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character.
CHARACTER NAME: Jackson Overland Frost
SERIES: The Rise of the Guardians
CANON POINT: A couple of days after the end of the movie.
AGE: Physically stuck at 18 for 300 years
APPEARANCE: Raggedy little scarecrow tbh :|
PREVIOUS GAME HISTORY: N/A
PERSONALITY:
Jack Frost, Father Frost, Old Man Winter; it's a myth that goes by a load of different names and faces. Folklore likes to whinge a lot between painting this guy as a mischievous sprite bent on ice-vandalizing windows and nipping noses, or a grim figure bent in age that can breathe the cold right into your bones and brings the inevitable snow and weather of winter.
This Jack is definitely that Jack, the guy behind the names and the myths and the cold--well, behind them, while also being simultaneously all and none of these things. ...It makes a bit more sense in context. After all, few myths are ever entirely true, but even the craziest of myths will have a kernel of truth in it, no matter how small. And Jack has rather a lot of these truth-kernels scattered around all over the place, under the layer of superfluous stories that have been knitted for him by mankind over the years.
But first we should cut short on waxing philosophical, rewind, and start with first impressions. ...Which fit quite soundly in the 'neither' category of this particular Jack Frost's mythological interpretations. After all, myths about Jack Frost don't usually really cite the utterly typical sarcastic teenager that Jack tends be on first meeting: some guy with an abundance of energy and a glib tongue, who seems to think entirely too highly of himself and his sense of humor. He doesn't seem to take anything particularly seriously, reveling in a snark streak a mile wide and delighting in practical jokes of the icy variety. It's his way or the highway, and if you don't like his style then you'll just have to suck it up--while he sits back and takes note of your issue and decides to give you twice the trouble for it. Overall he seems relaxed. He seems carefree. He seems like he knows where he is, what he's doing, and where he's going. He carries the confident and self-assured air of a person quite used to relying on himself.
And that's natural, a definite truth, even if everything else about this first impression isn't quite, because Jack has grown more than accustomed to relying on himself for quite some time.
Jack has been invisible and intangible to 95% of the world around him for three hundred years; and, with that said, loneliness and all the different ways you can cope with it is definitely one of the presiding baselines of Jack's identity, the chip that will always be on his shoulder, separating him from most everyone around him and shaping who he is as a person on several levels. Three centuries of being effectively nonexistent to anyone around you can do weird things to a guy, and for Jack, being alone in a crowd is pretty much the status quo, the 'normal'. It's almost needless to say that Jack isn't used to directly interacting with people--up until very recently Jack rarely had people to interact with, so to speak--and so, on the odd occasion that he actually does, the first impression you get in those couple of paragraphs above is the front that he tends to lift up automatically. The bravado and cheerful bluster is fairly natural, a definite organic part of his personality shaped over centuries of using one-sided humor to amuse himself. But when it's thrown under the pressure of actual attention there's still the slightest bit of strain to be found in it, an undertone of standoffishness and awkwardness that's pretty easy for the perceptive to pick up. It's not that Jack doesn't understand how interaction works--nah, he's spent a long enough time watching people go through the motions of socialization, and he fancies himself pretty well-versed in the do's and the don'ts, the traditions and the trends. But it's one thing to know, and another thing entirely to do, and frankly Jack still finds it very hard to adjust to, for all that he'd refuse to admit it. He's never been able to really relate with other people before, not extensively, not beyond either making them laugh or defending against scrutiny plied against himself. Jack's interaction with the Guardians throughout the movie is probably the longest stretch of sustained contact that he's had with anybody in his three hundred years of life, and though the experience has thrown him into a lot of new water, he's still struggling with the dignified swimming part, and has a long way to go yet.
Sucking at dignified social-swimming can make anybody feel pretty insecure at the best of times, unsurprisingly, and Jack still has difficulty handling insecurity terribly well, especially with an audience at hand. The novel awareness that he's being watched tends to have him automatically on the defensive--'defensive' denoting 'a lot of smart mouth and prickly quips' on Jack's part--and blended all together, this has sometimes resulted in discord and adversity between Jack and many of the few people he can communicate with at all. As we see hinted in the movie, especially by the Easter Bunny, Jack's past few interactions with his fellow spirits didn't tend to be the smoothest of things, and used to often end with latter parties sufficiently miffed or outright rubbed the wrong way. He's getting better at it these days, but it's marginal progress, and old habits can be very difficult to squash right away; it's pretty safe to say that to those who aren't very patient, Jack can still be an aggravating little prick, making forming positive relationships with certain impatient others far more difficult than it needs to be.
But if you can get a bit past the moderately abrasive veneer, via a saint's patience or otherwise, Jack's not necessarily a terrible guy to hang around with. If he has no reason to bear you a grudge, the chances are high that he won't mean ill towards you at all, and by default he's as friendly as he is carefree; a streak of kindness that runs right through and is entirely genuine. Tossing him in the middle of a crowd of children is a surefire way to instantly invoke this facet of him at its strongest, rest assured--Jack loves kids, always has and always will, and this unwavering affection was around long before the notion of becoming a Guardian ever occurred to him. Jack's always been able to relate to children far more easily than adults, despite the fact that they usually can't see or hear him any better than anyone else, and so the happiness of children is Jack's happiness, first and foremost and always. The very thought of harm against a child appalls him on a base level, and he will not hesitate to take any kid he finds under his wing, indirectly or otherwise, to watch over and defend as a core responsibility.
That said, though it's most concentrated in his attention to the younger members of human society, this benevolence of Jack's can and will extend to pretty much anyone he meets--even those that he might not get along with initially. In fact, Jack takes the most joy from the joy of those around him, children and adults alike, so much so he's made it his personal job to invoke that joy where he can. With no one around to tell him what to do otherwise, all those centuries ago, this is the purpose that Jack's given to himself, of his own choice. Purpose and identity in general is a very big deal to Jack--such a simple thing to anyone else, maybe, but after centuries spent pelting questions about his existence at a moon that never answers? Knowing who you are, and knowing why you're here, and knowing exactly what you're supposed to do...it's the most important thing in the world, knowledge of incalculable value. Having gone for so long without this knowledge for a handful of centuries, the prospect of regaining his past-life memories invokes an understandably powerful drive in Jack over the course of the movie, to the point where he ends up almost selling his friends short and listening to Pitch Black's offers. In this example Jack's good nature is also shown to be a pretty double-edged blade at the worst of times; Jack is often willing to hear anyone out, even with a hearty dish of suspicion on the side, and that inherent good nature can get turned against him very quickly by a clever enough adversary. While Jack might be more aware of this now, after the fact, it's another habit that will probably continue to hinder him at various points.
True, all this niceness is a kinda ironic contrast to the season Jack exists to serve, to anybody that might pay a thought to it--after all, cold and ice are not generally associated with kind things like life and cheer, and many (including Pitch Black) would argue that it'd be so much easier to go the natural route of the element, embrace its grim implications as something so much easier to forward than fun of all things--but Jack simply refuses to conform to that, because it's just not in his nature to take any gratification from the despair and unhappiness of others. He doesn't outright deny the frigid shadow that follows him wherever he goes, because that will always be a part of him, but instead he's tailored its fringes and edges where he can, and tried to make the best of the tools given to him without any explanation. With snow days and wild sledding courses and raucous snowball fights, he's turned improvisation into a never-ending active mission to give people fun, and help them feel...well, happy.
Spend three hundred years on a focused specialty, and you get rather uncannily good at it; this fact applies to Jack just as well as it would anybody else. Sincere one-on-one interaction may not be his forte at all, but Jack is a master at the more secondhand and roundabout forms of comforting a person--so much so that it's something he doesn't even really think about anymore, a habit as well-worn as breathing. Though it's rarely particularly evident or obvious, and tends to get side-lined when he's interacting with people in person, Jack is nonetheless in possession of a sharp perceptiveness when it comes to figuring what makes people tick, courtesy of that three-hundred-year observation bonus. And when he pulls on that perceptiveness properly, he can almost be like that older brother that always seems to know exactly what it probably takes to make you feel better. As far as Jack's concerned, it's his job, and specialty, and self-built identity to be there to cheer you up whenever possible, to help you actively enjoy yourself, to make it so you get the full benefit and still never feel obligated to return the gesture. It's serious business that he will address as such, often with a brief flash of maturity and self-awareness quite beyond his physical age and rascally teenage impressions. When it comes to the problems of others, he won't lather on an excess of sympathy or give false consolation if there's a less cushy solution that he can nonetheless offer instead, even if that means taking himself out of the equation of things sometimes (as we see him try to do when initially confronted for aid by the Guardians, feeling that he himself didn't measure up to the task they wanted out of him). And he ends up properly repairing his chafed relations with Bunny in the Warren by finally biting the bullet, sitting down, and flatly apologizing.
Ultimately, if he cares about you, Jack will always be automatically inclined towards doing whatever he can to swing your mood back up when it seems to be needed, because it's validation for him and catharsis for you. And it's this, more than anything else, that really cements the fittingness of his status as a Guardian of Fun at the end of the movie.
However. Make no mistake: while his inherently lighthearted trade does make for a genuine levity that permeates Jack's person and actions, the fact remains that Jack's hardly soft to the center. He takes the happiness of others as a personal responsibility, intentionally steering away his internal focus from himself whenever he can, because...to put it bluntly, he has a crapload of accumulated baggage that he's already had three hundred years to examine, and the contents always strive to drag him three steps back from the two he's made forward trying to solidify his own identity. This is tangible even on a surface level, sometimes: supplementary material from the creators of the movie outright states that "something isn't quite right with him", and that about sums up the muted impression that some might pick up when getting to know Jack over time. But then, this is probably only to be expected when you chuck a guy in a lake, bring him back from the dead as an immortal spirit of winter, and stick him on the land of the living with a name and absolutely nothing else.MANNY YOU LUMINESCENT DICK.
Despite all the simple joys he experiences as a spirit and the high purchase he takes in having fun, Jack is still every bit an old man trapped in a young man's body--a young man that never quite reached proper technical adulthood, to boot--and it's an old man's inevitable bitterness that lurks very lightly under the carefree surface, an old man's first-hand knowledge of an imperfect and not-always-kind world that tempers his own personal benevolence. He's seen all the last three hundred years the world has to offer, good and bad, life and happiness and death and poverty all alike. He has an old man's stubbornness, too, the kind that's spent a long long time living by his own laws, and has a solid stock of personal beliefs and values that are difficult to shake. Jack feels very strongly about his convictions, has firm lines set down when it comes to them, and will confront you upfront and angrily if you cross them. Perhaps inevitably, his measure of age has also given him something of an old man's 'i'm-an-elder-and-i-know-best-tbh' mentality that can crop up in irritating and inconvenient occasions.
Additionally, over the long stretches of time he's spent in bouts of intense loneliness, Jack has experienced "different kinds of grief". His entire life has pretty much been one very long and drawn-out existential crisis, and Jack has slogged through just about every single potential stage of doubt/anger/mourning that comes with the deal, with only his own resolve and self-assigned work available to soften the edges a little. Is he a bit messed up on the inside? Sure, as much as can be expected. It's left its dents on him. Even now, properly established as a Guardian with a set purpose and an actual foundation of believers, Jack remains reluctant to actively try to reach out to touch someone, after living so long under the knowledge that most everyone around him is more solid than he is. He's also never really made or learned the true value of friends and friendship until very recently (even then only beginning to scrape the surface of friendship's potential depth), and he's certainly never fallen in love. These concepts have always been distant things that he's only ever observed from afar, things that couldn't be for him, things that he's long accepted never being able to touch...and so he's never had a reason to try. Honestly, in a lot of ways, Jack's never experienced the full benefit of living as a functional and acknowledged part of a society before, the thrills and miseries alike, and this is a poignant factor that shapes the way he reacts to everyone around him. Hell, being able to react to people who are reacting to him still seems like a delicate and novel thing, a thing that Jack's utterly frightened of losing. Once upon a time his greatest fear was never being believed in, but nowadays Jack finds himself far more terrified by the idea of failure and rejection--of not being worthy of his status as a Guardian, and losing everything he's just now finally started to gain. The worst thing about finally emerging from invisibility is the gnawing thought in a corner of your heart that one mistake too big might just throw you back, after all.
But these are depths, of course, inner layers of that proverbial onion (or matryoshka doll metaphor depending on how you wanna look at it), and Jack's outer layer somehow manages to exhibit capability for cheerfulness and confidence and friendliness even despite all these internal factors. Perhaps it's somewhat strange that Jack isn't showing nearly as many symptoms of damaged goods as he probably really ought to be upfront. But this in itself is one of the most telling pointers of what it is that holds Jack together at the seams, at his center--while three hundred years of being alone has shaped his psyche in many ways that may not be entirely good, it's also carved and refined a will of remarkable tenacity. At his core Jack is nothing if not rebellious--against the silence of the moon that gave him his name, against the idea that winter can only bode bad things, against the notion that he might never be believed in, against three hundred years' worth of accumulated doubt trying to drag him down with clammy fingers. Because Jack doesn't do staying down, feeling sorry for himself, accepting things as they are with a sigh. Never for long. No, if there's a solution at hand, or work that needs to be done, or people that depend on him, Jack will throw every bit of who he is into the task, no hesitation, no questions asked, angst saved for later. You could call it optimism, maybe, a very careworn and battered optimism and hope for better things that has kept him pushing forward, and always will. This is how cheer and kindness in genuine form have managed to survive strong in Jack, even as tempered with age and sadness and Issues as it is; this is how Jack is able to spread that cheer and kindness to those around him, as a natural gift. Jack has determination and courage in spades, conforms to no policy but his own, and it's with these tools that he's fought the long fight against the burden of a loneliness that should have crippled him a long time ago. Far from crippled, he's come out quite a bit stronger for it.
Jack Frost is the raucous laughter of children running through the snow, and the chilly playful pinch at your nose, and the frosted flowers on your windowsill. Jack Frost is also Father Frost, and Old Man Winter, the bend of barren trees and the sigh of the cold lonely wind and, sometimes, the still peace of the final sleep that catches the weary traveler in a snowstorm. But alongside these things--more than these things and neither of these things, just so--Jack Frost was once a simple human young man who ranked his little sister's life above his own without hesitation, and spent his last mortal moments making her laugh and keeping her safe. Jack Frost is the Guardian of Fun, and Fun is his center because it's always been his habit and his nature, his calling, to use Fun as the base upon which he builds all his other values and strengths as a person. All for the sake and happiness of the people around him. Even if they never know he's there.
As far as he's concerned, getting a genuine smile for his efforts makes it worth the trouble every single time.
ABILITIES:
Winter is Jack, but Jack isn't winter. The season itself was around long before he ever set foot on any iced lake, and will probably continue to be around long after he's gone. Still, as a spirit of winter, and being...well, Jack Frost, Jack is the next-best thing to being winter by serving as its primary herald and purveyor. ...Which makes the job sound a lot more regal and fancy than it actually is, but well. Small details. Let's try and break this down as well as we can--
MAGICAL
POSSESSIONS:
1 crooked staff
1 set of clothing (30-year-old blue hoodie perpetually frosted, 300-year-old ragged pants)
CHARACTER NAME: Jackson Overland Frost
SERIES: The Rise of the Guardians
CANON POINT: A couple of days after the end of the movie.
AGE: Physically stuck at 18 for 300 years
APPEARANCE: Raggedy little scarecrow tbh :|
PREVIOUS GAME HISTORY: N/A
PERSONALITY:
Jack Frost, Father Frost, Old Man Winter; it's a myth that goes by a load of different names and faces. Folklore likes to whinge a lot between painting this guy as a mischievous sprite bent on ice-vandalizing windows and nipping noses, or a grim figure bent in age that can breathe the cold right into your bones and brings the inevitable snow and weather of winter.
This Jack is definitely that Jack, the guy behind the names and the myths and the cold--well, behind them, while also being simultaneously all and none of these things. ...It makes a bit more sense in context. After all, few myths are ever entirely true, but even the craziest of myths will have a kernel of truth in it, no matter how small. And Jack has rather a lot of these truth-kernels scattered around all over the place, under the layer of superfluous stories that have been knitted for him by mankind over the years.
But first we should cut short on waxing philosophical, rewind, and start with first impressions. ...Which fit quite soundly in the 'neither' category of this particular Jack Frost's mythological interpretations. After all, myths about Jack Frost don't usually really cite the utterly typical sarcastic teenager that Jack tends be on first meeting: some guy with an abundance of energy and a glib tongue, who seems to think entirely too highly of himself and his sense of humor. He doesn't seem to take anything particularly seriously, reveling in a snark streak a mile wide and delighting in practical jokes of the icy variety. It's his way or the highway, and if you don't like his style then you'll just have to suck it up--while he sits back and takes note of your issue and decides to give you twice the trouble for it. Overall he seems relaxed. He seems carefree. He seems like he knows where he is, what he's doing, and where he's going. He carries the confident and self-assured air of a person quite used to relying on himself.
And that's natural, a definite truth, even if everything else about this first impression isn't quite, because Jack has grown more than accustomed to relying on himself for quite some time.
Jack has been invisible and intangible to 95% of the world around him for three hundred years; and, with that said, loneliness and all the different ways you can cope with it is definitely one of the presiding baselines of Jack's identity, the chip that will always be on his shoulder, separating him from most everyone around him and shaping who he is as a person on several levels. Three centuries of being effectively nonexistent to anyone around you can do weird things to a guy, and for Jack, being alone in a crowd is pretty much the status quo, the 'normal'. It's almost needless to say that Jack isn't used to directly interacting with people--up until very recently Jack rarely had people to interact with, so to speak--and so, on the odd occasion that he actually does, the first impression you get in those couple of paragraphs above is the front that he tends to lift up automatically. The bravado and cheerful bluster is fairly natural, a definite organic part of his personality shaped over centuries of using one-sided humor to amuse himself. But when it's thrown under the pressure of actual attention there's still the slightest bit of strain to be found in it, an undertone of standoffishness and awkwardness that's pretty easy for the perceptive to pick up. It's not that Jack doesn't understand how interaction works--nah, he's spent a long enough time watching people go through the motions of socialization, and he fancies himself pretty well-versed in the do's and the don'ts, the traditions and the trends. But it's one thing to know, and another thing entirely to do, and frankly Jack still finds it very hard to adjust to, for all that he'd refuse to admit it. He's never been able to really relate with other people before, not extensively, not beyond either making them laugh or defending against scrutiny plied against himself. Jack's interaction with the Guardians throughout the movie is probably the longest stretch of sustained contact that he's had with anybody in his three hundred years of life, and though the experience has thrown him into a lot of new water, he's still struggling with the dignified swimming part, and has a long way to go yet.
Sucking at dignified social-swimming can make anybody feel pretty insecure at the best of times, unsurprisingly, and Jack still has difficulty handling insecurity terribly well, especially with an audience at hand. The novel awareness that he's being watched tends to have him automatically on the defensive--'defensive' denoting 'a lot of smart mouth and prickly quips' on Jack's part--and blended all together, this has sometimes resulted in discord and adversity between Jack and many of the few people he can communicate with at all. As we see hinted in the movie, especially by the Easter Bunny, Jack's past few interactions with his fellow spirits didn't tend to be the smoothest of things, and used to often end with latter parties sufficiently miffed or outright rubbed the wrong way. He's getting better at it these days, but it's marginal progress, and old habits can be very difficult to squash right away; it's pretty safe to say that to those who aren't very patient, Jack can still be an aggravating little prick, making forming positive relationships with certain impatient others far more difficult than it needs to be.
But if you can get a bit past the moderately abrasive veneer, via a saint's patience or otherwise, Jack's not necessarily a terrible guy to hang around with. If he has no reason to bear you a grudge, the chances are high that he won't mean ill towards you at all, and by default he's as friendly as he is carefree; a streak of kindness that runs right through and is entirely genuine. Tossing him in the middle of a crowd of children is a surefire way to instantly invoke this facet of him at its strongest, rest assured--Jack loves kids, always has and always will, and this unwavering affection was around long before the notion of becoming a Guardian ever occurred to him. Jack's always been able to relate to children far more easily than adults, despite the fact that they usually can't see or hear him any better than anyone else, and so the happiness of children is Jack's happiness, first and foremost and always. The very thought of harm against a child appalls him on a base level, and he will not hesitate to take any kid he finds under his wing, indirectly or otherwise, to watch over and defend as a core responsibility.
That said, though it's most concentrated in his attention to the younger members of human society, this benevolence of Jack's can and will extend to pretty much anyone he meets--even those that he might not get along with initially. In fact, Jack takes the most joy from the joy of those around him, children and adults alike, so much so he's made it his personal job to invoke that joy where he can. With no one around to tell him what to do otherwise, all those centuries ago, this is the purpose that Jack's given to himself, of his own choice. Purpose and identity in general is a very big deal to Jack--such a simple thing to anyone else, maybe, but after centuries spent pelting questions about his existence at a moon that never answers? Knowing who you are, and knowing why you're here, and knowing exactly what you're supposed to do...it's the most important thing in the world, knowledge of incalculable value. Having gone for so long without this knowledge for a handful of centuries, the prospect of regaining his past-life memories invokes an understandably powerful drive in Jack over the course of the movie, to the point where he ends up almost selling his friends short and listening to Pitch Black's offers. In this example Jack's good nature is also shown to be a pretty double-edged blade at the worst of times; Jack is often willing to hear anyone out, even with a hearty dish of suspicion on the side, and that inherent good nature can get turned against him very quickly by a clever enough adversary. While Jack might be more aware of this now, after the fact, it's another habit that will probably continue to hinder him at various points.
True, all this niceness is a kinda ironic contrast to the season Jack exists to serve, to anybody that might pay a thought to it--after all, cold and ice are not generally associated with kind things like life and cheer, and many (including Pitch Black) would argue that it'd be so much easier to go the natural route of the element, embrace its grim implications as something so much easier to forward than fun of all things--but Jack simply refuses to conform to that, because it's just not in his nature to take any gratification from the despair and unhappiness of others. He doesn't outright deny the frigid shadow that follows him wherever he goes, because that will always be a part of him, but instead he's tailored its fringes and edges where he can, and tried to make the best of the tools given to him without any explanation. With snow days and wild sledding courses and raucous snowball fights, he's turned improvisation into a never-ending active mission to give people fun, and help them feel...well, happy.
Spend three hundred years on a focused specialty, and you get rather uncannily good at it; this fact applies to Jack just as well as it would anybody else. Sincere one-on-one interaction may not be his forte at all, but Jack is a master at the more secondhand and roundabout forms of comforting a person--so much so that it's something he doesn't even really think about anymore, a habit as well-worn as breathing. Though it's rarely particularly evident or obvious, and tends to get side-lined when he's interacting with people in person, Jack is nonetheless in possession of a sharp perceptiveness when it comes to figuring what makes people tick, courtesy of that three-hundred-year observation bonus. And when he pulls on that perceptiveness properly, he can almost be like that older brother that always seems to know exactly what it probably takes to make you feel better. As far as Jack's concerned, it's his job, and specialty, and self-built identity to be there to cheer you up whenever possible, to help you actively enjoy yourself, to make it so you get the full benefit and still never feel obligated to return the gesture. It's serious business that he will address as such, often with a brief flash of maturity and self-awareness quite beyond his physical age and rascally teenage impressions. When it comes to the problems of others, he won't lather on an excess of sympathy or give false consolation if there's a less cushy solution that he can nonetheless offer instead, even if that means taking himself out of the equation of things sometimes (as we see him try to do when initially confronted for aid by the Guardians, feeling that he himself didn't measure up to the task they wanted out of him). And he ends up properly repairing his chafed relations with Bunny in the Warren by finally biting the bullet, sitting down, and flatly apologizing.
Ultimately, if he cares about you, Jack will always be automatically inclined towards doing whatever he can to swing your mood back up when it seems to be needed, because it's validation for him and catharsis for you. And it's this, more than anything else, that really cements the fittingness of his status as a Guardian of Fun at the end of the movie.
However. Make no mistake: while his inherently lighthearted trade does make for a genuine levity that permeates Jack's person and actions, the fact remains that Jack's hardly soft to the center. He takes the happiness of others as a personal responsibility, intentionally steering away his internal focus from himself whenever he can, because...to put it bluntly, he has a crapload of accumulated baggage that he's already had three hundred years to examine, and the contents always strive to drag him three steps back from the two he's made forward trying to solidify his own identity. This is tangible even on a surface level, sometimes: supplementary material from the creators of the movie outright states that "something isn't quite right with him", and that about sums up the muted impression that some might pick up when getting to know Jack over time. But then, this is probably only to be expected when you chuck a guy in a lake, bring him back from the dead as an immortal spirit of winter, and stick him on the land of the living with a name and absolutely nothing else.
Despite all the simple joys he experiences as a spirit and the high purchase he takes in having fun, Jack is still every bit an old man trapped in a young man's body--a young man that never quite reached proper technical adulthood, to boot--and it's an old man's inevitable bitterness that lurks very lightly under the carefree surface, an old man's first-hand knowledge of an imperfect and not-always-kind world that tempers his own personal benevolence. He's seen all the last three hundred years the world has to offer, good and bad, life and happiness and death and poverty all alike. He has an old man's stubbornness, too, the kind that's spent a long long time living by his own laws, and has a solid stock of personal beliefs and values that are difficult to shake. Jack feels very strongly about his convictions, has firm lines set down when it comes to them, and will confront you upfront and angrily if you cross them. Perhaps inevitably, his measure of age has also given him something of an old man's 'i'm-an-elder-and-i-know-best-tbh' mentality that can crop up in irritating and inconvenient occasions.
Additionally, over the long stretches of time he's spent in bouts of intense loneliness, Jack has experienced "different kinds of grief". His entire life has pretty much been one very long and drawn-out existential crisis, and Jack has slogged through just about every single potential stage of doubt/anger/mourning that comes with the deal, with only his own resolve and self-assigned work available to soften the edges a little. Is he a bit messed up on the inside? Sure, as much as can be expected. It's left its dents on him. Even now, properly established as a Guardian with a set purpose and an actual foundation of believers, Jack remains reluctant to actively try to reach out to touch someone, after living so long under the knowledge that most everyone around him is more solid than he is. He's also never really made or learned the true value of friends and friendship until very recently (even then only beginning to scrape the surface of friendship's potential depth), and he's certainly never fallen in love. These concepts have always been distant things that he's only ever observed from afar, things that couldn't be for him, things that he's long accepted never being able to touch...and so he's never had a reason to try. Honestly, in a lot of ways, Jack's never experienced the full benefit of living as a functional and acknowledged part of a society before, the thrills and miseries alike, and this is a poignant factor that shapes the way he reacts to everyone around him. Hell, being able to react to people who are reacting to him still seems like a delicate and novel thing, a thing that Jack's utterly frightened of losing. Once upon a time his greatest fear was never being believed in, but nowadays Jack finds himself far more terrified by the idea of failure and rejection--of not being worthy of his status as a Guardian, and losing everything he's just now finally started to gain. The worst thing about finally emerging from invisibility is the gnawing thought in a corner of your heart that one mistake too big might just throw you back, after all.
But these are depths, of course, inner layers of that proverbial onion (or matryoshka doll metaphor depending on how you wanna look at it), and Jack's outer layer somehow manages to exhibit capability for cheerfulness and confidence and friendliness even despite all these internal factors. Perhaps it's somewhat strange that Jack isn't showing nearly as many symptoms of damaged goods as he probably really ought to be upfront. But this in itself is one of the most telling pointers of what it is that holds Jack together at the seams, at his center--while three hundred years of being alone has shaped his psyche in many ways that may not be entirely good, it's also carved and refined a will of remarkable tenacity. At his core Jack is nothing if not rebellious--against the silence of the moon that gave him his name, against the idea that winter can only bode bad things, against the notion that he might never be believed in, against three hundred years' worth of accumulated doubt trying to drag him down with clammy fingers. Because Jack doesn't do staying down, feeling sorry for himself, accepting things as they are with a sigh. Never for long. No, if there's a solution at hand, or work that needs to be done, or people that depend on him, Jack will throw every bit of who he is into the task, no hesitation, no questions asked, angst saved for later. You could call it optimism, maybe, a very careworn and battered optimism and hope for better things that has kept him pushing forward, and always will. This is how cheer and kindness in genuine form have managed to survive strong in Jack, even as tempered with age and sadness and Issues as it is; this is how Jack is able to spread that cheer and kindness to those around him, as a natural gift. Jack has determination and courage in spades, conforms to no policy but his own, and it's with these tools that he's fought the long fight against the burden of a loneliness that should have crippled him a long time ago. Far from crippled, he's come out quite a bit stronger for it.
Jack Frost is the raucous laughter of children running through the snow, and the chilly playful pinch at your nose, and the frosted flowers on your windowsill. Jack Frost is also Father Frost, and Old Man Winter, the bend of barren trees and the sigh of the cold lonely wind and, sometimes, the still peace of the final sleep that catches the weary traveler in a snowstorm. But alongside these things--more than these things and neither of these things, just so--Jack Frost was once a simple human young man who ranked his little sister's life above his own without hesitation, and spent his last mortal moments making her laugh and keeping her safe. Jack Frost is the Guardian of Fun, and Fun is his center because it's always been his habit and his nature, his calling, to use Fun as the base upon which he builds all his other values and strengths as a person. All for the sake and happiness of the people around him. Even if they never know he's there.
As far as he's concerned, getting a genuine smile for his efforts makes it worth the trouble every single time.
ABILITIES:
Winter is Jack, but Jack isn't winter. The season itself was around long before he ever set foot on any iced lake, and will probably continue to be around long after he's gone. Still, as a spirit of winter, and being...well, Jack Frost, Jack is the next-best thing to being winter by serving as its primary herald and purveyor. ...Which makes the job sound a lot more regal and fancy than it actually is, but well. Small details. Let's try and break this down as well as we can--
MAGICAL
Winter Upkeep: Jack's main schtick is jurisdiction over cold weather. He herds fronts and winds where they need or ought to go, throws in an amiable snow day here and there where he can, adds that definitive snap to a crisp morning and keeps an eye on blizzards. The main catalyst that enables him to do these things is his broship with the Wind: and, alongside weather-shuffling, the Wind is responsible for giving Jack his capacity for flight (albeit of the distinctly leaf-like and flailing variety). Even without Wind immediately on hand, though, Jack's very mood can be enough to influence the temperature or the clearness of the skies, and he can even make it snow very lightly indoors if he's in the right frame of mind. But in Exit Void I expect the Wind to be rather different from the Wind in Jack's world, maybe still usable but prone to outright ignoring/disobeying/turning against him at inconvenient times; and, similarly, I expect Jack's grasp of the overall weather to be pretty nerfed, with temperature changes and invoked snowfall perhaps limited to his close vicinity only. Even without direct access to the weather, however, Jack is more than well-versed in reading it--so being able to predict what the atmosphere's gonna be like on a weekly basis is still probably going to be a thing, unless (naturally) it's plot-relevant that the weather be better left unforecasted.PHYSICAL
Ice: Jack's other schtick, second only to his tinkering with weather fronts. Specifically the spreading of it all errywhere, at an unusually fast rate and in greatly varying but pretty much limitless quantities. This ability is second nature to Jack, and he's capable of creating all the forms of ice there are, from snow to frost to solid slabs--and his snowballs are da bomb tbqh. He enjoys spreading his signature floral ferns the most, especially on windows, and alongside being able to manipulate it into all kinds of shapes and molds, Jack can bring certain designs to temporary life and motion/flight with a daub of added magic (like, say, fluffy bunnies). Despite his preference for using ice in benevolent applications, however, Jack's not beyond outright weaponizing his abilities if need be: usually by freezing threatening objects, or outright flash-freezing the air itself and effectively flinging concentrated ice blasts that you really don't want to be on the receiving end of. (Though especially gigantic feats of freezing, like the one seen in the first link, will take a lot of energy out of Jack and can render him almost unconscious afterwards. And really, getting an attack that violent out of him at all requires him going through a very powerful emotional phase at the time, like fury--Jack can't intentionally produce these kinds of results in a normal mood, and this kind of attack will usually be a last-resort thing.)
Staff: Tall thin piece of wood that kinda suspiciously resembles a shepherd's crook, and is commonly seen coated in a thick layer of frost. This thing is what enables Jack to be carried by Wind, and it's the channel through which Jack directs almost all of his ice-related powers; in anyone else's hands it's only a tall and awkwardly-shaped stick. But he carries it around with him 24-7 for a reason--Jack and his staff are connected on an unseen level, and losing physical contact with it chops a huge chunk out of Jack's powers; without it he can't fly, and can accomplish only the smaller of his ice feats. In fact, being dick enough to damage it somehow (like say SNAPPING IT IN HALF) can actually invoke physical pain on Jack's end.
Fun: Natural knack of making people feel better aside, Jack can actually directly imbue select snowballs or snowflakes with the pure essence of fun and joy if he so chooses, usually visible in a brief faint blue glow or sheen. Lobbing these sorts of projectiles directly at the face or head can invoke a sudden contagious inclination towards having a good time in even the scroogiest of recipients. It's more like a push in the right direction as opposed to outright forcing fun into you in an inorganic fashion, and there's a limit to how much of this Jack can distribute in one go, as well as a certain moodset that Jack himself has to be in; but it's an entirely benevolent thing that Jack pulls on when he deems there's someone in need of some quick lightening up. OOC player contact and coordination will always be had before I ever have Jack put this to use on somebody in-game, of course.
Ridiculous Monkey Skills: Exceptional agility and an abundance of energy are things that Jack has in spades. He's more than capable of climbing all over everything ever, and can parkour along outdoor structures with Wind's assistance as easily as other people breathe air. He's also in possession of a ridiculous center of balance that allows him to perch and walk on pretty much anything, from the tops of picket fences to the lengths of power lines to the crook of his own upright staff, often while thumbing his nose at the laws of physics.
SNOW ZOMBIE GHOST: Jack is an immortal spirit. He doesn't need to eat, and requires very little sleep; his body temperature is perpetually unnaturally cold to the point that he cannot physically warm anything up, and will be comfortable in any cool climate even if it borders on sub-zero; and he has no pulse, nor an actual need to breathe--inhaling and exhaling is more a deeply-ingrained habit that's uncomfortable to drop, but certainly not vital. Jack's body is also surprisingly durable, despite his slight frame and unnaturally light weight. Getting slammed into a cliffside and chucked down an icy ravine a few hundred feet deep bruises elbows and his pride but not much else, hinting at an above-average resilience to hard impacts; a slightly accelerated healing factor could probably be assumed here as well, though cuts and scrapes will have Jack bleeding just the same as anyone else, and he certainly can't regenerate or regrow limbs like a starfish or anything like that. Jack can't physically age, and now that he's an official Guardian with a pool of believers, it'll take losing all of those believers for him to actually truly die--but very critical physical injury would put him out of commission quite long enough to count towards a death tally anyway.
*Weaknesses: Awesome as it is to be a winter spirit, the status comes with inherent vulnerabilities. Jack's not really made for staying in one place, and usually follows winter wherever it goes; it's needless to say that warmer climates aren't exactly his favorite. While he can tolerate other seasons to a fair extent, the fact remains that the more prolonged a warm temperature is, the more prone Jack will be to tiredness and distraction, alongside increased difficulty with pulling on his ice magic. Similarly, very high temperatures would probably lead to proportionately adverse physical ailment on Jack's part.
Additionally, his newly-inherent status as a Guardian can be something of a double-edged thing in itself. As a general rule, spirits/entities in Jack's universe cannot be seen, heard, or touched by those that don't believe in them, as is further elaborated here (and for which I'll have a permission post properly set up accordingly :|b). Guardians, as a unique class of spirit/entity in and of themselves, rely especially heavily on belief--for them, it's no longer just a means by which to be seen, but also their power source, and ultimately the thing that holds them together at the seams. A decline in belief leads to a proportionate decline in vitality, and a Guardian that loses every single one of their believers will fade out of existence, which is as good as death. Now that he's a Guardian himself, this rule applies to Jack as well; if he somehow lost an especially large chunk of the base of believers he might accumulate in-game (due to either death or belief decline), he'd be feeling the detrimental effects in short order.
POSSESSIONS:
1 crooked staff
1 set of clothing (30-year-old blue hoodie perpetually frosted, 300-year-old ragged pants)