The best thing about this post is that everyone except John has some version of themselves or mental projection or something, and then John is over here getting his frustration out by yelling about a movie

No, see, that’s the thing. John IS talking about himself. Why do you think he picked John Cusack? John thinks he was the second dorky hero. He thinks he scampered around SBURB goofing off and getting into trouble. Davesprite and Jade both had to bail him out. He spent a good chunk of time following instructions from Rose and Jade and Terezi and Vriska, and those instructions even got him killed. Twice. While everyone else did cool stuff, he fell backwards into his powers and spent most of his time messing around. At least, that’s his vision of it. The Scratch becomes ‘operating heavy machinery’. I didn’t screencap that part, but he even complains about Cusack crashing a car, and in a few more panels John passes his father’s car in a dream bubble, which he crashed.

The other kids may have more direct ways of attacking themselves - at least their targets are clearly still them (save for Jake, I suppose). But John has always been the one to hide. His dreamself can’t wake up because he’s locked in nightmares. Jade tells him that’s why he always has bad dreams. He spends every intermission we see him in playing games and watching movies. He convinces himself that his father is a street performer so he doesn’t have to acknowledge the harlequins - and messages of self-hatred - that he has written on his own walls. He’s the one who treats SBURB as a game the longest, because it’s easiest. John isn’t ready for a self-hatred meltdown where he acknowledges he feels that he is useless, a runner up, dead weight to the team. The clown, the ‘terrible character’, the kid who keeps fucking up. But he can yell at a character on the screen with the same name, and for now that’s enough.  

t h i s s u b t e x t i s w h y i w i l l n e v e r b e b o r e d o f t h i s c o m i c