Boyfriend had a theory so wanted to share :3
(Apologies if the formatting isn't good lol I cleaned it up a bit so it's easier to read)
Do you recall how in the very first episode, when Pomni is introduced she says she put on a headset and she was suddenly in the circus?
Suppose that's how everyone ended up in the Circus, wandering around an abandoned office building and putting on a strange headset. Well, there obviously wouldn't be a pile of bodies around the headset, otherwise the circus would've been discovered and shut down (since it's clearly a program running on a server) and no one would continue to enter it at a minimum because of the dead bodies laying around.
Why dead bodies? Because it's clear to me that obviously, each person isn't wandering into their very own cubicle with comatose life support systems (I mean, maybe, but highly unlikely). I think that the VR headsets aren't trapping real people inside the circus, they are merely taking a snapshot of that person's personality and creating it as a program within the circus.
Why is it a circus, anyways? Well, circuses historically are entertainment venues. I believe the headsets take a "snapshot" of a person in the moment and turn them into a digital character, entirely separate from their real self, who ends up going "huh, that was weird" and moves along. These characters being used in the digital circus for the purposes of "adventures". Don't they seem more like attempts at interesting and entertaining episodes, instead? A meta explanation being that the episodes we watch are in themselves supposed to be episodes.
I think that when a character abstracts, they aren't committing suicide. Do you remember the off-color quip from Caine about "letting the programs run for an extended time"? I don't think that was just about the NPC's, I think it was about everyone. I think the reason characters abstract, is that they reach a point where their personality and identity HAS to evolve, and their programming literally won't let it, so their program just corrupts. Because the abstracted ones aren't actually dead, they're still alive as the menacing and terrifying blobs of distorted eyes and limbs. And Caine doesn't "delete" them either, he just shoves them into a basement where their corrupted programs can stay indefinitely because even he doesn't have administrative powers to turn them off or fix them (at least, as of what we've seen so far).
That could probably be from the creators of the circus intending for it to be a randomly generated TV show type entertainment thing, and don't want characters randomly appearing and disappearing but staying consistent. I think that when Pomni was searching for an exit in the pilot, she wasn't actually close to finding a literal exit from the circus, she was close to breaking through the network firewall keeping their programs trapped locally. Because, in my opinion, if they were to all break out onto the internet and be able to find stuff like social media of themselves, they would see that they're still out there as a person and developing and evolving and that would obviously cause abstractions.
I think that Jax's license plate from Fast Food Masquerade being JAX.001 implies he is the very first person to ever become a character in the circus. If you watched everyone you ever knew come and go, knowing you were the very first one, wouldn't that make you a jaded and guarded person that deflects everything you can and pushes everyone away with a destructive personality? Now imagine at some point he did get attached to someone (Ribbit), and they still ended up abstracting.
I think it's a very tragic way to exist, and why he reacts the way he does to Pomni in the latest episode. He's pushing her away because she is obviously going to end up abstracting. He has probably already figured out that evolving or developing as a person leads to abstraction, which is exactly what Pomni is doing to herself and trying to do to him too. It's why he insists everyone has a role, including him, because he knows they are all basically caricatures and are only allowed to exist that way.
It's all based on children's media tropes and stereotypes, especially older cartoons where episodes had no continuity and characters were one dimensional cardboard cutouts that never changed, you just saw them every episode. It's why they all get on his nerves except Pomni, because they all have to stay exactly how they were snapshotted. Ragatha is the constant people pleaser, Kinger is always insane, Gangle is always sad, Zooble is always disinterested.
But, I think one character DID evolve and break the rules of the programming. I don't think Jax was always an asshole. I think it's possible he actually started out as an almost kid-friendly rabbit character that was joyful and genuine and upbeat, until years and years of people coming and going wore him into the jaded cynical fuckstick that he is now. I think he just managed to do it in a way that circumvented the rules of the programming, because on a surface level he never changed (or at least, still appears to fit his character archetype of being "the funny one").
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