Thoughts on Cade

Spoilers for published chapters of One Last Song! You've been warned!

If you're a regular reader of One Last song, you know that in a recent interlude, the details of Jade's realization that she is bisexual landed like a bomb. Obviously, we've known since the epilogue of #GrandFinale that she's into girls (and one girl in particular; looking at you, Miss Vega). "Jori" was hinted at many times over the course of the show. Maybe it was intentional. Maybe it was just the way Vic and Liz played it. Whatever the real reason behind it all, "Jori" is probably one of the most popular 'ships on the show.

Shipping culture is not unique to the Victorious fandom, but it's definitely very loud and proud within our ranks. The reason for this, in my opinion, is that the show writers did such a poor job setting up and paying off meaningful character development that we were left to kind of fill in the gaps ourselves. We projected what we wanted to see on these characters, using our own biases, hopes, and preferences as fuel, and the natural chemistry between the actors fanned those flames.

A better example of this in action is Bella, from the Twilight series. Bella herself is a blank canvas, a plain "everygirl" with nothing special about her. This allows the readers to project themselves onto her and kind of become her.

So if you're a young woman who realizes you are bisexual or gay, Jade West may have been your awakening. The writers put in so many hints that all three of the main girls on the show were at least bisexual, it got a little out of hand at times.

Why did they do this? Was it clever writing? Subtext? Or were they just throwing a bunch of random stuff at it to see what stuck?

It's hard to say. I've got a lot of thoughts about the writing on this show, which I'll get into another time. But today, I want to focus on Cade, the pairing of Cat and Jade.

I decided to canonize "Cade" in Forever Victorious as I was approaching the end of writing The Untold Jori. I had just read a Cade story written by my dear friend (@elizabeth_gillies_daily on IG). At that time, a story about everyone's last few weeks at Hollywood Arts was materializing in my mind, and it felt like maybe if it were to happen, it would have to be their senior year.

Think about it. In the early running, Jade was awful to Cat. She made fun of her, tormented her, and basically reduced her to the role of a pet. They were not friends in the early seasons. But in my experience, a lot of fans seem to remember it differently, like they were always besties or something. It definitely doesn't seem like that to me, if you give the show a fresh watch.

In my mind, that began to change near the end of Season 3, when Cat decided to stand by Jade during the Platinum Music Awards. She's the only one who didn't show up in support of Tori. Cat always liked Jade. It was implied they hung out, their slap vids were adorable, she even got Jade the screen-used Scissors from her favorite movie. Yet Jade was awful toward her.

But after the music awards, Jade seemed to soften up towards her. The mean-spirited remarks were lessened. They hung out more. Their friendship evolved a little. Jade drove her to pay respects to Mona Patterson and even helped her move in with Nona. In Sam & Cat we see they still hang out and work together on school projects. I don't know if this was a choice made by the writers or if I'm just seeing it this way because it's all so generic and I'm imposing my own bias on it. But either way, that felt like the foundation of a friendship.

By the time we reach #GrandFinale, set during the last few weeks of high school, Jade and Cat's friendship has evolved into a sisterhood of sorts, and they share a special bond that doesn't seem to be strictly platonic. There are allusions in the story that "something" happened between them. I did that at the time just to have some fun and leave things vague, but as I mentioned, once the "senior year" story came together, I realized I was going to have to work out the details I'd only teased at. In the fifteenth, seventeenth, and nineteenth chapters of One Last Song, all Jade interludes, we finally see what happened between them. The next interlude, which I'm currently writing, will be Jade's last and will reveal how and why things turned out. the way we already know they did.

At times, it seemed like a lot to canonize both Cade and Jori in the same universe. But the fact is, many of us have coming out stories that involve someone who was a dear friend at the time, our great experiment who maybe became more. I felt it was an accurate reflection of the LGBTQ+ experience. And, as you'll see, their special bond, which still exists even though it's strictly platonic now, will factor heavily into our modern day story in the very near future.

We have just two more "Jade" chapters left before the narrative changes up again and we finally get to see what Cat has been up to all this time as the story presses forward. I know a lot of you have been waiting to see what happened after the previous Crossroads chapter, what path Tori chose (in the room or out the door?), and just what the hell happened to Sam. Answers are coming! With my Toriverse Hallowe'en fic, Disenchanted, finally published, I will be focusing exclusively on One Last Song until it's finished! And we are definitely creeping towards that conclusion.