You cannot stop the moon's demise

Jax and Ragatha are ultimately the same character with opposing chiralities. They are both maternal child abuse victims, they both repress their emotions and mask their pain with a false personality, they both have maladaptive coping mechanisms rooted in a belief that being emotionally honest about themselves will hurt or kill people they care about, they have directly opposed but functionally identical compulsions to get close to Pomni, they are both prevented by the nature of their character flaw from recognising that they are in any way similar, and while they both receive (or at least are offered) help with their issues from Pomni and one other cast member (Kinger in Ragatha's case, Zooble in Jax's) they need personally to be the ones who make the effort to overcome their flaws.

This is for me, as I'm sure it is for you, one of the things that is most compelling about FunnyBunnyDoll as a ship and why my preferred flavour is Pomni-Hinge (although I also enjoy triangular and there's something to be said for AU-ified Pomni-gets-unicorned also). But more importantly it's kind of a root of the problem with the way Ragatha gets treated as a character- her being forgotten and given less screentime doesn't just hurt her characterisation, but arguably Jax's as well.

Episodes 5 and 6, though they admittedly both focus a little too much on Jax, are encouraging in the sense that they pit Jax and Ragatha directly against each other around Pomni as a fulcrum. We are presented directly with the idea that despite their significant aesthetic and behavioural differences, these two characters have the same goal and are, internally, the same. And at the very least Pomni does oscillate between alignments with the two over the course of those two episodes.

I think the real problem starts at the end of episode 6, when we don't get to see Pomni and Ragatha's conversation after the awards show. Now, Goose has recently said in a tumblr answer that this is because their conversation is more or less a retread of Ragatha's conversation with Kinger earlier in the episode, and if that's true then not showing it makes a degree of sense because it would be mostly a scene of the two of them reiterating information the audience already knows hanging off the end of an episode that (IMO) has one of the strongest ending jokes of the entire show, but the problem with this is that Ragatha had her loser's corner conversation with Kinger, and Pomni (who is the one who actually suggests talking after the show) has come to the conclusion that she has neglected/mistreated Ragatha via a completely different route. What she talks about in that conversation would likely be completely different, and I think that's why it still frustrates me that we never got to see it.

I also don't think it makes much sense for post-episode-6 Pomni to be unaware of the commonalities between her two lovers closest friends in the circus, because I don't really see how she can come to the kind of conclusion that would compel her to reconcile with Ragatha in that way unless she has noticed it, since otherwise the thing she has spent the entire episode doing with Jax kind of has... nothing to do with that. You could I guess take an incredibly surface level reading of it and say "Pomni was frustrated about fun time with Jax going sour at the end because he's mean and decided she needed to patch things up with someone who won't be nasty to her" but I don't think that fits what we see. Pomni is frustrated that despite the level of closeness they've achieved over the gun adventure, Jax keeps bullshitting her with his obviously fake personality and throws the walls up higher when she asks for even minor validation. What about that implies "I should go talk to Ragatha" unless Pomni has realised that "Holy shit, Ragatha does the same thing and that's why Gangle and also me sometimes find her kind of insincere and annoying" but also realised that "Ragatha's walls are niceness-flavoured so she might be more receptive and I might have some more luck getting through to her than I did with Jax (at the very least I probably won't have to throw a gun at her head)."

But then in episode 7... we don't really see what ought to be the outcomes of that? Pomni and Ragatha are obviously on better terms and Jax's relationship with Pomni is strained, sure, but there's not really anything about the plot of that episode that even acknowledges the commonality between them or suggests Pomni has learned anything about how to get through to Jax from succeeding with Ragatha (besides maybe the handholding order at the end implying that if Jax were prepared to reconcile Pomni wants to balance her relationships with both of them, but I think that's a stretch and also my personal FBD-shipper feelings aside you can't really get away with just gesturing at Jax and Ragatha's dynamic with a general case "Pomni likes both of them" and nothing else and have it still hit after the third time or so).

And this is a shame because episode 7 is the episode where we're shown that Zooble has probably figured out what Jax's deal is, at least partially. I think this another thing that's criminally underexplored in the show and I genuinely would love to know exactly how much Zooble knew and when and what their reasons for not pushing more were, but anyway...

(Also I've activated my own trap card of another of my hidden hangups being the near-complete-lack of Pomni/Zooble interaction in the show- it's why I go out of my way to give them scenes together when I can in the YMverse because I think there's so much to explore in them being the two newest circus members, the two who have the biggest problem with the tone of Caine's early-show adventures, and later on the two who probably know the most about what's going on with Jax. They're also implied to have a much greater offscreen closeness than we get to see by Gangle's drawing on her easel in episode 9- girl why would you draw the shortstack who's said maybe two sentences to you or your partner hanging out with both of you unless there were shit going on BTS??)

You would think that, smaller and less productive as it might have been, Zooble's conversation on the beach with Jax would warrant a reconciliation between Jax and Pomni a la Ragatha's scene talking to Kinger in episode 6, but that doesn't happen and Zooble very notably gets much less far with Jax than Kinger does with Ragatha. Jax continues to get worse over the course of that episode and the next two, until of course her eventual abstraction and the revelation of who she is and what she's done only when it's too late.

These three episodes focus very heavily on Jax to the exclusion of Ragatha in most cases, and I find that very frustrating not only because I love Ragatha and when she's not on screen all the other characters should be asking "Where's Ragatha", but because it means her utility as a mirror to Jax is kind of wasted in those episodes? Unless Pomni tells her post-narrative or there were clues in Leeroy's socials in the presentation I think we have to assume Ragatha never finds out that Jax was also a maternal child abuse victim, and Pomni never does anything with that connection between them. Ragatha's personal flaw is more or less solved offscreen and neither she nor Pomni really get to utilise what she's learned to help or try to help Jax in any way. We get to see Caine presented as the "Jax if she accepted help" cognate when... it should have been Ragatha! Why wasn't it Ragatha?

So really my frustrations with Ragatha's sidelining are not just that I wanted to see more of my girl, but that she's dropped from the narrative consistently at the points where her nature as Jax's reflection would be MOST USEFUL to both of their plotlines!

So why did it happen? I think there are two root problems here:

Jax was always planned to abstract.

Ragatha is cis and you can't make her trans without fucking up the narrative.

These two things together I think are why the dynamic between what should be a very straightforward golden trio gets twisted completely out of shape in the final three episodes. Jax is a tragic figure who has to kill herself at the end of the show because she's too wracked by guilt and she needed to transition to survive, a thing she did not do. Ragatha is also wracked by guilt and is the narrative foil to Jax... but now we have a problem.

If the balance of foils between the two is clearly maintained, then Ragatha surviving becomes a message, a judgement on Jax. That's bad because the message becomes either "People-pleasing supplication is the correct and healthy response to being abused by your mother and traumatised by the deaths of your friends" (VERY LOUD INCORRECT BUZZER), "This is all going to happen again presently to Ragatha and Pomni will be similarly powerless to stop it" (horrifying) or worst of all "Jax would have survived if she'd only been a cis woman" which completely fucks up the point of Jax's plot and ultimately agrees with the kind of person that Jax is a condemnation of!

I actually don't know how you would fix this. I know transmasc Ragatha is a popular headcanon but I think that would fuck up the dynamic even more and make the implication of Ragatha's survival worse and more toxic because then you're into the weeds of "transmasculine and nonbinary people can be saved even if they have problems with their identities but transfems can't." You also can't make Ragatha a trans woman because introducing an out and transitioned transfem character to the circus just destroys the credibility of Jax's repressive abstraction completely. It can't be done. Assuming Jax even continued to repress the same way in that environment, Ragatha would immediately clock what her damage is and share notes with Pomni and Zooble well before the point of no return. Not an option.

You could maybe do it by making Ragatha's repressed lesbian nature explicit diegetic text instead of just a writing direction Goose admitted to two days ago. There might be something there, I'm not sure.

I think also there may be what we could call a limitation of Goose's writing ability here (and I'm prepared to call it that because it's a limitation I'm aware that I share, and the source of a lot of the skipped scenes and weird plot points in the You'reMeverse that I regret) and that's that Jax's tragic doom is an incredibly fragile plot point and Goose mostly maintains it by keeping every character who could disrupt it away from Jax (even if it means cutting them out of the story) instead of doing anything else. She does this with Caine as well, like it's notable that the only person who ever talks to Caine at length about his personal hangups and the things he doesn't understand is Zooble, the character who is least well positioned to figure out what's wrong with him and try to sympathise or correct his misconceptions.

To an extent this is how you're supposed to write tragic characters, like they have every opportunity available to get off the train before it crashes but they just can't, but I do think it's noticeable that Goose's main ways of doing this are either having the doomed characters aggressively rebuke the positive influences they can't avoid talking to or just straight up not have characters who realistically would talk about the subject at hand ever interact. Like, I think Pomni and Zooble comparing Jax notes and figuring out with plenty of time to go what her central damage is being eminently believable is the exact reason they're not allowed to get close or interact much in the show, but there isn't a diegetic explanation why this happens. And I also think this is why Ragatha's plotline kind of disappears from the last three episodes: Now that Jax is marked for death, being able to see a mirror of herself improve and recover and face her trauma and get close to Pomni would fuck that up, make her eventual isolation and abstraction less believable.

But I think there has to be a way that you could still do that. Ragatha isn't trans, she's not responsible for Ribbit and Kaufmo's deaths. We're exactly in the area where the two of them are divergent and I just feel like there must have been a way you could include a smoother and more satisfying arc for Ragatha without having her salvation necessarily mess up Jax's doom, especially if Jax still refuses to accept the similarities of their reflectionhood and not the just the differences.

Or, you know, you could also just go with it and make her salvation a key part of what ultimately pulls Jax back from the edge. But I get that that's a different story.