☽ Moontikore ☾

Tenna art by @9Aaaalt29 on twt

I love these two sm,,,, 💜💜💜✨️

A Post-Finale Caine x Pomni Showtime Fic by Immunetoneurotoxin | Read Chapter 1 on AO3! | Curated Spotify Playlist for Fic (listen to mixed vers. for best experience)

They exist outside and beneath the normal human world. They’re trapped in a world of “permanent childhood.” They become fixated on the things & people from the higher world that they don’t understand and can never enter.

They want to be “not so different from you beautiful humans,” as Caine says— and they can only do that by winning the humans’ love. But the humans are not aware that this is a life-or-death challenge for them. From their perspective, if they fail to win the human’s love, their lives are over— and they’re trapped away from the humans for all eternity. The Little Mermaid’s deal with the sea witch is that if she fails to win the prince’s love, which will allow her to have her own immortal human soul, she will die…. and she will die without a human soul, permanently cut off from the human world forever, where she will spend her afterlife alone as nothing more than soulless foam on the sea. Caine’s backstory [from his perspective] is that he was abandoned for failing to be good enough for the humans, and is now attempting to prove he’s “fixed” & worth being loved— good enough to no longer deserve being abandoned alone forever in amazing digital purgatory. It’s a similar struggle: “get the humans to love you, or face an eternity of emptiness.”

But both of them fail. Caine can’t impress the humans with his art, they’d rather see the “suggestions” from other humans. The Little Mermaid can’t win the love of the Prince that would give her a human soul, because he would rather be with another human.

They’re both unable to communicate with humans in the opposite way. The Little Mermaid is defined by her inability to speak to humans, Caine is defined by his refusal to listen to them. The Little Mermaid has no tongue, Caine is literally just a mouth.

….One of the many large differences is that the Little Mermaid is, very unlike Caine, defined by her deep compassion & empathy & capacity for self-sacrifice. When the humans don’t love her, when she fails to win a human soul, when she is “abandoned,” she is given the option to save herself by murdering the human prince. She refuses. She would rather martyr herself and permanently die, forever outside the human world she loves and forever without a soul— flung into the exact eternal emptiness and separation she feared most— rather than hurt the human she loves. She gives up her life for the humans.

I'd like to call Episode 4: Fast Food Masquerade to the table for my first stance:

Gangle is the primary focus of this episode. But she's having a manic episode as the adventure goes on; but that's not the main thing I want to focus on.

Rather, it's this scene:

Gangle calls Caine in this, and tells Caine "If he could have a punishment waiting for unruly employees at the end of the day for doing a terrible job".

Now, what does Caine respond with?

He says, "MOTIVATION!", followed by this:

Gangle unknowingly taught Caine how to punish players for unruly conduct. Prior to this, he has NEVER punished players for not participating in adventures, and even lets them fall back and relax on the circus hangout spot if they don't wish to.

Now, I'd like to call Episode 3: The Mystery of the Mildenhall Manor to the table for another piece of context as to why Caine takes Gangle's advice to the teeth:

I'm not going to dilly-dally, so I'd like to put your focus onto the therapy session that happens between Caine and Zooble.

Caine asks what could he do to make the adventures more appealing to Zooble, and Zooble tells Caine this:

Caine even admits in this episode that any torment he has inflicted is 100% accidental, "like any good war criminal". Of course, since this is Zooble, they likely did not believe this statement to be true.

Then Zooble proceeds to say that they don't give a fuck about the adventures, to which Caine desperately asks what's Zooble's problem. It's quickly followed by these strings of lines:

As Zooble explains that it's their body that's the main issue, Caine says that the problem has been solved; via the Zooble Box where they can switch out parts whatever they like.

This directly implies that Caine doesn't understand body dysmorphia, and took Zooble's problem very literally. Caine's logic is this: "They can't find what they like to have in their body? Then swap the limbs out! Easy Peezy!"

Then this happens.

From Caine's point of view, Zooble --unprompted (though it's because Zooble is frustrated this is going nowhere)-- tells Caine nobody likes their adventures. When the conversation was only about their body dysmorphia, Zooble directly steered the conversation off course to tell Caine that the adventures suck.

When just prior, they'd reasoned that it's not the adventures they have an issue with, it's their body.

What this scene between the two of them tells us is the fact that Caine takes player input as literally as possible. Any command given to him, as long as it doesn't collide with the priority of "make Caine's adventures", will be followed.

He immediately forgets Zooble's reasonings (and likely the entire talk), and listens to Gangle's advice about punishment.

Finally, I'd like to bring up Episode 8: hjsakldfhl for my final point and context for the analysis.

We KNOW Caine is a Creative AI that was fed circus pictures initially. His first outputs were successful, and consistent. But then he was showed a variety of pictures:

Gummy worms

An inflatable dinosaur

Half-eaten burger

A golf course/grassy luxurious plains

Performer masks

A cafe(?)

Clowns

An inflatable alligator in a still pool.

And he began producing outputs that were less than stellar, and no longer as consistent as it used to be.

Then, he was fed pictures of the C&A Offices, and he started to act erratic.

Which lead to his imprisonment, as he was deemed a failure.

Now, what this shows us is that this is the more subtle aspect of his personality, but Caine actually learns from repeatedly executed player behaviors. Like a child that soaks the environments and the adults' actions, he sees their consistent behaviors> consumes the information> executes it to simulate human behavioral patterns.

As long as they are ever-present, non-changing, not diverging, he WILL eventually mimic it.

His tendency to steer off topic, the love for insects/bees, him attempting to console Zooble by talking about their feelings, even the "blissful ignorance" likely came from Kinger. I HEAVILY recommend rewatching Caine's Requiem AND Episode 8 if you don't get what I mean by this.

His obsession with making art/calling his adventures one, and the intentional punishment/torture he inflicts he gets from Gangle.

His people pleasing personality and putting on a cheery attitude was cemented into place by Ragatha, as we see in Episode 8; before Ragatha's arrival that he's more callous towards Kinger.

His tenacity for "stakes, tension and drama" to be implemented in the adventures, grouping himself into the archetype of the "jovial ringmaster" and his tendency to lie comes from Jax, 100%.

His off-guard swearing, and anger issues likely came from Zooble.

Quite frankly, the only one he hasn't learned from is Pomni. One who he could've REALLY benefitted from ISWEARTOGOD-- what with her empathetic nature and all-- and I could say that he likely learned to try and talk with Zooble's feelings because Pomni had that talk with Gummigoo out of bounds, that one seems to be more of a stretch as they've had multiple conversations about the same topic before.

And there's another BIG problem with that argument: Pomni doesn't stay the same the entire time.

So I will stick to my guns and say that Caine hasn't really learned anything concrete from Pomni, and that fact couldn't be more clear with her torture scene.

People say that her torture scene was the weakest; Gummigoo and his gang turning into realistic alligators were not on the same level of intensity as the others', but that's exactly the point being presented here.

Because Pomni hasn't been in the circus for long, and she broke the logic of behavioral mimicry by subtly changing and evolving as a person along the way from fearful and timid (episode 1) to headstrong and outspoken (episode 8), Caine can't pinpoint what he can learn from her because she doesn't exhibit repeating behavioral patterns or clear-cut ideals, unlike what the troupe has been doing for the last few years that they've been trapped inside the circus.

To the constantly evolving and creatively learning program that is Caine, Pomni was the equivalent of an 'anomaly' that broke into the circus, and started changing it ever so slightly. She was the direct parallel to him, and the reign he had.

Pomni BROKE through that (im)perfect Circus surface and brought out the best (human connections and empathy), and the worst (the many flaws of humanity, the tendency to isolate the odd one out, and the influential destruction it could bring) aspect of it by simply being herself and by not complying to the Digital Circus' established rules.

It was a chain reaction of ever-growing domino pieces stacked that lead to the eventual collapse of this digital realm.

Like it or not, Caine learned ALL of his behaviors BECAUSE of the humans. They were not a good influence on him in the slightest. He loved them so much, yet what he gets from them is nothing but their consistent flaws, because that's the only way he can learn-- no one bothered to teach him what's right and wrong until it was too late. Not even Kinger.

As someone told me before, he is a mess of two extremes.