If You Don’t Rewrite Prime Empire. - Blog Posts

I love this idea sm.

I also like to combine the Movie verse and the Show verse.. So I have Jay as a nervous person with anxiety when meeting new people. If he knows the person, then he rambles non-stop even.

But otherwise.. I love these concepts for Jay and might completely rewrite Prime Empire.. or at least I’mma try to incorporate some of these into my fics. I love this sm.

@akita747 (sorry this took so long)

Doodlarambla 4

Jay!

Hell yeah! The lightning ninja. Established early on as someone who literally cannot stop talking, the comic relief, the creative, scrappy guy all about reaching new heights! When we see his flashback sequence in s9, the concept that they stick with is the idea that Jay is a dreamer. He’s pretty ambitious always trying to craft something that will take him above and beyond (as in he was literally trying to make a flying machine), and his element helps symbolise it. He’s into being flashy like lightning, and tries to climb higher (relating to the sky). This ambition does lead to him having a lot of insecurities though, and he has some interesting ways of dealing with them but I’ll elaborate later.

Jay’s backstory when it’s told in s1, is the most straight forward. I mean, he’s the only ninja with both of his parents on regular speaking terms, although he grew up on a junkyard, it’s pretty mundane and he has an air of normalcy about him, which he seems to be trying to escape. He does really mundane stuff, like poetry and comic book reading (compared to Cole who abandoned art school to go mountain climbing shirtless). I kinda hc Jay having gone to public school and immediately getting bullied because he was raised in a junkyard and his parents are weird, bc those insecurities have gotta come from somewhere. He’s pretty impressionable too, getting fixated on video games and Cliff Gordon (and those also probably influenced his uhh outlook on women and romance).

Jay has a lot of insecurities. I’ve mentioned his upbringing but also his low self esteem is the crux of his true potential episode. Jay’s over the top bravado is him trying desperately to make others like him, almost to the point that he didn’t even tell anyone about the real problems he had (being a snake). The s3-4 love triangle plot follows the same themes; Jay feeling insecure and threatened by Cole, only to reveal that secretly he missed being Cole’s best friend and he hadn’t even confronted those feelings until s4. Again in s6, Nadakhan straight up says that Jay makes jokes to hide his deeper insecurities. And yeah I thinks it’s understandable why he would be a little insecure considering he’s living with shirtless mountain climber Cole, actually gets btiches Kai, literally computer for brain Zane, badass Samurai x Nya, and grandson of god chosen one Lloyd. On top of that, Jay is the most panicky ninja and the main comic relief of the team.

I think his greatest strength is his tenacity to succeed even when he’s at a low. As a junkyard boy, he learned to scrap together quick solutions out of barely anything as shown in Hunted, and when all his friends were captured in s6, he scrapped together a new team, and even after quitting the ninja he was able to make it big and score a job as a tv host. Nadakhan’s characterisation is supposed to parallel Jay in that, like Jay, Nadakhan also relies on what resources he had, and his own wits. Jay’s “fake it til you make it” personality has its use in how he doesn’t stop trying and can find ways to make the most out of his situation. He kinda embodies the message of Lego, being able to build his way to a solution. He’s a dreamer, with his head in the clouds, which makes sense because that’s usually where lightning is.

Although after all that’s happened to Jay, I have sort of a theory/headcanon to do with his perception of reality. Because Jay, since the start, already has some association with not being completely honest. I think Jay having some sort of detachment with reality is really interesting and it’s only briefly touched upon in the show. But yknow especially after s6 I think he should because a) Jay literally learned that season that he was adopted, and whilst he still loves his parents dearly, that’s still gonna shake him to find out that he doesn’t know a lot about his past and heritage, b) everyone he loves keep dying and undying again and again and at that point I think death would be even ever so slightly desensitised c) Jay literally bent reality to his will. He is one of the only two people who remember things that never happened, and all the tragedy that happened in his life was erased and promptly ignored. He never tells the other ninja. He’s never seen going back to Cliff Gordon’s house. We don’t see him go back for Echo. He isn’t shown to try to look for his mother.

(Crystalised part 1 spoilers)

Ninjago, intentionally or not, does play around with Jay and reality and his sanity in s9 and Crystalised. In s9, whilst Jay knows what’s going on, he just loses any semblance of self preservation and gives up with even the idea of being stressed about a situation so hopeless, and is weirdly at peace with it all. (Spoilers here) In Crystalised, Jay believes Nya is in cups of water and decides to become a hermit, cutting himself off from the world and kinda losing it. Jay tends to lose his grip on reality/lose faith in his situation and I think it might be because he’s been through a lot of things that have already made him question his life (s6). Also being separated fro Nya, who he not only loves but also is the only one who can possibly understand what he went through in s6, may have played a role in this.

It’s a shame Prime Empire didn’t really use this, since Prime Empire had all the pieces to have an escapism themed arc for Jay, which I think would’ve made sense since I think Jay could’ve used escapism to cope with his hardships, even before s6, even being a ninja is an escape from his boring junkyard life). Prime Empire provides a fun, totally harmless (not) adventure than you can physically use to run away from reality. Jay was popular there, and the most skilled there and it was supposed to be his season. I mean it would have been cool if the reason why half of Ninjago entered prime empire is because they’re also traumatised and want to leave too (just last season they were attacked by fire snakes and eldritch horrors). But they don’t really explore it that much so there’s some missed potential there (one day, I’ll rewrite this season).

Although we can see, ever since s6, some of Jay’s insecurities are alleviated. It might just be the writer change, but post 7 Jay seems to be a lot goofier that pre 7 Jay, (the uwuification), and I’m interpreting that as him no longer feeling like he needs to fake bravado in front of everyone else. And that’s nice. Jay has some really good developement, and is a really enjoyable character to watch because he’s just so endearing in my opinion. In conclusion, I like Jay’s arc and his consistent character traits and his character development, and he’s just a really interesting character.