Limoki

It's made ten times worse by the show's addiction to fridging. Kaufmo is nothing but a guy who died. Kinger's character arc (aside from just being sanist and gross) is about his wife who died and has maybe three speaking lines. Even Ribbit reads like a dead wife montage. The people who die in this show are only important because they died. So, when Jax dies, audiences are already primed to read her the same way.

It's a totally understandable reading of the text. Nobody who hurt her ever had a realization of what they did wrong. You get the sense that the narrative itself blames her for this, and it never breaks that facade.

She was constantly tortured by everyone for, what? Being snarky? Teasing gangle, the only other person in the circus as visibly miserable as her who gets help while Jax gets abused further?

Maybe trans women know it wasn't her fault, but the narrative itself doesn't agree with that. Nobody but Pomni ever expresses regret for how they treated her, and even pomni only does it once (in a random voiceover that sucks).

It's very clear that the way Jax hurts others and the ways others hurt her are not equivalent. Jax having keys to everyone's rooms is a reference to how she knows everyone's secrets and inner lives, and she doesn't exploit that knowledge to hurt them except in retaliation. Even then, she's always dealing with people making really cutting insults in response to her comparatively milquetoast jokes.

And then, she dies. I can't remember anyone ever sincerely apologizing to her in the show besides, like, Pomni, who is clearly just trying to deescalate and unaware of what's actually happening. The tagline at the end about never making someone feel unwanted is easily read as the reason Jax deserved to die: she made Ribbit feel unloved, and so she suffered the consequences.

Honestly, besides them not understanding Jax already went through the torture (something I haven't seen anyone else acknowledge?), the narrative fully agrees with them. She hurt other people, so she didn't get the help she needed. Then, she got what she deserved.

You know better, but the show doesn't do anything to agree with you. The evil tranny died, and everyone else finally got to be happy with her gone. The end.

Leeroy doesn't help anything, either. Despite Goose's tweet about boymoder (as if trans women don't know what that is?) that's not present in the text. It reads way more as a dysphoria hoodie. Sure, trans women might know that purple is basically a safer to wear pink, but that isn't a fact present in the text or acknowledged as relevant. Instead, it just reads as a reason Jax was purple. "Oh, I guess she liked purple."

This isn't hopeful. She's approaching the friend group of someone who has already been shown would abandon her. Leeroy doesn't read as a hopeful future. Jax reads as Leeroy's future.

The text itself is completely hopeless. I am happy to see all kinds of transfem stories out there, but this isn't a good story. It's kind of dangerous in how little it challenges the hopelessness.

I know a lot of this can be read differently, but that's the problem. You have to read into it. You have to put your hope into it. The story itself doesn't show you any. If you don't have any of your own hope, it just confirms everything you already knew.

To put it another way, if I had seen this show when I was an egg, earlier in transition, or even just while being HALd, it would have made me want to die more.

pet peeve that happens more often than you would both think and want

hey do you guys like my new outfit

Aren't we all