The Amazing Digital Circus isn’t a lore-based show. It isn’t a psychological thriller or horror. The Amazing Digital Circus isn’t about the game or the AI running it. It isn’t about “forgiving your abusers.” It isn’t about the environment.
The Amazing Digital Circus is about acceptance.
Every character in this show, in some way, had to learn to accept themselves.
Pomni learned to accept her surroundings and circumstances. Kinger learned to accept his shortcomings and loss. Gangle learned to accept her emotions and “true” self even if that self isn’t “pleasant” for everyone. Zooble learned to accept their body/gender expression. Ragatha learned to accept that she can’t make everyone happy and fix everything. Caine learned he isn’t perfect, he doesn’t know everything, and he alone can’t fix everything either. The only one who never learned? Jax. And what happened to Jax? Denial caught up with him and it killed him.
Jax denied reality, his emotions, the emotions of others, his surroundings, his friendships, his gender identity, his trauma, his fears, everything. Jax denied and ran from everything like his life depended on it, ran like the prey animal he was depicted as, and hid like a bunny in a burrow from everything that ever came close to making him feel. In the end, when he couldn’t run anymore, mentally and physically exhausted, instead of trying to turn around and change, accept, he gave up.
Jax’s story isn’t about “be an asshole then kill yourself and everyone will love you now that you’re gone.” Jax’s story isn’t about “look how bad transgender people are.” Jax’s story isn’t about excusing your poor actions because you were traumatized. Jax’s story is about how denial will kill you in the end if you choose to let it chase you, while everyone else’s is how acceptance can heal you.
Zooble and Jax butted heads so hard because they were opposites of the spectrum. Zooble hated their body and didn’t know how to express their identity, in the end they learned to love who they are from the support of a “friend” and embraced their identity and ended up with a happy life. Jax hated his body too and didn’t know how to express his identity either, instead of going Zooble’s route he pushed his only friends away and denied he ever felt anything ever about the topic and ran until he died. That’s why they were always together. They could have been wonderful friends, they were so similar it was blinding, yet Jax forever pushed their advances away, another point of how hard he always ran.
The Amazing Digital Circus movie did leave much to be desired in terms of the lore, yes I understand, so many loose ends that may never be tied up were left in this finale, so much lore now wasted, however the main point of this show since the pilot was told, the main narrative was shown, the point of the story was closed; Acceptance.
The reason why so many of you hate this show is because you don’t understand the themes it has because half of you are too young to be watching it anyway. It isn’t about the lore, it’s about life.
“The worst thing you can ever do, is make someone feel unloved or unwelcome.” Isn’t a remembered quote because “Jax is dead and it’s your fault because you didn’t try hard enough to save him.” the quote is there because it includes doing those things to yourself as well. The worst thing you can do to someone around you that you care about is to not try for them and not love them, yes, but the worst thing you can do to YOURSELF is to not accept and love who YOU truly are.
It goes both ways. It’s this crazy thing called “Double Nuance.” You guys should look it up sometime.
