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I want to talk a little more about the parallels between Jack and Bitty and their respective parents.
The easier comparison, I think, is the similarity we can draw between Mama and Coach Bittle and Bitty and Jack; Suzanne and Bitty are fairly similar (they’re “best friends,” oh god), and that affects Bitty’s personality as well as the ways in which he perceives, accepts, and expresses love. Passive-aggression, martyrdom/martyrdom-seeking, and caretaking - three hallmarks of Bitty’s personality - are all quite feminine-coded behaviors. Though we don’t know Suzanne very well, I think it’s fairly safe to assume he learned many of these behaviors from her. Coach, on the other hand, is a more stoic figure, a little less known, a little less well-loved, or so it seems from the brief glimpses we catch in Bitty’s Twitter and the comic. His name is “Coach,” for cryin’ out loud! The association with a brutal and aggressive sport, the emotional distance, and his body shape and body language are all quite masculine-coded.
I think we can all see where this is going. Bitty:Jack::Suzanne:Coach.
I’m not saying that Bitty is a woman or womanly, by the way; I’m also not saying he shouldn’t be who he is; I’m suggesting that his particular mannerisms are coded as feminine by historically rigid perceptions of gender. And I wonder how much of that comes from Bitty himself, how much of that comes from expectations put upon him by his family or in reaction to expectations put upon him by his family, and how much of that comes from what visibly queer identities Bitty had available to him as a role model growing up. We can’t know about any of this because the comic hasn’t told us, but it’s pretty interesting fanfic fodder (hint, hint) and it’s worth investigation as we continue to see Bitty evolve.
The obviousness of this comparison is twofold, I suspect: for one, the shorter-person-who-is-nurturing-and-who-bakes and the taller-person-who-is-stoic-and-who-does-sports is a fairly standard gendered trope, and for another, while we’ve seen a little more of the Bittles as Bitty is our POV character, there are fewer visual parallels drawn between the couples, so we have less potential symbolism (or whatever) to worry about.
@camilliar had some really interesting stuff to say about how Bitty and Jack represent “the dichotomy of gender performance in gay male culture,” which I have been obsessing about ever since. I don’t have real conclusions to draw yet, but I invite you to think about the history of gendered roles in the lesbian and gay communities and again, Bitty’s access to queer history and visibly, obviously, unmistakably queer role models as a closeted gay kid in the rural south - it is awfully hard, as a closeted and powerless child in an unwelcoming environment, to read in between any kind of lines; it’s either dangerous but worth it, because it’s obvious, or it’s too dangerous to be worth hope.
I also think that, like any true American, Bitty has been fucked up by his parents, but I don’t think he’s as fucked up as Jack is; Bitty doesn’t explicitly compare himself to his mother in the way we see Jack compare himself to his father, and though he does indeed play hockey and stop figure skating, over all Bitty seems to have shaken at least some of his masculine expectation of himself through feminine-and-therefore-gay-coded activities.
Again: I’m not saying that gay men are necessarily feminine, just to be clear; I’m saying that when men participate in activities that are not explicitly coded as masculine, and especially activities that are explicitly aligned with femininity, like, say, baking or figure skating, those men are subsequently identified as breaking gendered expectations, and therefore identified as deviant. Traditionally, this deviance was associated with being gay, although I suppose it is probably also associated with being trans. It’s fucked up in either case.
Anyway, we move on to my fave, Jacktastrophe, who is clearly fucked up about his parents. This begins in his very character design: he looks almost exactly like his dad, who coincidentally was an incredible success in the field that Jack now has to prove himself in. And in the picture above, Bitty is being explicitly compared to Jack’s mother, who we know almost nothing about. Of course, Bitty hasn’t met her and so we haven’t been able to, but regardless of Ngozi’s intent I can’t help but associate her narrative silence with the silences of literally every hockey WAG I’ve ever heard of.
Since Bitty is currently a hockey HAB, we can look at Bitty’s space in Jack’s life and see a parallel to Alicia’s narrative silence. Bitty seems to be many things to Jack, most of them involving the above mentioned caretaking, but challenging or assertive? Hardly! And, as @camilliar pointed out, even when Bitty tries to assert a kind of boundary in 3.10, that boundary is summarily ignored in the guise of Jack’s love and concern. Bitty is, in this sense at least, voiceless - you know, it didn’t occur to me before this, but on several occasions when Bitty is being “overly” talkative, someone punctuates that talkativeness with a punchline; look at Shitty raising an eyebrow at Bitty’s notecards in 1.14, or Jack kissing Bitty through his gossip in 3.5. So there’s a pattern here of people commenting on, judging, or simply not listening to Bitty’s words, which is most aggressively apparent in 3.10.
Meanwhile, Jack is clearly and uncomfortably obsessed with his father, or at least the idea of his father; we see it in the glimpses of their relationship, sure, but really we see it in the trajectory he chooses above all else. Jack loves hockey, but I wonder very seriously whether he ever felt able to imagine himself on any other track. His desire to emulate his father is taken to nearly absurd lengths: he lacks the insight and the fortitude to go after Bitty at graduation until his father talks him into it!
Here’s where I think this gets interesting, gender-wise: Jack, clearly, is masculine-coded, but in two arenas this backfires. First of all, as I talked about here, I think his body is masculine-coded in a way that also becomes gay-coded; I invite you to imagine the queer role models who would have been available to Jack but who would not have been available to Bitty, the wave of gay men in the late '80s and throughout the '90s who adapted the masculine-coded archetypes of manhood, especially the ones popular in the '70s-'80s, rather than subverted or openly questioned these archetypes. Second of all, Jack fails to live up to his own gendered expectations that have been set for him, or perhaps we can say that he has set for himself, as a result of his father. He isn’t as aggressive a player as his father, in the hockey rink or when it comes to romantic pursuits: I suspect, given what we’ve seen, that this is something he’d classify at least subconsciously as a failure.
Oh Jack. Oh, Bitty.
I have more to say about Jack and Bitty and the ways they perform parenting behaviors and narratives for and to each other, but I think that’ll have to be for a different night because I’m too tired to keep up this level of complicated thought; see you then!