"You want to hold onto that part of you that still thinks it's part of that world, but in the end, what does it get you?"
These moments with Jax are so fascinating to me in hindsight because what they imply about him as a character is completely different from what we actually got in the end.
The way he tenses up when Ragatha alludes to him having friends, his stunned reaction when she actually apologizes to him, the offense he takes at the implication that he's trying to corrupt Pomni, the horror he displays when left alone with his memories, and the way he blows up at her when he thinks she's accusing him of being the reason why his friends abstracted- as Ragatha once did- all paint the picture of someone who blames himself for what happened to his friends and thinks everyone else does too. Someone who said or did the wrong thing at the wrong time and hurt the people he loved without meaning to. Someone who's so afraid of driving anyone else to abstraction that he intentionally pushes others away to protect them from him. Someone who used to be better than this...thing he's become and doesn't like it but thinks he's too far gone to ever be that way again.
And then in the finale, he's shown abusing and isolating his closest friend who did absolutely nothing to deserve it, refusing to take any accountability for his actions and ultimately driving her to abstraction, having absolutely disgusting fantasies about harassing Gangle after Zooble's abstraction- and yes, fantasies. Those were NOT intrusive thoughts, trust me, I know- and just generally being the exact irredeemable bastard he tried to convince Pomni he was in Episode 6.
(I was gonna put more screenshots here but the wiki doesn't have all that many rn and I am NOT going back through that fucking finale to get them you CAN'T MAKE ME-)
And I'm sorry but like...I just find that boring. Like, the Jax we got in the finale was so much less interesting than the Jax we saw in Episode 5-8.
He was still a dick in those episodes but he felt remorse, he had lines he wouldn't cross, he had people he cared about, and he seemed genuinely shaken when the others wouldn't give up on him. He felt like a real person, one who'd let himself fall into self-destruction to deal with a nightmarish situation, but who still had a heart after everything.
So to see the writing go, "Actually no, forget all that happened, he's irredeemable and now he's dead!" is just kind of lame. It feels like an attempt to subvert audience expectations like with killing off Gummigoo or the entirety of Episode 7 but in this case it renders like half the show functionally useless as they build up Jax to be a completely different character than the one we actually got, meaning that the time we invested into him turned out to be a waste.
For as bad as the others got the shaft in the finale, I honestly think Jax made it out the worst because everything it felt like his character was building towards abruptly got thrown out in favor of painting him as the irredeemable monster he tried and failed to convince Pomni he was and then just unceremoniously killing him off. It's not so much a cautionary tale as much as it is just an aimless mess of a character arc that looks like it's going somewhere interesting before making a sharp U-turn off a cliff.
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