They had not been seen together in the museum galleries for quite a while. Monet’s “Women with Umbrellas” are once again side by side in the Impressionist gallery.
ok every time this post comes by i resist geeking out on it but NO LONGER
so these women are probably the same woman and that woman is monet’s wife camille doncieux. he painted her a LOT.
but fun fact: monet had this asshole friend named ernest hochede, and ernest racked up some debts, and like an asshole he basically just fled the country, leaving his wife alice and their six kiddos behind. monet immediately got alice and kids to move in with him, camille, and their two kids.
at this point, monet, alice, and camille became my favorite probably historic poly threesome. they lived together, taking care of the kids. they were so poor that alice and camille took turns wearing the nice dress so they could go out with monet.
when camille got uterine cancer and began dying, alice helped monet cope and took care of things while he painted camille over and over. when camille died, alice is the reason monet was able to survive.
when ernest finally died, monet and alice married, and remained married until alice died. at that point, blanche, the oldest daughter, took care of monet until he died.
anyway, the point is, the umbrella ladies are probably the same ladies, but as far as i’m concerned, there WAS a historically queer poly family in that household and they were wonderful.
Jax has come out of the show as being extremely controversial, both with people completely disregarding the text that he is a closeted Trans woman, and the prevalent belief that he is completely irredeemable and a monster. I personally don't think that's true, but it brings the question, how do you come back from the pain you caused? Theoretically, would there be any way for him to come back from what he did to Ribbit and Kaufmo? And if not, what about Gangle? What do you do when you hurt someone so much? Is he irredeemable? Was abstraction his just desserts narratively speaking? Or was there another way?
Okay so I guess this is my Punishments are not Accountability post. So I will say there are some Jax spoilers but most of this covers episodes 7 and 8 more than the finale so, if you know what happens to Jax, the general idea about Ribbit and Kaufmo (no details) you can read this safely regardless of whether you have seen the movie or not.
If you haven't seen it at all and somehow managed to avoid these spoilers by some grace of God, there is a spoiler.
How TADC Handles Accountability: Virtue Ethics vs Consequentialism
The short answer is, sometimes you do nothing.
It's why I keep repeating that Punishment is not the same as Accountability. Sometimes you do something you can never take back, and you keep living anyway.
Things happen. Sometimes you become a monster in an attempt to protect yourself the only way you know how.
Most harm is never an actual accident, the accident is that we forgot to factor others into our decisions. And the point is, that's exhausting. You can't care about every stranger, every possible hypothetical other on the planet all at once and then be asked to weigh the utilitarian ethics of your choice to have a Hamburger for dinner or if your job that you need to make money is in any way responsible for the collapse of human civilization.
You can't be human trying to be a machine. And the only way to do no harm is to be a machine, and even then a machine is only making calculated decisions on the least amount of harm.
Because life itself is physical harm overlayed with joy, sadness, and interpretation all in the effort of the survival of that singular life. One is not alive when they are not struggling against something (even as abstract as fear, hunger and loneliness). One is not living when they are dreaming of being free from struggle.
And sometimes that struggle is ourselves and carrying the memory of the actions you did and what it did to someone else. Or even worse, what it did to your own idea of who you are.
In regards to Jax specifically, my essay focused on the scene when he pressed the button to keep everyone in the Circus and the discourse taking place about what that said of Jax and the subsequent displeasure when the next episode felt emotionally jarring for audiences who have been trained by society to see Punishment the same as Accountability.
So taking all those questions, we can explore them through that scene of the button. It is also a great exercise to open the door to existential thought and how to metabolize and cope with things outside your control in real life.
The reality of Episode 7 is that if they had pressed the other button, they all would still be exactly where they are. In the canon, nothing would have changed from the outcome, the pain and even Caine would still have had his own breakdown because it would have been definitive "proof" that they hate him.
Not a single material thing is changed by Jax's actions; both buttons were going to end with everyone feeling betrayed, used, and still trapped. And through it all, Jax would still be sitting there saying "I told you so."
Zooble being hung up on what-ifs is simply a maladaptive coping mechanism: Skapegoating. Zooble is mad at the state of reality, not Jax. Because we can objectively look at the story and accept that there never really was a choice to begin with, we can and should admit Jax didn't actually do anything but break the illusion.
An illusion, might I add, that was destined to collapse no matter who pressed either button. Even if Jax hadn't pressed any button, nothing changes. So what does he need to be punished for?
Zooble, and much of the audience, want a punching bag. They want to let off the frustration of the reality that they are powerless to circumstances objectively beyond their control. It is punching a wall so you don't punch the other person.
ou could beat down Jax all day long. You can even rationalize it that "well if he hadn't pressed that button and allowed us all to find out it was a lie by doing what I wanted, then I wouldn't be beating on him."
But the wall is a person. So actually it is punching the person closest to you (Jax) because you can't punch the person you are actually mad at (Reality).
And then we have to ask if anything would have changed if Zooble had been the person to press a button only for them all to be sent to Shrimp Land? Maybe one could argue Zooble wouldn't have lashed out at Jax, but we know that isn't true. We all know that Jax still would have been there saying, "I told you so", which would have had Zooble lashing out anyway because Jax isn't centering THEIR feelings in a moment where he feels justifiably apathetic.
He warned everyone not to get too invested because it was another adventure. From his perspective, their hurt feelings are their own fault. He tried to spare them the heartbreak, but no one listened to him.
And that isn't to justify Jax, but that is simply who he is and that is how people actually behave. We choose when we care for others and we justify when we choose not to. He never cared about their feelings, but it isn't about him caring. It's about recognizing that even if he is being a jerk, he's not objectively doing anything wrong.
And this is where I get to the point that people do not require anyone else's permission to live. You are not obligated to live for anyone but yourself. You are not mandated to care about anyone but yourself. That doesn't mean there are no consequences. The consequence of pushing a cup off the counter is that you now have a broken cup. But if what you want is a broken cup, the consequences are not causing you pain. And if the consequence does not cause you pain, and life itself is the singular act of survival in one's preferred state, what do you need to change?
Jax doesn't want to care, so he doesn't, his motivation fits his behavior, as such he has no reason to change his behavior. The comfort of others doesn't concern him because their discomfort is an inconvenience to him. He is in an agitated state because everyone is sitting in their feelings when his whole character is all about running away from vulnerability.
But let's make this more difficult:
What if it was true and Jax trapped everyone in the Circus forever?
They are still in the circus.
And so this is where we go back to Anon's questions. When you do something so horrible, so terrible, so hurtful that you can't ever take it back?
Because the logic changes. Now we are no longer addressing a closed loop of futility. It should change things, because now it was not inevitable. Now Jax actually took something from everyone.
And in this scenario, Jax has taken the "ultimate" something: Their lives. He unilaterally trapped them forever in the Digital Circus where he has taken their whole futures away from them.
So what now?
Jax did something arguably unforgivable. I would point out how people are rejecting Caine's genuine and heart-felt apology that I doubt anyone would accept if Jax came back and apologized after realizing the gravity of the situation. Not only do I think that the audience wouldn't have forgiven him no matter what he did, I think it would have been too much to ask the characters to forgive Jax.
So then, what do you do now? What is the appropriate reaction?
Torture him?
Isolate him?
He can't die, all that would happen is what happens in the finale: He abstracts.
And with the reviews coming from audiences on how they felt about the ending, many people are deeply upset with Jax Abstracting. Some claim it was the coward's way out, treating it like a suicide to avoid responsibility. Others claim it robbed Jax of a "proper ending" and becoming a better person. And then there are some, as Anon points out, who see it as narrative punishment.
While I give those feelings space because I understand how one could form those conclusions, feelings of an audience are not indicative of the function of a narrative choice.
In my post on Existential Authenticity in TADC, I broke down the narrative functioning of Abstracting in-universe. The psychological deterioration that leads to a character Abstracting is structurally consistent: it's when the pain of a broken heart can no longer be coped with.
Characters abstract when they can no longer bring themselves to keep struggling, for any reason.
For Ribbit, it's because she loved Jax so much that she felt she failed him when he started treating her differently. She couldn't cope with the fact that she had hurt Jax so much, somehow, and couldn't make it right, that she Abstracted.
Kaufmo Abstracted because he felt that he lost both his friends. He never recovered from Ribbit because Jax refused to be there for him, and he watched Jax, one of his closest friends, become someone he didn't know at all.
And Jax abstracted because he finally stopped running away from the responsibility. He finally allowed his heart to break. Jax Abstracting was the consequence of him finally taking accountability.
You can never take back anything you do, all you can do is paper over it with apologies and promises not to do it again. But that hole is still there. Even if you spend the rest of your life trying to reinforce it and hide it, you know it happened. You can't make it un-happen.
So to answer you, Anon:
one of the strangest truths I learned in my life is, sometimes, the greatest kindness you can give is never trying to make up at all. It is possible to do something so awful that the only way the other person can survive you is by you being the villain unworthy of redemption.
So you redeem yourself anyway. But not to make it up to them. Not to try and prove you are better than that. But because you're still alive and are worthy of living, and also have already done enough.
Performing accountability is to say "Look how much I changed. I did the work so I deserve to move on from my past."
Taking accountability is realizing that changing in the future doesn't change the past. You may never be allowed to move on from it, and you accept that and keep living with yourself anyway.
the best fanfiction you've ever read was written by a woman in her 40s before she made dinner for her kids. it was written by a teenager after school when they should've been studying for a history test. and a barista came up with the idea while they cleaned the espresso machine and busser fact-checked it on their break and the post-doc edited between writing grant proposals and the nurse apologized for typos in the notes after a long shift and behind every drabble and one-shot and multi-chapter fic there is a person with a wonderful and interesting and chaotic life and it is such a privilege that we get to be apart of it because they decided to do this thing we all share, for fun.
It's always hard reading about the violence committed to steal America, but the buffalo is always like... That's some inhuman shit. Everyone is burning in hell for that one. Wdym there were thirty to sixty MILLION buffalo in 1800, and by 1900 there were only 300 left. THREE HUNDRED. Do you know, can you fathom the amount of purposeful cruelty required to kill NINETY NINE PERCENT of a population of an animal, just to spite and murder the living Native people who existed and thrived with them? All this, for White Power and Entitlement?? Sickening.
A 91 year old grandmother was given a welfare check after being unresponsive to her family. When police showed up, she was in her room breaking her personal record on a video game😭
I think quite possibly my favorite line from GLaDOS in all of the media she's been in is "Federal regulations require me to inform you that this next test chamber... Is lookin' pretty good."
