Tadc ep 9 spoilers
No one's gonna read this but I had to write my thoughts (mainly about Jax) somewhere. Don't worry, they are positive.
I absolutely love the ending. It fits so well with the theme of TADC, which is... How important is acception.
Everyone in the circus has to accept that they can't leave, and then has to accept they're not real people too.
Being unable to accept the circus for a long time causes an incompatibility between their physical form and the brain files, causing abstraction.
That's why I think Ribbit's abstraction wasn't about Jax, but Jax could've prevented it and instead left her to "die" alone.
So the last episode HAD to be jax-centric. Because everyone else has accepted who and where they are. Jax never did: they hated themselves the whole time and only survived by convincing themselves that nothing was real.
Jax is the best representation I have ever seen of internalized transphobia, it's clear that Gooseworx had experience herself and was the best person to tell this story.
Yes, internalized transphobia makes you feel like you're "the evil one", then it makes you hurt others to fit with the evil image you have of yourself. It can be empowering as long as you don't care about others. But it also leaves you lonely.
Jax cared about his mom, about Ribbit, about Kaufmo, about Pomni. And they forced themselves to stop caring, hurting everyone in the process.
Jax's mom cared about them (as shown by the hug). Did that stop her from laughing at them when they came out and showed themselves? No. So Jax starts associating care and hugs with "eventually this person will see me vulnerable and laugh at me".
Jax never comes out to Ribbit, but Ribbit gets it on her own. That makes Jax panic, and think they cared too much and didn't hide themselves enough, so someone found out. They would never care again. They tried to gaslight her and preventively told Kaufmo that Ribbit would spread fake news, scared that Kaufmo would find out their secret too. It's fine that Ribbit and Kaufmo abstracted: no one would care about Jax again, no one would hurt them like their mom did.
But then he started caring about Pomni, so he had to push her away too. Pomni is with Ribbit and Kaufmo, laughing at their naked skinned yellow body, in Caine's nightmare torture sequence. Their worst fear, the "mom incident" repeating.
No one sees Jax's real abstraction, not even us. They try to handle the "brains scans" news alone, while the others are together. They fail. You can't accept something like that on your own. Not even us viewers are allowed in their space, there's no one helping them.
Jax is scared but no one can know they're scared. They don't even reveal it to Pomni until the very end of their conversation.
Then there's Caine, the one that accepts his destiny, accepts how the humans see him, lets himself change for the better, and is allowed to stay. They're opposites and that's why the last episode is THEIR story.
So I don't wanna hear "critics" being mad at Jax's screentime. Especially the ones that are mad at the fact that it's a "man" and want the women to have the screen time even though it would add nothing to the story. I'm not arguing with you, you're just wrong (and free to block me).
If you've actually read this wow I didn't expect it, thanks.
