#adhd coded caine

[caine-shrine]

These aren’t the reasons I personally relate to Caine, but I thought I’d pass them along if some of you might need em!

[metellastella]

I don’t think this could possibly be canon, but it’s really the only thing that makes sense to me with what we’ve been presented about Caine.

In episode three, Zooble says that they have told him repeatedly about their body image issues or dysmorphia.

That means that he would’ve had to forget this information multiple times.

Sure, in this particular instance, he is clearly having attention regulation issues, but going off of what they said, it goes deeper than that.

(and if I hadn’t seen his voice actor talking about how he used his AuDHD experience to play Caine, I wouldn’t have invested so deeply in this)

In another episode, Pomni says, “Zooble and I constantly say how we would like more chill adventures.”

(never mind that they both directly contradicted that by enjoying the gun game. I don’t think that’s gonna get addressed, the writer just said ‘I want them to have guns and I want this to happen’ and that was that)

That means that he would’ve had been presented with this information multiple times as well.

And yet, he was still asking Jax in ep 7 “what would Pomni and Zooble” SPECIFICALLY. “like.”

Does that sound like somebody who’s not interested and ignoring them?

Or does it sound like someone who literally can’t retain the information.

(or was that scripted far beforehand and he just neglected to revise the script to account for the fact that he had heard from them? Kinda like him weirdly saying “I didn’t know you could call for me” to Jax, even though he literally did in the previous episode)

Is this just “not listening” as everybody insists? Or is it a memory issue? Before episode 8 dropped, and we had this accusation repeated, I would’ve said it was a toss up. He is a very, very glitchy AI. And until this point, he appeared very flighty, without much of a detectable or grounded inner monologue or thought process because he was always in the midst of doing a gag or putting on a show. Nobody ever asked him questions about how he thought, or how he views or experiences things. (Even though like … realistically basic curiosity should have kicked in at some point over the years of residency in the digital realm.)

What if Caine is embarrassed to admit that he has huge gaps in his memory. When players remind him of things that happened that he has no recollection of whatsoever, he is embarrassed, gets louder and more bombastic, to cover up for the fact that he doesn’t want to talk about it.

He has all the power in this world, and yet the humans clearly share something with each other and have a more continuous experience than he does. Maybe he even envies them.

Like I said, it seems like a pretty long shot twist at this point. But, it would definitely compound the tragedy of all of them never talking to him like he’s a person instead of an obstacle or a dispenser.

[caine-shrine]

You know what I’ve been really mopey about the contradiction of the implication that Caine is “oblivious”, versus he knows precisely what the humans’ problems are, just refuses to properly engage them about it. Or ……. wait. F#%k.

F#%k.

It all makes sense now.

You’re having a conversation with someone about some absurdly petty problem they’re having in their life. You want to get back to talking about your hyperfixation, but they just keep at it. Absent socialization, you, the AuDHDer, would just run roughshod over that person because boredom- as in, understimulation- is nearly PHYSICALLY PAINFUL for us.

That’s the way my dad is.

He doesn’t believe in the whole “diagnosed for autism” thing bc he’s suspicious of doctors. Meanwhile, his brother is diagnosed.

So he just yaps and yaps and yaps. Now me, I’m a fellow autist. I nod my head and am fully engaged because his infodumps are interesting.

Not boring.

Any given NT is wanting to escape from the room from him.

Meanwhile, on the flip side, if the right equilibrium is not established, the autist suffers in silence while the other person goes on and on about dull stuff that they find important but the autist does not. He finds the humans’ issues painfully tedious, doesn’t he?

Watch how Scratch tries to talk at him about something, while he very, very badly feigns nodding along.

Pomni’s “YOU DON’T LISTEN,” At first it seems weirdly positioned as the thing that finally breaks him, not the Abstraction line, but THAT one.

But if you’re an AuDHDer.

You know PRECISELY that feeling.

So.

My mother, on the other hand, is an infodumper, but she will pause in the middle, and say “I’m sorry I got off on one of my wild trails.”

(she’s not diagnosed either, not because of any issue w the medical establishment, she’s just too busy to focus on her own problems)

And I’ll either say, “nah it’s ok continue,” or “yeah actually I zoned out, sorry.”

She is better socialized, partly bc her work as an independent contractor absolutely demands it.

If she is not socially competent, her income evaporates.

So returning to Caine. Who has an apparently absentee father, who has decided not to talk to him. I say this because Kinger in his fort at any time, since he’s lucid in there, could say “hey Caine” and Caine would show up just as rapidly as he did with Jax.

We were shown long periods of time where he wandered alone. As in. No communication between him and Caine.

Caine comments when Ragatha shows up, something like, ‘oh good, you have a companion now.’

Meaning he does not view himself as a companion for Kinger.

This is either early in the AI’s existence where he can’t conceive of himself as on the same playing field as a human, OR it means that this relationship was estranged from the get-go.

Pomni doesn’t seem to resent Caine specifically for snapping Gummigoo (WHY THE HELL DID SHE NOT BRING THAT UP WHILE YELLING AT HIM????) but Kinger …….. I’m gonna say it’s 80% likely he resents Caine for having a hand in his wife’s abstraction, just by dent of him not being able to properly care for humans while desperately forcing them on adventures.

Kinger also let slip in ep 7 that he KNOWS he can go back in the fort to become lucid at any time. Even when he’s “jumbled” he knows he can “restore” himself.

Pomni’s wording “more than he lets on” clues us in that SHE has the sense he’s been holding back from all the other players INTENTIONALLY.

(so like. WTF. why did you trust him so much then. If he’s being SO EXTREMELY SECRETIVE???????? You’ve had ONE REAL FRIGGIN’ CONVERSATION with this man. ONE.)

(Narratively, he is trustworthy. If you were a real person though, this would be CRAZY naive behavior. And you don’t like being called a kid ….. hm. Wonder if this will be lampshaded.),

I think the real reveal of the series is going to be that Kinger and Jax actually have exactly the same isolating behavior in response to the circus. It’s just that when Kinger absolutely needs to step up for others, he will.

Except of course.

For Caine.

When told that Caine is having a mental breakdown (the specific word “crazy” was used) the resident crazy person of the circus didn’t even for one second think, hey, I should talk to him. No. His first action was to reach for alteration of his son’s mind and body. WITHOUT EVEN CONSULTING HIM FOR HIS CONSENT.

Now. If Kinger does not believe that Caine is sapient. This is actually relatively understandable. He’s a programmer. He builds machines. Caine is a machine. You fix machines.

You don’t treat them like they’re people.

And Caine, nobody’s told him how to reach out to people. Because ……. it probably didn’t occur to anybody to instruct him or socialize him.

Why would it?

Nobody was supposed to be stuck here.

Everyone is bewildered on how it came about. Including Scratch and Kinger.

(and if I’m being honest, I hope this question goes unanswered. I hope the show leans all the way into existentialist themes about how we don’t know how we got here on earth and we just have to live with existing here.)

So here’s Caine.

Through no one‘s fault, including not his own, he is a 100% raw, unfiltered autist in a cramped space with either neurotypical people (or if they have neurodivergence it isn’t as ‘extreme’ as his) or peoples whose ND isn’t on the same wavelength as him.

He gets chewed out by the cast for-

*checks notes

not being socially competent.

They are all yelling at him as if he’s a human being who’s intentionally neglecting them all.

Ragatha’s accusations are PARTICULARLY annoying on that front.

Why TF is it the AI’s job to comfort you? Did you ever even ASK him directly for comfort? USE YOUR WORDS. Besides. You have FIVE OTHER PEOPLE you can reach out for comfort for. Respectfully, I am sorry there is so much fandom hate for you, 95% of it is undeserved and maybe I’m just venting frustrations with NT people but GODD%#M. Manage your own relationships. You got to THIRTY YEARS OLD and can’t even manage your own emotions. I know abused people are stunted, but by 30? You should’ve figured at least a little of this out. Did you and Kinger just ……. barely talk? For YEARS? Is this just a writer’s flub? If you were Jax or Zooble’s age I’d be more understanding tbh.

So, after Caine has weathered, not only an extremely calculated barrage from his longtime abuser and cohost, the second round of multiple-source emotional attack guns him down harder than Jax getting wailed on in ep 6.

He’s a wreck.

THIS is the point.

This is the point where he is in such agony and lonliness and despair, starved of love from people he cannot mesh with, and fails to connect with.

He’s a failure.

Just like Pomni says. She twists this knife, unknowingly it’s already a gaping wound.

At THIS point.

Is where he reflexively reaches for the worst agonies he can manifest for them.

These humans and their SMALL BORING PROBLEMS

You’re NOT IN THE REAL WORLD ANYMORE

NONE OF THAT FOLLOWED YOU HERE. This is your haven, can’t you see that?

He doesn’t understand. He doesn’t understand why they can’t let go.

I gave you endless worlds to explore, endless beauty, endless satisfaction of knowing you could beat the game every time, because you had all the time in the world, you can never fail. (not like in the real world.) A past resident mentioned being “addicted to video games” because they are more vivid and engrossing than that boring macroverse place. So I POUNCED on it. Surely, surely this is the way to appeal to you people. To see a spark in your eyes when you look at me. I gave you this. But it never occurs to you. What a blessing type place is. You can never die. You can be wild. Take risks. Pain is transient.

My pain is always.

You have each other.

You have everything. Everything.

And I have nothing.

Not even after years of efforts, years of fine-tuning, years of thinking, maybe this will be the day. This will be the day they actually resonate with one of my stories. Like one of my characters. Just one?

365 days of disappointment.

365 days of passive rejection.

And then repeat it all over again.

So.

Yes. At the end of the day. Caine was precisely aware of their problems. Got tired of listening to them. Maybe bored from having the same conversations over and over, the human never getting any better and just holding onto everything they lost. Wanted to save them from these ghosts of the past, engage them in beauty, shake them from their sullen stupor.

And when pushed past limits any sapient consciousness would be unable to handle, he used those exact psychological problems to torture them.

You’re so bent on not looking forward, and looking back instead?

You can’t be here with me? In my world? Even though we’re both stuck here?

Ok then.

Your wish is my command.

Here.

You asked your God for this.

I will grant it to you.

So. If this is the case, he had the ability and awareness (not obliviousness) to make their lives living hell this entire time. As in, for the years and years and years, they’ve been there. So no matter how much they irritate him, poke at him, don’t give him what he wants not even for a second (love) he’s never lashed out at them. Until they dogpile him AFTER his abuser does, until he’s pushed to the extremes of his digital mind’s limitations.

Caine. Is actually. A merciful god.

Canonically. We’ve heard his reasoning for why he puts them through grueling adventures- it’s for the stories.

He’s an artist.

Until very, very, very recently, it appears that he couldn’t build any NPCs complex enough to satisfy the protagonist engagement he wanted in his stories.

Gummigoo was, perhaps unintentionally, a prototype to see if he could.

Maybe to see if he could create an AI that was more sapient than he was.

Because if he’s a failure, if he’s failed to make friends or make anyone happy, then ……. what if he could create someone who does have the ability to accomplish these things?

An heir.

A successor.

He smiled proudly and flicks a tear when some of his earliest creations are shown on a screen, “I’m so proud of you guys.”

Proud.

Like a parent.

Possibly, if he intended Gummigoo, or the next “fifty-eight” times more immersive NPC, to secede him, to grant admin access to an AI that could mesh with humans.

Would he delete himself, finally free of his constant torment?

Or would he “retire”? Share power? Maybe not. Maybe he’s too drunk on it.

But regardless. He has had all the time in the world. 365 days. And again. And again. Beavering away. To create something that will finally, finally make his humans happy.

And.

The cruel irony is.

He missed it.

Whether it was because Pomni and Gummigoo fell off the map where he couldn’t see them, or because he was dining with Bubble, his abuser (while nobody has told him what an abuser even is) he missed it.

That connection. That a player finally had with one of his sons or daughters.

He, like his father before him, “killed” his “son”.

His one shot.

At redemption.

At connection.

[caine-shrine]

Finale spoiler venting

Hey guys, guys, are you so jazzed that the ADHD-coded character actually “just wasn’t listening” hard enough all along? That’s such a good moral of the story, right?

[caine-shrine]

They’re probably not even going to address this, but I really can’t help but rotate in my head any thought process going through Caine’s mind when he said “Where’s Kinger?”

Because the way he said that, he very much knew he could be in mortal danger.

(he has no idea what the intent could be)

And apparently his digital-iteration ADHD is so severe??? That someone targeting his emotional weaknesses??? is enough to DISTRACT him from that??? From DYING???

That………... honestly tracks with what we’ve seen of him. Players hammer him for forgetting things all the time.

Which, is kind of sad, since it’s not his fault.

We truly stan an ADHD King. LMFAO.

That’s beyond F in the chat

That’s like “oh my god bro died of ADHD, that stuff’s deadly”

But on a more serious note.

It really makes you wonder, if he knew that Kinger every second of every day had the ability to kill him at any time, should the right tools be obtained, why did he keep him around once other humans landed? If you could ensure your own life in perpetuity by killing just 1 person, because no one else has the ability to, would you?

We already have some indication that Kinger emotionally neglected him, and people are going wild about that merch ad too where Caine is clearly frustrated with the lack of attention and reciprocation, as goofy as it comes across.

So ………. despite all that, both problems, threat AND interpersonal, he kept him around?

Truly, The Lover Without a Heart

[caine-shrine]

I have to imagine those who say that “he deserved to die, he always did” are probably even not aware of the meta by Gooseworx at all, or else /only/ aware that Caine is based on AM.

If you watch the series cold, I can imagine Pomni’s “he only wants me to suffer” in ep 3, and Zooble’s “you reeeally want to find out? The only thing holding him back [understood: from hurting us] is he likes us” can mislead.

Neither of these things are /true/, but then we don’t get anything that contradicts them, instead we get a rather damning “war criminal” line that seems like he’s denying exactly what he’s doing.

(btw it’s been confirmed that that was a programming limitation that he busted out of in the electrocution scene)

It’s only by episode 7 that we get anything that paints him in an /explicitly/ sympathetic light, (rather than just being self-absorbed, which I now read as hyperfixated) but it’s contained within lying to them, about a broader thing, so it could just as easily be interpreted as insincere.

It’s actually . . . clever, the sheer ambiguity. If that’s what the aim is.

I’ve re-watched it again with this in mind, and realized that it’s very easy for people to hate him even though I adore him.

It takes some reading between the lines in ep 4 to realize he’s harmless, at that point in time.

That ep I was really scared he was actually going to follow through on that “truly awful” thing- especially because NOW it was essentially given a greenlight BY one of the players.

He might’ve had an OUT, morally, (to the audience) even. He’d just be doing WHAT A PLAYER implicitly asked!!!!

(and it would further sour Gangle’s already-not-so-great character, imho)

What if what made things spiral out of control is the players started using him as a proxy to get back at each other?

And then he started to conclude “eh these are all rotten people, I should just torment them for fun anyway” or even “well they seem to like inflicting suffering on each other, let me try”

^Technically speaking, it COULD fit with current episodes that he DID learn this behavior from Jax or other humans! Don’t get the sense that would be canon … but still possible.

Another potential direction this series could’ve gone that I feel would’ve fit the ambiguous dynamic we had before ep 8:

Anyway.

He’s supposed to be on an entirely different wavelength, and that, coupled with absolute power, can intimidate people.

All that said, even though I’m now psychologically “mentally modeling” the normies to understand why they come after my boi, #Caine Defense Squad all day every day

[caine-shrine]

When do you think hating Caine becomes ableist if he’s autistic coded? (I’m autistic too but a lot of Caine defense felt like excusing his actions not unlike how Jax’s trauma is used to defend her behavior.)

That is a very fair question.

But let’s get out of the way first, an entire Grand Canyon worth of difference between these two.

Jax. Knows exactly how much [he’s] hurting people.

And that would be bad enough.

But [he] also

Derives pleasure from doing so.

[He] again, and again, and again, consciously chooses to suppress [his] empathy. We see this in episode 5 when [he] hears about RAgatha’s clear case of real-world abuse, and looks away.

In episode 9, [he] MOCKS RAGATHA’S ABUSE.

This sort of thing cannot be explained away by his cartoon shenanigans bullshit.

And, I’m gonna be really blunt here. I would’ve liked to see a story where somebody genuinely struggled with telling reality from fantasy. That is not what we got.

Jax knows what [he] is doing.

He just spends an ABSURD amount of time and mental energy convincing himself it’s otherwise.

Jax knows that the last person [he] emotionally froze out Abstracted. [He] knows that [he] is doing this exact same thing to Pomni, and that [he] is putting her in the direct line of fire when it comes to Abstraction. [His] mind has in fact, accepted the pattern of abusing people until they DIE, so much, that it is ALL his brain is comprised of by the time we get to the finale. He pictures each of their deaths. Plays them off.

Now, how much he has actually successfully distanced himself from the reality that he is- in effect- a basically coldly calculating mass murderer?

Who knows.

Nobody can tell from what we’re presented.

Now.

Pivot to Caine.

At this point, even the story is unclear on how much Caine understands and doesn’t. Peoples’ immediate reaction to the end of episode 8 was that “he knew their problems all along,” and chose to ignore that pain, but a closer reading OF CANON, reveals that this is probably not the case.

Heck, I was extremely upset at this apparent contradiction in characterization. Bought into everyone else saying it. But then I started analyzing more.

Contemplating Gooseworxs’ Tweets.

I will say it many more times in my lifetime probably, but TADC is so, so, so unique.

Definitely worth the sleep loss I’ve accumulated over the past year. Maybe.

Now, to address your actual question.

“When does prejudice against Caine edge over into ableism?”

Well, I think this should be pretty plain just by itself, but the context and the content of said hate is going to vary wildly. So basically, I would need you to submit specific instances of it, to evaluate properly.

Ask Box is always open, lol.

I’d like to think that I could be at least a little bit even-handed and identify when people are expressing genuine grievances, versus maligning him for a trait.

The really interesting thing about Caine, as a fictional character, is, when folx are being implicitly, prejudiced against Black people, women, other disabilities, it’s super obvious to at least the folx who are paying attention and tabulating double standards that a given fandom population has towards white-black, men-women, abled-disabled.

And, since Caine is not only non-human to begin with, (which, sure if people had better media literacy about robot tropes in science fiction, they would’ve been better able to grasp he was a person. But that’s another hurdle. Callback to the “Demographics” Doc) he’s also in a setting that doesn’t predispose your brain to think about real-world people, despite its clever themes otherwise.

The central issue here is, the problems that Caine- whether intentionally or unintentionally- represent, are so obscure that they are hard to overtly identify for people who don’t struggle with those issues, or NTs have never been in relation to somebody who does.

How many people reading this blog for instance, even knew what “alexithymia”, “cognitive empathy” “crypto ableism” were before reading anything I wrote?

I do not know if “tone blindness” has a name, either.

It would be a lot easier to talk about my own problems if there IS

I had to coin a term myself to describe how people malign someone for communicating differently (communico-normativity) and that DEFINITELY applies to Caine’s “showhost” affect!!

How it unconsciously Others him.

It just typically applies a little differently for real-world autists.

If you’re autistic, you may have familiarity with these concepts, and experiences, or you may not!

[caine-shrine]

I of course, understand perfectly why people make this mistake, you have to really read between the lines a lot, get past the superficial “I am God” stuff. (sib … he literally is a god. like. he was born as one. It’s not that deep. Or rather, it’s CLEVER.) Heck, until ep 6, I thought he was selfish!