Never Intended For This Blog To Happen

Note: I'm using he/him pronouns for Jax because that's what the movie uses. In my opinion, Jax is a #$@% regardless of gender. So throughout TADC, both Caine and Jax do a lot of arguably unforgivable things. Which one is 'worse' depends on your perspective. Some say Caine is worse because he used his god powers to torture everyone. Others say Jax is worse because he bullied people to the point of despair (and abstraction in Ribbit's case).

I'm not going to pick a side in that debate. What I want to argue is that Caine's redemption and Jax's abstraction are not a double standard, and they are both consistent with the show's main message.

TADC's thesis

There's a Tumblr post from who-knows-when where anon asks what the point of the show is, and Gooseworx answers "That there's meaning to be found in a stagnant life."

And the digital circus IS a stagnant life. Nothing the guests do will affect the outside world. Nothing they do inside the circus has any permanent effect. They must spend an eternity inside a digital daydream with no escape except insanity. Their situation may seem like pointless suffering, but how the characters cope with this existential crisis matters.

Coping Mechanisms

Caine copes with this prison through distraction. He tells himself his purpose is to entertain the guests, so he distracts them with busywork so they don't have time to mope. But his quests all feel shallow, because Caine only has a rudimentary understanding of human emotions. And he's reluctant to give the guests any input or agency in the adventures, because he's deeply afraid of losing his own, self-assigned purpose. Jax, meanwhile, copes with nihilism. He claims that since nothing means anything, he can do whatever he wants without consequences. If everything he does is a joke, then he doesn't have to fear rejection or feel guilty for hurting anyone. Cruelty is his drug of choice to feel anything other than numb.

In other words, Caine is over-controlling and treats everyone like dolls. Jax's lifestyle represents excessive freedom, and he treats everyone as punching bags. Neither see the other guests as people.

But Pomni, Ragatha, Kinger, Zooble, and Gangle all do see each other as people, and they treat each other's feelings with care. The emotional web they build amongst themselves gives structure and texture to a shallow world. In psychology terms, this is called constructivism - the idea that an event's meaning is built by the people experiencing said event, similar to how a vase is built out of clay. (This is an over-simplification of the term, but this is a Tumblr post so deal with it.) The world doesn't come with a predetermined meaning - it's just the 'circus' where you perform your own interpretation of life.

Two Diverging Paths

Caine eventually gets redeemed because he learns how to make meaning. After his banishment, he realizes that goals aren't a replacement for genuine connection. He can't force a specific 'purpose' onto humans - he needs to let them build their own lives. Once he gives up his godhood, his control, he's finally able to connect with the humans and find fulfillment. Jax knows the digital circus's lesson, but he can't bring himself to believe it. In order to accept that he mattered, he'd have to acknowledge that his actions mattered, and that they had consequences. He'd rather give up all agency over his life than admit that he made mistakes. That's why he stays in the dark, hiding in safe ignorance like the other abstractions.

So essentially, Man From the Future (MFF) claims he is traveling to different timelines to find a way to stop a mysterious AI from plunging humanity into the Matrix. Except as the night persists, MFF's team comes across increasingly surreal scenarios that time travel can't explain. By the time the giant cat centaur shows up, it's obvious that everyone is already in a simulation, and have been since the diner.

Because MFF was never a time traveler. He's a kid sitting in the snow, pretending he has the power to save a world that has already collapsed. And from his reactions to the hot sauce and the cat centaur, he knows he's in a simulation. That's why he's so callous with human life, why he never learned how to use the all-important USB stick, etc.

So why is MFF playing a game designed by the AI that destroyed his world, when nothing he does in the game will impact the source code? He tells his team the reason, quite explicitly: MFF wants to create a 'future' (i.e. a playthrough) where he can watch a sunrise with his mom.

This is the first playthrough where MFF teamed up with his mom, and thus the first where he got got to watch a sunrise with her, but...it's not authentic. The sky has no color, and the sun moves too quickly. The mom's flashback shows a similar bland sunrise over the city.

The program doesn't know what a sunrise looks like because it doesn't have eyes, and MFF isn't old enough to remember an open sky. So MFF knows he's going to have to keep playing, and continue prompting the AI in new ways (like the rat plague plan), to get the vision he wants.