Thinking about it more, I feel like Zooble accusing Caine of being childish is another instance from the cast of every accusation is a confession. Zooble has themselves acted extremely childishly, such as their self inflicted self isolation due to personal issues, the fact that when they were forced to go on the Spudsys adventure they threw a tantrum about it and then didn’t do anything more than exactly what a burger flipper is expected to do, they acknowledge that no one should antagonize Caine and then repeatedly poke the bear themselves, they hate when the adventures are too complex but also hate if they’re too bare bones à la the gun adventure. It really comes off as Zooble doesn’t know what they want or that their moods and demands are so mercurial as to make them particularly unpleasant to be around.
I’ve seen something like this interpretation before, on a pro-Zooble Discord server no less, (which has a mirror Community on Tumblr btw) so it’s entirely possible that’s the intent.
Personally, I don’t read the ‘pickiness’ that way. (Only the Poke The Bear trope.) It is not unreasonable to have personal preferences that are Goldilocks-like. You don’t want to burn your tongue, and you also don’t want to drink tepid, lukewarm broth.
That Caine could never quite thread the needle on that (although, technically he did. Twice. They enjoyed the episode 4 adventure, while he got to sprinkle in a small dose of chaos with the NPCs, which Pomni the Humorless did not find amusing, but wtvr, and ze by all appearances enjoyed the gun game) was just unfortunate, and as for the rest of the cast, we don’t exactly know what balance of “that seems sort of … dark?” by Gangle and relatively fluffy Candy Kingdom and Gloinks stories happened in the years that were referenced in the pilot.
(sidebar: the one time I feel bad for her, she speaks up and gets shut down)
Also, being an extreme introvert myself, I don’t read opting to spend time alone as vindictive (even tho you easily could, given their line in the pilot), merely one valid choice among others. They did not seem like they were particularly suffering from having lots of alone time. We didn’t see any relief nor angst about it. The other thing is, RAgatha called Zooble a “grouch” (or as I like to say from the mispronunciation, “The Grunch”) but has Zooble ever directed that grumpiness to anybody who didn’t come after them first, as in, incite it? Other than Caine and Jax, I don’t think they’ve ever said an unkind word to anyone in particular?
Maybe we’re supposed to conclude that ze has, since RAgatha was disgruntled about it.
In that case, it would just be the story suffering from another case of, by virtue of being a mini series, not enough runtime to organically establish character traits as opposed to just stating them aloud. This problem also plagued Jax’s characterization (which I have a Google Doc on) and seemed to be the root of confusion in the fandom.
(though to be clear, I think this has put enough very obvious stress on Gooseworx that even if we could go back in time and petition for a second season, I don’t think having a better story would be worth whatever she’s going though in being unexpectedly thrust in the spotlight. She’s stated that she never expected this thing to get this big)
When I was first watching episode 4, and hearing Gangle’s utter lack of foresight in invoking Caine as enforcer, and Zooble’s subsequent line about it, it was legit scary wondering what Caine could do if he put his mind to it, but after watching ep 7, where Zooble references getting run over by a steamroller, seemingly not traumatized by such, it got me to wondering what exactly they’d be afraid of. They seemed on the whole pretty unbothered. I used this notion to introduce the Only Read Only fic, too.
And that brings us to yet another possible “bouncing from mood to mood” thing which may be in play, which is something a lot of pro-Caine blogs, myself included, spend a lot of time on, which is not considering what Jax did as torture, (albeit lesser amount) but whipping that out against Caine.
So, since you phrased it this way, that does beg the question, what if it is Zooble’s mood that determined that?
I see them as a pretty consistent character in feeling and attitude, but what if they’re not? What if I’m just blind to it bc autism?
Is it that they were just more fed up, which resulted in stronger wording?
I gotta say, with burger-flipper Zooble, I would love to do a fan animation collab with someone, where Zooble and Jax teamed up that episode on the basis of ‘wage slavery sux, screw the consequences’
Jax, at multiple points, doesn’t seem too concerned about danger. He strapped a bomb to a person who was gonna be in a room he was in. Upon rewatch of ep 4, he wasn’t begging for something not to go down … just trying to make sure nobody would see him cower.
Jax in canon apparently throttled himself a little bit, in not doing anything else OTT like the tossing Ragatha thing, but still couldn’t keep a lid on it enough not to mouth off.
(only time I even remotely relate to him. I can refrain from virulently insulting or shouting at someone, but if I’m snarky, it can still get me in trouble. lol.)
But with Zooble as a backup egging him on (pun not intended) maybe he’d be bolder.
