#rannebles

[spushii]

So, Jax is a pastiche, right? She's Bugs Bunny. She's an irreverent wisecracker; a harbinger of perfect comedic violence who's always one step ahead of the doleful idiot she's pitted against. She's aware of the narrative, she leans into the tropes, she sees the X-mark drawn on the floor and knows to step just off it before the piano comes crashing down onto the fool she lured there.

In this, Jax is sort of an intellectual exercise: What if Bugs Bunny were a person? What if her comedic victims were people, too? And her character in The Amazing Digital Circus becomes this methodical examination of what exactly would have to be true about a person for her to become Bugs Bunny.

Why would a person be so irreverent of her circumstances? Well, put frankly, she's dissociating. She places a mental barrier between herself and her reality because engaging with reality is painful. Her wisecracking jokes serve a similar purpose: she is selling to herself the fantasy of this fiction. She can wear a mask, and be a character, and be funny! She's violent because the violence she and others experience is inherently unreal. It feels unlike real violence, and it has no obvious consequence. Like a cartoon: injuries are fleeting and impermanent; they disappear like magic from scene to scene. Leaning into this reinforces her fantasy of unreality: every gag another reminder that nothing is real. She is especially aware of circumstance and of narrative because she is terrified of unawareness being weaponized against her. So she always has her ear to the ground; always notices when things are off just before anybody else does. Then this awareness returns her in dividends: it is what allows her not to be the butt of a joke!

And you'll notice as we do this, as we peel away these layers, our Bugs Bunny indeed becomes exceptionally human. Pitifully so, even. We see the beating heart of a person who is terrified of the world, and who cannot stand to be herself within it. We see Bugs Bunny become a mask and a bludgeon. Our Person uses it to destroy and control herself; to destroy and control others. Bugs Bunny is not a person; so for a person to become Bugs Bunny, she must seek to sublimate and eradicate her personhood.

Bugs Bunny is a crossdresser. We suppose its part of his irreverent character. So disconnected from genuine personhood, he cannot even feel emasculated; or rather that his masculinity is of no importance to him. So he can dress as a woman, and fool the idiot again, and we're not asked to see Bugs Bunny being leered at and harassed as being representative of misogynistic violence. In fact: in this dichotomy, Bugs Bunny is powerful. He disarms men who blubber and fawn over a beautiful woman. Then there is violent catharsis: a punchline to the joke! Bugs Bunny is a man who emasculates other men by tricking them into being attracted to him. Then he assaults them---very literally! A gun! A smack! A falling piano! And the cards are all in his hands. He, as always, has absolute control over and awareness of the gag.

Jax, in a dress, is violently humanizing. For a moment: she's torn from her character almost completely! No longer can she be the irreverent, the wisecracker, the self-aware or the powerful. She is put into a dress despite herself. She is the joke, the emasculated. She is... 'put in her place': this humiliation is consequence. Her victims are frustrated enough with her that they orchestrate a joke to humiliate her just so, and for her it is obscenely and totalizingly humanizing. Because she cannot be Bugs Bunny. She cannot portray the surreptitious, leering dominance of the Man In A Dress. She can only be "emasculated." She can only be a person.

[butchsophiewalten]

in my big expansive network of google drive folders containing walten files images i did actually have a folder to differentiate the waltens' house from what i theorized might have been the krankens' house with the distinction being i thought the krankens had wood paneling on the walls while the waltens had elaborate (sometimes floral) wallpaper and gaudy carpets. and then i remembered that edd & molly's room has wood paneling which destroyed everything

(unedited room lol look at the sink. this is literally just an ugly hotel room)

[spushii]

There's this aspect to Zooble I love which I think is most obvious and concentrated in very early TADC. Which is their sort of complete obstinate refusal to engage with The Circus. This is an obvious part of their character throughout the whole series---their constant conflict with Caine is a major aspect of the narrative---but what I'm exactly referring to is beyond just obstinance around adventures or discomfort with their body or otherwise aspects of the circus created and controlled in totality by Caine.

I kinda get the vibe in the early episodes that Zooble doesn't have much of a relationship with the other circus members. They're not friends with anyone, they don't seem to have any particular dynamic with anyone---except maybe Jax, who makes herself necessarily unavoidable. It isn't until episode 4 that we start to see them develop a real relationship with Gangle, and the development of that relationship seems to upset the circus' group dynamics pretty substantially. Pre-EP4, I kinda see Zooble as biding their time as they await an inevitable Escape Opportunity: whereafter they can become a Person again. In the circus they're in like a dissociative stasis, disembodied and dehumanized. Their own humanity becomes this thing of almost mythological significance: this promise of future, of being returned to personhood. In this way, their time in the circus is a prison sentence to wait out. They don't try to contend with it. They don't play the games, they don't get to know anyone.

This is obviously maladaptive. Imagine spending what is almost certainly several years locked in a box with 5 other people and having next to no relationship with any of them. It's like in Sartre's No Exit where Garcin suggests they can avoid being each other's torturers if they just don't ever talk to each other---for eternity.

A big reason I like this is because here Zooble and Jax have ideologies that almost perfectly foil each other. Zooble tries to avoid the reality of their absurdity by absorbing themself into the mythology of their Humanity. Jax tries to avoid the reality of her humanity by absorbing herself into the mythology of absurdity. Through Zooble, we see what happens when a person opens themself up and finds that the truth is somewhere in the middle: the circus is real, and its reality must be contended with, but its members are real people, too, and their humanity cannot be forgotten. Then, obviously, Jax shows us what happens when someone doesn't.

[spushii]

I do feel a little alone sometimes in my belief that Jax being a woman is evidenced entirely within the text of the series and that you don't need any twitter screenshots or comments from livestreams or any other auxiliary evidence whatsoever to Prove It. Obviously I think its a bit fun to laugh at some particular comment or other that really makes Jax seem very eggy but none of that is actually text. It's not even paratext.

I guess my problem in particular is when I see people say or imply stuff like "oh, Jax is transfem BECAUSE Gooseworx said something on Website" and its like. No.... Jax is transfem because of what happens in the webseries.

Like. I think the most realistic outlook on Transfem Jax, the one I personally believe, is that her being a woman is not the only possible way her character can be interpreted, but that it is a very supported (and to some extent, intended) read. Like, it is an available interpretation that is heavily supported by the text. She doesn't have to Come Out As A Woman in episode 9 for this to be true. And as it stands, interpreting her as a transgender woman is at the very least Just As legitimate of an interpretation of her character as interpreting her as a cis guy with unrelated identity problems.

[spushii]

I can't even articulate the abject rage I'm flown into when I detect even 1 molecule of ragatha disrespect on a digital circle fan. I say this well-aware of my own Rabbit-Based Proclivities but peoplw who love Jax and hate Ragatha are less than dogs to me

[spushii]

maybe this is trite but I've long liked the idea that Jax's relationship with Ribbit for a long time kinda satisfied her desire for proximity to womanhood, at least to an extent where it made her life feel much more bearable. And I like to think there are places where her grief over Ribbit and her grief over herself---what she wants to be, and what she isn't---are indistinguishable.

[spushii]

i swear to god this was a mobile bug a million years ago what the hell happened to bring it back

[spushii]

Sorry. Sorry. I really like it when people make Jax unironically into vore. She really is so desperate to be consumed. To be drawn completely into a greater whole and finally become a non-thing free from the burdens of the Individual.

This sort of just Is what the fantasy of abstraction represents. It's sort of right there in the name, no? Its complete totalization. A sublimation into a category which encompasses everything yet represents nothing; consummation into a whole which will hold you and ease you and digest you so entirely that you cease to be yourself at all. And in it you're freed from the ache of existing as a person incomplete.