I’m gonna elaborate on what I mean by this:
He is very flawed and doesn’t understand humans; he hurts them and feels no remorse for his actions until the very last second.
But he also tries his best, and he does eventually come to realize why what he’s doing is wrong. He redeems himself and becomes a good friend to the rest of the circus members.
This was not meant to throw shade onto Caine, but I see why that might have been interpreted that way, so I apologize.
Jax is a great, complicated character.
He’s a bully. He hurts others and pushes people away. His actions have lead to the abstractions of both of his friends.
But it’s also easy to understand why he acts that way. He’s constantly paranoid the people around him are going to hurt him because of how his parents (especially his mother) treated him in the past. He pushes them away before they can hurt him and before he can be abandoned by them. He hurts them first before they can hurt him.
Does this justify his actions? No, absolutely not. How Jax treats others is not excusable by his trauma.
Jax did make his friends abstract, but I highly doubt it was deliberate. Jax debates checking up on Ribbit multiple times in the flashback. He never ends up going through with it, but it’s unlikely that he would even consider going to them if he was purposefully trying to get her to abstract. And Jax his clearly distraught after he runs away when he finds out Kaufmo abstracted.
Jax being a bully is also not a good point on why he deserves to be hated. Jax has been a bully since episode one. He’s picked on all the characters (especially the girls) since the show began. Yet Jax has not gotten this amount of hate until recently.
I’ve also seen a lot of people upset with how much screen time Jax gets conspired to the other characters. This is understandable, but at the same time, it was important to the story for Jax to have gotten as much screen time as he did. His abstraction wouldn’t have been nearly as impactful (or even as relevant) had he had less screen time. The amount of time Jax got on screen was important to the flow and outcome of the story.
Jax also does have that brief moment of almost-redemption when he finally reaches out and accepts the hug from Pomni.
TL;DR: Jax is a complicated, flawed character who is very much not black-and-white. His past traumas are a huge factor as to why Jax acts the way he does, and while that does not make it excusable, it makes it more understandable. He gets a lot of hate compared to other characters with even more questionable decision-making, and personally I think that’s unfair.
Overall, I believe both characters are very much redeemable given the time and care.
Think whatever you want to, but this is my opinion.
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