About J
I genuinely don’t understand how people admire J. To me, he was the worst of them all. In the end, he wasn’t any different from Baz or Smurf.
People defend him because he had a difficult childhood, and that’s true. His mother was a junkie, he grew up without his family, and he was abandoned. But people forget an important detail: when Julia was thrown out, Craig and Deran were still kids, and Pope was mentally unstable and completely under Smurf’s control. Pope often didn’t even fully understand what was happening around him.
That’s why I don’t blame Pope, Craig, or even Baz as much as people do. The real person responsible was Smurf. She was the one making the decisions. You don’t throw your pregnant daughter out and leave her alone like that. The others didn’t really have the power to go against her.
People also say J was treated badly by the family, which is true at times. But they forget that while he was managing the family business when Smurf was in prison, he was secretly stealing money from them. That’s one of the main reasons Deran stopped trusting him and started treating him differently afterward. J betrayed them first.
And honestly, respect was never automatically given in that family. Even the brothers constantly fought and disrespected each other. Craig complained early in the series about always getting the dirty jobs from Baz and Pope. There were tensions between everyone all the time. In that family, you had to earn your place and earn respect.
Eventually, J actually did earn his place. After Smurf died, he became a true part of the family and was basically running things alongside Deran. He finally had the respect and position he always wanted.
And yet, in the end, he still betrayed all of them.
What makes it worse to me is that after Julia died, they took him in. They gave him a home, money, protection, and a future. Without them, J probably would’ve ended up alone or in foster care. They helped make him who he became, but he still held onto his hatred and turned against them anyway.
People also forget that J was a murderer too. He killed Morgan, he killed Penny, and he killed the Latina woman as well. That’s three murders. Yet people still act like he was morally better than the others.
That’s why I see J as the real hypocrite of the story. He acted like family meant nothing, while despite all their flaws, Craig, Deran, and especially Pope still had a real sense of loyalty and family.
Pope suffered the most out of everyone, and he didn’t deserve what happened to him. He was broken and manipulated, but he was also the only one who still had genuine humanity left in him.
J, on the other hand, acted out of selfishness from beginning to end. Not for Julia. Not for revenge. For himself.
And in the end, he became exactly like Smurf and Baz: someone who only cared about himself.