you wanna know what REALLY hurts me??? in entry 72, after jay thinks he sees the operator and after he rewinds the tape, he says something like “im not stupid, i know what i saw” and tim replies with “i never said you were stupid…”
i know its just a small line of dialogue and maybe im looking way too deep into it but??? it really seems like theres an underlying issue here, especially with the word choices
like look what yall did… you took this perfectly good man and made him INSECURE…. because i definitely don’t doubt people were calling jay stupid even back then (like i wont deny ive made “haha jay dumb” jokes before but…. ouch this hurts)
I just wanna point out: after literal Years of jay being missing we only hear about jay’s parents once, and it was when his apartment burned down. we never see anything come of it, we never hear about anyone going to find jay to make sure that he was okay or like, you know, Alive.
likewise, the one and Only time jay mentions anything about his past outside of the tapes (outside of marble hornets) was when he was opening up to tim. and the way he described it was that he’d felt directionless and empty. and the implication there is that part of the reason why he’d fallen into obsession so quickly was because he had Nothing To Go Back To.
the operator is drawn to people who are already struggling because those are the people that he can hurt the most effectively. people who are isolated, people who are traumatized, people who feel like outcasts. and it’s a self-perpetuating cycle with the operator praying on preexisting problems and making them Worse, making the people with them lash out or self isolate, but the fact still remains that it starts from Something.
insecurities don’t come from nowhere, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that jay lived alone before the start of the series. that no one came for him, that no one looked for him. that he reached out to Strangers and kept his twitter and his channel up even when he realized that put him in danger, because it was better than being forgotten and alone.
To bank off of this:
One of the biggest plot holes in the series is: how can Jay do all this without any money or job?
To bank off of the previous player’s statement, it’s likely that something happened, be it that Jay’s parents didn’t agree with him wanting to be a film major, or knowing what we know now, disagreed with him being gay, it’s likely that though out the series, Jay’s parents are the ones giving him money.
Maybe they thought he wouldn’t be successful, so his only connection to his parents is through them sending him money every week / month.
![hybridhornets: edited my drawing of skully’s system in light of issue 3.5 :]](https://64.media.tumblr.com/7124b5ed40e5997421276fb9381aa194/8ecf40fc5614b825-3f/s1280x1920/037dcb16f5acacfd5c0380725822152691f06217.png "hybridhornets: edited my drawing of skully’s system in light of issue 3.5 :]")
