i think given the show's message the best case scenario for jax is an implied chance for redemption around the end, whether he does so or not is left up to interpretation.
Fair take, and i can actually see something like this happening.
I don't think he'd take any initiative in that direction by himself, so as long as Pomni doesn't cut ties with him until the end of the show, I think his chance will remain "intact". There's Kinger, too, who I don't think holds any grudge against him, but we've never seen these two interact properly.
Regarding the others, I just don't believe it's likely he would reconnect with them until then. The bridges are completely carbonized at this point.
I really disagree with your take on Jax. He could absolutely be redeemed. But I don’t think he’s going to be redeemed at the end of the show. We could see him in the *process* of being redeemed/changing for the better, but having it be one way or the other on redemption would probably cause a civil war in the fandom
My take is not that he's irredeemable. I don't think he's done anything bad enough to reach that point even. I just don't think he WILL be redeemed or even get into that process because he doesn't strike me as the type of character who was written with the intent of going through a character redemption arc. Nothing in the show indicates he will, and nothing Gooseworx has said until this point does either. If anything, her posts about him indicate the opposite, really
A very personal and self indulgent rant about why I think Jax is terrible
Ok, so, I have been working on an analysis of episode 6, and I’m gonna be completely honest…it’s been really fucking hard, because trying to dissect certain scenes in a critical manner without getting what closely equates to white-hot reflexive anger about what happens in them has been a challenge. There’s something that I think that I need to address regarding Jax that specifically pisses me off before I can actually dive into why this episode was phenomenal.
Because make no mistake, I loved episode 6, I rank it as the 2nd best episode of the series, and I really want to bring up about what’s been on my mind that makes it so good. But I just need to get a few things off my chest so I can finally move on with talking about this show again in the way that I want to.
Full disclosure, this is not meant to convince anyone why Jax should be hated or that you’re a bad person for liking him. And if you come into the comments or reblog this post trying to defend your stance on why he’s actually not as terrible as I make him out to be or that I’m taking what happens to a bunch of cartoon characters way too seriously or why you think he actually deserves my love instead of my contempt, I’m deleting it and blocking you on the spot.
I just want to vent.
Alright, let me just cut right to the chase.
This moment here
Was legitimately triggering
And it makes Pomni’s subsequent reaction of just fucking going off on the obnoxious motherfucker that much more cathartic
Because nothing pisses me off more than someone backtracking what they said that clearly went too far by putting the blame on the person who was offended for being offended
I’ve grew up with people like this, and it is fucking exhausting
But more importantly, it solidified exactly the kind of asshole Jax is that I want to keep far away from me
People who find Jax to have the most depth out of all the characters, I’m glad you’re enjoying your puddle of a man. Sincerely, I’m glad that he’s a character that you can go crazy for and he has so many layers that you can peel back and play with to your heart’s content.
But to me, Jax has always been kind of a glass onion. A character that may appear complicated, but their covering is so transparent that it doesn’t take much to see their core. And at Jax’s core, he’s a selfish coward.
Which is why as a character I didn’t find him to be all that endearing compared to the others, cuz he doesn’t give me much else other than “Insecure bully”, and later “insecure bully who also misses his friend”
That’s not to say that I didn’t find him entertaining or his behavior interesting to analyze, because obviously that’s not true. I just wasn’t inclined to sympathize or project any headcanons about how he just needed one good hug to be better. He wasn’t a misunderstood jerk, I understood him just fine, it’s the deliberate choice to be shitty to other people that I don’t tend to tolerate
And it can be quite aggravating to once in a while stumble onto a take that claims that because Jax’s behavior manifests from a trauma this means that it entitles him to some patience and understanding, or even worse, forgiveness and empathy from the victims of their abusive nature
I don’t know who needs to hear this, but I’m just gonna say it, you don’t owe the people who hurt you your patience, nor are you lesser for refusing to extend that patience
Now, there’s a big difference between a misanthrope and a bully. Misanthropes would rather fully not engage with people for reasons that vary, but generally it’s because they don’t like or trust them. They will do whatever they can to be as isolated as possible. They will not be friendly, they will bare teeth, they will push others away because isolation is much more manageable and it makes feel like they’re less likely to get hurt. Bullies, however, need to be around other people that they can torment so they can feel better about themselves, they actively seek out their victims and seek validation from like minded mean spirited individuals because it gives them the satisfaction of having power over someone to compensate for having little to no power in other aspects of their lives. Taking and coveting control are a bully’s main goal.
And because of that, bullies have always been losers to me, and no amount of sad backstory or tragic reasonings or self justifications is ever gonna make me think of them as anything less than just losers
Do I pity the fact that they are commonly victims of their own terrible coping mechanisms and quite often victims themselves that led to them developing the said coping mechanism? Sure. Do I think they deserve death? No. Do I think that bullies deserve the chance to change and eventually find a way to be genuinely happy? Absolutely, I actually quite adore characters like that. I adore characters that grow from a crack in the concrete, get stomped on repeatedly, yet still find the strength to bloom into something that defied previous expectations. I find that kind of resilience rather beautiful
But Jax, is not that kind of character, and the show has been repeatedly beating its audience over the head with the fact that his arc is not about getting better. It’s him making the conscious choice to double-down on his bullshit despite the fact that it’s obviously making him absolutely miserable
And choosing to hurt people out of some flimsy attempt at self preservation, will automatically make someone unsympathetic in my eyes
What ultimately makes me think of Jax, and by extension a lot of troubled male characters that are generally favored by their fandoms, as genuinely awful:
Is the utter lack of personal accountability
And for a character to receive any kind of redemption arc that’s actually worth something, they need to acknowledge the people they’ve hurt and make an effort to change
(Also, the key to redemption, is to not expect complete absolution for those efforts)
Jax has proven time and time and time again, that he won’t
Even him getting explosively defensive over Pomni unintentionally insinuating that the reason why people abstract is because [he] doesn’t take things seriously enough, goes to show that just accusing him of being responsible for someone else’s “death” sets him off
He doesn’t want to acknowledge consequences
This is why I sincerely doubt that Gooseworx wrote him with a redemption arc in mind, because it takes more than just a character having someone to support them in their journey and not giving up on them, they need to not give up on themselves, and Jax already has
Jax essentially lost what little respect I had for him (and mind you there wasn’t much in the bucket to begin with) when he admitted that he doesn’t think of the others as people
And I’m well aware that he includes himself on that front, which is why he uses this self defeating nihilism to cover up his own self loathing
But there’s a clear double standard that he exhibits between how he thinks the others should be seen and therefore treated and how he prefers to be seen and therefore treated
If he really believed his own cope, he wouldn’t get so petulantly upset when things don’t go exactly his way. If the benefit of no one being real truly meant that everyone has the freedom to do what they please, he wouldn’t try to force everyone to act a certain way just to feel more comfortable in his own skin. So it’s pretty obvious by that point that he’s just saying all this to take the agency away from his own shitty behavior. If he’s not a full on liar, then he’s a full on hypocrite.
And, frankly, when we get to the point where we see him visibly struggling and regretting his choices
I could not give two iotas of a shit about how bad he was feeling in that moment. My pity well had pretty much dried up at that point for him. Call me heartless if you want, but the only thing that was going through my mind in this moment was, “fucking good”
Because here’s the thing, the level of cruelty that Jax put Pomni through, to taunt, lie, deny, belittle, and poke at her most deepest insecurities, are all very conscious acts of malice. Cruelty, and I’m not talking about knee jerk reactions like yelling or hitting, I mean true cruelty takes actual effort. Jax deliberately went out of his way to callously put Pomni down so that he doesn’t have to face the reality that she was starting to actually like being around him. His cruelty was needless and irrational, and while I can sympathize with the fear of experiencing loss again, I don’t see that as the only driving force for it
People who experienced cruelty do have the power to not be cruel in turn
Or at the very least, learn to not spread that cruelty onto those that care about them
Jax is not a asshole who is secretly good, he’s an asshole who’s (not so) secretly scared
So, do feel like Jax deserves to suffer alone for everything that he’s done. Well, that’s not something I wish on anyone, even someone as pathetic as him
But until he does anything to show me that he wants to actively change within the story, I’m not really gonna care about his whole pity party.
This post pretty much encapsulates the way I currently feel about Jax.
In episode 6, when he expressed he doesn't see the others as actual people and doesn't take anything seriously because "it's just a game bro", for the first time, I felt like I was able to understand why he acts the way he does. If he truly believed what he was saying, maybe he didn't see any of the absurd things he's done to the others as being actually harmful. He's just "trolling his friends" by that logic. He's the "funny one", after all. However, by the end of that episode and after episode 7, it's clear he doesn't really believe any of that bs.
Jax is an Asshole with a capital A who doesn't want to face the reality of who he truly is, hence why he looked offended when Pomni asked him if, by his own archetypes logic, he'd be "the villain". While I personally don't think this show has any actual villains, his reaction to her comment goes to show that he feels uncomfortable with the idea that people may interpret his actions in such a strongly negative way, even though they would be completely justified in doing so.
At this point, the "nothing is real and therefore nothing really matters" cope that he WANTS to believe, to me, seems more like something he tells himself so he doesn't feel too bad about any of the terrible shit he does to people. He doesn't like the idea of being seen as "evil" by others, and he doesn't want to see himself as a bad person either. That's why he miserably tried to downplay as a joke all of the cruel stuff he told Pomni by the end of the adventure in ep 6. Seeing someone feel genuinely emotionally hurt because of him makes him uncomfortable, because it forces him to see firsthand the effects that his mentality and behavior have on people. And even though he most likely didn't actually mean what he said to her, especially since he hasn't forgotten about ribbit or kaufmo, this man ABSOLUTELY CANNOT take accountability for ANYTHING he does, so pulling the "it's not that deep" card is his way to go about it.
Jax really doesn't strike me as the type of character who would be willing to change for the better at all. I see him as the type of character who will grasp at anything he can to stay the way he is and keep things the way they are, even if that means keeping everyone else stagnated with him, as we saw in episode 7.
Pressing the red button is genuinely the worst thing Jax has ever done (on-screen) so far, and it absolutely baffles me to see people overlooking that fact because "he was right tho". It really doesn't matter that it was all fake because at the moment he freaked out and rushed to press the button, he genuinely thought they had a real chance to escape! and by doing what he did, he basically showed everyone he's got no problem with dooming them all because of whatever unknown shit he's got going on irl.
With only 2 more episodes left, there's no way this guy is getting a redemption arc, and like OP said, I don't think Gooseworx wrote him to be a "misunderstood redeemable bully" type.
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