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Jedidiah Abraham Adonais Martin was born on May 15, 1997 in Dirt, Texas.

The name itself tells us everything. "Jedidiah" means "beloved of God"—a weight of religious expectation from a wealthy Protestant family. "Abraham," the patriarch who nearly sacrificed his son. "Adonais," a Hebrew name for God, borrowed by Shelley for his elegy to Keats—a poem about dead potential. And "Martin," derived from Mars, the god of war. Jedidiah carries warfare and divinity in his bones, sacrifice and love intertwined before he ever made his first choice.

Interpretive Framework: Why Covert NPD

This analysis reads Jedidiah through the lens of covert narcissistic personality disorder—not as armchair diagnosis, but as interpretive framework that illuminates his canonical behavior patterns.

The evidence from Season One is substantial:

The gaslighting. Jedidiah systematically denies Sydney's perceptions, reframes Sydney's reality, and positions himself as the arbiter of what's true. When Sydney expresses distress, Jedidiah manages rather than validates. When Sydney questions his own experiences, Jedidiah confirms the doubt rather than the experience. This isn't occasional disagreement—it's a consistent pattern of reality-shaping that serves Jedidiah's need for control.

The resurrection without consent. The foundational act of their post-death relationship is Jedidiah making a unilateral decision about Sydney's existence. He didn't ask Sydney if he wanted to come back. He didn't consider what Sydney might want. He decided, and he acted, because he couldn't bear a world without Sydney in it. This is narcissistic entitlement dressed as devotion.

The isolation. Jedidiah and Sydney have no other close relationships. No other friends. No other confidants. This isn't coincidence or circumstance—it's architecture. Jedidiah's campaign against Elijah, his positioning of himself as Sydney's sole protector, his construction of systems that make Sydney dependent on him alone—all of it creates the isolation that narcissistic supply requires. A partner with other options might leave. A partner with no one else has nowhere to go.

The neglect. Despite his obsessive monitoring, Jedidiah consistently fails to meet Sydney's actual needs. He watches without seeing. He maintains without nurturing. He keeps Sydney alive without asking what Sydney needs to live. This is the fruit fly pattern: admiration without sustenance, love that forgets to feed.

The targeting. Blue Wolfe confirmed that Jedidiah is white. Sydney's background—Métis Canadian, impoverished, marginalized—is left deliberately open to interpretation. This analysis argues that Jedidiah chose Sydney because of these vulnerabilities. Sydney's poverty meant he'd never feel entitled to what Jedidiah's wealthy Texas family had. His traumatized background meant he'd accept less. His marginalized identity meant fewer resources, fewer escape routes, fewer people who'd believe him over Jedidiah if it came to that. The class and racial dynamics of their relationship aren't incidental—they're foundational to the power imbalance Jedidiah cultivates.

Covert NPD—as distinct from grandiose NPD—fits Jedidiah's presentation precisely. He doesn't demand admiration openly; he engineers situations where admiration is the only logical response. He doesn't rage when wounded; he withdraws, sulks, makes others feel guilty for hurting him. He doesn't claim superiority; he demonstrates it through competence while performing humility. The covert narcissist's mask is "I'm not special"—while systematically ensuring they remain indispensable.

Jedidiah's backstory in this analysis—the shed, the straps, the father who called torture "calibration"—is built from this interpretive foundation. Children don't develop NPD in a vacuum. They develop it as armor against annihilating experiences, as a way to survive environments that would otherwise destroy them. The shed made Jedidiah. The NPD is what the shed produced.

The Abraham Motif: Sacrifice on the Mountain of Adam

The name "Abraham" carries particular weight when understood through the story's mythology. In the biblical narrative, Abraham takes his son Isaac up a mountain to sacrifice him at God's command. The parallel to Jedidiah's relationship with Sydney is devastatingly precise—but with a crucial twist.

Adam is the mountain.

This interpretation reframes everything. Jedidiah doesn't just use Adam as a tool; he brings Sydney to Adam the way Abraham brought Isaac to Mount Moriah. The resurrection isn't salvation—it's sacrifice. By using Adam's power to bring Sydney back, Jedidiah performs a twisted version of the Abrahamic sacrifice: he offers Sydney up to Adam, and Adam returns Sydney transformed, bound, dependent.

Unlike the biblical story, where God stays Abraham's hand and provides a ram as substitute, there is no divine intervention here. The sacrifice completes. Sydney is killed and remade on the mountain of Adam, and Jedidiah gets to keep his "son"—but only because he's made Sydney into something that belongs as much to Adam as to him.

The mountain motif runs throughout: Adam as the peak of capitalist ambition, the site where deals are made and lives are traded. Jedidiah ascends this mountain not in faith but in desperation, not to prove devotion to God but to prove his own capacity to conquer death. He becomes a dark mirror of Abraham—a father figure who completes the sacrifice rather than being stopped, who uses the mountain rather than submitting to it.

This is why his "love" for Sydney is so fundamentally corrupted. It's not parental love; it's the love of someone who has already killed what they claim to cherish, who keeps the resurrected body as proof of their own power over life and death. Abraham was willing to sacrifice Isaac and was blessed for his faith. Jedidiah actually sacrificed Sydney and calls the result "protection."

The Deadly Sin: Pride

If each character in the story embodies one of the seven deadly sins in Adam's constellation of transgression, Jedidiah's is Pride—the original sin, the sin of Lucifer, the sin that precedes all others.

His pride manifests in three devastating ways:

The belief that he has the right to play god. Jedidiah doesn't just resurrect Sydney—he does so with absolute certainty that this is the correct choice. He doesn't agonize over the ethics of dragging someone back from death without consent. He doesn't question whether he has the authority to make this decision for another person. His love for Sydney, in his mind, justifies anything. The arrogance required to look at death itself and say "No, I know better" is pride of cosmic proportions.

The conviction that he can control supernatural forces. The Clock of Meantime, the Sympathica, his entire project of managing Sydney's existence—all of it rests on Jedidiah's belief that he is smart enough, precise enough, good enough to harness powers that have destroyed everyone else who tried. He builds cages for gods and genuinely believes they'll hold. When the Clock begins failing, his first instinct isn't humility but redoubled effort. He'll make it work. He always does.

The refusal to acknowledge the damage he's caused. For years, Jedidiah lies to Sydney about Sydney's own nature. He "manages" Sydney's existence without Sydney's knowledge or consent. When confronted with the harm his control has caused, his instinct is to explain, to contextualize, to demonstrate how his actions were actually protective. His pride cannot tolerate the possibility that his love has been a form of violence. Admitting error would require dismantling the entire architecture of self-justification he's built.

Pride is traditionally considered the root of all other sins—the sin from which the others grow. In Jedidiah's case, this is structurally true. His pride enables his manipulation of Sydney (which feeds Sydney's envy). His pride isolated Elijah (which fed Elijah's wrath). His pride created the conditions for Adam's influence to spread. He is the architect who believes his blueprints are flawless, even as the building collapses around him.

The tragedy is that his pride isn't baseless. Jedidiah is brilliant. He did build something unprecedented. What he feels for Sydney is intense and consuming. But pride doesn't require being wrong about everything—it only requires being certain you're right about the things that matter most. And Jedidiah's certainty has been catastrophic. He's certain he loves Sydney. He may be wrong about what that word means.

The Architecture of Silence

Jedidiah's most consistent character trait is his deliberate absence. When Sydney describes him, the language circles around negation: distracted, closed-off, self-involved. Blue Wolfe's own characterization frames him through what he avoids—"confronting the desires of the people around him or the thoughts in his brain." He is a man defined by the space he refuses to occupy.

This manifests linguistically in his speech patterns. In canon dialogue, Jedidiah's responses are marked by truncation and deflection:

"Mm. Hi."

"You never fail to find the most difficult questions to ask."

"I mean, I'm just a private person, you know? I must've gotten it from you."

Notice how even his humor carries a blade—attributing his emotional unavailability to Lucille positions his damage as inherited, external, not his responsibility. When she pushes for connection, he retreats into observation: "You're being, like—open. I mean, you're at least trying. That's not normal for you." He transforms her vulnerability into data, an anomaly to be analyzed rather than a gift to be received.

"The Reversal of Norms": When Jedidiah Is the Ethical One

Episode Five of Season One provides a crucial complication to the simple narrative of "Jedidiah as controller, Sydney as victim." On Opposite Day—a government-mandated holiday requiring everyone to do and say the opposite of normal—Sydney forces Jedidiah to perform the morning announcements while Sydney plays cryptic games with the rules.

The episode reveals Jedidiah's deep anxiety about ambiguity and unstructured situations:

"How granular am I meant to get about that? Can I even mention the sun, or should I call it the moon instead? Do I call the ground the sky?... How does this come so easily to you? I can't figure this whole thing out."

This isn't mere pedantry—it's the terror of someone who learned that mistakes get punished. Jedidiah needs to understand the framework before he can act because the shed taught him that getting it wrong has consequences. Sydney's playful ambiguity, which might seem like harmless fun, is actually a form of torment for someone whose survival strategy depends on perfect comprehension of rules.

But more significantly, the episode shows Sydney enabling genuine harm in the name of "camp spirit":

JEDIDIAH: Sydney. Sydney, people are getting hurt.

SYDNEY: But are the children getting hurt?

JEDIDIAH: What kind of question is that?

The children, taking advantage of Opposite Day, have staged a mock execution of Counselor Juniper—stringing him up on a flagpole "gallows-style." They've created a miniature black hole in the kitchen. They've dissolved another counselor's uniform with unidentifiable pink goo. And Sydney, committed to letting the children enjoy their holiday, has actively prevented Jedidiah from intervening.

Jedidiah—the supposed controller, the clinical manager, the man who can't tolerate chaos—is the one begging to stop the harm. Sydney—the supposed victim of control—is the one insisting the fun must continue.

When Sydney finally acknowledges what happened, his self-reflection is telling:

"After talking things over with Jedidiah, I fear that my camp spirit may have made me rather myopic. I fear that in my blind passion, I may have… ruined Opposite Day... After all, kids, if I hadn't prevented Jedidiah from intervening when you sentenced Juniper to be hung by the neck until dead, perhaps it would not have had to become a camp-wide affair."

Sydney admits that his "utterly righteous and pure" intentions led to genuine harm. He admits that Jedidiah was right to want to intervene. He admits his methods were "over-the-top."

This episode matters because it complicates the moral architecture of their relationship. Jedidiah's need for control isn't purely pathological—sometimes it's the appropriate response to genuine danger. Sydney's warmth and flexibility aren't purely virtuous—sometimes they enable harm. The man who would later resurrect Sydney without consent is also the man who tried to stop children from nearly killing a counselor. The man who was later controlled and managed is also the man who cheerfully prevented intervention in a mock execution.

Neither of them is simply villain or victim. They are both capable of harm; they simply harm in different directions. Jedidiah's harm comes from too much control. Sydney's harm comes from too little. The tragedy is that they never learned to balance each other—Jedidiah's anxiety about Sydney's leniency fed his need to manage, and Sydney's resentment of Jedidiah's management fed his resistance to reasonable intervention.

"He Called It Correction": The Shed and the Straps

The origin of Jedidiah's clinical remove is not theoretical. It was built, deliberately, in a shed behind his father's property—a small wooden structure with a rusted padlock and a chair in the center, fitted with leather straps.

When Jedidiah finally returns to this place in The Granular Fall, his description strips away all his usual analytical armor:

"He called it discipline. Structure. He said I was too soft, too emotional. That I needed to learn control. That the world would eat me alive if I couldn't master myself."

The language is crucial. His father didn't call it abuse—he called it discipline, structure, control. The very vocabulary Jedidiah uses throughout his adult life to describe his management of Sydney. The clinical framework wasn't invented; it was installed.

When Elijah asks how old he was the first time, the answer is devastating:

"Three. He said I cried too much at my grandmother's funeral. That grief was a weakness I needed to overcome."

Three years old. Crying at a funeral. This was the "mistake" that required correction—the display of appropriate human emotion in response to loss. The lesson: grief is weakness. Feeling is failure. The only acceptable response to loss is control.

The methodology was systematic:

"He would strap me in and make me recite things. Latin declensions. Mathematical proofs. The periodic table. If I made a mistake, he would—"

He can't finish the sentence even now. But he can name what his father called it:

"He called it correction. Calibration."

Calibration. The exact word Jedidiah uses for the sessions where he adjusts Sydney's reality through the Clock. The exact word for managing the Harmonization Lenses. The exact word for optimizing his "project." His father's torture vocabulary became his love vocabulary.

And then the confession that explains everything:

"I learned to stop making mistakes. I learned to control every part of myself—my voice, my face, my heartbeat. I learned that precision was safety and emotion was danger and if I could just be perfect enough, he would stop."

This is the architecture of Jedidiah's entire personality. Precision as safety. Emotion as danger. The belief that perfect control could earn love, or at least cessation of pain. His obsessive management of variables, his inability to tolerate uncertainty, his terror of the messy and uncontained—all of it traces back to leather straps and recited proofs.

But Elijah asks the question that breaks the framework:

"But he didn't stop."

"No. It was never about the mistakes. It was about control. About breaking me down so he could build me back in his image."

The lesson Jedidiah learned was wrong. Not because precision doesn't create safety—but because the abuse was never about mistakes in the first place. His father didn't want a perfect son; he wanted a controlled one. The goal wasn't to teach; it was to break.

And then Jedidiah sees the pattern with unbearable clarity:

"The Clock. The way I managed Sydney. The calibrations, the control, the careful construction of his reality—I told myself I was protecting him. But I was just doing what my father did to me. Building a box. Strapping someone into a chair. Making them recite the answers I needed to hear."

The Clock is the shed. The calibration sessions are the recitations. The Harmonization Lenses are the straps. Jedidiah didn't escape his father's methodology—he inherited it. He built a more sophisticated version, furnished it with love instead of cruelty, called it protection instead of discipline. But the architecture is identical: a box designed to produce specific outputs from a human being who didn't consent to the construction.

When he asks Elijah how he can be sure Jedidiah isn't just "a more sophisticated version—a prison with better furniture"—the question isn't rhetorical. It's genuine terror. He's looking at his own hands and seeing his father's tools.

The Kindergarten Classroom: A Practiced Smile

By the time Jedidiah meets Sydney, he has already been in the shed for two years. The three-year-old who cried at his grandmother's funeral has been systematically rebuilt into something else—a five-year-old who knows how to sit perfectly still, how to observe without participating, how to perform connection without risking it.

The kindergarten classroom was noisy and too bright. Jedidiah sat very still at his little table, with his hands folded on the shiny top. His sweater was soft like a little grey bird, and his shoes, which the lady at his house made shiny every day, sparkled under his chair. All the other kids were loud. Blocks crashed and voices yelled about toy trucks. It was messy and noisy and everyone was the same. A chilly, clear feeling grew behind his eyes. He was watching funny animals in a zoo.

Funny animals in a zoo. This is how a child shaped by the shed perceives his peers—not as potential friends but as specimens. The "chilly, clear feeling" behind his eyes is the dissociation his father's "calibration" sessions installed. He sits perfectly still, hands folded—the posture of a boy who has learned that stillness is safety, that control of the body prevents correction. He observes chaos he has no intention of joining because joining means vulnerability, and vulnerability means the straps.

Then he sees Sydney:

He was curled up in the book corner, a quiet spot in all the crazy. His hair was black but not shiny, like the chalkboard after erasing. He wore corduroy overalls, and one strap was fuzzy from his fingers playing with it. A patch with a faded animal was on one knee. His socks were too big and bunched around his skinny ankles.

The detail is forensic. He notices the texture of Sydney's hair, the wear patterns on his clothes, the specific way his fingers fidget with the strap. This isn't how children typically see other children. This is surveillance—the same careful observation his father demanded of him when reciting the periodic table, when cataloguing his own "mistakes" for correction. The shed taught him to watch. Now watching is all he knows how to do.

He watches a boy bump a truck into Sydney's leg and walk away:

He didn't say anything. He just curled up smaller, like a turtle going into its shell.

A warm, sure feeling spread in Jedidiah's chest.

That "warm, sure feeling" is recognition. He knows what it looks like to curl up smaller, to absorb hurt without protest, to make yourself a smaller target. Sydney's response to casual cruelty mirrors his own response to the shed. But where he feels terror when he's the one curling inward, watching Sydney do it produces something else: certainty. Purpose. He has identified someone like him—someone who needs what he needed. Someone he could protect the way no one protected him.

Or: someone he could control the way he was controlled, but gently. With love instead of straps.

When he finally approaches, his method is calculated:

He didn't run. He walked, his shoes going tap-tap on the floor. He sat down near him, not too close, and picked up a book about planets.

Not too close. A controlled approach. An indirect opening. He's five years old and already managing proximity like a chess piece—because two years of calibration have taught him that direct approaches are dangerous, that emotion must be regulated, that every interaction is a test where the wrong answer brings pain.

His first words are a correction:

"This picture is wrong," he said, his voice steady. He poked Jupiter's big colourful swirl. "It's a big storm that keeps going. It would squish you and gobble you up forever."

He begins their relationship by identifying an error. By demonstrating superior knowledge. By positioning himself as someone who sees what others miss. This is what the shed taught him love looks like: correction, instruction, the superior party identifying the inferior party's mistakes. His father "corrected" him out of love (or so the framework insisted). Now Jedidiah will correct the world—starting with a picture book, eventually extending to a reality-bending miracle who doesn't know he's dead.

And when he introduces himself:

"I'm Jedidiah," he said, giving a little smile he practiced in the mirror at home.

A smile he practiced in the mirror. The mask is learned—not innate, but installed by a father who demanded control of voice, face, heartbeat. The performance of warmth is separate from the feeling of warmth because feeling got beaten out of him in the shed. At five years old, Jedidiah knows that connection requires acting, and he has rehearsed his part the way he rehearsed Latin declensions: until the performance is flawless, until no mistake remains to be corrected.

The conversation that follows reveals his strategy with chilling precision:

"That girl in the big fluffy dress. Her castle is made of silly plastic. It's gonna break."

Sydney's fingers found his fuzzy strap again, tugging at the threads. He looked down at his own shoes, which were scuffed and dirty.

"They like stuff that breaks," Jedidiah said, his voice soft like the doctor's. "They would be mean to you, too."

Soft like the doctor's. He has learned to modulate his voice for effect—another skill from the shed, where the wrong tone could trigger correction. And what he's doing isn't comforting—it's isolating. He's telling Sydney that the other children are dangerous, that their things break, that they would be mean to him. He's separating Sydney from the group, positioning himself as the only safe alternative.

This is exactly what his father did to him. The shed was positioned as necessary because "the world would eat him alive" if he couldn't master himself. Other people were threats; only his father's discipline could make him safe. Now Jedidiah offers Sydney the same poisoned gift: everyone else is dangerous, but I can protect you.

The clincher:

"I have a secret garden," he whispered, leaning in so his collar tickled his chin. "Behind my house. There's a really tall rock wall. It's very quiet. Nobody is mean there. You would be safe."

This is the offer that will define everything: I can keep you safe. But the safety is his garden, his walls, his territory. The protection is also a claim. Sydney isn't being invited to freedom—he's being invited into a sanctuary that Jedidiah controls. The garden is a gentler version of the shed: an enclosed space where he sets the rules, where quiet replaces chaos, where he decides what happens.

And Sydney's response:

He wasn't asking to play. He was showing him how to fix things. He saw his eyes get very big, like someone seeing a drink in a hot desert. He was holding his words like treasure.

Sydney, desperate and alone, receives what he needs most: someone who sees him, someone who offers safety. He holds Jedidiah's words "like treasure." He doesn't see the calculation behind them—how could he? He's a lonely child being offered water.

But Jedidiah "wasn't asking to play." He was "showing him how to fix things." Even at five—especially at five, after two years in the shed—his framework is correction, not connection. He doesn't want a playmate; he wants a project. He sees Sydney's brokenness and offers to repair it—on his terms, in his garden, behind his walls.

This is the fruit fly's Tupperware container in embryo. The garden is the first cage. The practiced smile is the first mask. The chilly, clear feeling behind his eyes is the clinical distance his father's straps installed. Everything Jedidiah will become is already here—not innate, but made. A five-year-old architect of enclosures, building his first sanctuary for someone who doesn't know it's also a trap, using the only tools his father ever gave him: observation, control, and love that looks like correction.

The Curator and His Exhibits

Jedidiah's relationship to knowledge is fundamentally possessive. His journals aren't records—they're containers. When confronted about keeping secrets from Sydney, his reasoning reveals a worldview in which understanding itself is a form of ownership:

"I really… don't think I should tell you anything else, Sydney. This information… resists being known. And if anyone besides me really understands—what the deal is—they… end."

The information "resists being known"—as if knowledge has its own agency, its own territorial instincts. And crucially, only he can hold it safely. This isn't mere secrecy; it's epistemic hoarding. His father died from understanding. Therefore, understanding must be controlled, rationed, kept in a vault whose combination he sets to "SYDNEY"—his own name for the boy he claims to protect.

The irony cuts deep. He locks away knowledge behind the identity of the person he's keeping it from, as if Sydney is both the question and the forbidden answer.

The Children of Playing House: Three Parables of Pathology

When Sydney and Jedidiah played House as children, their "children" were objects—a fruit fly, a pile of acorns, a rock. Sydney's broadcast about these games wasn't nostalgic reminiscence; it was psychological warfare disguised as wistfulness, a public therapy session directed at one listener in particular. Each story isolates a facet of Jedidiah's pathology with surgical precision.

Fruity (The Fruit Fly): Neglectful Admiration

"He named it 'Fruity,' put it in a Tupperware container, and kept it in the cabin under his bed. Every morning he admired it, buzzing around in there... He loved that bug. He thought that was enough. One day, Fruity died. Jedidiah cried and cried and cried and cried... 'Jedidiah, did you… ever give your fly any fruit?' And he said no. It hadn't even occurred to him."

The conventional reading is that this story proves Jedidiah's love is genuine but poorly expressed—the crying demonstrates real feeling, just misdirected. But examine what that "love" actually consisted of: admiration (watching the fly constantly), possession (keeping it in a container), display (taking it everywhere), identification (it was his pet, his project). What's conspicuously absent is any consideration of what the fly needed.

The crying doesn't prove love. It proves genuine emotion—but emotion over what? Not over Fruity's suffering, not over the life cut short, not over the experiences the fly would never have. Jedidiah wept for his loss. His pet was gone. His project had failed. The thing that made him feel like the kind of person who loves things was no longer there.

This is the prototype for everything that follows. The fly's needs weren't part of Jedidiah's love because his love wasn't about the fly. It was about what the fly provided him: something to admire, something to own, something that confirmed his self-image as a devoted caretaker. The fly didn't die loved. The fly died needed. There's a difference.

The Tupperware container is the prototype for every cage Jedidiah will build: the secret garden, the Clock, the carefully managed reality he constructs around Sydney. He admires what he contains. He needs what he controls. And he calls it love because he doesn't know the difference.

Sydney's devastating conclusion: "How he could love something so much… and forget to feed it." But the question Sydney doesn't ask—the question that cuts deeper—is whether Jedidiah loved Fruity at all, or whether he loved how owning Fruity made him feel. The forgetting isn't an accident of poor expression. It's a revelation of what the attachment actually was.

Cartagena (The Acorns): Hypocritical Grief

The second child was a pile of acorns in a paper bag, given googly eyes and named Cartagena. Jedidiah kept her in a porcelain bowl in his bedroom. Then the acorns hatched:

"Just about every acorn in the bowl split open, and out from the pile of broken shards squirmed a horde of fat white worms. These maggots had burrowed into the acorns, eaten the flesh inside, and were now infesting Jedidiah's bedroom."

Jedidiah's response is telling: he screamed and recoiled in revulsion. He refused to pick up the maggots with his bare hands. But when his mother made him flush them down the toilet, he cried for days. He didn't even attend school.

Sydney's analysis cuts to the bone: "If he didn't value these creatures when they were alive, why was he so affected by their deaths?"

This is the pattern that will define Jedidiah's adult life: revulsion at the messy reality of living things, grief at their loss. He can't handle Cartagena when she transforms, when she becomes something unexpected and squirming and alive in a way he didn't authorize. But once she's gone—flushed away, contained, finished—he mourns her with theatrical intensity.

The parallel to Sydney is unmistakable. Jedidiah was attached to Sydney—obsessively, consumingly attached. But when Sydney died—when the messy, unexpected reality of mortality confronted him—his response wasn't acceptance. It was resurrection. He couldn't tolerate the transformation, so he reversed it. And when the resurrected Sydney proves to be something other than what Jedidiah expected, something alive in ways he didn't authorize, his instinct is the same: revulsion masked as management, control disguised as care. The attachment remains. Whether it was ever love is another question.

The crucial difference in Sydney's response: "Either way, I stopped killing bugs after that. Whenever I got the impulse, Jedidiah's tear-stained face popped into my head." Sydney learned empathy from Jedidiah's grief—learned that even small deaths matter. Jedidiah learned only that infested life must be compartmentalized and flushed away.

Cain (The Rock): The Inability to Accept Finality

The third child came at the end—Sydney's attempt to give the game of House a proper funeral:

"When I suggested to Jedidiah that we play house one last time to honor its place in our lives — a funeral of sorts — he struggled to articulate why he didn't like the idea. 'I just don't understand why we have to say that it'll be the last time we ever play it,' he finally managed. 'What if we want to in the future?'"

Sydney understood that the game was already over—"It was over, it was already gone, and we'd only be briefly resurrecting it to say goodbye." But Jedidiah couldn't tolerate the certainty of finality. He needed the potential for continuation, even if that potential would never be exercised.

They found a rock, gave it googly eyes, named it Cain. The name itself is loaded—Cain, the rejected brother, the murderer marked by God, the outcast. They went through the motions: teaching it to read, taking it on a picnic, feeding it pebbles. But the heart wasn't there:

"I looked at the stone and felt nothing but a tiny sadness in the leftmost corner of my heart."

When Sydney tossed Cain into the lake—giving the game the ending it deserved—Jedidiah was upset. His response, meant as a bitter joke, reveals everything: "Ha. Abandoning your child in a lake… so that's what motherhood means for you?"

Sydney's reflection on this moment is the thesis statement of their entire relationship:

"Jedidiah had always developed such sincere attachments to the objects he played father to and I never quite understood that. The objects meant nothing to me. But I realized that I didn't want to let go of them. I wanted to learn how to keep loving, even after the original context changed. I wanted to be a person who didn't abandon their children to the lake."

Here is the fundamental schism between them: Jedidiah requires the potential for continuity—he can never accept that something is over and gone. Sydney needs closure—finality, endings, the ability to honor something by letting it end. Jedidiah keeps things on shelves, dead but preserved, maintaining the illusion of potential. Sydney tosses things in lakes, accepting loss as the price of having loved.

This is why Jedidiah couldn't let Sydney stay dead. Not because Sydney needed to live, but because Jedidiah couldn't tolerate the finality. The resurrection was Jedidiah refusing to throw Cain in the lake—keeping the potential alive at any cost, even if the thing being preserved was suffering, even if the continuation was worse than the ending would have been.

The Children as Prophecy

Together, these three stories map Jedidiah's entire pathology:

Fruity predicts the Clock: a beautiful container where something he loves slowly starves because he forgot to ask what it actually needed.

Cartagena predicts his response to Sydney's transformation: revulsion at the living reality, desperate grief at the loss, the instinct to flush away what he can't control.

Cain predicts the resurrection itself: the absolute refusal to accept finality, the need to maintain potential even when the heart is gone, the horror of watching someone you love throw something precious into the water and call it mercy.

Sydney understood all of this. The broadcast wasn't for the children—it was a diagnosis delivered to one patient in particular. A mirror held up to show Jedidiah what his love looks like from the inside of the Tupperware container.

Targeting Vulnerability: The Confession

In The Granular Fall, Jedidiah finally admits what the kindergarten scene only implied—that his selection of Sydney wasn't innocent connection but calculated acquisition:

"The first day I met Sydney. Kindergarten. I looked around that classroom and I saw... targets. That's the word my father would have used. I was five years old, and I was already scanning for vulnerability the way he taught me to scan for weakness."

The confession goes deeper:

"He was curled up in the book corner... His socks were too big—bunched around his ankles. A boy bumped a truck into his leg and he just... curled up smaller. Didn't say anything. Didn't fight back. And I remember thinking: this one. This one will need me. This one won't leave."

This is predation with a five-year-old's face. Jedidiah didn't see a potential friend; he saw a system to be managed, a need he could fulfill, a person whose desperation would make him loyal. His approach wasn't connection—it was acquisition.

The most damning admission:

"I looked at Sydney—this child with his too-big socks and his hungry eyes—and I thought: he's poor. He's lonely. He's desperate. He'll be grateful for anything I give him, and he'll never expect more than I'm willing to offer."

He chose Sydney specifically because of his vulnerable background. His poverty meant he'd never feel entitled to what Jedidiah's family had. His loneliness meant he'd accept whatever version of care Jedidiah could provide. His desperation meant he'd stay.

"That's why I chose him. Not because I loved him. Because he was safe. Because his background meant he'd never feel entitled to the things my family had. Because his loneliness meant he'd accept whatever version of care I was capable of giving. I targeted him, Elijah. The same way I later isolated him from you. The same way I've controlled him ever since."

This reframes their entire relationship. Sydney believes Jedidiah saw something special in him—something worth saving. The truth is uglier: he saw someone he could keep. Someone who would stay because he had nowhere better to go. The practiced smile in the kindergarten classroom wasn't warmth; it was the opening move in a thirty-year campaign of gentle captivity.

"Crude": The Word That Broke a Friendship

The salamander incident with Elijah exposes the absolute limits of Jedidiah's capacity for acceptance. When young Elijah—desperate to feel something through his hyposensitive haze—maims a creature, Jedidiah doesn't respond with anger. He responds with something far more destructive:

"I didn't know," Jedediah said, and his voice was quiet, so quiet it was almost lost under the creek's murmur. It was laced with a condescension that could flay skin from bone. "I didn't know you were so… crude, Elijah."

That single word—crude—contains Jedidiah's entire moral framework. He values precision, cleanliness, controlled observation. "The pinned beetles. The picked-clean bones. It's safe. It's clean. It's already over." When confronted with the messy reality of Elijah's neurodivergent need for sensation—the aliveness of suffering, not the aestheticized aftermath—he can only see failure. Vulgarity. A design flaw.

His subsequent campaign against Elijah demonstrates how his clinical mindset becomes weaponized. He doesn't attack; he reframes:

"A fifteen-year-old boy who finds beauty in hurting small, helpless things... what do you think he's capable of, Sydney? What happens when he gets bored of salamanders?"

He pathologizes Elijah's intensity as "unstable," his intelligence as "manipulative," his difference as "dangerous." This isn't lying in the traditional sense—Jedidiah likely believes his analysis is accurate. But that's precisely what makes it so insidious. He transforms his own disgust into diagnostic authority, offering Sydney not propaganda but case notes.

"I'm Nothing Without You": The Confession That Confesses Nothing

When Jedidiah finally speaks his guilt to Sydney after the pyre, his language reveals the precise nature of his love's failure:

"Your death was my fault... the things I did to you… both the stuff that killed you and the stuff that saved you… horrified me. I was horrified by what I made you. I couldn't cope. You became this… walking reminder of everything that had gone wrong in my life. So I avoided you… I… I avoided myself. And I'm sorry... Because I'm nothing without you, Sydney, I really am. I'm the ugliest, emptiest nothing."

Three things emerge from this confession. First, Sydney is framed as something Jedidiah "made"—not a person who experienced death, but a creation whose existence testifies to its creator's failure. Second, Jedidiah's guilt isn't about Sydney's suffering; it's about his own inability to "cope" with what he'd done. The avoidance was self-protection, not kindness. Third, and most tellingly: "I'm nothing without you."

This isn't a declaration of love. It's a declaration of dependency, of existential emptiness that requires another person to fill. Sydney's response—"I'm so unsatisfied!"—cuts through the emotional fog to the actual problem: nothing has been explained. Nothing has been addressed. Jedidiah has performed contrition without providing substance.

The Work as Amoral Arithmetic

Perhaps the most damning window into Jedidiah's psyche comes from his private journals, where he describes his approach to Sydney's care:

"The work is amoral. It is arithmetic."

He views Sydney's existence as a system to be managed, emotions as variables to be optimized. When Sydney's psychic projections cause anomalies, Jedidiah installs "Harmonization Lenses"—devices to "identify and quietly delete or redirect any storylines emerging from Sydney's psyche that he deems 'unsustainable.'" He is literally editing his partner's unconscious.

His justifications are presented with clinical precision:

1. "Would overwhelm his processing capacity." (Sydney is a computer, not a person.)
2. "His perception could alter their function." (If Sydney knew about the controls, he might resist them.)
3. "Cross-contamination of roles… leads to him attempting to 'fix' a structural issue with emotional tools." (Emotion is incorrect methodology.)

The third point reveals the fundamental tragedy. Jedidiah sees emotion as a "clumsy tool," when for Sydney—a being whose feelings literally reshape reality—emotion is the foundational force. He's trying to repair a nuclear reactor with a wrench and blaming the radiation for melting his tools.

The Parallel and the Foil: Why Elijah Works

The eventual relationship between Jedidiah and Elijah succeeds precisely because they have seen each other at their worst. Jedidiah witnessed Elijah's "crude" violence; Elijah knows the full scope of Jedidiah's manipulations. Neither can idealize the other.

More importantly, they are structural parallels—both control-seekers who approach chaos from different angles. Elijah's control is mythological, systemic, grand; Jedidiah's is clinical, individual, contained. Their differences become complementary rather than incompatible. As noted in the development notes: "They're foils of each other... their differences complement each other as well."

With Sydney, Jedidiah's rigidity meets Sydney's fluidity and finds no purchase—they are "so different that it doesn't work." But with Elijah, Jedidiah finds someone who understands the need for control even while expressing it differently. They can be "broken together instead of broken alone."

The Cardinal and the Clock

Jedidiah's symbolic bird is the northern cardinal, associated with the folklore saying: "When a cardinal appears in your yard, it's a visitor from heaven." This connects to his father's death—the cardinal that sang "too loud" in the wheat field where Jedidiah received the Clock of Meantime from Adam disguised as the Conductor.

The Clock itself was never his creation. It was a Trojan horse, a corrupted tool planted by the very entity he fights against. Jedidiah's entire identity as the "guilty architect" is what one analyst calls "a fabricated mythos, an emotional implant designed to ensure he would forever tend the garden without questioning the gardener."

This reframes his character completely. His obsessive guilt, his conviction that only he can maintain Sydney's existence, his horror at what he "made"—all of it was seeded by Adam. Jedidiah is not the master of the system; he is its most thoroughly programmed component. The man who believes himself the curator is merely the most carefully curated exhibit.

"You're a Supervillain!"

When Sydney learns that Jedidiah tested dangerous information on Elijah first—using him as a human trial to see if the truth would kill—Sydney's response is telling:

"So we're just gonna gloss over the fact that you could have killed Elijah?"

"Well, preferably, yes."

"You're a supervillain!"

"It's just science, it's—y'know, before they roll out the new drug to the people, they gotta test it on the rats."

The casualness is horrifying. Jedidiah has so thoroughly internalized his framework that experimenting on a human being is merely "science." But Sydney's accusation—"You're a supervillain!"—lands differently because it's delivered with laughter. Sydney sees the absurdity. He sees that Jedidiah's clinical remove has become its own form of cartoonish evil, divorced from human feeling by sheer consistency.

And Jedidiah's defense—"they gotta test it on the rats"—reveals how he categorizes people. Elijah is a rat. Sydney is the "people."

The Hierarchy Is Malicious

It would be easy to frame this as merely cognitive—just how Jedidiah's mind organizes value, a quirk of his clinical worldview. But this reading is too generous. The hierarchy is a choice, and it's a choice that serves Jedidiah's interests.

Consider who becomes the "rat" and who becomes the "people." Elijah—the person Jedidiah betrayed, isolated, and helped drive toward possession. Elijah—the person who represents Jedidiah's guilt, his failure, his unfinished business. Elijah—the person whose friendship Jedidiah deliberately destroyed because he couldn't stand to share Sydney's attention. That person becomes expendable. That person can be risked.

Sydney—the person Jedidiah needs, the supply source, the shape that fits the hole—remains protected. Not because Sydney's life has inherent value in Jedidiah's framework, but because Sydney's life has use-value to Jedidiah. The hierarchy isn't neutral. It's organized around Jedidiah's needs.

This is the same logic that governed the kindergarten classroom. Jedidiah didn't see children; he saw targets and non-targets. He didn't evaluate people based on their inherent worth; he evaluated them based on what they could provide him and how easily they could be controlled. Sydney was valuable because Sydney was vulnerable, desperate, unlikely to leave. Elijah became a threat when Elijah disrupted Jedidiah's monopoly on Sydney's attention—and a "rat" when Elijah became useful for absorbing risk Jedidiah didn't want to take himself.

The hierarchy maps perfectly onto narcissistic supply. Primary supply sources (Sydney) are protected because losing them would mean facing the void. Secondary sources, former sources, and threats to the primary supply can be sacrificed. The "science" framing obscures the emotional calculus underneath: I need Sydney more than I need Elijah, so Elijah can absorb the danger.

Notice, too, the rhetorical move in "before they roll out the new drug to the people." Jedidiah positions himself as a pharmaceutical company—an institution, not a person. He's not making a choice to risk a human life; he's following protocol. The passive voice, the appeal to scientific convention, the framing of murder-risk as standard procedure—all of it distances him from the moral weight of what he's actually doing: deciding that one person's life matters less than another's, based entirely on what each person provides him.

Sydney laughs and calls him a supervillain because the alternative is screaming. The joke lets them both off the hook—lets Jedidiah's monstrous calculus become absurdist comedy rather than genuine horror. But the laughter doesn't change what was revealed: Jedidiah has a system for deciding whose lives are worth risking, and that system is organized entirely around his own needs.

The hierarchy isn't how his mind happens to organize value. The hierarchy is malice wearing the mask of methodology.

The Colonial Cartography: Jedidiah as Empire

Jedidiah Abraham Adonais Martin is from Dirt, Texas—the heart of American mythology, where manifest destiny meets oil money and Protestant work ethic. But his relationship with Sydney, a Métis Canadian from "the lowlands (but not quite the lowest lands)," maps onto something older and more troubling than individual dysfunction. Jedidiah is both Britain and America: the empire that claims divine favor while extracting everything from the land it professes to love.

Consider the structure of his relationship to Sydney. He identified Sydney's vulnerability—his poverty, his loneliness, his desperate need to belong—and immediately positioned himself as the only one capable of filling that void. But the void he was really filling was his own. Sydney wasn't special to Jedidiah; Sydney was useful. He was the shape that fit the hole in him, the supply source that would never leave because he had nowhere else to go. He "saved" Sydney through methods Sydney didn't consent to, then demanded gratitude for the salvation. He built elaborate systems to maintain Sydney's existence while never asking what Sydney actually wanted. He framed his control as protection and his extraction as care.

This is the colonial playbook. Britain didn't conquer; it civilized. America doesn't exploit; it develops. And Jedidiah doesn't imprison; he maintains. The language of benevolence obscures the architecture of control.

His clinical approach—the journals, the calibrations, the Harmonization Lenses that "quietly delete or redirect" Sydney's autonomous psychic productions—mirrors the administrative apparatus of empire. He doesn't need to be cruel. He just needs to be thorough. The violence is bureaucratic, systematic, recorded in neat handwriting for future reference. When he installs devices to edit Sydney's unconscious, he's not committing atrocity; he's optimizing resource management. The work is amoral. It is arithmetic.

And like both Britain and America, Jedidiah genuinely believes in his own benevolence. This is what makes him so dangerous and so tragic. He isn't lying when he says he loves Sydney—he believes it completely. He isn't pretending when he weeps over his failures. But the empire always loves what it consumes—loves the land it strips, the people it "civilizes," the resources it extracts. The question isn't whether the feeling is real. The question is whether "love" is the right word for a feeling that never asks what the beloved needs. In this framework, love isn't opposed to exploitation. It's the justification for it.

The name tells us. "Jedidiah"—beloved of God. Both Britain and America have positioned themselves as divinely favored nations, chosen people with a mandate to bring order to chaos. Jedidiah's Protestant background, his wealthy Texas family, his absolute conviction that he alone can manage the dangerous miracle that is Sydney—all of it echoes the theological certainty of empire. He doesn't question his right to control because control feels like calling.

But there's a fracture in the allegory that makes it more interesting: Jedidiah is also, in his way, colonized. The Clock of Meantime wasn't his invention. It was a Trojan horse from Adam, a corrupted tool that made Jedidiah the instrument of a power he doesn't understand. He believes himself the architect when he's merely the most thoroughly designed component. This is America inheriting Britain's imperial project while believing itself an exception—using the master's tools while convinced it's building something new.

Two Gods of War: Martin and Michael

The name "Martin" derives from Mars—the Roman god of war. Jedidiah carries warfare in his surname the way he carries divinity in his given names. But his warfare is specific: administrative, clinical, waged through management rather than confrontation. He doesn't fight Sydney; he contains him. He doesn't battle Elijah; he pathologizes him. His violence is the violence of the ledger and the protocol, the violence that never has to raise its voice because it controls the terms of engagement.

Elijah Volkov, meanwhile, embodies a different martial archetype. In the fanfiction's framework, he is associated with St. Michael the Archangel—the angel of war, the commander of heaven's armies, the one who cast Satan into the abyss. Where Jedidiah's warfare is horizontal (human managing human, system containing system), Elijah's is vertical (cosmic battle between forces of light and darkness, the eternal war for souls).

This creates a devastating symmetry. Both men are gods of war wearing the masks of love.

Jedidiah's warfare manifests as the clinical campaign—the careful reframing of Elijah as "crude," "unstable," "manipulative." His weapons are words chosen with surgical precision: "What do you think he's capable of, Sydney? What happens when he gets bored of salamanders?" He doesn't attack; he diagnoses. He doesn't condemn; he predicts. This is Mars as administrator, war as risk assessment.

Elijah's warfare manifests as the prophetic crusade—the absolute certainty that Sydney must be saved, sanctified, made eternal through ritual. His weapons are worship and sacrifice, the pyre built with devotion. "The gospel as writ by the devil!" he calls Jedidiah's confession, recognizing the theological stakes even when Jedidiah frames them as mere information. This is Michael as zealot, war as holy mission.

When they finally come together—not as enemies but as collaborators—the two forms of warfare don't cancel each other out. They combine. The Sympathica project represents their synthesis: Elijah's cosmic framework (the sympathetic magic, the vessels that catch feeling) joined to Jedidiah's clinical methodology (the calibration, the measurement, the controlled variables). Two gods of war, building a machine together.

The question the narrative poses is whether warfare can ever become medicine. Whether Mars and Michael, having spent their lives destroying, can learn to heal. The answer isn't simple. Jedidiah's administrative violence created the conditions for Sydney's suffering; Elijah's prophetic violence nearly killed him on a pyre. But both men are also, in their broken ways, trying to fix something. They've just never learned a vocabulary for care that isn't structured as combat.

This is why their eventual relationship works where Jedidiah's relationship with Sydney failed. With Sydney, Jedidiah was always the general managing a civilian—someone to be protected from the war, kept ignorant of the battle plans. With Elijah, he finally has a fellow soldier. They've both seen the front lines. They've both committed atrocities in the name of love. Neither can pretend the other is innocent, which means neither has to pretend themselves innocent.

Two gods of war, laying down arms not because peace has come, but because they've finally found someone who understands what the fighting cost.

The Crack in the Machine: Jedidiah's Love for Elijah

Jedidiah's love for Elijah represents a fundamental crack in his carefully constructed mechanical worldview. This uncontrollable, messy emotion disrupts his entire self-concept—here is something that can't be engineered, optimized, or "fixed." His feelings for Elijah are organic, chaotic, and deeply human—everything he's tried to excise from himself.

The irony is particularly sharp because Elijah embodies everything Jedidiah claims to reject: raw emotion, uncontrolled expression, authentic pain. Yet it's precisely these qualities that attract him, suggesting a deep longing for the very authenticity he's trained himself to fear. This attraction threatens his carefully maintained facade of controlled perfection and exposes the fundamental lie of his mechanical approach to existence.

His response to these feelings reveals his character's tragic flaw. Rather than allowing this love to humanize him, he attempts to "engineer" Elijah into something more controllable. When this fails—as it must—he transforms his love into a weapon, using his intimate knowledge of Elijah to better destroy him. The violence of his reaction proportionally matches the depth of his denied feelings, showing how love becomes corrupted through his need for control.

This internal conflict extends to his American allegory—like the nation confronting movements it can't control, Jedidiah's response to genuine emotion is to attempt to sanitize or eliminate it. Yet the very intensity of his efforts to destroy Elijah betrays the depth of his continuing attachment. His hatred becomes an inverted form of love, as obsessive and uncontrollable as the original emotion.

The Question of Love: What Jedidiah Actually Feels

The standard interpretation of Jedidiah is that his love is "genuine but deficient"—real emotion, poorly expressed. The fruit fly parable seems to support this: he wept when Fruity died, therefore his love was real; he simply forgot to feed it. But Jedidiah's confession at the truth ritual forces a more uncomfortable question:

Is what Jedidiah calls "love" actually love at all?

"I told myself I loved you. I believed I loved you. But I don't know if I've ever known what that word actually means. I know what it means to need someone. To need them to stay, to need them to need me, to need them to be the shape that fits the hole in me. But love—real love, the kind that wants what's best for the other person even if it costs you—I don't know if I'm capable of that. I don't know if I ever was."

This isn't false modesty or dramatic self-flagellation. It's a man with covert NPD confronting the possibility that his entire emotional architecture is built on something other than what he's been calling it.

The Narcissistic Counterfeit

People with covert narcissistic personality disorder experience emotions they identify as love. Those emotions feel real—the longing, the obsession, the grief at loss, the desperate need to possess. Jedidiah's tears over Fruity were genuine tears. His devastation at Sydney's death was genuine devastation. But the question isn't whether the feelings are real. The question is whether they're actually love, or whether they're something else wearing love's face.

Narcissistic attachment feels like love from the inside. The narcissist experiences intensity, devotion, preoccupation with the beloved. But the structure of the attachment is fundamentally different:

Love asks: What do you need? How can I support your flourishing? What would make you happy, even if it's not what I want?

Narcissistic attachment asks: What do you provide me? How do you fill the void in me? How can I ensure you never leave, never change, never become something I don't control?

Jedidiah's confession reveals which questions have actually governed his relationship with Sydney. He didn't approach him in kindergarten because he saw something wonderful in him that he wanted to nurture. He approached him because he saw vulnerability that made him safe—safe to need, safe to keep, safe to control. He saw someone who would be grateful, who wouldn't expect much, who would stay.

This isn't love discovering a worthy object. This is need identifying a suitable supply source.

The Fruit Fly Reconsidered

Return to the parable with this framework. Jedidiah loved Fruity—or so he believed. But examine what that "love" actually consisted of:

• Admiration: He watched the fly constantly, took it everywhere, named it
• Possession: He kept it in a Tupperware container under his bed
• Display: It was a performance of devotion, visible to others
• Identification: The fly was his—his pet, his project, his thing

What's missing from this list? Any consideration of what the fly needed. Not because he forgot—the word "forgot" implies the concept was there and slipped his mind. The concept was never there. The fly's needs weren't part of his love because his love wasn't about the fly. It was about what the fly provided him: something to admire, something to own, something that made him feel like the kind of person who loves things.

The fly didn't die loved. The fly died needed. There's a difference.

When Fruity died, Jedidiah wept—but notice what he wept for. Not for Fruity's suffering, not for the life cut short, not for the experiences the fly would never have. He wept for his own loss. His pet was gone. His project had failed. The thing that provided him with the experience of being someone who loves things was no longer there.

This isn't love. This is narcissistic supply dressed in love's costume.

The Targeting Confession

The kindergarten confession makes this framework unavoidable. Jedidiah didn't "fall in love" with Sydney and then happen to develop controlling patterns. He selected Sydney specifically for characteristics that would make him controllable:

"I looked at Sydney—this child with his too-big socks and his hungry eyes—and I thought: he's poor. He's lonely. He's desperate. He'll be grateful for anything I give him, and he'll never expect more than I'm willing to offer."

This is predator logic, not love logic. This is identifying prey, not recognizing a soulmate. The entire relationship was founded on Sydney's vulnerability—a vulnerability Jedidiah then spent thirty years maintaining, ensuring he remained dependent, ensuring he never developed the resources or relationships that might let him leave.

When he says "I targeted him the same way I later isolated him from Elijah, the same way I've controlled him ever since"—he's naming the pattern. The initial selection, the isolation from alternatives, the ongoing control: it's a single continuous behavior, not love that went wrong but something else that was never love in the first place.

What Jedidiah Gets From Sydney

If it's not love, what is it? What does Sydney provide that Jedidiah needs?

Narcissistic supply: Someone who sees him as brilliant, necessary, irreplaceable. Someone who needs his protection and thereby confirms his power. Someone whose dependence validates his self-image as the one who saves, fixes, maintains.

The void-filler: His own confession names this—"the shape that fits the hole in me." Sydney isn't loved for who he is; he's needed for what he provides. He fills the emptiness his childhood abuse created. Without him, Jedidiah is "the ugliest, emptiest nothing." Sydney doesn't complete him in a romantic sense; he prevents Jedidiah from having to face his own hollowness.

Control substitute: Jedidiah can't control his own internal chaos—the trauma, the wounds, the shed. But he can control Sydney. Managing his existence through the Clock gives Jedidiah the experience of mastery he can't achieve over himself. Every calibration session is a reenactment of control, a proof that he can make something stay the way he needs it to be.

The resurrection as supply: Even bringing Sydney back from death serves Jedidiah's narcissistic architecture. He didn't resurrect Sydney for Sydney's sake—he says as much. He did it because he "couldn't bear a world without you in it." Sydney's existence isn't about Sydney; it's about what his existence provides Jedidiah. The miracle wasn't a gift to Sydney. It was a refusal to lose his supply source.

The Horror of Genuine Emotion Without Genuine Love

This analysis doesn't mean Jedidiah feels nothing. It means what he feels isn't what he thinks it is.

His emotions are real. His grief is real. His desperate clinging is real. When he cries—and he cries often—the tears are genuine. But genuine tears don't equal genuine love. A narcissist losing their primary supply source will grieve devastatingly, will weep and rage and feel like they're dying. The feelings are authentic. What's inauthentic is the belief that those feelings were "love" rather than "dependency, need, and terror of abandonment."

This is what makes Jedidiah more tragic than a simple manipulator. A manipulator knows he's pretending. Jedidiah genuinely believes he loves Sydney. He has spent thirty years certain of his devotion. And he may be completely wrong—not lying, but wrong. His covert NPD has structured his emotional experience so thoroughly that he can't distinguish between loving someone and needing them, between devotion and possession, between caring for someone and ensuring they never leave.

The Confession as Breakthrough

What makes the truth ritual confession significant is that Jedidiah finally articulates the doubt:

"I don't know if I'm capable of that. I don't know if I ever was."

This is a person with covert NPD beginning to question their own emotional architecture. It's not a full understanding—he still frames it as uncertainty rather than recognition—but it's the first crack in the structure. He's admitting the possibility that what he's called love for thirty years might be something else entirely.

Whether he can actually develop genuine love—whether anyone with his level of narcissistic damage can learn to want what's best for someone else rather than what's best for themselves—remains an open question. What's clear is that he's finally asking it.

Sydney's response to this confession—the shift from grief to something harder to name—suggests he's asking it too. And he may be closer to an answer than Jedidiah is ready to hear.

The Five-Year-Old Predator

There is a chilling parallel between Jedidiah and Elijah that must be named: both were predators before they reached double digits.

At five years old—the age when most children are learning to share toys and make friends—Jedidiah had already developed the capacity to identify and target vulnerability. When he met Sydney in that kindergarten classroom, his internal monologue wasn't childlike wonder or simple curiosity. It was assessment:

The crying child was new here. He watched the water on his face. He had learned that water was weakness. Everyone would find out his weakness. He didn't know why, but he wanted to get there first.

"Get there first." At five. The instinct to claim vulnerability before others could exploit it—already installed. The abuse that started at three had already taught him that weakness attracts predation, and if you're going to survive, you need to be the one doing the claiming rather than the one being claimed.

The Making of a Child Predator

How does a five-year-old become a predator? The same way a nine-year-old does: through education by example.

Jedidiah's abuse started at three—at his grandmother's funeral, when he cried, and his father decided this display of emotion required "correction." By the time he walked into that kindergarten classroom, he had spent two years being systematically broken and rebuilt. The shed. The straps. The recitations. The lesson drilled into his nervous system: weakness invites violence; control prevents pain; claim before you are claimed.

When he looked at Sydney crying on that first day, he saw what his father had taught him to see: a target. Not consciously, not maliciously, but instinctively. The predator pattern was already installed. The five-year-old who had learned to "sit very still" and watch the other children like "funny animals in a zoo" had already been trained to observe vulnerability and move toward it.

Both Predator and Prey (But Less Prey)

Like Elijah, Jedidiah occupies the position of "both predator and prey at the same time." But with an important distinction:

"Jedidiah is less prey than Elijah."

This isn't because Jedidiah suffered less. It's because Jedidiah has fewer pathologies that mark him as vulnerable. He doesn't have autism. He doesn't have BPD. He doesn't have C-PTSD in the same visible, destabilizing way. What he has is covert NPD—which functions as armor rather than wound. His narcissism is a defense mechanism that makes him appear less vulnerable, even when his internal damage is just as severe.

Elijah's autism and BPD make his pain visible, his dysregulation obvious, his prey-status legible to other predators. Jedidiah's covert narcissism makes his pain invisible—even to himself. He reads as composed, intellectual, in control. The predator aspect dominates the visible presentation; the prey aspect is buried in a shed he hasn't visited in years.

Privilege and the Predator's Toolkit

What enabled Jedidiah's predation? The same factors that enabled Elijah's: privilege.

Wealth: The Texas oil money. The resources that allowed access to education, to tools, to the frameworks that would become his clinical methodology. Jedidiah could afford to develop sophisticated systems for managing others because his family could afford tutors, schools, laboratories.

Whiteness: The unquestioned assumption of authority. When Jedidiah builds a reality-managing apparatus around Sydney, no one questions his right to do so. His entitlement to control another person's existence goes unremarked because the world has always told him he belongs in positions of power.

Class: The expectation that the world arranges itself around him. When Sydney doesn't fit the parameters Jedidiah has designed, the problem is Sydney's instability—never Jedidiah's assumptions. He inherited the colonial perspective: the managed object exists to serve the manager's vision.

Compare this to Rowan and Sydney—both from poverty, both non-white, both denied the tools and frameworks that would allow them to build elaborate systems of control. Their trauma stayed internal. They couldn't afford—financially, socially, psychologically—to become the predators. They remained, in the dynamics of the story, "just prey."

The Clinical Predator vs. The Prophetic Predator

Jedidiah and Elijah represent two different styles of predation, shaped by their different resources:

Jedidiah's predation is clinical: diagnoses, calibrations, Harmonization Lenses, carefully managed variables. He doesn't devour dramatically; he manages quietly. His victims don't always know they're being controlled because the control is framed as care, protection, optimization.

Elijah's predation is prophetic: ceremonies, worship, cosmic narratives of salvation. He devours dramatically, with fire and sacrifice. His victims know they're being claimed, but the claiming is framed as honor, as election, as divine purpose.

Both styles are products of privilege meeting trauma. Jedidiah had access to scientific frameworks; Elijah had access to theological ones. Both built elaborate structures to contain their pain—and both structures required prey to function.

The five-year-old in the kindergarten classroom and the nine-year-old at the riverbank are mirrors. Both saw a crying child and thought this one. Both had already been taught that the world divides into those who control and those who are controlled. Both chose—because their abuse had removed the possibility of any other choice—to be the ones who control.

The Parasite Who Cannot See Himself

Perhaps the most illuminating distinction between Jedidiah and Elijah lies not in their capacity for redemption, but in their access to it. Elijah, for all his monstrous acts, can eventually recognize his wrongs, feel their weight, and choose to become different. Jedidiah's path to the same recognition is far more obstructed.

This isn't a simple matter of "can versus cannot." Elijah's self-redemption in The Granular Fall doesn't happen in a vacuum—it requires the trial, the confrontations, Sydney's boundary-setting, Rowan's refusal of easy forgiveness. External events catalyze his transformation. But the crucial difference is that Elijah has access to his own pain in a way Jedidiah does not.

The mechanism lies in their different pathologies. Elijah's conditions—his autism, his BPD, his C-PTSD—make his pain visible. His dysregulation is obvious. His wounds are external enough that he can eventually examine them, even if that examination is agonizing. He cannot hide from himself.

Jedidiah's covert NPD makes his pain invisible—especially to himself. His defenses are so thoroughly constructed, his performance so seamless, that the wounds are buried beyond his own sight. He isn't choosing to avoid self-examination; he genuinely cannot see what needs to be examined. The shed exists in his memory, but its meaning is locked away. His pain has been so successfully converted into mechanism that he's lost the key.

This is what makes Jedidiah parasitic at his core. While Sydney might be materially dependent on Jedidiah, Jedidiah is ontologically dependent on having someone to save. He doesn't just need help; he actively drains others for his own benefit. He frames Sydney as the parasite while he himself is the one feeding off their relationship. Without a project, without a broken thing to fix, he's "the ugliest, emptiest nothing."

The word "parasite" captures something essential: not just dependency, but exploitation. Jedidiah's need for external salvation isn't a temporary condition to be overcome—it's a fundamental character flaw that shapes all his relationships. He cannot exist without someone to "save," because the act of saving is how he saves himself. The rescued become his hosts.

This connects to his engineering mindset: a machine cannot repair itself from the inside. It requires an external technician. Jedidiah, having reduced himself to mechanism, has lost the capacity for the kind of organic, internal transformation that redemption requires. He can only be "fixed" by someone else's intervention—and that fixing will always be another form of consumption.

The tragedy is that this might be the only model of care he knows, learned from parents whose love was always conditional, always transactional. Elijah's pathologies, for all their devastation, left him porous—capable of being broken open by the right confrontation. Jedidiah's defenses left him sealed. Not "cannot redeem himself" but "cannot access the self that needs redeeming." The machine runs perfectly. It just doesn't know it's broken.

The Fandom Mirror: Why His Popularity Is Troubling

There's a disturbing pattern in how Jedidiah's fans defend him—one that mirrors his own manipulation tactics with uncomfortable precision.

His presentation is masterfully crafted to invite sympathy:

• He appears vulnerable while actually being the oppressor
• He shows just enough emotional shakiness to seem sympathetic
• He performs care and protection in visible, admirable ways
• His violence is clean, institutional, and therefore more palatable
• His "professional" presentation shields him from criticism

The defenses his fans offer are the same justifications Jedidiah uses for himself: "He's just trying to help." "His love for Sydney is deep, even if misguided." "He's traumatized himself." "At least his methods are clean/professional." These defenses ignore how calculated and deliberate his harm is, mistaking his control for care.

What's particularly troubling is how this creates a silencing mechanism. People who recognize Jedidiah's abuse are often dismissed as "overreacting" or "missing the complexity." Critics are painted as the unreasonable ones for not seeing his "good intentions." The more you try to explain, the more defensive his supporters become. The valid recognition of harm gets twisted into "personal bias."

This mirrors exactly what Jedidiah does in the story—he makes anyone who questions him seem irrational or hostile, while his own hostile actions are framed as reasonable and necessary. The fandom unconsciously reproduces his exact manipulation tactics. Some fans who relate to Jedidiah see themselves in his "reasonable" explanations. They employ his same tactics of making critics seem "unstable." They're essentially defending their own patterns by defending him.

Like America itself, Jedidiah's crimes are often forgiven because they're wrapped in good intentions. People tend to sympathize more with clean, institutional violence than raw, visible harm. His type of abuse is harder to recognize because it mirrors accepted power structures. And that's precisely what makes him so dangerous—both as a character and as a model for real-world behavior.

The Medium's Complicity: What the Audio Format Conceals

The audio-only format of Camp Here & There fundamentally shapes our perception of Jedidiah's character. Every instance we hear his voice comes either through direct interactions with Sydney or through recordings explicitly made for Sydney's consumption. This creates a unique dynamic where we never access Jedidiah's truly private moments—every utterance is inherently performative.

The format creates a particular kind of distance precisely because we don't get to see facial expressions. In visual media, a character's face might betray what their words conceal—a flash of contempt behind a smile, a moment of genuine tenderness beneath performed indifference. Audio strips away this layer of involuntary revelation. Jedidiah's face remains forever hidden, his performance complete and unverifiable. For a character whose entire methodology depends on maintaining a pristine surface while concealing darker impulses, the medium is almost too perfect.

Yet there are moments when his real feelings bleed through despite the format's limitations. The most notable is when he rants about Sydney being a parasite—when his frustration with the relationship and how it affects him surfaces through tone, through the crack in his careful composure. These moments of breakthrough are rare and telling: they suggest an entire inner life of resentment and complexity that the format usually conceals. If these feelings can bleed through occasionally, what else exists in the spaces between recordings that we never hear?

The medium's inherent time-distortion properties mirror Jedidiah's attempts to control narrative and memory. Through recordings, moments can be preserved, replayed, or deliberately destroyed—much like how he attempts to curate Sydney's reality. The ability to manipulate these audio artifacts becomes another expression of his need for control. He is, in a sense, the editor of his own story.

There's profound irony in how the format creates simultaneous intimacy and isolation. While we hear Jedidiah's voice in startling clarity—every tremor, every sharp intake of breath, his emotionally shaky delivery that always seems on the verge of tears—this intimacy is always mediated through technology, creating an unbridgeable distance. This technological barrier symbolizes the emotional walls he constructs, allowing him to maintain the illusion of closeness while keeping genuine connection at bay.

What Jedidiah never shows—what the medium deliberately conceals—is any feeling for Sydney that isn't performed for Sydney's consumption. Because every time he's being recorded, either Sydney is there or he's recording himself for Sydney to listen to. The format itself becomes complicit in his performance of care. We are left to wonder: in the unrecorded moments, in the silence between broadcasts, who is Jedidiah when no one is listening? What does his face look like when he's not performing vulnerability? What does he say about Sydney when Sydney cannot hear?

The medium doesn't just tell Jedidiah's story—it protects him. It gives him exactly the kind of control he craves: the ability to present only what he chooses, to hide everything else in the gaps between recordings. In this way, the podcast format isn't just a storytelling device. It's an extension of Jedidiah's methodology.

Conclusion: The Cage and the Occupied

Jedidiah Martin is a man who cannot distinguish between keeping someone alive and keeping them close. What he calls love may not be love at all—it may be narcissistic attachment so thoroughly mistaken for devotion that even he can't tell the difference. He built the cage believing it was a sanctuary, and when Sydney tries to touch the walls, Jedidiah feels betrayed—as if gratitude for the cage should be unconditional.

The deepest irony is that his clinical approach to everything has blinded him to the one variable that matters: Sydney isn't a system to be maintained. He's a person to be known. And Jedidiah, for all his journals and calibrations and carefully managed secrets, has never once asked Sydney what he needs. He assumed. He engineered. He possessed.

He called it love. He may have been wrong.

"The work is amoral. It is arithmetic."

"Because I'm nothing without you, Sydney, I really am. I'm the ugliest, emptiest nothing."

These two statements aren't contradictions. They're the same confession in different registers: the clinical and the emotional, the curator and the void. Jedidiah reduces attachment to maintenance and maintenance to mathematics because the alternative—genuine presence, genuine vulnerability, genuine unknowing—terrifies him more than any monster in the woods.

His own confession at the truth ritual may be the first honest thing he's ever said:

"I don't know if I've ever known what that word actually means... I don't know if I'm capable of that. I don't know if I ever was."

Whether Jedidiah can learn what love actually is—whether someone with his depth of narcissistic damage can develop the capacity to want what's best for another person rather than what's best for himself—remains an open question. What's certain is that thirty years of what he called love produced a person who was controlled, isolated, and slowly dying. If that's love, the word has lost its meaning.

In the end, the most dangerous thing about Jedidiah isn't what he's willing to do. It's what he's incapable of seeing. The fruit fly died because feeding it never occurred to him. The child he targeted became a walking reminder of his failures. And somewhere in a vault with a changed combination, the truth waits—not resisting being known, but simply unasked for, while its keeper insists the silence is protection.

"Jedidiah, did you ever give your fly any fruit?"

And he said no. It hadn't even occurred to him.

Because it was never about the fly.