Mewo's Sketchbook

So, in the... couple hours? Since Episode 8 dropped, I've seen a couple people noting/joking about how when Caine traps everyone in their worst fears, Pomni's is much less personal than the others. She's attacked by Gummigoos, sure, but that's a trauma she obtained inside the circus. Everyone else has VERY personal issues– Zooble and Jax's dysphoria, Ragatha's mommy issues (and implied physical abuse, what with the knife going straight into her missing eye), Gangle's depression and possibly suicidal tendencies. Pomni was just shown a friend she lost all the way back in episode two, it doesn't have anything to do with her life before.

Or does it?

See, this is a theory I've kinda had in the back of my mind for a while, but I didn't want to say it because there was so little evidence and I didn't want to sound crazy. But this nightmare of Pomni's was so specific that I'm just gonna come right out with it.

I think Pomni had an abusive boyfriend in the real world.

And, hell– could've even just been a platonic friend or family member like Ragatha. But at this moment, I think it was specifically a boyfriend, and we'll get to why in a second. But the main gist is I think Pomni, like Ragatha, is an abuse survivor.

First, let's talk about the specific metaphor of Pomni's torment.

Pomni is left alone in the dark, until she sees Gummigoo, someone that she considered a close friend. She loved and trusted him. But he turns around and suddenly he has a monster's face. He disappears, and she doesn't know where he is– and then he surprise attacks her and starts literally ripping her apart.

So boil that down to the essentials: someone Pomni loved suddenly became a monster and attacked her when she wasn't prepared and didn't or couldn't have expected it. That's not just "losing a friend," that's your friend or other loved one turning against you for reasons you can't understand.

Gummigoo is also a very specific choice, when they could've easily been her friends from the Circus– Jax saw the other Circus members during his nightmare. Especially since the scene called for more than one person to be tearing into her, so it could've even been Gummigoo and then the other characters. But it's specifically him.

It could be that Pomni saw herself in Gummigoo. She specifically told him that she didn't want anyone to feel like they were nothing, heavily implying that that's a feeling she knows well. But there's a few other moments that make me think he may have been a proxy for someone else as well.

One, Ragatha specifically refers to Pomni as "flirting" with Gummigoo. This specifically casts the idea of Gummigoo in a potentially romantic light for the audience. Which is interesting because Gummigoo and Pomni's interactions in Ep2 were not at ALL romantic– it was mostly Gummigoo crashing out, Pomni comforting him, and then them just chilling platonically.

Now, there's plenty of other explanations for this. There's the fact that Gummigoo's reappearance affected Pomni heavily. She formed a bond with him and then he acted like he didn't even know her. Because he didn't. Everything she went through with him didn't matter at all, because he just got reset. It would absolutely make her feel like she's nothing. Or this could just be Ragatha's repressed lesbianism bubbling up to the surface. What else is there?

Well. There is the fact that, spiritually, the crocodile is often seen as a metaphor for hidden danger. The animal itself can swim so well underwater that the water itself appears still, so when it appears in stories and myths it is often used as a symbol for something that looks safe but is actually deadly. Which fits with Pomni's nightmare perfectly, to the point where I'm kind of mad I didn't see the idea of Gummigoo's image being corrupted coming.

There's her general people-pleasing personality quirks. How she is very well-acquainted with therapy-speak and trying to get in touch with people's emotions. This can also be seen in an extremely interesting scene, Jax's crashout in Episode 6.

So what happens in this episode? Jax and Pomni end up alone. Jax– while not exactly intentionally... well, let's just say, this episode is him specifically isolating her from the other characters, convincing her to change her worldview to match his, and then encouraging her to act out-of-character. This isn't to say Jax is an evil abuser with no other motivations– far from it, he's clearly also a victim of some kind of abuse or neglect and he's just repeating the cycle. But in this circumstance, that's what Jax is representing in this episode.

First, he spent the last episode dragging Pomni away from Ragatha, her main female influence, supposedly just to piss off the ragdoll. But then in this episode, when Caine allows them to all turn against each other, Pomni is left alone with Jax, a male (at the moment lmao) figure who tells her to stop showing how much she cares about people and act like him. She slips into this idea and proceeds to spend the rest of the episode mirroring his actions.

The two of them, right before the end fight, specifically sing a romantic duet together. "Daisy Bell" is obviously a reference to the first song a computer managed to sing, but it's a marriage proposal song that they had these two characters sing together. During the crashout, Jax refers to them derogatorily as a couple. Like with Gummigoo in episode 4, this is asking the audience to look at this situation in a romantic circumstance.

So. When Pomni won't shoot Jax, the first thing he does is gaslight her. She says they were a team, they were working together and bonding, and he says that she's delusional.

Jax says that he wasn't actually getting close to her, he was doing this all to mess with her. And her immediate, immediate response, is: "Did I do something wrong?"

Pomni is upset about how Jax suddenly turned against her. He's been acting normal all day, and then suddenly said they were never friends. Especially after he'd told her so many personal things about himself. She asks, "What about all that stuff you told me?" When he tries to deflect, she says... "No, no, no, no, we're not doing this."

She tries to argue with him, and he again deflects with a joke, as Jax does, and then says "You must be misremembering." That's when she snaps and asks if this is why he didn't show up to Kaufmo's funeral. When he gets mad and almost breaks down, she backtracks hard and immediately apologizes.

She then asks what Jax would do if she abstracted. When he says he would forget about her, adding to her fear of being nothing, she stares off into the distance for a long second, before looking down at the gun. And when Jax makes another quip, she makes a distraught, upset face– one that clearly shows her holding back tears, or maybe a scream– before finally whipping around and throwing the gun at him.

That's when Pomni starts physically attacking Jax. Confused, he asks what she's doing, but she proceeds to hit him with multiple objects, bite him, punch him, all while screaming, "FIGHT BACK!" And considering Pomni's earlier reaction to Jax's screaming at her was to freeze up and apologize, it makes one wonder if she's projecting a little when she asks, "Why didn't you fight back?"

And when Jax claims that he is irredeemable, that he hurts people for fun, that he never cared about Pomni, we get a shot of her wide eyes and trembling mouth as she stares defiantly up at him, and then a long-shot of her, alone, sitting completely still and staring after him.

Now, again, not to say "Jax is an abusive partner." It seems more like they're both reliving their own traumas right now: Jax with whatever happened to him in the past, and Pomni with someone who acted a lot like him.

Would now be a good time to mention that survivors of domestic abuse are more likely to return to their abusers or enter another abusive relationship? Over half of women who leave an abusive relationship will return at least once. In fact, the National Domestic Violence Helpline's data collection shows that it takes, on average, seven attempts to leave this kind of relationship for good. This is because someone who has become entangled in an abusive relationship will start seeing the cycle of abuse as familiar, and that familiarity as comforting. The unfamiliarity of being actually loved and cherished is terrifying, and potentially triggering in itself. The trauma bond within an abusive relationship can also become addicting– you get the harmful behavior, but it's soon followed by lovebombing and promises that it will never happen again, leading into a honeymoon period, somewhat interrupted by the knowledge that it's not going to last. Then the abuse happens again, and then the honeymoon again. Your rise-and-fall of emotions in this time can literally be conditioned into you. The switch-up of adrenaline and dopamine. Psychologically, it becomes an addiction, one that many victims don't understand they're still trying to process.

And you know what it can lead to? Anxiety, a state of constant panic. Or depression, a feeling like you're nothing. Or at the very least nothing without your partner.

And now let's get to the big guns. There's one specific line that's reverberated in my head since I first heard it, and it was in Episode 3.

Episode 3, as we recall, saw Pomni and Kinger literally being dragged to hell. After Pomni gets possessed and unpossessed, she freaks out hard. Not having control over her own body drives her to the point of admitting things aren't okay, and then she says something really interesting.

Scratch that, rewind.

Why the fuck did she say this?

Caine isn't outwardly aggressive yet. He won't be outwardly antagonistic until episode fucking eight. Pomni has no indications that Caine is doing any of this on purpose. The only other "he/him"s in the Circus are Jax (so far) who isn't doing anything in this adventure, and Kinger, who clearly is not in control here and is also the person she is talking to at the moment, so she'd have to be talking about Caine, right? But there's no indications that Caine wants her to suffer. Especially her specifically. And in no other episode, up until #8, does Pomni ever imply she thinks Caine is acting maliciously. In fact, when he does start being a dick in #8, she's really surprised and thrown off. Which would make this line out of place if she was talking about him.

When I first heard this line, this all flashed through my mind, and then made me wonder if she was talking about someone else.

He just wants me to suffer. Did I do something wrong? Gummigoo leaving her behind. "You must be misremembering." Gummigoo turning around and attacking her. Why didn't you fight back? "She's flirting with the gummy guy." I knew it would end up like this. What would you do if I abstracted tomorrow? He just wants me to suffer.

See, that line is where I started this thought process, but it wasn't until Pomni's nightmare in this episode that I was finally able to say I think this might actually be what is going on. And with this episode's implications of Ragatha's physical abuse and Gangle maybe running into the street on purpose, it shows that this show would potentially be willing to "go there."