Overly Angry 1950s Pianist

From as soon as we learn to talk we're told our wants and opinions don't matter. When our self-expression is deemed off-limits, it's natural that food choices, experiences of pain & sickness, passions and aspirations cannot be our own either. Basic medical care is held over us in exchange for compliance. We're told our sicknesses aren't real. Exercise and fitness are used as a cudgel to coerce us into proving our masculinity. School sports and extracurricular sports are basically used as sexgendered hazing rituals, sexual & physical & medical abuse enforced by teachers, parents and same-age peers alike. Our relationship to domestic labour is that we're taught that domestic labour is how women prove they are women, so we take up that role aggressively as the only means of feminine expression we're permitted, but without ever being rewarded with recognition as women. And everyone else around us gleefully accepts the way we overwork ourselves to the bone. Medical transition is completely out of the question for most of us, so you'll very commonly hear how we tried to completely starve ourselves during puberty to prevent our body from growing, the only bodily autonomy we can afford. And what little choice we do have for medical transition is basically doctors subjecting us to years of puberty blocker monotherapy, widely known to cause lifelong chronic health issues, just to prove that we're really actually trans. Then once we pass that trial they continue underdosing us anyway.

And through that whole process we're horribly aware of the way that society talks about us, how the entire landscape of entertainment treats us as a punchline, how the news playing everywhere calls for our erasure, how laws shift to delay your medical transition another year every year, how grown adults will write fantasies about hunting down and dismembering us, and will actually coordinate harassment and assault circles to target us, how the police & parents & teachers & any authorities won't do anything to protect us against that, instead preferring to enthusiastically call you by your deadname over your grave. They all want us dead. And so we play the part. We hide, we shrink ourselves, recluse into the corners of society to find solace. Dissociate from our already neglected bodies. Hope that a safety net will divine itself upon us by chance when we have no control over the forces dictating our lives. And kill ourselves if it never comes.

Nobody wants to give Jax the grace they would give any homeless mentally ill racialized teenager. Because she's TMA. But Gangle, who is four years the senior of this homeless mentally ill racialized character btw, gets a free pass from the fandom to Ludovico her. Because Jax is TMA.

The point of the digital circus is they are flawed people thrust into an impossibly bad situation trying to make the best of it, and slowly becoming better and finding meaning because of it. Zooble disassociates, Gangle minimises herself, Ragatha overcompensates and Jax takes it out on others. None of them practice healthy coping mechanisms and yes, Jax's way of dealing with everything is deeply flawed but that's the fucking point of her story, and reducing it to popsych "Jax is an abuser" is A) catastrophizing, and B) the kind of black and white thinking the characters story is directly trying to steer the viewer away from.

She's a deeply flawed troubled kid who doesn't even get to come to terms, accept, or even try and make amends before she's functionally killed. The last conscious thought she has is realising for the first time she doesn't want to go and she wants to try. Every other character gets to improve and find meaning, and she doesn't, and that sucks and is sad and it's meant to because she is a tragic character.