I’ve got a couple of TADC theories, and nope, you don’t get a choice—you’re gonna read them.
Average reading time: 1:21–2:41
1. Why Jax is actually right
Okay, hear me out. Jax says we should just play our characters and forget that we used to be human, because we’re taking this place with cartoon bunnies and ribbon masks way too seriously. And honestly? He’s kinda got a point.
Like, look at Pomni. When she holds the gun the right way and aims properly, she can’t even hit a can. But the second she starts spinning it on her finger and fires completely at random—bam, bullseye. Same thing happens a few more times, and then in the finale against Zooble: the bullet ricochets like five times and rips all her arms off.
The Circus doesn’t want a realistic, tactical shootout—it wants a cartoony, over-the-top slapstick gunfight. If you play by its rules, you actually get results.
So here’s my theory about why and how characters “dissipate.” When someone enters the Circus, their mind basically gets reformatted into a “file” that’s stored in the Circus database (and now imagine this: what if all the characters are literally just copies of real people’s minds in a cartoon wrapper? meaning it’s not the real people suffering here—it’s just their digital duplicates. meanwhile the originals are still out there living normal lives. Gooseworx, can you laugh evilly if that’s actually true?).
Anyway—if the mind’s a file, then that means it’s just strings of code making up thoughts and memories. And over time, those strings have to grow and multiply. The human brain’s already insanely complicated—but imagine what happens when someone starts spiraling, like Kaufmo.
He wanted to find a way out, got obsessed, lost his sanity—and that’s when the file crashed. The Circus’s “system” can easily handle a predictable cartoon archetype, but not a broken, unstable human brain. So the file corrupts, and that’s what causes dissipation.
2. Who even is Caine, and why can he dissipate?
This one’s way more of a guess than the first theory. We know one of the co-founders of the company (the one whose logo keeps popping up everywhere) was named Caine—it’s literally written on the gun.
Sooooo maybe Caine’s AI is based on a digitized copy of the real Caine’s mind. That would explain why he’s got emotions, and why dissipation might actually happen to him too.