Stratt’s “villain monologue” in the book explaining what she is about to do to Grace before sending up into space just rends me. In a metatextual context, the monologue is there so we, the readers, understand exactly how and why Grace woke up in space with no recent memories to explain this. In the context of the character’s experiences, however, I see it as Stratt giving one last act of compassion to Grace. She didn’t need to meet him in his cell to explain the amnestic drug. Grace’s internal monologue actually addresses how such a thing would typically be a waste of time from Stratt’s perspective—that he isn’t owed this. But to her, he is. That is her friend, and she is doing him one last favor making sure that when he gets all his memories back, there is as little unexplained as possible. She is dulling the edge of the pain. Grace won’t have to fret up in space if the coma damaged his brain that badly, won’t have to wonder if there is just one last little thing out of reach or have the feeling of a black hole in his memory with no explanation for it. He won’t because Stratt tells him she’s going to give him amnestics even though she doesn’t have to do this. And then she calls him Grace, the last time she speaks to him—not Dr Grace as she had been in that entire conversation—because he is her friend and she doesn’t want this even if she knows it is necessary.
every roman author's opinions on the galli can be ranked on a scale from 'if they lived in the 21st century they'd be standing on the side of a road with a big sign saying GOD IS KING' to 'if they lived in the 21st century they would be on estrogen'. mostly it's towards the former end. obviously the christian authors. i think earlier authors lean more towards 4chan. where was i going with this.
I really think the feminism outreach to teen girls really dropped the ball by not separating ‘not like other girls’ internalized misogyny and ‘not like other girls’ I am literally not like other girls and as such have been targeted by other girls all throughout my childhood for being unable to conform and it hurts so bad and I don’t know how to make it stop.
Cause personally I’m just continuously horrified at how much people failed me as a child. And I mean women too. I would’ve never subjected a child that suffered in the way I did to what I went through. Completely unnecessary through and through. Those that failed me did nothing for me in those moments of failure and I have only seen them more clearly in their injustice.
potentially controversial b;apo take, but hey, why not -- there are many more things i would've liked to say, but they didn't really fit neatly into the main thesis i was working under ;
the merit of considering Jason and Ivy's sex during 'One' as a depiction of assault, drawing parallels to Spring Awakening
To preface; I acknowledge that I am not using 1:1 examples. Since both b;apo and Spring Awakening are stage shows, there is so much of the atmosphere that is created through lighting and blocking and the subtleties in the way that each of the characters are played against one another, there’s no way to make a definitive blanket statement. That said, I was personally inspired by the production of b;apo I got the absolute pleasure of seeing live last year. Not only did we have the Ivy ever, but the team made an, in my opinion, super brilliant choice when it came to 'One'. They cut the “it was cute” line from Jason when Ivy’s apologising, and they really played up a visceral discomfort and overwhelm, culminating in Jason pacing up and down beside the bed while Ivy tells him he is “all [she] need[s]”, and it’s at that point that he concedes before focus shifts across to Peter trying to call his mother on the phone.
Right off the bat, I think we’d be remiss not to acknowledge the gender dynamics at play when drawing these parallels, especially when gender as a concept intersects so much with the way sexuality is understood and explored by the characters in both b;apo & Spring Awakening. In particular I want to touch on the fact that - at least to my perception - Jason’s fully realised masculinity functions almost as a barrier to his emotions within the context of the story overall, but also when it comes to the meta context of his decision to have sex with Ivy. Because Jason is presented as this sporty, conventionally hot, outgoing guy who is popular with women, and because he is the one who is delivering most of these innuendos during 'You & I', I think there is a subconscious bias towards seeing him as someone who wouldn’t have sex with anyone he didn’t want to. And while generally a fair assessment, I think this subconscious bias is what leads people to unfairly assign amounts of blame when it comes to an analysis of his and Ivy’s relationship. Of course, 'One' and 'I Believe' don’t serve as exactly 1:1 examples even without the gender factors, given the time periods in which both shows were written and set, but I think both explore the idea of a grey area when it comes to sex as the crux of complicated relationships, both shows have running themes of dubious consent and religion, and most obviously both instances result in a pregnancy.
Where it gets interesting to me is where the lines start to blur — yes, Wendla “let [Melchior] love [her]”, and Jason made Ivy “make [him] promise […] ‘I love you’” — but the contexts of both shows paint Wendla and Jason as confused and uncertain. Both Melchior and Ivy know, or believe they know, within themselves that both parties want to have sex. And while they may be correct on the subconscious level, this belief and expectation that they are holding dismisses the material reality of the situations. It’s not that Wendla wants to have sex with Melchior, it’s that she wants to know about sex, wants to understand why she has this physical attraction to him, not necessarily act upon it. It’s not that Jason wants to have sex with Ivy - it’s that he wants to want to and doesn’t have the safety to express that in any other way than simply going through with it. Where this is often acknowledged in the Spring Awakening context, I find that analysis of Jason and Ivy’s interactions in One don’t dig quite so deep.
Which is not to say that Ivy or Melchior are terrible people - it is more so to say that they are both characters who struggle with appropriately communicating, and understanding other people’s communications, about sex and sexuality. Where Ivy likens pursuing Jason to “such a game of hide-and-seek”, Jason only ever takes their sex as something deep and important. Where Melchior has been “playing with [Wendla] in [his] fantasies”, Wendla “only wanted to be close to him”. Despite Ivy and Melchior’s knowledge on and experience of the subject, it manifests more so an intellectualisation of the act of sex itself, as opposed to a genuine understanding of the ramifications on a personal level - especially for people like Jason and Wendla who don’t have the same experiences or beliefs as they do.
Melchior knows that the way the adults in their lives address sex and sexuality - or don’t address it, as the case may be - isn’t productive, and because of this perceives himself as the ultimate authority on the subject. I think that this belief is what leads to the implicit forcefulness of his interaction with Wendla in the hayloft. He knows what’s happening, and because he is armed with a preconceived idea of what Wendla must be feeling, “defending [herself], until finally [she] surrender[s] and feel[s] heaven break over [her]”, he isn’t receptive to her hesitation. Rather, he interprets it as a necessary part of the experience. He knows that Wendla wants it to happen - but he also knows that she doesn’t comprehend that it means sex yet. And because they are both so present in the moment, “hearing [each other’s] heart beat”, Melchior falls back on his belief that the truest understanding of sex and that kind of physical pleasure can only come through lived experience - such as when he all but teaches Moritz about how to masturbate during 'Touch Me'. Even when productions of Spring Awakening do revise the dialogue to include a verbal ‘yes’ from Wendla, the presentation is still that of an assault, intense and hazy hounding and coercion.
Ivy knows why boys are nice to her - “I know them, and what they’re after” - and when she stacks this belief up against the fact that Jason is nice to her despite his loyalty to and care for Nadia, it makes sense that she would assume that he wants to have sex with her, it makes sense that she wouldn’t put any thought into the subtleties of Jason’s responses to her or the hesitation in his questions about her “want[ing him] to kiss [her]”. What’s very interesting to look at in regards to Ivy and her character is this dichotomy she has in her head. She knows that “[...] boys will be boys [...]”, and on some level has the same expectations for Jason, teasing him about “see[ing] what [he’s] staring at” on her birthday. Even so, she believes that it’s different, because she loves him in a way that “[she’s] never felt [...] before”, she has the notion in her head that Jason “want[s her] just like [she] want[s him]”, because he kissed her on her birthday when she asked. I would argue that it is because of her conviction in her belief that Jason does want her that she does put such a pressure on him in the moment of 'One' - “If you like me, kiss me, don’t stop”.
It is also important to acknowledge Ivy as a victim - while no abuse is heavily implied or stated outright in b;apo, there is an understanding that Ivy is a girl who has been sexualised for a long time, and that is of course going to skew her view of and relationship with sex as an activity and the role that she is expected to play within that. I don’t mean to detract from that fact at all by drawing out comparisons to her and Melchior, and acknowledging Jason’s own victim status as it parallels Wendla’s.
There is also something to be said for how both Wendla and Jason’s loss or lack of functional autonomy contributes to their deaths. Both of them are characters burdened by conflicting expectations - Wendla is expected by her mother to still be young and naive, while simultaneously expected to know better, and Jason is expected by his father to “keep the McConnell flame burning”, an expectation competing with the one held by Peter that he cannot stay closeted forever. However, Wendla’s mothers expectations of her don’t conflict directly with Melchior’s expectations of her in the way that Mr McConnell’s conflict with Peter’s - in a way, Mrs Bergmann’s expectation that Wendla is still young enough to follow blindly what she’s been told is the expectation that leads to the pregnancy in the first place. Melchior is explicitly more knowledgeable about the mechanics of what they are doing in the hayloft, and as such holds a power over Wendla by being able to lean into those expectations that if another person knows more they ought to be listened to. Similarly, it is Ivy’s assumption or expectation being that Jason does truly want to have sex with her that snowballs into the conflicts as presented in Promise, and ultimately b;apo’s “story ends in total damage” at least in part as a result of these expectations being enforced.
To summarise, I believe that because Ivy and Melchior are so sure of their own wanting, their own understanding, and their own emotions, they end up projecting that onto Jason and Wendla respectively, turning them into vessels for sexual gratification and somewhat diminishing their personhood in the moment.
There are of course many other parallels that could be drawn, many other configurations of characters to compare and contrast in regards to b;apo and Spring Awakening, and even on this topic specifically I think there is a lot of room for different takes and interpretations - I simply wanted to throw my hat in the ring, so to speak, when it comes to breaking down and analyzing Jason and Ivy’s relationship.
Jaxploitation: Jax Is Black and I'm Tired of Pretending She's Not
Amidst conversation about racism surrounding The Amazing Digital Circus, I’ve yet to see it mentioned that while Jax is a character who draws his origins from African American oral traditions and West African folklore (see: Cunnie Rabbit), he is not in any manner portrayed by black actors despite being the most heavily black-coded character in the entire show.
The trickster rabbit motif, which is marked by a predilection for trickery, antagonistic relations with others, and the framing of which as personal means of survival and entertainment, find their origin within the Brer Rabbit folk stories. This specific connection (rather than to any other tricky rabbits) is strengthened by episode 9 specifically alluding to Bugs Bunny, a whitewashed and appropriated version of the Brer Rabbit character.
Looney Tunes being referenced is of particular note due to its history with racism and racist caricatures.
The very same antiblack racism and discrimination contained within numerous Warner Bros. cartoons, is also the historical context of black oral traditions, and is part and parcel with the specific motifs that Jax's character pulls from and plays off of. That is to say, that when Jax invokes the signifier of Bugs Bunny (who himself signifies Brer Rabbit), he is also invoking the signified historical context of American antiblack racism.
This intertwining with black history is best demonstrated by the Jax psychodrama in episode 9. This interplay also informs his perception by and interactions with other characters throughout TADC. As a matter of fact, we may as well run through the faces of Jax real quick.
First up is violent Jax. The murderous aggressor we all know. The bully who routinely breaks Gangle’s mask just to hurt her. The misanthrope who threw Pomni off a truck just to be an ass. The heartless monster who shot Ragatha straight in the face during a trust exercise. The genocidal maniac who sicced a fudge monster on the people of the candy kingdom. He lives to hurt people. It’s what he does. He said it himself. It’s his preoccupation. It’s an old fear born from the slave owner’s anxiety towards their slaves. The looming threat that their ostensibly happy and subservient property might one day turn on them without reason (after all, the master is doing their slaves a favor by purchasing and putting them to work from dawn ‘til dusk!), like so many other unruly and unpredictable slaves who initiated violent uprisings against their masters.
The aggressive black is practically an unpredictable wild animal. He is not like you. He is inhuman. His sole desire is to destroy and defile all that you hold dear. You must remain wary of him. He must be forcibly controlled. Otherwise, the moment you let your guard down is when he will suddenly strike, as is his inherently savage and irrational nature. It’s the stereotype of the angry black man. It’s the image of the crack baby superpredator. It’s the black militants who have to be stopped because they’re ‘taking things too far’. It’s the super criminal Simon Phoenix in Demolition Man. It’s King Kong. It’s Birth of a Nation. It’s a cornerstone justification for antiblack violence. The black is inherently violent and simply waiting to strike, so violence must be done to them first to maintain peace and keep them in their place. When Jax hurts anyone around him, it's deemed to be solely due to him being actively malicious. When he is doing so little as simply existing near someone, he is considered a threat to them.
Next up is sexualized Jax. Jax as a degendered object. Jax as third sexed. Jax as emasculated man, and hypermasculinized woman. Jax as sexually aggressive and virile. Isn’t Jax just so “gender-freaky” in that maid outfit? Isn’t it hilarious and wacky that we put this man in a dress? I bet he’s a real sex pest who just wants to fuck Pomni and Gangle too, that’s obviously why he’s always hanging around them. Look at him ruin the two-man with all his unwanted sexual comments! That Jax is so hypersexual! Transmisogyny alone serves as an analytical framework that partially explains why Jax is degendered. His identity and presentation are seen as ultimately fraudulent and inauthentic (He’s totally dressing like this ironically! He would never genuinely present himself this way, like a real woman.), but it does not sufficiently explain him being treated like a dress-up doll in episode 5, nor does it adequately explain Jax’s self-perception that he is seen as sexually aggressive as shown in episode 9.
These concepts can only be properly analyzed through the lens of antiblack racism. The black slave as a sexual object meant to serve the sexual desires and tastes of their masters. The stereotype of the Jezebel, the sexually forward and aggressive black woman, who cannot be raped or assaulted, as she herself is the sexual instigator. A fiction that allows slave owners to have affairs with their slaves while maintaining an image of chastity and innocence. “She came on to me!”, the logic goes. It is also one of many justifications for racial segregation and antiblack violence. Blacks cannot be allowed to intermingle with whites, their voracious sexual appetites will drive them to assault and desecrate our civilized, chaste, and puritan population, who do not share such barbaric desires. Their population in fact, must be kept in check, due to their fecundity, through sterilization and other control measures, lest we allow ourselves to be outnumbered and overrun. Black gender and sexuality is inherently inferior, so ultimately black men must be denied their manhood, and black women their womanhood.
What Jax faces when he is forced into a dress by institutional forces ‘for fun’ and treated as a ‘genderfreak’, is neither just transmisogyny nor antiblackness, but transmisogynoir, the intersection of both transmisogyny and antiblack racism. Jax can be put in a dress because his gender presentation is subordinate and up to others to determine due to his blackness. If Jax willing puts himself in a dress, he is seen as engaging in a gross parody of gender performance and propositioning sex from others due to both his trans femininity and blackness. Jax viewing his womanhood and trans femininity in this manner denotes not just a transmisogynized, but also racialized existence prior to entering the circus. The transmisogynoir embedded into this sexualized version of him only makes narrative sense if Jax as a character is not only transfem, but also black.
Thirdly we have funny Jax. Y’know, the funny one? He said it, not me. Jax the buffoon, the fool, the perpetual jokester, the comic relief. He’s always laughing about something. Everything is just a big joke to him, and he’s always up to some nonsensical harebrained scheme. What’s wrong with this dude? He’s so childish. Can’t he take anything seriously? Of course he can’t, not like the rest of the circus members, who are capable of having actual feelings and thoughts, like real people. Even Kinger has his moments of lucidity when he isn’t actively disassociating. Beyond the jokes and the sarcasm, there’s really is nothing else to him. He doesn’t care about anything beyond himself, and he sure as hell can’t really feel shame or remorse. It’s all just a game to him. He’s hollow on the inside. There’s no use in even looking. We all know that Jax is an unhelpful good-for-nothing, and so is the minstrel clown Zip Coon.
The coon is funny. He says funny things in a funny way. He’s slick and streetwise, always pulling some scheme of some sort get a foot up on honest (read: white, protestant, property owning) people. He’s a selfish bum and a cheat, refuses to listen to anyone, and certainly doesn’t care about anything beyond keeping himself entertained. He’ll makes pretensions that he’s an intellectual and knows anything at all about the world, but it’s all a cover for his own inborn ignorance and stupidity. He’s still lesser, impotent, and inferior, he just refuses to act like it. Hell, the coon is incapable of even being ashamed of himself and who he is (if black people could genuinely feel shame, they’d be able to show it by blushing, like the rest of us whites!). At the end of the day, he’s merely shallow facades and cheap tricks. He’s an overall pathetic sham of a person. The coon is simultaneously a caricature of black people who refuse to acknowledge their place at the bottom of the social pecking order, and a justification as to why they’re down there in the first place.
The coon is poor because the coon is lazy. The coon cannot be hired for a job because the coon is too stupid to follow even the most basic instructions. The coon will inevitably screw things up, because the coon is a bumbling fool. The coon desires equality with the betters of society because the coon is jealous of their superiority, but can never actually achieve it due to the coon being simple-minded. The coon is only any good as long the coon is useful to your interests, and the coon is not useful for much. The coon lies, steals, and cheats even though the coon knows better, because the coon is unable to feel shame. The coon is actually incapable of feeling anything at all, even pain, so the coon can be beaten and brutalized without consequence. The coon is perfect for medical experimentation, vivisection, and demonstration, as the coon, unlike real people, is unfeeling, and even when the coon dies, probably from being too dumb and lazy to live anymore, the corpse is up for grabs too. The coon is not a real person, not in life, nor in death.
The coon is a black person reduced to a clown performance whose meager, waking existence is the punchline. Being the funny one is not just being the one who tells jokes, anyone can do that. The funny one is the primary butt of the jokes. Anything done to ‘The Funny One’ is fair game, because the funny one can never actually be harmed. You can bite and choke out the funny one all you like, and it will be fine. You can force him into a dress and control what he eats, for fun! Go ahead and send him into a torture chamber! It’s funny! It is funny that this is happening to Jax, the funny one, the one to whom funny things happen. Whenever Jax does or says anything, it's all fun and games, so don't even with bother trying to take him seriously.
Lastly, there is the evil good Jax. The Jax everyone’s been trying their damnedest to bring out. He’s just so sweet and demure! He even has a neat trick he can do! He can play the piano! Just look at him go! Why can’t we have this Jax all of the time? This Jax who goes along to get along. The Jax who doesn’t do back talk or challenge anyone. Those other Jax guys are so irritating and annoying, always talking about what they want to do, like get a fucking grip. The world doesn’t revolve around you and what you want, just shut up and play man. Get yourself fixed so you can always be like this. He’s the spitting image of the good slave and the good black person. The polite Uncle Remus who tells you old folk stories from the good ol’ days when everything and everyone was in their place on the plantation. The ever so sweet and patient mammy who’d spend the day feeding, raising, and playing with her master’s children, all while her own children go about unattended to elsewhere. The well dressed black child in the big house who’d be brought out to play music for guests. Aren’t they so talented? Isn’t that a neat trick? It’s life as a trained circus animal. Jump through a hoop. Sit. Roll over. Speak. Play that song you know on the piano. It's the only thing you're good for, anyway. It’s telling that all we’re told of good Jax is what he does, because that piano that he’s shackled to is all he is, reduced to a single function like a mere tool. An entire person shrunk down and pressed into a narrow box, and he’s happy to serve. At least that’s what he says anyway. Granted, he’ll agree with anything you say, regardless of how true it is. It would be bad of Jax to complain or disagree, as he would be causing trouble for everyone else to deal with, and wouldn't it be so much better and unproblematic if he didn't?
None of these figures represent who Jax truly is. It’s why they all go up in puffs of smoke the moment Pomni endeavors to go and see the real Jax. She’s finally seeing for the first time that these racist constructs and garish exaggerations aren’t him, and never were. I’m jumping way ahead here, though, only to lay the groundwork for understanding the historical context framing how Jax is seen by his peers. Before we can get to Pomni moving past her own racism to see Jax as he is, instead of as others think he is, we first need to identify how said racism manifests and operates specifically within TADC.
To best understand just who Jax is, it’s important to begin with understanding the world that he lives in and how he relates to and interacts with it. The circus is a setting that explicitly operates by video game logic as shown in episode 2, with Pomni clipping out of bounds due to jank collision physics. In episode 6, Jax points out that the circus also runs on cartoon logic, and that actions will work out as long as they are cool, funny, or nonsensical enough. This fact is reinforced by both Ragatha causing Jax’s gun to backfire with her finger and Pomni’s nonsensical trickshot to disarm Zooble. This knowledge on how the circus functions informs a sizable number of the decisions that Jax makes.
Yes, he throws Pomni off a truck, but he also makes it clear that he did so to make a bridge, and the digital world treats this as a valid course of action by having Pomni’s limbs stretch in order to form a tightrope he can cross. Was he being impulsive? Absolutely. Was he acting with the sole purpose to hurt Pomni for his entertainment? Not really, he’s shown to be far more interested in obliterating Gummigoo and his gator gang to get his kicks. As a matter of fact, Jax only really engages in and enjoys violence within the context of adventures and games. It's why Jax is willing to deliberately throw Gangle's mask at the doors in Mildenhall Manor, but clarifies that breaking her mask while practicing softball in the circus wasn't intentional. It's why he shoots Ragatha during Caine's trust exercise, but isn't going around attacking her outside of planned activities. Jax is not a homicidal brute destroying everything he sees. He is someone who plays games in a manner that he finds entertaining. He’s very adamant about his preference for chaos, action, and violence in his adventures, and finds those lacking it far less interesting. It’s why he’s so disappointed by the peaceful resolution of the Candy Canyon Chaos adventure. When he dunks Ragatha into a deep fryer at Spudsy’s, he’s trying to make his own fun in an adventure that he isn’t enjoying. He is at worst impulsive and laissez-faire to the point of carelessness.
Jax is not a violent, irrational animal in need of being controlled. He is someone who engages in nontraditional behavior, and at most needs clear boundaries set before engaging in roleplay scenarios. The reason he is treated as the former, however, is due to his racialization by the other circus members, who treat his indifference towards societal norms and niceties as an active danger. His reputation as violent, malicious and incompetent stems not from who he and how he acts, but from racist assumptions made about his motivations, and you know what they say about assumptions.
This phenomena is most blatant in his interactions with Ragatha, who treats him as a corrupting force that needs to be segregated away from the other circus members. This is exemplified during the softball match in episode 5, where Ragatha outright accuses Jax of attempting to corrupt Pomni into being like him. Underlying her accusation is the image of the savage black rapist defiling the civilized white woman. Jax is framed as the desecrating black aggressor, and Pomni is placed into the role of pure innocent white virgin. These are both incredibly reductive categories, and Pomni is made noticeably uncomfortable by the infantilization. Jax rebuts by pointing out that he isn't telling anyone what to do, and he's right. He isn't making Pomni do anything, and she can very much think for herself. Ragatha is being racist and misogynist, treating Pomni as property that must be defended and that cannot think for herself. Ragatha’s racism, however, is not just characterized by her personal hatred and disgust towards Jax, but also the clear double standard that is applied to him.
Both her and Zooble characterize Jax as a screw up and the primary reason their adventures go off-rails, but neither of them apply such a reputation to Kinger, who routinely causes major accidents himself. Kinger is the one who sends the war rig careening into the fudge canyon in episode 2, leaving them all stranded. He’s the one who drags Pomni into the scary door while running after Gangle’s comedy mask in episode 3. His team loses due to him shooting himself in episode 6. Most notably, he’s the one who deleted Caine and wrecked the entire circus in the process in episode 8 (Caine, however, still remains because deleting his AI only allows the data to be overwritten. Thank goodness Kinger did not format the drive they were all in, otherwise they would’ve all been completely destroyed.). Kinger, despite being at times just as impulsive and careless as Jax, is never at any point considered actively malicious, nor is he thought less of for these actions. Jax, by contrast, constantly has nefarious ulterior motives assigned to his actions by others. In episode 4 while playing softball with Gangle, he hits the ball into her comedy mask, breaking it. Jax immediately states that he didn’t do it on purpose, but Ragatha treats him as if he had anyway, despite there being no evidence for this. When Jax apologizes for the President Pomni adventure in episode 5, Ragatha immediately presumes that he is lying and attempting to be manipulative. Pomni also treats Jax with undue suspicion, acting incredulous when he asks her how she’s doing at Spudsy’s in episode 4. His innocuous question that amounts to nothing more than small talk is treated as a possible threat. In episode 5, she responds to Jax talking about his relationship with Gangle with skepticism, stating that she didn’t think he cared about what other people thought. She considers Jax to be duplicitous, despite having little reason to.
Speaking of Gangle, we should take a short tangent to explore just how she and Jax relate to one another, as it’s often misconstrued as just bullying when it’s more complicated. In episode 2, Jax specifically calls out for Gangle to drive the war rig to chase down the syrup bandits. It’s worth asking why, if Jax’s only motivation for being around Gangle is to pick on her, would he care who drove the truck at all. Anyone else could have driven, so why specify her? The reason is obvious when you consider his relationship to every other member of the circus. Ragatha clearly dislikes him and is notably infantilizing to those around her. Zooble also doesn’t like him, and is usually busy avoiding Caine and his adventures. Kaufmo is preoccupied with chasing his personal white whale (and also locked in cellar by now). Kinger is barely present as is. As for Pomni, she’s new and he doesn’t know her at all. Jax chooses Gangle because she is the only person willing to go along and do anything with him, even if he has to press her to do it. He chooses her because he wants someone to join in on his plan to hijack the syrup tanker, and she’s the only one he knows who will. He initially picks her for his team in episode 6, because he believes she’s the only person who’d be willing to team up with him, and given the reluctance of everyone else to team with him, he has ample reason to feel this way.
Yes, Jax chooses Gangle because she’s “submissive and agreeable” (although, all it takes to stop Jax is for her to stand her ground and say no, as she does in episode 4. Jax, in reality, holds the least social power and influence within the circus, as we’ll address later), but he also does so because the alternative to Gangle, as far as he is concerned, is doing everything by himself, and we see where being perpetually alone gets him. Pomni only joins Jax's team out of a compromise to keep Kinger away from him. Kinger, despite his flaws, gets to be seen as a vulnerable individual, while Jax is perpetually considered a danger to others. Gangle is often hurt by Jax’s actions, yes, but it becomes very apparent that Jax does not know this, as evidenced by him saying “She likes when I’m mean to her though.” while stargazing in episode 5.
The comedy mask breaking is clearly a big deal for Gangle, but for Jax, the comedy mask breaking is just a thing that happens every day due any number reasons (even breaking by itself at one point), and being sad is just how Gangle is (he calls her "the sad one" after all). Forget the idea that Jax hurts Gangle’s feelings deliberately, he hasn’t even made the connection that what he does has anything to do with why Gangle is sad in the first place. It’s why he asks Pomni if she thinks Gangle is actually capable of being happy. He genuinely does not know why she’s sad or how to cheer her up.
Why does he not know? How could he think that she likes when he’s mean? It’s because Gangle never tells him. Instead, she masks her feelings over entirely, never telling him how she feels, even when he hurts her. This is best illustrated in episode 4, when Jax tells manic mask Gangle straight to her face that he liked her better when she was sad. We can hear her mask breaking underneath, but she never tells Jax that what he said hurt her, instead, she pulls rank and sends him off to ‘get more training’. This is all compounded by the fact that every other member of the circus quite readily voices their displeasure with him. From Jax's perspective, his actions are already heavily scrutinized, and everyone else around him has no qualms about telling him off at any given turn, so if Gangle had a problem with his behavior, not only would she most likely tell him just like the rest, she'd also be among like-minded company and incentivized to do so, if anything. Jax cannot read minds, and has little reason to think that someone was taking issue with what he's doing, but not telling him about it. At no point is he made aware of how his actions affect her (aside from Ragatha chiding him) and it’s solely left up for him to guess. This lack of open communication between the two winds up hurting them both, as we see in episode 9 that Jax thinks Gangle may full on hate him, but refuses to actually say so to his face. We see later that her feelings about him are more complicated than that, but Jax doesn’t know this, because again, she never once tells him how she feels. Zooble knows, and Pomni knows, but only because she opened up to them.
Actually, while we’re on the topic of Zooble (we’ll get to Pomni, don’t you fret), we should address Jax’s actual social standing within the circus itself. Jax is explicitly depicted as disenfranchised, in stark contrast with Zooble, who has quite a bit of sway. In episode 5, Caine institutes a voting system that allows for the circus members to decide if they want to skip past adventures from the suggestion box. Zooble is easily able to wield this system to not only skip adventures, but also as a means to control Jax’s behavior, from what he wears to what he can eat. Jax however, is completely unable to utilize this system to accomplish anything. His one vote to skip an adventure is shut down by them before it can even be called, requiring him to get Gangle to choose to skip it instead, and his attempt to turn Zooble into a slug is unanimously blocked. Jax is quickly shown to be at the very bottom of the social ladder, ultimately having no control or influence in what the group chooses to do, or even over his own body, which is somehow less than the very little that he had before. What that winds up democratized in Caine’s temporary democracy, is not just adventure choices, but also ownership and control over Jax’s body, because democracy does not make anyone’s racism go away, it simply puts it up to a vote, and since Jax is in the minority, because he is a racial minority, he is still wholly subject to the will of the majority population.
Zooble, curiously enough, gets away with quite a few shenanigans during episode 5. Not only did they make Jax vegan and put him in a maid outfit (much to Gangle’s delight, she is very clearly a part of the circus in-group), but they also manage to top everything off by spooking him with a corncob after realizing he was afraid of it. This prank attracts hardly any notice whatsoever, not even the camera finds it an action worthy of focus. Even Kinger at one point just takes Zooble’s eyeball without asking to use as a game piece with little pushback. Neither of them are treated as cruel or malicious, and none of these actions draw a word of complaint from Ragatha, who instead spends her time lecturing Jax about how he’s ruining Pomni by chatting with her. Engaging in wacky hi-jinx is perfectly fine and lighthearted, low stakes fun when everyone else is doing it, not even worthy of mention when Jax is the subject of them, but Jax’s actions, no matter how innocuous, are routinely interrogated and ascribed hostile motives. The problem the other circus members have with Jax, then, is not what Jax does, but who Jax is.
While it is tempting to claim Jax’s trans femininity as the reason for this difference in treatment, both he and Kinger present as cisgender men for the majority of the show, so it cannot solely be a matter of gender presentation. There is another social factor at play here. Jax is not merely disliked, he has been placed within a vilified out-group that has been reduced to second-class status, socially and institutionally disempowered, made hyper-visible, and construed as being disreputable, violent, corrupting, irrational, malicious, childish, and unserious as inborn traits. Pomni does not need to know Jax's gender identity to start making judgements about him. After one day in the circus, she determines that he's an asshole, and unlike with the other circus members, treats him with considerable trepidation when he first approaches her for conversation. No one had to tell Pomni to treat Jax as dangerous, she recognized him as such all on her own and proceeded to act accordingly. Jax is a visibly marked individual and everyone in the circus understands what that means and the implications therein. What makes their prejudice racial in nature is that the negative traits associated with Jax are treated as if they are inborn. They are not considered personal failings, sicknesses, or matters of stigmatized behavior, but inherent qualities that contaminate and motivate everything he does. It is Jax’s very existence and presence that is stigmatized. Jax is being discriminated against on racial grounds. The prejudices that he faces are specifically antiblack in nature, and this very same racism is what causes his and Pomni's relationship to completely fall apart.
In this light, Jax's archetypes spiel takes on disturbing implications. Signalling that at the beginning, he attempted to reach out to the other circus members as people, only to find himself ostracized to the point that his life is now a series of shallow interactions with people who endeavor to keep him perpetually at arms length. When he says "I at least have the self-awareness to choose who I am!", what he's saying is that he knows how he is seen, and is playing into it for his own sake, attempting to not be constantly seen as malicious and dangerous, but as comical and ultimately harmless to the status quo, "The Funny One". Inside the circus, Pomni gets the opportunity to try something new and be whatever she likes whenever she likes, Jax, on the other hand, is stuck in the dynamics of a machine that he has no control over.
Things come to a head for Jax and Pomni in episode 6, when they're the last two remaining players in the circus deathmatch. Pomni introduces the idea that one of them betray the other. Jax is on board with her doing so as part of her ‘evil’ character and gives himself up. He’s had his fun and doesn’t particularly care about winning or losing at this point. It’s only then that she tries to drop the idea entirely, but Jax wants her to see her role through. He’s been working to keep her committed the whole game. He wants her to have her fun too, and not back out of it due to fears of how she'll be seen. It was her idea. She was clearly excited about it, and she shouldn’t be afraid to enact it. It’s why he insists that they aren’t a team. He’s still playing the game and acting as if a betrayal is going to happen, as him being shot in cold blood is the most evil thing to be done at the very end. Pomni, however, is not playing anymore. She is not trying to be ‘Pomni the Evil’, and is fretting that shooting Jax within the confines of game is the same as shooting him for real. She isn’t operating with the same hard demarcation that following the end of all this, life will go on as usual. Jax is treating this like a role-play scenario, Pomni is not, and they both get hurt by this disconnection. Pomni thinks she has done something wrong, and Jax has no idea that she’s genuinely upset until a full on fight has broken out.
What’s more interesting, however, is why Pomni backed out of shooting Jax in the first place. Why was betrayal fine when she thought the both of them would be doing so, but suddenly not once Jax gave up (the betrayal itself never at any point stopped being mutual, as Jax agreed with her idea of “One of us betrays the other")? Why is Jax also attempting to shoot her a requisite part of the betrayal? It’s because the two of them were attempting to play out completely different scenarios. When Pomni says “I suppose this is the part where one of us betrays the other.”, Jax believes that she is floating the idea of her next evil act being to eliminate Jax to be the sole winner, which he agrees to. What she was actually doing, was issuing a callout, a presumption that he was going to betray her. She believes she has figured him out, but where did this idea even come from? While Jax can be antagonistic, he’s never turned on someone just to win a game, as a matter of fact, he doesn’t seem all too concerned with winning or losing an adventure at all. If he was, he wouldn’t have been so disappointed about the peaceful return of the syrup tanker in episode 2. The question remains, why did Pomni think he would betray her? The answer lies in the reputation that comes with Jax designating himself as ‘the funny one’. The unspoken racist baggage of the Zip Coon caricature, the ‘funny’ black person. Jax is presumed to be fundamentally unserious, emotionally stunted, and a huckster looking to con his next mark. The fantasy in Pomni’s betrayal callout is getting one up on the scam artist, being sharper than the sharpies. It’s the fantasy of establishing superiority and catching the coon out as the fraud that he always was. Pomni is of course wrong, because her racist assumptions do not at all reflect Jax as a person. She has completely shed her 'evil' role to take on an outright heroic one, and that heroic fantasy is based on racial stereotyping.
This is why Pomni is so deadset on backing out. The scenario she wanted to play through did not happen, and now with Jax surrendering, cannot happen. Jax does not know this, because Jax has no idea how exactly Pomni was picturing the betrayal going, or even who she believed was supposed to do the betraying. She did not say “I suppose this is the part where you betray me”, because she presumed that this was the only way the scenario could play out.
The conflict between Jax and Pomni in this scene ultimately boils down to Pomni's inability to see past her own biases. Pomni automatically presumes her feelings are the correct ones to have for this situation, so if Jax's don't match hers, he is obviously expressing the wrong ones and is in need of correction. This is why she takes so much offense to him stating that they are not friends. She wants to be friends with him, so he ought to also want to be friends with her. If he expresses less than positive feelings about sharing personal information, it must be because he is lying. Jax did not perform the same rituals to grieve Kaufmo's abstraction as everyone else, so he must not be grieving at all. Simply because Jax hasn't shared certain feelings publicly, she believes he must not be having them. Jax jokes about Pomni coming on to him romantically, and it's because she is, in a way. Pomni is trying to railroad Jax into a friendship that he does not want, demanding that he should reciprocate her feelings no matter how much he protests. Pomni is denying Jax both his interiority and autonomy, policing his emotions by treating them as deliberately malicious, and responding to him not wanting to be friends as if it were a personal attack. She's being solipsistic, and Jax rightfully calls her on this. She has no idea why Kaufmo abstracted and certainly no more idea about the details of his abstraction than anyone else, least of all Jax, one of his former friends. If Jax were read as a cis woman, this scene would be easily read as him being subjected to unwanted advances and demands for intimacy, but since he is not, and uses the evil gaslighting words ‘delusional’ and ‘misremembering’ (which evil gaslighters use as magic phrases to gaslight people because they are evil), he is not.
Pomni is misremembering, however. Jax had at no point come to her to pursue a friendship. He approached Evil Pomni while playing softball, but Pomni is the one who initiated the first hangout between the two. This fact retroactively frames Pomni’s ‘Pomni the Evil’ character not as a role chosen for her own personal enjoyment and catharsis, but instead as a blatant attempt to pander to him based on her perception of what he likes, and explains her lack of commitment to the role, as she was never personally interested in it to begin with. Jax remarks on her facade falling apart by saying "I thought you were cool", hearkening back to him describing Evil Pomni as 'cool'. This explains why she asks Jax "Weren't we kinda bonding over being chaotic evil together?". She wasn't playing at being evil because she wanted to play as evil, but instead because she wanted to present herself in a manner that she knew he found appealing. Pomni the Evil is a disingenuous creation, and is perhaps the true evil of the character.
The question still stands, however. Why is Pomni so invested in this narrative of Jax approaching her for a relationship? It’s because this is the traditional gendered social script, men being the initiators in encounters with women, and after doing so, the man isn’t supposed to be the one to back out, as this is the role of the woman, who bears the onus of signaling disinterest. Since Jax’s assigned gender role is that of a man, Pomni interprets him making conversation with her as an indication that he’s interested in pursuing a relationship with her. When he states that they are not friends, Pomni treats as him as if he had been leading her on the whole time. In her eyes, he is violating gender norms, and is acting in an inappropriate manner. Beyond this, there’s more at play here than just gender roles and expectations, as they do not explain why Pomni believed he was offering her an invitation to be friends in the first place. She does not treat Zooble, Gangle, or Kinger this way, presuming that they wish to be intimate friends after a few conversations, so why does she treat Jax specifically in such an over-familiar manner?
The answer goes back to the fact that Jax is socially marked by his racialization. He is considered a public spectacle, and so naturally, anything he does is treated as an invitation for attention. It’s why she starts addressing him using the explicitly familiar terms “bro” and “partner” during the deathmatch and hugs him at the end, despite barely knowing him. If Jax is drawing her attention, it surely must be because he wants it, in whatever form it takes, and if he pushes back, he is sending mixed signals and in the wrong. It’s why she acts so entitled about them becoming friends, from her perspective, he was asking for it. To Pomni, Jax, as a racialized person, should obviously find a relationship with her, someone who is non-racialized, desirable, which is why his every action can easily be read as an extension of that desire. When he pushes back against this idea, to her it just means that he is actually being dishonest about how he really feels (because she ‘can just tell’), and needs to have his true feelings drug out. This racist perspective is why she attacks him and tries to start a fight. It’s her attempt to prove herself right to him, because she genuinely believes that she knows him better than he knows himself.
This final effort backfires, because Jax is not lying about how he feels, Pomni just isn’t listening to him. When he asks her what she’s doing and what’s wrong with her, these are not rhetorical questions. He has no idea what’s going on inside her head, and he’s genuinely bewildered as to why him not wanting to be friends with her is such a big deal in the first place, he just wanted to play out getting shot to death in the ‘shoot people until they’re dead’ game. Pomni, who up to this point has not cared about what Jax has to say, and certainly isn’t about to start now, replies by asking him why he didn’t fight back. It’s at this point the he gets frustrated, gives on trying to have an actual conversation, and simply tells her what she already believes. That he doesn’t care about anyone. That he sees the people around him as mere objects and hurts them for fun. That every word he says serves only as a means of manipulation. That if he ever acted in a way that seemed friendly, it was only to draw people in to hurt them more. That there’s nothing more to him, so she can stop looking. This all conveniently lines up exactly with what has been said about him by the other circus members. He says it not because these statements are true or accurate (as we’ve seen ample evidence to the contrary), but because he knows it will get Pomni to leave him alone, which is better than whatever the hell she’s doing right now. Jax drives Pomni away because both her racism and transmisogyny make her unsafe for him to be around, and her bigotry becomes the unbridgeable gap between them.
When Jax abstracts in episode 9, Zooble gripes about how he waited until they couldn't do anything about it, treating it as a personal failure on his part and little more than an inconvenience that he deliberately caused. Their view is backwards. Jax abstracts because there is wasn’t anything he could do about it. In a time of tremendous stress, when all the other circus members have to lean on one another for support, who exactly is Jax supposed to turn to? A Zooble who doesn't respect him? A Ragatha who treats him as ontologically evil? A Gangle who refuses to openly communicate with him? A Kinger he never knew and who just wrecked the one home he had? A Pomni who refuses to see him for who he is? When Jax says "Now, we have nothing", he is only speaking for himself. The other circus members have each other. He, by contrast, doesn’t have anyone.
Following his abstraction, when Pomni finally resolves herself to see who Jax really is, the person she finds is one whom lives in an extremely vulnerable position. Jax is homeless, and on the run from his family. When he panics and pushes the button to remain in the circus at the end of episode 7, he is not being rash or irrational. He does it because he knows, that unlike everyone else, there are no other options for him. Leaving the circus means giving up the meager bit of comfort he has to be left out on the street and at risk of dying from starvation, exposure, or worse. There is no discussion to be had for him, if the button to leave actually worked and the group chose it, he would have essentially been left for dead. This prioritization of his own safety in a hostile world defines the decisions that he makes, such as why he turns down Kaufmo’s offer to search for an exit, and is why his relationship with Ribbit collapses.
Jax trusts Ribbit, and more importantly, Jax likes Ribbit. It’s why he opened up to her about his past, his relationship with his parents, and his precarious living situation. It’s why, for a brief moment while in her room, he’s finally able to come out and live as her true self. She is safe here in this space with Ribbit. She trusts Ribbit with herself fully. However, when Kaufmo comes to the door, reality comes crashing in. Jax may trust Ribbit and feel safe expressing her trans womanhood around her, but that trust does not extend to the rest of the circus. Jax has spent her entire life having her gender policed by her mother, and has ample reason to be concerned about facing similar abuse from her peers. She trusts Ribbit with her identity, but what about Kaufmo, or Ragatha, or Kinger, or anyone else? A terrible contradiction emerges. The Jax who remains closeted to avoid transmisogynistic violence from her fellow circus members cannot be the same Jax who is close friends with Ribbit and open about who she is. Jax must choose either to remain safe, and in the closet, or come out completely and open herself up to the very same dangers she ran away from home to escape from. When Jax throws Ribbit’s bow away, she is choosing her own safety. It’s why she pushes Ribbit away. She knows that she cannot have the relationship that she wants with her given the circumstances. It’s why she asks Ribbit to tell no one. It’s why she runs off and panics about the mess that she’s made. It’s why she refuses to admit to anything she said being true in public. Being friends with Ribbit means being fully out to everyone, and given how the other circus members abandon Ribbit and Kaufmo (which is why she retorts “Are you seriously gonna blame me for something that everyone else did too?” when Pomni insinuates that Jax's behavior may be responsible for why people abstract.), it’s no wonder that she feels unsafe doing so.
When Jax tells Pomni that he would probably forget about her and move on if she abstracted, he is saying what he wishes were true. He has not forgotten about Ribbit, nor Kaufmo, and he is still grieving them. He grieves not just the loss of Ribbit as a person, but also the loss of a life that he wanted to live and a relationship that he wanted to have, but could not, due to the hostility of the world he inhabits. He grieves not just the loss of Kaufmo, but the loss of the last person he had any sort of real connection with, frayed as it was.
It's only now, following his abstraction, that Pomni finally sees this Jax. The Jax who is a lot. The Jax who's lost everyone he was ever close to. The Jax who was driven away for not being what other people wanted him to be. The Jax who was never good enough. The Jax whose femininity gets laughed at. The Jax who's been left with nothing. Pomni embraces this Jax. She embraces Jax for the first time.
It's bittersweet. It's far too little, and way beyond too late. For Pomni, this is a major breakthrough. She's finally seeing who he is as a person, not as an archetype, not as a villain, but as a human being. For Jax, this is him receiving the bare minimum of human decency and acknowledgement. He has been treating Pomni this way since they met, showing genuine interest and care in her as a person, and she is just now, after days of treating him like a problem to be solved, reciprocating it. What Pomni does in episode 9 in bothering to get to know Jax, is what he had already been doing when he made the President Pomni suggestion (an adventure designed specifically to get to know her by putting her in a scripted scenario and seeing how she'd respond), and when he asked how she was doing back at Spudsy's. When Jax says that he hates her, and that she's making things complicated and so much harder, it's because for all the seeing that Pomni is doing now, she has not actually done anything to undo the harm that she's caused him. Being seen is not nearly enough. He's been hurt, is still hurting, and he's now saddled with Pomni's hangups over his abstraction. Pomni's grief is piled on top of his just so she can have a personal revelation and closure. It's why "You should have just talked to me man" rings so hollow, because he had been talking to her all along, she simply wasn't listening. She has only started now, which is why Jax finally starts talking to her again, well after it's too late.
Isn't she lovely, in retrospect? We didn't care much for her when she was alive, but now that she's passed on, she's a pleasant memory. Jax is now a nice, tragic story we can tell each other and feel good about ourselves for feeling all the correct emotions about. It's sad that she's gone, but now that she is, we can wrap her life up in a nice, personally affirming bow where we don't have to think about the reasons why she's no longer with us. Everyone loves a good dead black person story, because their demise can be treated as a sad inevitability (and possibly deserved), instead of as a preventable outcome brought about by social inequality and injustice. Jax's abstraction was a social murder, and everyone in the circus is as culpable for it as they were for the abstractions of Ribbit and Kaufmo. I hesitate to say that Jax is dead, because abstraction is not quite death. It is more akin to the eugenicist notion of degeneration, which posits that beings with higher levels of sentience (read: human) can over time degrade into lower, more base and primal creatures without treatment (the same concept that underpins the concept of 'going savage' in zootopia, and is part of why its critique of its own in-universe racism falls apart.), and that this degradation can spread as a contagion from contact. Exploring the implications of abstraction as a metaphor are beyond the scope of this post, but I acknowledge them in order to accurately describe Jax's actual state. He is not dead by the end of TADC, instead living in a reduced state where his humanity has been completely stripped from him. This is a fate far worse than death, Jax is now undead in a manner similar to the Haitian folk zombie. A person totally reduced to the status of mere object.
Jax becomes a lovely memorial. Jax becomes a springboard for everyone to gather around and learn a valuable lesson about sticking together through hard times and looking out for one another. It's so convenient that at no point did anyone have to actually check up on him or tend to his needs in any way to learn this. The important thing is that we all came together (without Jax) in order bolster each other's ability to survive (without Jax). Jax becomes something the other circus members can finally manage, a thing that can't talk and can be sequestered in a place where no one has to interact him if they don't want to, not seen, not heard. Jax is posthumously granted personhood for a brief moment by Pomni and Caine, and it just as quickly passes. Jax is now someone who can be fondly remembered instead of presently considered. Jax is one of hundreds of black trans women who get a day's worth of coverage and acknowledgement when they die, not a moment before, and not a moment after, before becoming just another faceless statistic, a mildly interesting factoid on average lifespans.
If there is any racism to be interrogated in the production of TADC, the fact that no one on the creative team took a look at Jax's characterization and said "Hey, this character draws pretty heavily from black culture and history, maybe we should deliberately engage with that in some way", while also having the ability to do anything about it. Jax's casting is indicative of a considerable lack of awareness of and sensitivity towards black cultural history. Jax is a black character with her black skin and historical context stripped off and repackaged, just like Bugs Bunny himself.
This sort of racism isn't unique to TADC. It's everywhere in studio production. It's Pararmount's Yellowstone, a show that explicitly references American colonialism, having an entire storyline dedicated to exploring the forced sterilization of a white woman, while ignoring the United States' campaigns to forcibly sterilize indigenous women. It's Samurai Jack, a critically acclaimed children's show, portraying its black characters only as noble savages, unscrupulous mercenaries, or misguided, childish buffoons who need to be set straight, while nonblack characters are allowed to be shown as Jack's friends and equals. It's pervasive enough that Shrek 2 riffs on it by making Shrek's happily-ever-after potion effect be that he is now white and no longer racialized (although donkey, who's played by Eddie Murphy, must remain as an animal. Not even the iconoclast Shrek films are so bold as to defy the convention of non-white protagonists spending the majority of an animated film's runtime as non-human).
It's simply not as sensational to say that TADC is racist in the same ways many other shows are, and it's much harder to harass the cast and crews of these larger productions. I, however, care very little about scrutinizing tweets and stream clips, and I am not shocked that the racist industry in a racist country that was constructed on a foundation of racism, has racists in it and encourages racism in its constituents. The people who are shocked, are far more concerned with optics than anything else. "What's wrong with these public creatives?" they cry, "They should have known better, and been racist more quietly and privately, like the rest of us!". If Gooseworx and co. had access to giant PR firms to ensure that their online presences were squeaky clean, there would be no problem at all for these sorts of people, regardless of how racist any of them may actually be. It's scandalous in the same manner as an exposed nipple on a TV broadcast. We all knew the nipple was there the whole time, regardless, but how horrid that it was out where we could all see it! I find this sort of reasoning uncompelling, and so should you.
The real reason for these accusations is simply to provide a thin justification for attacking a trans woman who had the audacity to exist in public. It has nothing to do with what Gooseworx has done, as no one is organizing a concerted effort to harass Taylor Sheraton for making his racist westerns, but rather, who she is. Perhaps this is why both she and Jax stir up such virulent hatred. All I know is that you all sound just like Ragatha.
TLDR: Jax is black, and the reasons that she is not portrayed as such have to do with a history of racism most users are not willing to earnestly contend with.
[edit] it occurs to me I should actually explain what this is, whoops
This is a video essay I put together for Sylvanas Windrunner, arguing not that she’s definitively good or bad, but why the way she’s been treated is unfair, and how maybe that makes more deserving of sympathy than the devs would like to believe
The Iliad Summarized, With Apologies to Don McLean
(To the tune of American Pie)
A long, long time ago
I can still remember
How my homeland used to make me smile
And I knew if I could just try
That I could raise my people high
And maybe they’d be happy for a while
But Helen’s capture made me shiver
The messages that they’d deliver
War lies on the doorstep
I couldn’t take one more step
I can’t remember if I cried
When I heard about his stolen bride
But I must go out with the tide
I guess we will abide
So bye, bye my dear Ithacan isle,
Hate to leave you but I need to
Won’t be back for a while
And the armies of Greece will fight and die by the pile
But as for me, I’ll survive by my guile
But me, I’ll survive by my guile
Will Troy fall for Paris’ love
And do you believe the gods above
If the seer tells you so?
And do you believe that they control
Each man and woman’s earthly role
And can you teach me the best way to know
Well I know that on Apollo’s whim
Chryseis it’s said, belongs to him
Agamemnon wants his dues
Achilles just can’t refusevSo with Brieseis Agamemnon was stuck
Left Achilles pining for a [CENSORED]
But I knew we were out of luck
I guess we will abide
I started saying bye, bye my dear Ithacan isle,
Hate to leave you but I need to
Won’t be back for a while
And the armies of Greece will fight and die by the pilevBut as for me, I’ll survive by my guile
But me, I’ll survive by my guile
Now for ten years, we’ve been on our own
And Achilles sits alone to moan
But that’s not how it ought to be
When Patrokles fought at the gates of Troy
In a suit he borrowed for the ploy
And in his wrath he killed fifty-three
Oh but while the Greek was looking down
Apollo smote him ‘bout his crown
The ships had all been burned
The armor not returned
And while the boats collapsed to smoke and sparks
The walls of Troy our one landmark
And we sang dirges in the dark
The day Patrokles died.
We were saying bye, bye my dear Ithacan isle,
Hate to leave you but I need to
Won’t be back for a while
And the armies of Greece will fight and die by the pile
But as for me, I’ll survive by my guile
Helter skelter in a summer swelter
Hector will find no place of shelter
Three times round and falling fast
He landed hard on the grass
Achilles will not let this pass
And Priam’s boy has found himself quite out-classed
Now for nine days it dawned crystal clear
Dragged Hector round the funeral bier
His vengeance to enhance
Poor man never had a chance
Then Priam chose to take the field
Achilles at last was made to yield
Do you recall what was revealed?
The day both armies cried
I was singing bye, bye my dear Ithacan isle,
Hate to leave you but I need to
Won’t be back for a while
And the armies of Greece will fight and die by the pile
But as for me, I’ll survive by my guile
But me, I’ll survive by my guile
Oh and there we were all in one place
A generation far from grace
With no time left to start again
So come on, Ajax be nimble, Ajax be quick
Our leader’s dead from Apollo’s trick
>‘Cause Paris was his ankle’s early end
Oh, and as I saw the troops engage
My hands were clenched in fists of rage
The Trojan horse will rise<
Defeat the walls with lies<
And as the flames climbed high into the night
To light the Trojan’s final fight
I saw Eris laughing with delight
The day the Trojans died
I met a seer who sang the blues
And I asked her for some happy news
But she just smiled and turned away
I thought of sweet Ithaca’s shore
Where I’d departed many years before
Penelope, I swore I’ll be back that way
And in the streets, the children screamed
The lovers died and Cassandra dreamed
But not a word was spoken
The stone walls all were broken
Left the three things I despise the most
The sea, the war, the soldier’s ghost
I took my crew back toward the coast
I guess we will abide
I was singing bye, bye my dear Ithacan isle,
Hate to leave you but I need to
Won’t be back for a while
And the armies of Greece will fight and die by the pile
But as for me, I’ll survive by my guile
But me, I’ll survive by my guile
Extended thoughts on Riko Sakurauchi’s portrayal in each season of Love Live Sunshine, I guess.
I’ve been mentioning that I’ll be doing this on my blog for a while now, and this is the final result. It’s sort of a character analysis and character criticism, functioning both as my “Why I love Riko” essay and a “Why season 2 was weird for Riko” essay, and even a “YohaRiko amirite?” essay. I don’t know how well I wrote this, maybe it’s full of typos or maybe I did a horrible job expressing my points. I don’t really know. If there are indeed any mistakes, I’m sorry.
Season 1 Riko is an absolutely phenomenal character, and is easily the best written and developed character in Love Live, in my opinion.
Riko’s arc is one of rediscovering your passion. At a piano competition in her first year of high school, Riko was unable to play the song she had prepared, and left the stage, bowing in apology to the audience for her rather disappointing performance. This event, unsurprisingly, had a pretty severe impact on Riko. She’s gone her entire life adoring the piano, but got super stressed out when expectations became too high. And piano is all she really had, she hadn’t even heard of school idols because of how focused on piano she was.
And so Riko’s family moves from Tokyo to Uchiura. There are a few explanations for this action. The most significant explanation, and the one that the anime uses, is that Riko wants a change of scenery so that she can better capture an oceanic feel for her song that she failed to play in her first year. It’s also possible that she moved to get away from a sense of shame after her failure, she’d inevitably get dirty looks in class for something like that. Moving to a new place means you don’t know anybody, so nobody knows of your failure or really has any major expectations of you. Riko can take comfort in that fact. However, the change of scenery is the most important thing. Riko couldn’t play her song because she didn’t think it was good enough. It was supposed to feel oceanic, but she didn’t know how to capture that feel, so she didn’t play the song. This completely encapsulates just how all of the pressure on Riko affects her. She felt her song didn’t meet expectations, so she didn’t play it. If she just perfects the song, she can win the competition and validate herself, effectively. But that last step about winning the competition, Riko doesn’t realise that yet.
Enter Chika “orange you glad we live next to each other” Takami. A really good character but this is about Riko so we won’t go into that in great depth. Chika’s story of school idols and normal people shining in episode 1 is a simple one, but it cheers up Riko and encourages her to do better. This is the start of the absolutely fantastic relationship they’ll develop. Chika wants Riko to be a school idol, but Riko’s entirely uninterested. After spending presumably a few days repeating the cycle of “Do you wanna be a school idol?”, Chika sees Riko on the beach and takes a quick peek up her skirt before telling her that they can go listen to the sound of the ocean together. This process goes smoothly and Riko hears the sound of the ocean she so desperately craves. Content, she decides to help Chika and You with composing, and in that moment comes to understand just how passionately Chika loves school idols. Later that day, Riko plays Yume no Tobira on her piano, and Chika, who happens to live beside her, takes note. It’s in this scene where Riko opens up about her problems and history with the piano. Chika’s response is to recruit her anyway, but Riko says she can’t quit piano. It’s here where we get an absolutely beautiful exchange between the two:
Chika: “Try it, and if you can smile and change, you can go back to piano. You won’t be quitting”
Riko: “It’d be rude to try being a school idol with that kind of motivation when you’re trying so hard.”
Chika: “If it helps you, that makes me happy. Putting smiles on peoples’ faces is what a school idol is about.”
And with that, Riko joins up as a school idol. Her motivation – enjoy being a school idol and therefore enjoy life, allowing her to return to piano and enjoy that. Across the rest of the season, Riko and Chika gradually become closer and closer, with Riko being an incredibly supportive friend to Chika’s issues as well as her being the one who notices why this town is so great – something that makes sense for her to realise as she’s the most inexperienced with the town.
Episode 10 and 11 are where Riko’s arc is brought into the spotlight again, as she receives an email informing her about that piano competition. And she deletes the email, because she’s content being a school idol. Chika overhears her sister and Riko’s mum talking about the competition though, and Riko’s mum is concerned since Riko hasn’t done anything about it to her knowledge. Chika takes matters into her own hands and, when the rest of Aqours are asleep, Chika wakes Riko up and they cycle to the school, where she asks Riko to play her ocean themed song from much earlier. Riko does, Chika likes it, and then they talk at the beach. Chika tells Riko that she wants her to enter the piano competition, and in this moment, Riko’s shocked, too shocked too even respond for several seconds. Several seconds after Chika suggests this and even managing to ignore Chika’s explanation, Riko jumps to the conclusion that Chika doesn’t want her to come along. Across this season, they’ve developed such a wonderful, beautiful friendship even, and Riko’s become incredibly comfortable as Chika’s friend and as a school idol. The moment that piano competition is brought up again, Riko jumps to a false conclusion, that Chika doesn’t want her at the Love Live event. She’s still insecure. She’s suddenly way less certain about what Chika thinks of her. Riko’s showing her weaknesses. Let’s be real for a second, Riko’s conclusion is irrational, but that’s how her insecurity manifested. Thankfully, Chika explains everything. As we already stated earlier, Riko’s arc is one of rediscovering passion, and this is what happens here. Chika basically tells Riko that the piano was important to her, and that she shouldn’t just forget it. Riko’s allowed to balance out these things, she doesn’t need to choose just one. And in episode 11, Riko does indeed go to that piano competition and play her finished song, taking 1st place in the process. By taking 1st place and doing what she couldn’t do before, Riko’s essentially validated herself – she’s proven to herself that her decisions were right. I’ll get into it later, but season 2 does do something to give this arc a more definitive conclusion.
And there’s Riko’s arc. It’s one of a very insecure character losing passion for something she loves, but, thanks to the help of others, she learns to enjoy life again and can go back to her old passion with a smile. The thing that makes this especially great though is how good the execution is. Love Live has a tendency to introduce a character’s problem and then give them all the development they need to overcome it in just an episode, and it often ends up feeling sort of superfluous. That development methodology isn’t terrible per se, and SIP actually does it quite well with the likes of Rin and Nico, but taking the time to carefully develop Riko as an individual as well as developing her relationship with Chika worked wonders. It’s no surprise that an arc that great would result in Riko being my best girl and Sunshine season 1 is my favourite season of Love Live.
However, while all of this was really, truly fantastic, there was one major flaw in Riko’s treatment in season 1. She gets no significant interaction with anyone in Aqours sans Chika and You. I’ve briefly touched on why Chika’s great, but the interaction with You was poorly done, imo. Remember how I mentioned Love Live introduces character flaws and overcomes them in the same episode? The 2nd year drama was that for me. You’s jealous of ChikaRiko even though every interaction You has with the two of them prior indicates that she wouldn’t be even remotely jealous. Heck, You seemingly flirts with Riko at times. But that’s a thing for another day. For now, let’s take a look at how season 2 developed Riko and her relationship with the other members of Aqours.
Or I suppose I should say with Yohane and nobody else.
But before I open that can of worms, let’s touch upon the definitely great moments for Riko in season 2.
See, Riko definitely gets off to a strong start in season 2. Yes, Riko-chan Beam is actually an incredible scene for highlighting Riko’s development as a character and the security in her relationship with Chika. Remember Riko’s reaction to the suggestion of going to the piano competition by Chika? That was a pretty scary situation for her. In the 1st episode of season 2, after Riko tells Chika that it’s okay that they lost because they were disadvantaged but did their best. Chika’s response…
“If you really mean that, I despise you.”
Woah. Despise? That’s pretty intense, Mikan. But Riko’s response isn’t just perfectly calm, it’s playful. She does the Riko-chan Beam! It doesn’t take a genius to identify that, if Chika had said that to Riko as she were pre-S1EP10, she’d cry. That Riko was fragile and insecure. After that whole ordeal though and her piano competition, Riko’s finally feeling content again. She’s comfortable. She’s secure. She hears Chika suggest that she despises her, and she responds by being a cute little goofball. Just goes to show you how much more confident she’s become.
Riko also gets some closure to her arc in season 1, which I alluded to earlier in this essay. See, by winning that piano competition, Riko essentially validated her decision to participate in it. She got what she wanted from it, it was the correct decision. But Riko’s also an idol now. And in episode 12, when Chika asks everyone if they want to win Love Live, Riko’s response is as simple as saying that she wants to win Love Live to prove to herself that being a school idol was the correct choice. She wants to be a school idol. In season 1, she validated herself as a pianist, and in season 2, she validates herself as a school idol by winning Love Live. Her arc in season 1 felt complete, but this detail in season 2 makes that feel more complete. That she’s playing piano so confidently in many scenes in the last few episodes is the icing on the cake.
Anyway, now I can open the aforementioned can of worms that is YohaRiko.
First and foremost, I’d like to clarify something. I love YohaRiko. It’s not my favourite Riko ship, that honour goes to ChikaRiko by far, but YohaRiko takes second place. I think the two go incredibly well together aesthetically, and there’s a lot of potential for genuinely good character interaction be it platonic or romantic between the two. With how popular the ship is and the fact that even their seiyuus love it, it’s no surprise that the writers tried to capitalise off of its popularity in season 2 and just have more of it.
Emphasis on “Tried”.
See, Riko and Yohane’s relationship starts in episode 5, where Yohane discovers a seemingly stray dog and, unable to take care of it herself because of rules and such, as well as unable to give it to most of the other members, offers it to Riko, who begrudgingly ends up taking care of it. They bond in the process of caring for the dog, and eventually end up returning it to its owners. After a quick “is this loss” meme (I’m serious) the two wait near the owner’s house wanting to meet it again, and have a conversation about the natures of coincidences and fate and datenshis. The development for each character individually doesn’t really mean anything. We don’t really learn anything about Yohane we didn’t learn in season 1, and Riko’s development in this episode is completely meaningless outside of this episode. Honestly, it’s the most filler episode in Love Live. But at minimum, it’s still cute fun with two girls we love very much. And from know on forth, we can have Yohane and Riko having significant interaction! With the opportunity to put these characters in a lot of interesting scenarios and develop a genuine relationship between the two to match the likes of ChikaRiko, what do you think the writers did?
It’s pretty simple, really. Yohane does some Datenshi things. Riko gets mad. Yohane calls her “Riri”, and then Riko gives an angry Datenshi response. And that’s every interaction they have for the remainder of the season.
To say it’s unfortunate is an understatement. These 2 had potential. Riko’s biggest flaw in season 1 was the lack of interaction outside of Chika. Yohane’s biggest flaw was a pretty severe lack of development. Give Riko someone else to interact with and give Yohane someone more grounded than she is yet still understanding and have Yohane develop thanks to her. In the process, give us some funny and varied jokes and cute moments. Try not to forget about ChikaRiko in the process, preferably. I don’t think that’s too much to ask, and yet, we get none of it. Simply put, it’s wasted potential.
Plus, perhaps it’s just me, but I think it’s even more offensive in the case of Riko. Yohane didn’t really have much going on in season 1, so for her to be in a similar situation in season 2 was fairly whatever to me. I’d definitely have preferred she get development, but she wasn’t Hanamaru’d at least. She’s pretty even across both seasons, there’s a consistency in quality, even if that quality is somewhat disappointing. Riko meanwhile was the most interesting character in season 1 for me, so for Riko to otherwise be the butt of Datenshi jokes was infuriating to me, even in spite of the good moments I’ve mentioned. It’s not impossible that this upsets me more out of bias towards Riko, but really, how could I not be upset? I think even if you’re not a fan of Riko, you have to agree that this isn’t the best direction to take her character, right? Maybe you don’t. That’s whatever.
Season 2 Riko isn’t exactly flanderised or anything. Those good things I mentioned about her portrayal in season 2 still hold true in spite of what they do with YohaRiko. Her being a Datenshi joke is only really a thing in the middle of the season. It starts and ends with phenomenal development for her. And sure, the YohaRiko scenes can get annoying, and I’ll admit in hindsight that they weren’t really very good. But at minimum, they’re all still cute and basically all of them managed to make me laugh on my first watch.
All in all, Riko’s an odd one. Her season 1 portrayal is absolutely incredible. It’s extremely well written and her relationship with Chika is stellar. Her biggest problem is a lack of interaction with others, and season 2 flops when it tries to fix that. However, season 2 gives her season 1 arc the conclusion we didn’t know we needed. And in that aspect alone, I gotta give season 2 Riko some props. Is she the worst girl in Sunshine season 2? Absolutely not, no way. Hanamaru still exists, You was barely a character, and as I already mentioned, Yohane was underwhelming. Is she the best girl though? Probably not, I think I’d give that to Mari. I still liked Riko though.
