(no subject)
Dec. 3rd, 2007 01:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
astri13If anybody has read Confidence - which btw is a rec as well (it`s a multi-chapter J2 AU) - would you care to give me your take on the ending?
Because I seem to differ from lots of others in my reading of the way it ends.
Not the fact that it is an unhappy ending. Those are not my personal preference and I`m not sure I`d ever write one myself but it was powerful and suited the story.
No, I read a lot of "Jensen did go through with the con after all". And I really felt: no, he didnt.
Well technically maybe but it wasn`t like he woke up, decided the con meant more to him than silly Jared and did it all business-like. His behaviour was emotion-based, he went through with it out of love, motivated by a threat and not even to his best interest. Which would have been to flee indeed.
So did he end it like a true con-man? No. Not for me.
Also to me the ending pointed more in the "Bobby is pissed off enough to order a kill-strike" direction. Sure, it could be read as that Jensen is a valuable enough commodity to him to "just" be taught a lesson and then continue working for him.
But I don`t know, the man struck me as a) vengeful enough and b) a good reader of people so he`d know that Jensen finding himself again confined to a life he hates might not possess the certain je-ne-sais-quoi anymore to be as effective as he once was.
Jensen was depicted as a survivor sure but losing a certain drive can be fatal in his business. It`s not like he wouldn`t go back to the way of not-caring he did before.
So yeah, I read it as pretty final.
Because I seem to differ from lots of others in my reading of the way it ends.
Not the fact that it is an unhappy ending. Those are not my personal preference and I`m not sure I`d ever write one myself but it was powerful and suited the story.
No, I read a lot of "Jensen did go through with the con after all". And I really felt: no, he didnt.
Well technically maybe but it wasn`t like he woke up, decided the con meant more to him than silly Jared and did it all business-like. His behaviour was emotion-based, he went through with it out of love, motivated by a threat and not even to his best interest. Which would have been to flee indeed.
So did he end it like a true con-man? No. Not for me.
Also to me the ending pointed more in the "Bobby is pissed off enough to order a kill-strike" direction. Sure, it could be read as that Jensen is a valuable enough commodity to him to "just" be taught a lesson and then continue working for him.
But I don`t know, the man struck me as a) vengeful enough and b) a good reader of people so he`d know that Jensen finding himself again confined to a life he hates might not possess the certain je-ne-sais-quoi anymore to be as effective as he once was.
Jensen was depicted as a survivor sure but losing a certain drive can be fatal in his business. It`s not like he wouldn`t go back to the way of not-caring he did before.
So yeah, I read it as pretty final.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-03 01:01 pm (UTC)Yes, totally what I got from it as well, it was just that throughout the story I feared Jensen would go through with the con after all and in the end I was well, not happy, but at least a bit satisfied that he didn`t. Then I read so many comments how he did and was confused. For me the distinction of motive is critical. He started out a con-man, his sole object getting the money out of people.
In the end he did what he had to to protect Jared and he did it the only way his con-man self thought it would work so it was technically a con but to me not in the way I`d feared. If that makes any sense other than to my jumbled brains. :)