Sometimes I think of how Jax was presented for a good deal of the show.
Ngl I kinda missed when Jax’s motivation was like. A “guy” who gets bored playing Grand Theft Auto so he goes on an in-game rampage. A kid who tries out Genocide route for fun. It’s literally just a game and NPCs so it doesn’t matter.
Except what if the NPCs were real people. You’d be doing actual harm so of course you just pretend it’s still just a game because you don’t want to accept you’ve become a Bad Person.
And I feel it also applies on a wider level to abuse because not every sad backstory makes someone abusive, similarly not every abuser had a sad backstory. The simpler fact is that a lot of people don’t take it seriously when they do a bad thing because sometimes we have a moment where we snap but we figure it doesn’t matter because the other person will move on with their life.
Every relationship has its lows right? You apologize and move on and eventually because everyone’s imperfect it’ll happen again. No biggie.
But you keep doing it and the rate and severity crank up. A person who was so nice at first realizes they have nothing to fear about impressing someone or hiding their darker self. And they realize the other person is too invested in this relationship so they can just let it all out. And then just not care because they know that person will still be there for them.
And when confronted over this they panic because I can’t have just casually become a Bad Person, I know what a Bad Person looks like and it’s not me! And their conception of a Bad Person is a mustache-twirling supervillain.
On a more banal level, some people just don’t see others as having actual feelings, like NPCs. They get over it anyway. Hence misogyny.
Jax pretends they’re all cartoons because that means the damage doesn’t matter, it’s slapstick as their bodies snap back into place and they all return to the status quo. “His” question of whether Gangle can ever be happy… He’s asking Pomni to validate the justification that if Gangle is always sad then it makes no difference if Jax is that reason. Ergo Jax is not doing anything wrong.
He just wants it to be a game with fun and none of the chores of emotional consideration or consequences in how he conducts himself, hence Jax making a point to treat his romp with Pomni in the gun adventure is just meaningless fun and not an actual emotional connection. He’s a guy. He’s a guy who said he didn’t really care for that date beyond sex. He doesn’t want a deep relationship because that’s a drag.
For a while I even suspected that what happened with Ribbit was as simple as that: Jax was a friend of hers but he did a lot of shitty pranks and jabs. He felt he was just laughing with, not AT her. Ribbit went along because she didn’t want to be a downer because Jax hates it when people get serious about anything. And eventually Ribbit couldn’t handle it and she abstracted.
Jax couldn’t get why, or rather chose not to. He insisted it had to have been something else that did it. He couldn’t have just accidentally made someone abstract because then he’s evil and he doesn’t feel evil so that’s not true. The others are still around and so he keeps acting that way to prove in some pseudo-scientific experiment that it had nothing to do with the way he treated Ribbit. Gangle and all the rest are control samples.
But deep down he knows why. That’s the other reason why Jax pushes Pomni away; He knows what he does to people like Ribbit. He cares enough about Pomni to warn her not to get too invested. But Jax doesn’t care enough to just work on himself so Pomni can get what she wants without having to die for it.
Jax is a kid who just wants to play and let the women around him handle the chores of unpacking the emotional consequences for him. And that plays into this Annoying Younger Brother he had with Ragatha, a dynamic that isn’t just Pomni.
It felt self-aware how this was written. Almost feminist. A way to tie in gender commentary but also tie in Jax’s whole rationalization for abuse into the premise and titular setting of the show. A way to tie into Caine making this all kid-friendly and Jax is the kid who wants to stay in Neverland forever and that’s why he presses the button to stay. But then the show drops the implications of that and even Caine doesn’t bring it up for some reason…?
All of this could play brilliantly into the revelation that they’re all NPCs. If they’re all brain scans then none of them are real. The story’s aim at being more character driven and emotional is now in a struggle with this revelation. Jax’s own past doesn’t matter. Maybe the cast members can even be cloned. If they abstracted they could get brought back reset like Gummigoo like none of it happened.
…But instead it feels like the show drops this kinda brilliant premise for a character that feels more mature in exploring the motives for abuse beyond “Who hurt them” for what should be a compelling transfem suicide concept but the problem is that Jax only ever got love and understanding and support for her gender and the transphobia ended a long while ago and she’s in a circus where none of it matters. Zooble exists out in the open.
And so a story about how transphobia kills people is undermined by the fact that it was Jax who did to Ribbit and Kaufmo and herself. And the story suddenly centers itself this pity party. Episode 6 felt like it captured the way Jax gets serious and petulant the moment the joke turns on him, he gets violent but then knows how to put on a mask as soon as a new friend for whom this behavior can have consequences shows up.
And the show just ignores that and it’s like. This should’ve been two separate characters if you’re not gonna explore that. Jax the guy who just wants to play games and not be burdened by emotional obligations (those are chores for the older sister to handle) and Jax the transfem who is the vector for the lethality of transphobia.
Jax’s transfem identity is something that could be so interesting to have her philosophy and brain scan revelation interact with. She says nothing matters yet she is terrified of transphobia in a circus where it doesn’t exist. She isn’t even a biological “male” and never really was so what does it matter? Yet Jax refuses to engage with HERself. Maybe it’s because to be trans is to change and for someone who revels in the power of a status quo without consequences that is terrifying. It’d be funny if Finding Meaning in a Stagnant Life had its dark echo in Jax’s ideology.
But the show never bridges these two aspects of Jax’s character, it feels like a switch of “Forget this ever happened” because Jax just having a casual sleazy confession of “I guess I didn’t want to think too hard about what I was doing” doesn’t draw you to saccharine tears as much as “She was a victim of transphobia” does. But Gooseworx could’ve had her cake and eaten it. Jax just not wanting to engage with real life and consequences just ironically felt more real.
