this aforementioned unfulfillment, where John's easygoing nature repeatedly gets the better of him and he never takes a moment to second-guess his own existence. Show him his friend on the other side of the country can reshape his bedroom at will? Haha, that's so cool! Have him discover that he and his friends are just genetic clones from their own future? Wow, what a wild day he's having! He just kinda accepts it and moves on.

When John meets Vriska online for the first time, she immediately singles him out as the human leader and models him after herself. John's reaction, surprise surprise, is barely-disguised glee. And he adopts more aspects of her as time goes on - repeating characters eight times, ascending to Godhood on her instructions, really just doing everything she says, more or less - and one could sort of develop the impression that his Vriskafication might have progressed further were it not for the death of his father.

The death of Dad Egbert is saddening for two reasons: First, on the initial read, because the guardians are repeatedly built up to be these infallible, indestructible figures who have everything under control all the time, and second, on the rereads, when its bitterly apparent that John is so inarticulate with his own emotions that he doesn't even find the tears to cry. What makes John such a sad character to me is that he's caught in the paradoxical cycle of being incapable of truly accepting his own feelings because he doesn't know how to talk to anybody about them, and being incapable of talking to anybody about his feeling, because he doesn't know how to truly accept them. I could go on and on about how this hamartia of his, deeply upsetting in its realism, is yet another symptom of the burden of toxic masculinity, and how he puts it upon himself to bottle up his feelings and act like the man his father never got to see him become, and so on, and so forth, but you get the picture. I'm saying John Egbert is... shockingly well-written, if read as a trans woman, and that's really all there is to say on the matter.

But I guess I didn't write out this colossal fucking essay for no reason, right? There's gotta be some takeaway on why John Egbert is a character so deserving of our appreciation. Well, I think it's this: What makes John a special character is that he's a blank slate, but not in the way protagonist characters tend to be - rather, he models himself after all the people most important to him. You've got a little bit of the other beta kids in there, a little bit of dad, a little bit of the scourge sisters, and so on - and ultimately, you're left with a character who feels a massive hole within themself, filled by all the ways they deeply and wholeheartedly love their friends. And how can we not love a character like that?

Also meat!John's kinda cute ngl

[BrobyDDark]

I have to agree that John takes on traits of people he cares about and maybe looks up to. I don't think I can agree that how he's portrayed makes sense for him being trans, but different experiences craft different perspectives. To me, John didn't grow up with toxic-masculinity. His dad was constantly baking in an attempt to connect with his son's emotions, and encouraged his perceived hobbies. I think it's fairer to say John grew up with movie masculinity. Some may say that's toxic masculinity, but the way John internalized it and used it to balance himself and become someone people respect, made it non-toxic. He was overwhelmingly kind and patient with shitty people in his life. He tried to understand people's feelings and bring down tensions, helping whenever he could.

He was eager to please and everyone seemed to need his help. That hole in the Epilogues was created by him realizing that nobody needed him anymore. When he was a Homestuck protagonist, not a minute went by where he wasn't doing something. Now that the game is over, he has nothing to do. Like once you've done everything on an rpg.

I think there certainly are feminine things about him, mostly the way he talks and acts sometimes, but, then, he's 13 for the majority of the comic. I can't speak for every man, but as for me and lotsa kids I saw in middle school, they acted as feminine as John did at his age. After the timeskip his actions are more masculine, fitting with getting out of the awkward stages of early teenage-hood and into the late-stages of hormone-induced growth.