SaltyWaffles
I am dissapoint, son
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I think you're misunderstanding this. Jaune (in this story) is an actual character, one with his own history, trauma, personality quirks, and more.
Our choice was always going to tap into that, regardless of which one we chose. Hell, Oobleck might have had the same revelation/diagnosis regardless of which choice we made, for all we know.
Moreover, Oobleck explicitly stated that he was not critiquing Jaune, or saying that Jaune's choice was somehow flawed. And Jaune himself also said (to which Oobleck did not object or disagree) that he did share what he shared for the reasons he stated. Oobleck's observations are nonetheless mostly true because, to Oobleck's expertise, Jaune's story revealed additional things about Jaune's character and past.
Oobleck's primary conclusion about Jaune's character is that Jaune is a highly empathetic person, and that empathy at least substantially stems from the trauma and isolation of his own childhood/past. And, critically, that Jaune never realized this, and never realized that most other people were not like that (at least not to nearly the same degree).
There's also something to be said about how HII's Jaune is a reflection of his Semblance, and vice-versa: Jaune breaks down his experiences and the world around him into quantifiable things, into data and calculation, information with which he can solve problems, including his own, through that understanding and the power to affect change with that understanding. Rather than just being cold and calculating, though, Jaune is driven by empathy and wonder, and I think this, too, was partially shaped by the trauma and difficulties his Semblance caused him combined with the earnest and loving support he got from both his family and, if begrudgingly, society at large.
He had a Semblance that was killing him, and very painfully. It rendered him mostly unable to function, unable to really socialize. Nothing anyone tried worked. Even worse, his Semblance was an active problem for the world around him, frying computer systems (sometimes explosively) just because he was around them. But nonetheless, his family tried their best to support him despite having even less understanding of what to do than he himself did. They put a lot of time, effort, and care into helping him make it despite all that was against him. And, eventually, he was able to figure it out--a solution, one created with his Semblance, and the support of others. He was a fatal failure, one that society kind of shunned and had valid reason to, but enough people cared, enough people put enough effort and time and sympathy into his struggle that he was able to succeed and overcome it all. And so, after so many years of feeling like nothing but a burden, a failure, a broken hazard of a person, he balks at the idea of not being like the people that made all the difference in the world to him.
Promising to make sure that Boriah Lee is ended for good when he tries to come after his friend? Yeah, he's going to do that, because fuck the odds, he's not about to let the world screw over an innocent, good person like it nearly did him. Defeat the Grimm once and for all? Yes, because that is a problem that plagues the world, and if his unparalleled ability to quantify, understand, and solve problems isn't going to be put to good use to solve that, then what does he even have that power for? Put an end to the threat of an immortal witch that can command the Grimm, when a reincarnating ancient wizard has tried and failed to do that for longer than recorded history? A tall order, but damned if he isn't going to try. His power, his abilities, all of the things he can do with ease, all of the things he could do with ease if he actually wanted to? They're convenient, and when it's harmless and minor he'll enjoy it after a lifetime of extreme hardship of trying to do anything that everyone else could do without any problems at all--but ultimately, it's all just tools and capabilities for overarching altruistic goals. He has to give back to this beautiful, wonderful, endangered world that he was finally able to properly experience after an entire childhood in a haze of pain, fear, frustration, loneliness, and despair.
And it's how he copes with his trauma, even though he has never realized it, and has tried his best to downplay said trauma to the point where he treats it more like the punchline to a joke, like a funny story that's funny only because the horror is just a thing of the past, now. If he were to look back at his past without that filter, without that reflex, he'd have to face how horrifying and painful it all was, and how the only reason he wasn't in even greater despair than he had been was because he'd been too young and ignorant to even be aware of how certain his painful, lonely, meaningless, pitiful life and death would have been if he hadn't been born to a loving and relatively well-off family in a time and society that tolerated him and had the technology to provide the materials needed for him to create a solution with his Semblance. He doesn't want to face, to accept a world where the only reason his life ever had any chance to emerge from the hazy, painful nightmare was just luck. Not when he has the power now to change it.
