User blog comment:Miskos3/Fairy Tail 525: Why Did the Emperor Never Love His Child?, Review/@comment-4829046-20170304191746/@comment-7418318-20170305155519

Speaking of Jude...

I never really game much thought to him before, but today I did and his character actually makes a lot of sense in hindsight.

Think about it.

He build his company together with his beloved wife and then that wife died due to a magical ritual gone wrong. She was destroyed by her own magic (okay, maybe not literally, but close enough).

The two things that connected him the most with his dead wife were his daughter and the company they build together.

Usually you'd expect him to devote himself to his daughter over his company, but the problem with that is that his daughter looks just like his wife and with each year this similarity grew stronger. So despite his love for his daughter, he couldn't take looking at his dead wife's mirror image all the time and ended up distancing himself from Lucy and buried himself in work instead.

Later when Lucy was old enough he tried to make sure that she studied as much as she could for two reasons. One so that the company that his wife helped found would survive and also to make sure Lucy wouldn't have the time necessary to study magic, because it was magic that killed Layla (the former can be infered from his reaction to Lucy's birthday gift, the latter is my theory).

So far I (and probably most other people too) assumed that Jude hired Phantom Lord when he did, because that was when he found a suitable creditor that he could mary Lucy to for the sole sake of the company causing him to send out Phantom Lord to get Lucy back so he can marry her off. That this happened shortly after she joined Fairy Tail was just a coincidence... or was it?

I think that when he learned that Lucy became a mage - the very same profession that killed Lucy's mother - he became afraid that Lucy would end up destroyed by her own magic like Layla and thus wanted to make sure to marry her into an enviroment where she wouldn't be using magic. Either she could just be a fine lady, attending balls and raising children, or if she needed to work, it would be as a businesswoman.

That's of course not excusing his cold behaviour to Lucy, his choice to have her kidnapped, trying to order her to marry someone she's never met and generally behaving like an ass, but I can see how he ended up like that.

It also explains how he could go from tyranical asshole back to loving father in such a short time. Because it was only a facade he put up to hide his grief, insecurity, fear for Lucy's future and anger at Lucy for "repeating the same mistake that killed Layla", rather than it being his true nature.

It's quite the irony that this life that Jude originally tried to get Lucy away from ended up depositing Lucy in a position to become close with three people intricately connected with the event that killed Layla, gave Lucy the very key who's absence killed Layla, gave her nine of the keys that Layla had and got her into contect with the other two and finally pitted her up against an army led by Zeref who's also linked with the Eclipse Gate...