I'M WORKING ON IT...

[tencrush]

Just rewatching some episodes to get some inspiration re. Ianto and what I am now calling his alpha-in-training-ness. Wow. He is the weirdest character, dudes. He's never on screen, he's always physically reserved and he doesn't say much, but when he does he COMMANDS attention, it's way more blatant than I thought it would be.

But anyway, I'm getting a bit distracted, so I'll just post random things in the meantime.

Watch this scene from Day One again.
"None of you have partners?" says Gwen. And LOOK! Jack was totally going to say something and then he shuts his mouth and changes his mind.



He's so doing the teaboy already at this point in time.

Comments

[antelope-writes.livejournal.com]

I tend to look at the whole cyberwoman thing as a long, bizarre metaphor for drug abuse or alcoholism and what it will do to a relationship. You can have attraction through the booze or the drugs, genuine feeling, blah blah blah, but there is always that next fix and what you have to do to get your next fix and the next fix will always, always, always come ahead of your partner. I dumped the guy I was sure I'd marry at one point because he was a drunk. I KNOW. It's crushing when you finally figure it out.

So there you are, desperate to get your next fix, and then one day something happens and your addiction gets pulled out into the pitiless light of day and all sorts of bad shit happens before you go into rehab...it's painful, it shatters you. The kind of manipulation that Ianto does, about "I just clean up your shit?" Classic manipulation that an addict does. Then the denial. Then the threats. Then the pleading. Then you wind up in rehab drying out (or a 30-day suspension from the office).

If you think of Ianto as an addict (with Lisa being the drug), in Fragments he's just doing what he has to do (damn near whoring himself) to get his next fix. Jack got played, played hard core, but that doesn't mean there can't be genuine attraction and/or affection there. It just got buried under the drugs. And the stopwatch thing? He's out of rehab and doing better and so the relationship starts to come back. Whatever they have going on is still eight shades of fucked up crazy, but it's not at all surprising to me.

In the immortal words of Bowling for Soup, Life after Lisa's not so bad at all.

[love-jackianto.livejournal.com]

Ianto as an addict. I never thought about that, but it makes a lot sense.

[antelope-writes.livejournal.com]

In S1, Ianto is an addict and Jack is the terminally ill patient desperate that one more doctor will give him the cure. Ianto starts out headed towards rock bottom and winds up in rehab, with a brief bit of falling off the wagon in EOD.

In S2, Ianto is in recovery (reasonably successfully) and Jack has learned that his illness is not terminal but manageable and he is dealing with it as best he can. Think diabetes instead of cancer. By extension, Zombie!Owen in DMW and DITD is a metaphor about learning to cope with sudden disability.

[nightspring.livejournal.com]

Interesting thought. But if Lisa was an addiction... do you think it's possible Ianto's just replaced one addiction (Lisa) with another (Jack)?

[love-jackianto.livejournal.com]

It really looks that way. Although it could be that Ianto replaced replaced one addiction (Lisa) with another (Torchwood), he did say Torchwood gave his life meaning again.

[nightspring.livejournal.com]

Well... he says "Coming here (presumably Torchwood 3) gave me meaning again. *pause. looks at Jack* You." Um... the ways we could intepret that... makes my head hurt. :D

[love-jackianto.livejournal.com]

'Um... the ways we could intepret that... makes my head hurt. :D'
It is fun, though. Like that whole 'I came back for you... *looks at Ianto*...all of you.' thing.

[antelope-writes.livejournal.com]

I thought that "you!" was one of the sweetest moments in Torchwood. I always saw it more as "my life was a wreck, and this job helped me put it back together, and then, where did you come from I didn't expect this you have made me so much happier than I was I don't know what to say."

[nightspring.livejournal.com]

And see, I get stuck on the thought that there's some editing of history going on there. Because, see, Ianto starts out by saying something about meeting Lisa and never feeling so alive, then he says something like "losing lisa. felt like the world ended." *Then* he brings up the "coming here." But strictly speaking, Lisa died after Ianto started working at Torchwood 3. So unless Ianto is seeing Canary Wharf as the point where he lost Lisa (which is in some ways a valid pov), then there's a bit of shifting around of event order going on within Ianto's internalized personal history. It's like he's editing out the time when Lisa and Torchwood 3, Lisa and Jack overlapped, and remapping it into a more straightforward sequence: Lisa - losing Lisa - coming to TW3/meeting Jack, allowing himself to skip over what was probably the most traumatic period of his life, when he was desperately trying to save Lisa while being wracked with the stress/guilt of deceiving Jack and other TW3 members.

And I'm reading way more into this than the script writer probably intended, aren't I? LOL.

[love-jackianto.livejournal.com]

'And I'm reading way more into this than the script writer probably intended, aren't I? LOL.'
Yeah, I always love what you have to say though.

[antelope-writes.livejournal.com]

I vote that Torchwood 3 has been his rehab.

[antelope-writes.livejournal.com]

Possibly.

It could also mean that there was truly genuine affection and attraction between them, and now that both the elephants are out of the room (Lisa and the Doctor) they are free to follow that attraction wherever it leads.

I vote for some combination of the two.

If you go by tencrush's hypothesis that Ianto's family is dead and make the likely assumption that most of his friends were killed in TW1, and by extension that he has serious death/abandonment issues, Jack is the ideal man for Ianto. He can't lose him to death and in S2 at least Jack follows him like a lost puppy so he won't lose him to abandonment. I think that's part of why Ianto is in such an incandescent rage at John.