Epantiras wrote...
Or maybe it's just a plot hole 
But my personal opinion is that Cerberus has been studying Jack even after she escaped the Teltin facility. Something like releasing their experiment and watching how she manages to survive.
On a side note... yesterday I watched the Dark Knight and I liked how every time Joker told a different tale about his face scars. I wondered if he did it on purpose or if he really didn't know that and/or his mind was so messed up that he filled the holes in his memories with imagination without knowing the difference between what has really happened and what he made up.
So...
How much of Jack's story is real? Has she made up some facts (especially about the time spent in the Teltin facility) or did the Cerberus scientists create "false memories" to traumatize her even further? I know this is a cliché, there are "false memories" even in Blade Runner and in Wolverine's past I believe (is Jack "Wolverine in space"?). Opinions?
For the record, Epants, I think the Joker's stories are
all true - to a point. Maybe one little detail here and there and the rest is some little yarn he spins on the spot for whoever he's about to hopelessly maim
As for Jack's past... I think in a similar vein that everything she says in Teltin is true - if not to the record, but to her. Jack strikes me as having had no influence in her life to shape the way events are perceived (in her early life at least). She remembers experiences and ignores the gaps that could occur in the recall of traumatic events. What exists is only the memory; like Grunt's picture book, Jack has a broken VCR in her head that plays back half a scene and then jumps through a couple of minutes of static; the gap is nothing, so whatever the gap
really was,
never was.
Perhaps as I've theorised before, Jack's first formative perspectives came from the crew of the ship that picked her up, leading to her potentially thinking her abuse at their hands was 'normal'. Once this negative image is discovered for what it is, Jack no longer trusts her perceptive model and wings it with one she constructs from the criminal fraternity she ends up rotating in. Betrayal is answered in kind, as is injury or humiliation. It could even be construed to be a part of Jack's "tower of sh*t"; whether she made her revenges on others terminal or not, saying they were is the same is putting up a
'Beware of the Badass Psychopath' sign - it keeps anyone from looking around the other side of the tower and seeing the confused, frightened child hiding behind it... because that child can be exploited and hurt again. Maybe Jack's myths, told as often as they are, fill in the blanks in the VCR tape, or, as I believe, she always is aware of their false nature.
Because of this, Jack has to lie, and lie often. To me at least, the lies are transparent because not even Jack believes in them; in her heart of hearts, she knows the tower isn't real. If it was, she would never fall for Shepard - it would be a compromise too far if she really was the monster she wants to be see as (reinforced by the whole recounting of the Murtock story - even though she can't face Shepard and cry, she tells the story to show the cracks in her armour and show him she isn't the person she's spent the past few days trying to convince him she is)... so Jack deliberately exposes herself to Shepard; becoming flustered, angry, overly defensive, because she wants him (and I don't think it's subconcious either) to see her as she is: someone who needs to stop, to paraphrase that brandy-swilling hottie-doctor.
As far as Teltin is concerned, what she says is the only truth she may be able to accept for a while. KNowing things played out different might never repair the damaged tape in her head, but she has an idea of what was missed. That means to me that the Teltin memories are as true as something can be, particularly to Jack. After Teltin, I think things are inflated for the purpose of self-defense. I'm not trying to say Jack is a little saint who never made someone's head explode for pissing her off, but I do think some of her stories are inflated to support her defensive myth of being the biggest badass in the galaxy. The difference being, when Jack is alone with herself, she knows where the line between fantasy and reality is... there's probably a lot of things she wishes she could write over with static, which would explain the drugs, and times where another perception is needed, like when she joins the cult or when she hangs with the pirate clan (but to tell it to someone else, the cult was just for sex and drugs, and the pirates were just because they were as hard as her), she is attempting to change the tape for something better.
And strangely enough, that change comes when she joins the crew of a Cerberus ship, surrounds herself with people that by all rights she shouldn't get on with, and meets a man (or woman) she can let her guard down with and let them accept her for who she really is (and in some cases accept her so much that he opens his heart to her too).
Retour en haut
I can't seem to keep current with the thread at the rate you all are going. Seriously though, I'm glad to see things are hopping around here (in a good way). Just have to read and comprehend faster, I guess.
