obsessed with the Helena and Irving parallel and what it says about the aspects of our identity we think are fundamental (but aren't)...
Like Outie Irving assumes his Innie is just as radically anti-Lumon as he is. He assumes his hatred of Lumon is something ingrained in his personality! That's why he stays up at night drinking coffee and making paintings, because he hopes that when his innie dreams about the testing floor, he'll say "okay bet" and start exploring. That's what Outie Irving would do, after all. But he miscalculated! His hatred of Lumon isn't inherent--- his desire for meaning and art and spirituality is inherent. That's what his hatred for Lumon is built on. But in a world where there's no meaning outside of Lumon propaganda, of COURSE his innie would become ridiculously devoted to the company.
And Helena!! She is the corporation, that's her whole identity. She presumably assumed that Helly would be just as pro-Lumon as she is. But she miscalculated too! Her devotion to the company isn't inherent, her headstrong and entitled nature is what's inherent! And in a world where she's denied any agency whatsoever, that manifests as rebellion.
It's the same dynamic flipped on its head. They both sent their innies in there with opposite intentions--- one to take down the company, one feed the company's expansion--- only to realize that rebellion and devotion aren't inherent characteristics. Their innies have become the exact opposite of their outie selves, while still being exactly the same!! Because even though your personality is inherent, the values you hold are determined circumstantially. OUGH IT'S SO GOOD.
y'all ever just have such a shitty life and it gets so much shittier that you scroll tumblr to look at doomed yuri funnybunny to try and feel okay?
also sorry about not posting in forever, i've been a ghost on tumblr and js wanted to vent a bit and ask a genuine question
Ts is a little long but I needed to post it. It was 4:18 am when I wrote it. Enjoy
I just had a dream that Jax was in Fortnite but her name was daisy bell and she was an npc and if you had a certain object you could call her in to rapid fire on an enemy until either her kr the enemy died. If she killed them than her ears would perk up and she would say โoh, hey, I actually did it.โ And u could goย ย talk to her and sheโd tell you not to die ( โdonโt die, kid,โ ), throw you a healing item, and skip away. Also when you called her in or just found her she was always skipping. The only difference in her sprite was that she had her bow on. If you find her out in the open after/ when someone didnโt call her and she sees you, sheโll pop over with a smile ( โhey, friend,โ in her snarky tone) and u can all to her and sheโll say something about hiding out to not die ( โhiding, really? Well, you got this far, better stick it out.โ)ย ย then drop a healing item AND the thing u can call her with. If she finds you when youโre right next to a wall and you happen to go back next to it, sheโll turn around, walk over, lean to look behind the wall, and if she sees you, you get the other interaction, and if she doesnโt, she says something confused ( โcoulda sworn Iโฆeh, whatever.โ ) and skips off.ย
Jax haters will do anything but admit that maybe being trapped in a virtual reality for years while being a suicidal closeted trans woman with a shitty real life ON TOP of grieving the only friend you had might eventually make you a jerk who's not exactly enjoyable to be around.
you're allowed to draw. draw badly even. draw and then delete it. draw and rework it and then delete it anyway. draw only half of it and the other half three years later. in one style or another. in different styles in the same week. traditional or digital. you're literally allowed to draw however you want
you have permission to pick that 2 year old "abandoned" project back up. it's not mad at you for setting it aside. and maybe time and distance have helped ease or erase the things that made you put it down in the first place.
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.
You 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.
* using they/them pronouns to refer to Jax, as they never fully got to transition and is still using he/him irl it seems.
One of the most tragic things about Jaxโs abstraction is that they not only couldโve turned to Pomni for support, but literally any human in the circus.
They couldโve talked to Ragatha about having a complicated relationship with oneโs mother.
They couldโve talked to Zooble about gender/body dysphoria.
They couldโve talked to Gangle about masking, anxiety, and depression.
They couldโve talked to Kinger while lucid, who couldโve been the father figure they never had and helped them unlearn harmful aspects of toxic masculinity (plus heโs a loving girl dad).
I know the point is that some people canโt be saved from themselves. Ribbit really, really tried to be there for them and Jax pushed her away (and everyone else).
I wish fans would stop woobifying or damning Jax. The idea that Jax *couldโve* been redeemed and that their fate was self-inflicted can coexist.
๐ฒ เฃชโ ๐น เฑจเง @crqzytogether77 - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
