Digital Circus fans accidentally proving the show’s point...
Hi, I decided to write this because I’ve seen the Digital Circus fandom turn into a huge war lately… and I wanted to put my thoughts somewhere about what I’ve been seeing.
I don’t want anyone to change their favorite character or “excuse” anyone’s mistakes, but I do want to maybe open people’s minds a little about REAL people…
I’m going to ignore arguments.
I genuinely just want people to think for a moment, so if this text reached you, I hope you always have amazing people in your life (:
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So… Gooseworx has said multiple times that Jax is kind of a self-insert for her, while also constantly calling him a “bad person,” insulting him, treating him like TRASH.
People usually ignore the first part (the self-insert part) and blindly embrace the second one (“trash,” “terrible,” etc).
But let’s talk as creators for a second...
A LOT of people write self-inserts not as “this is my idealized self 🥰” but as:
“this is the side of me I hate / fear / feel ashamed of.”
And Jax REALLY feels like that kind of character...
Because he’s annoying, cruel, avoids intimacy, mocks everything, runs away from vulnerability, provokes others before they can hurt him, acts like someone desperately trying to seem impossible to reach.
That is a VERY real defense mechanism. VERY real.
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And when Gooseworx calls him “trash,” “terrible,” etc… honestly, I don’t read that as “look how evil he is.” I read it more as: “this character represents parts of myself that deeply bother me.”
Especially because authors are usually MUCH crueler to characters that resemble themselves.
But let’s remember: this is how Gooseworx seems to see herself. That’s HER personal perception, and it may or may not be true.If Jax really carries parts of her emotionally, then when she calls him “trash,” she may also be talking about herself. And honestly… when your friends talk about themselves like that, lacking self-esteem and puting themselves down, are you really comfortable agreeing with them?
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There’s even that classic phenomenon:
favorite character → treated gently
emotional self-insert → thrown directly into the blender of suffering
Because writing becomes a way to externalize insecurity. And I think fandom culture makes this SO much worse.
Because when an author jokes that a character is trash… part of the fandom starts treating that as absolute truth.
Then it becomes: “oh so he deserves suffering,” “he’s irredeemably abusive,” “he’s a monster,” etc.
When sometimes the character is actually just emotionally broken.
And honestly? Jax never felt “evil evil” to me.
He feels deeply dysregulated. Almost all of his behavior feels like dissociation through humor, a need for control, and the need to provoke reactions because reaction = confirmation of existence.
He constantly avoids real vulnerability.
He reminds me A LOT of the kind of person who makes everyone laugh so nobody notices they’re drowning. Except in his case, he’d rather people simply hate him, and he’s okay with that... (maybe not toooo okay, but that's not the point here)
And that aligns VERY strongly with self-deprecating creator humor too.
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I’ve followed Gooseworx for a long time, and looking at everything she’s written, I can honestly feel traces of that in her too. And it’s honestly painful, because a lot of people use self-deprecation to cope with insecurity.
People have a habit of blindly accepting everything an author says without questioning ANYTHING, but words can carry completely different meanings depending on context and the feeling.
Gooseworx seems to have that kind of relationship of “I’m going to hit this character before anyone else can.”
That happens A LOT with insecure people. Speaking from experience.
“if I call him trash first, nobody can hurt me with it.”
And honestly? Sometimes creators use characters like that to explore ugly impulses without directly saying “I am literally like this.”
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Because human beings have ugly sides. Everyone does. Some people just turn those sides into art.
And I think it’s kind of sad when fandoms take “emotionally flawed character” and turn it into a “moral punching bag.”
Because Digital Circus itself talks a lot about broken people reacting badly to suffering. And Jax is practically the mascot of that idea.
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People love traumatized characters until they start acting traumatized.
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So in the end, this is not a “forgive him for hurting your favorite character” post. It’s more of a “let’s look beyond words and try to understand what a REAL PERSON might actually be feeling.”
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That’s what psychology is. That’s what human interaction is.
And just like Gooseworx uses Jax, there are many people using not only him, but also Ragatha, Pomni, Zooble, etc, to feel safer in their own skin.
Even though they’re fictional, the way people treat others who use fictional works for comfort says far more about the cruelty inside the person attacking others without empathy than it says about the fictional character, or the person identifying with them.
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Anyway, peace~
