Tag: ianto jones

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bitsygirl9:

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bitsygirl9:

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occupyvillengard:

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merindab:

I love tumblr. I’m involved in a discussion over which Harry Potter house Ianto Jones would belong in. I’m leaning towards Slytherin myself.

I’ve been trying to work this one out myself – I think it’s rare to come across someone who could fall neatly…

Everything you’ve said makes sense and jives with canon, but I can’t help but wonder – are their Slytherin qualities part of their natural temperaments, or learned behaviours because of their circumstances? 

Jury’s still out on Ianto, I could still see that going either way for him.  But Jack’s never been so much about ‘by any means necessary’ as ‘because I have to and if I don’t people will die and the world will end and I’m shit out of luck/hope/better options/time to come up with them’.  There seems to be an overriding duty to ‘the greater good,’ and I reckon that’s a different kind of Gryffindor thing – that was a Dumbledore thing, for a while, wasn’t it?  Never mind the fact that if Jack had the same unbending convictions as Gwen and Rose, planet Earth would be doomed and he knows it.  And sometimes his decisions are all the more awful as a result of his brashness and unwillingness to consider that he might be in the wrong – again, seems like a Gryffindor quality from my angle.  And you said yourself, Jack wants to be a Gryffindor.  He wouldn’t be the first to make that choice over Slytherin – and it’s our choices, not our abilities, etc.

Is Ianto naturally ambitious, ruthless, cunning, and selectively loyal?  I think so, yes.  A boy from the Cardiff estates doesn’t make it all the way to Torchwood One in London without those qualities, and he doesn’t keep his half-converted girlfriend in Torchwood Three’s basement without them either.  It is about choices, it is exactly about Ianto’s choices: he chose to work for Torchwood, he chose to pull Lisa out of the wreckage instead of letting UNIT finish cleaning up, he chose to lie repeatedly to Jack, to continue working for Torchwood even after Lisa’s death, to open the rift for a chance at getting Lisa back.  None of those choices had to do with saving the world, and a few of them actively endangered it.  All of them were in some fashion selfish choices.  Slytherin choices.

Jack is murkier, I will agree with you there, and there is no doubt in my mind that post-Doctor Jack would ask the Sorting Hat to place him in Gryffindor, but Jack can still be overwhelmingly ruthless, unethical, and selfish, and though his decisions often come down to “the greater good” and what must be done to save planet Earth, they also often don’t.

The manipulative things Jack does are not always about saving humanity (and even when they are, they could stand a good shot of ethics and still end up keeping the planet intact).  He keeps his past hidden even when hiding it puts his team directly in danger (John Hart, Exit Wounds), he keeps his team isolated and small because he has such a desperate need to control his surroundings and those he loves, even though that understaffed isolation is mostly what gets them all killed, and clearly keeping Torchwood a “secret” is only at issue when he wants it to be, not because it serves any greater purpose, and even when retconning someone is the entirely wrong thing to do outside of that.

Jack is a Slytherin with a Gryffindor coat of paint, and his coat is perpetually wearing thin.

(Albus Dumbledore is a whole new post unto himself, but I will say that he strikes me as a bit more Slytherin than anyone would like to admit.  The difference is that after Grindelwald, Dumbledore is almost never doing his manipulating for selfish reasons.  Often, Jack is.)

Just wanted to point out that Ianto doesn’t open the rift to get Lisa back. At no point is it ever suggested that if he opens the rift he’ll get Lisa back. Not even by Lisa vision.Lisa vision tells him that if he doesn’t open the rift thousands of people will die.I have a number of problems with Ianto in EOD, but wanting Lisa back and risking the world for that isn’t one of them. 

LISA: Hello, Ianto.

VARIOUS FLASHES OF: [Scenes from 1X04: Cyberwoman] Lisa the Cyberwoman and Ianto crying.
End of flashes.

(Lisa walks toward Ianto.)

IANTO: What do you want? Why are you here? This isn’t happening.

LISA: There’s only one way to stop this, before things get worse. People will die, Ianto. Thousands of people. Unless you open the Rift.

Also remember that in CJH despite whatever feelings Ianto has for Jack and whatever loyalties he has to Jack he’s prepared to leave both him and Tosh back in 1941 rather than risk opening the rift dangerously. So while Ianto is certainly loyal to the people he loves (and even then not really if he apparently believes there’s a better cause (see Adrift) by the end of s1 it’s not as simple as that. Even with Lisa in Cyberwoman I don’t think it’s as black and white for him as Lisa v. the World, but that’s a debate for another time lol.

Correction about Lisa accepted.  I had Owen’s Diane issues in Captain Jack Harkness mixed up with the flashbacks in End of Days.  My apologies.

However, everything else I mentioned stands, and I do think that Ianto’s refusal to allow Owen to open the rift in CJH is first and foremost out of his loyalty to Jack personally.  Look at Ianto’s language during this episode (italics added for emphasis):

“Good.  Jack would never have wanted us to use it this way.”

"You can’t open the safe.  You’ve got no right.”  […]  "There’s stuff in there we don’t know about.  That’s how Jack likes it.

“He’s our leader.”

“I’m much more than that.  Jack needs me.”

Of course he’s also concerned with saving the world, as any right-minded person would be (Owen most certainly not being in his right mind at the time), but his first loyalty is not to the world as a whole but to Jack in particular.

If in Adrift you’re referring to Ianto giving Gwen information about Flat Holm against Jack’s wishes, I would point out that the group of people Ianto is specifically loyal to does include Gwen, and in this one case his loyalty to her along with his belief that she needs to know/won’t give up until she knows trumps his loyalty to Jack’s secret.  I would also point out, however, that this may also stem somehow from his loyalty to Jack; he knows Gwen won’t give up, and he also knows that Jack can’t bring himself to tell her, so he’s done it himself, because in all honesty he’s better equipped to handle the emotional fallout than Jack.  In either case, his actions are fairly Slytherin in and of themselves, and none of it has anything to do with any “greater good.”

I do rather think Cyberwoman is a case of Lisa v. the World, actually.  Ianto knows that, were she to fully convert, Cyber-Lisa would destroy the world, and there are no foreseeable benefits for the world at large if she’s cured other than an escape of utter destruction, which would be served far better by her immediate destruction.  Yet, he keeps her alive, in Torchwood Three’s basement, right under Captain Harkness’ nose, for months.  That sounds exactly like Lisa v. the World to me, and in Ianto’s mind, Lisa won.

It’s never made clear what Ianto’s agenda is in Adrift. He’s more of a catalyst for Gwen and Jack’s plot than a character with his own distinct motivations. It could be loyalty to Gwen, it could be loyalty to Jack or it could be that for some reason never explained he thinks it’ll benefit the people at Flat Holm. Or even none of the above.

I think Lisa is a very personal issue for Ianto, but I also don’t think it’s as simple as Lisa v. the world because I don’t think Ianto’s thinking about the potential threat to the world at all. I don’t even think he considers Lisa as a potential threat until she becomes a threat. If anything before that it wouldn’t surprise me if he considers the world more of a threat to her than her to the world because until the Doctor ‘fixes’ her she’s the vulnerable one. She can’t move or breathe without help, she’s in pain, she’s not even in a real position to stop someone from man-handling her if they want to, she’s utterly dependent on him and to all intents and purposes, at least, from what we’re shown, she still seems to have Lisa’s rather than a cyberman’s mind. But I also think Lisa is pretty much the last time the personal is so absolute for him to the exclusion of all else. I don’t think we see that CJH and I don’t think we see it in EOD. Of course saving the world is what a thinking person would do, but the point for me is it never becomes a choice between Jack or the world for him. If he can save Jack and Tosh then fine if not they’re never his priority the way Lisa is in Cyberwoman and (at least for this episode because Torchwood and continuity past each respective episode is kind of a crap shoot) I think that’s the point because Lisa is supposed to be a lesson learned for Ianto. One he tries to impact to Owen when he goes doollally over Diane . Of course it’s hard for me to say much about s2 because the only other time they have any real conflict is when Ianto goes against Jack in Adrift and like I said he’s really not given much of a motive beyond moving Gwen’s plot along.

It is true that we aren’t explicitly given Ianto’s motivations in Adrift, so I suppose he could have done it because he somehow believed it would be good for the patients at Flat Holm, but it seems to me that, given the general trend of Torchwood employee behaviour and Ianto’s tendencies to act more out of loyalty to those he cares about than out of vague impulses to save strangers (and one wonders what he could have possibly thought they’d get out of Gwen knowing about them that they weren’t already getting from only Jack knowing about them), the possible motivations I cited above are far more likely.

As for those tendencies of Ianto’s, I already cited multiple quotations supporting my belief that Captain Jack Harkness does show Ianto’s specific loyalty to Jack as leader—which is this case manifests as not opening the rift irresponsibly, because “Jack would never have wanted us to use it this way.”   (Incidentally, I don’t think he gives much of a damn about “imparting lessons” to Owen at this point, as evidenced by his shooting Owen in the shoulder rather than calmly talking him down.)  He does desperately want to get Jack and Tosh back, but he isn’t willing to go against Jack’s wishes to do so, not because opening the rift is dangerous (although it is and he knows it, and no one is ever going to argue that he isn’t far more emotionally stable than Owen), but because Jack said not to do it.

End of Days, rather than disproving that loyalty to Jack, simply asserts that his loyalty to his teammates and to Lisa’s memory collectively is strong enough to overcome it when coupled with the threat of imminent global doom.  Vision Lisa does tell him that thousands of people will die if he doesn’t open the rift, rather than promising that he’ll get her back, it is true, but it is also Lisa telling him this, and his teammates are absolutely certain this is the right course of action, and he’s terrified the world is ending (let’s not forget that self-preservation is one of a Slytherin’s most important instincts), so he decides in this one case that Jack is wrong.  That doesn’t disprove his loyalty to Torchwood specifically over any kind of moral or ethical stance.

Even if Ianto didn’t believe Lisa was a threat (or more probably, was doing his damndest to convince himself she couldn’t possibly be a threat), he witnessed Canary Wharf.  He watched his friends and coworkers being converted, watched them die, watched as UNIT killed the converted or partially-converted in the aftermath who weren’t quite dead yet, watched his whole life go up in flames in the space of a few hours.  He knows that Cybermen could wipe out the universe, and he knows that Lisa is partially a Cyberman.  He chooses to sneak her out of Torchwood One under UNIT’s nose, to sneak her into Torchwood Three under Jack’s nose, and keep her a secret for months.  He also chooses to hide the body of Dr. Tanizaki after Lisa kills him, at which point he must know that she is dangerous, even if he had no inkling before.  In short, he chooses to protect her rather than letting UNIT kill her, letting Jack know about (and kill) her, or even telling Jack about her after she has attempted to convert and killed a man in cold blood.

It’s all personal for Ianto, either out of loyalty to those he loves or for his own gain.  He endangers the world, lies to multiple government agencies, lies to Jack, lies to his enemies, lies to his friends, threatens to torture John Hart to death (Exit Wounds), attempts to kidnap his niece to perform experiments on her, and shoots Owen in the shoulder, to name but a paltry few examples, and none of that, to return to the original argument, sounds like anything a Hufflepuff would ever do.