So I finally watched the Amazing Digital Circus finale and I do have Thoughts.
I personally think this show shouldn't have been made FLKDJSAJGLKDS like not because I don't love it but because it's such a deeply personal and intimate journey of self exploration and self expression and like.
This is the kind of media that is damaged by having a capital-f Fandom. So many fans of this fuckin' show are goddamned braindead. The fact that modern day fans will take a thing and go "This is mine." is nuts. Art isn't yours. You can play fucking dolls with it all you want but that art is not yours. That art is a piece of Gooseworx's soul that she was GRACIOUS enough to share with you, and if you do think it belongs to you, you should be shot in the street.
As a friend of mine put it, Jax being a trans woman isn't "the curtains are blue" it's the fucking curtains. Saying you don't believe it is like saying you don't think the curtains ARE THERE. Anyone who says otherwise is braindead.
While I think the finale was a bit all over the place, I think it delivered basically exactly what it was meaning to do. The story throughout the first 8 episodes isn't "This is an action packed adventure romp through funny worlds!" it's "These are people coping with an absolute nightmare they're being put through" and the finale is the cap on that.
It takes all of the things they've dealt with and both contextualizes it and works through it. It unpacks all of the really horrible shit Jax has gone through her whole life, and extrapolates on the way that her destroying herself has hurt everyone around her, the way that her fear and insecurity was damaging both within and without, and the way that people moved on after she was gone.
Whenever transfems write stories about transfems, this is kind of often how it ends. The necessary sacrifice. The spiral into hell. The unavoidable death. The world we live in makes that a very real and very tangible possibility, and one of the only a lot of us see ourselves in. Jax is a poster child for the way a system can chew us up and spit us out and we end up losing ourselves.
I'm grateful that the version of her on the outside seemed to have gotten better, the idea that Jax is the girl that figured it out too late, who wasn't given support and fell through the cracks and ended up... there, but there was another one who got better.
I don't know. I think it's all fascinating. I think that the complaints of "It's just a bunch of people standing around and talking" is fucking asinine. Just absolute fuckin lunatic behavior lmfao the finale was meant to be catharsis and completion and it was that. I don't think it was the best paced in the whole world but like. It was good. It was necessary, even. Any more Movement or dynamic pacing put in would've felt cheap and fucking stupid. We needed these characters to reach their natural endpoint, talk to each other, talk about what's wrong with them, and face their demons. Jax had to die. The others had to accept where they are, and who they are. Finding community even when they're somewhere that feels untenable. This was the conclusion it was always pointed at. Personally, I think it could've gone another half hour and breathed a little more, but that's just me.
Anyway. Isn't She Lovely.
