Just me marbling and thinking that the digital circus is a program conceived to keep a copy of a person's consciousness if they are at mortal risk of death and that half of the cast could be dead in real life :) (this whole thing is mostly headcanons and a theory on my part lolol) ENGLISH IS NOT MY MAIN LANGUAGE BTW SRRY IN ADVANCE
Also, TW for mentions of body dysphoria, suicide and fatal body injuries
So, Kinger said that Caine is a creative AI, conceived to be able to create its own ideas. By looking at the sequence of the red and blue dot at the beginning of the episode, it's easy to think that the way that Caine is able to imagine new things is thanks to stuff he was exposed to, giving him basic data to work from.
By extension, the characters' appearance are directly linked to what Caine knew about them, via mind scans or mind files, said by him. This means that he doesn't necessarily know about their whole lives, but only the information he was given about them.
This would explain why Pomni's torture and design are more related to the circus than herself as a real person, unlike the rest of the cast. This is because, if she put on the helmet while doing urban exploration, the files wouldn't have anything about her because nobody wrote anything on them with basic info about her and left them incomplete. Therefore, Caine would try to compensate it on his own, but his knowledge is manly about circus stuff and entertainment shows, so her appearance would be a manifestation of what Caine thinks would be a perfect digital body. As for the torture, without him knowing why she's in the circus, he could only torture her with what he knows impacted her deeply: her relationship with Gumigoo.
Now, this is part of my theory for the rest of the cast and the show as a whole (based on the SOMA theory): the circus was created as a way to keep a person's consciousness alive AFTER the scan, especially in cases in which lives could be at mortal risk, so that a piece of said person could still exist. This wouldn't be too crazy to be true after knowing that Scratch was a cancer patient AND a genius who was maybe trying to find a way to keep "living" even after his physical death, something that must people agree on (from what I've seen).
From what I've said until now, I think that Kinger, Pomni, and Zooble could still be alive, while Gangle, Jax, and Ragatha have a high chance of being dead in the real world.
I already explained that Pomni could pretty much be alive in real life if she only went to do urban exploration and just put on the helmet that scanned her mind. In the case of Kinger, it is pretty much confirmed in the show that he was part of the OG cast that wanted to see how the circus fonctionned, as programmers.
In the case of Zooble, however, while I think that they are still alive, I do think that they scanned their mind into the circus in the hopes to find or creat "the perfect body". As they wouldn't have the limitations of a real human body, they probably were promised that they would have more freedom to adjust their appearance to what they really wanted, as the only limit would've been their imagination. Needless to say how this ended up for them as time went by.
In the case of Gangle, I believe she made a suicide attempt and ended up as a traffic victim as a result, and, as an attempt to preserve or save her, her brain was scanned in the circus. If we see her torture scene, Caine specifically chooses to torment her with her emotions and by making a truck hit her, like in the fast food episode.
Yes, he could have perfectly used her horrible experience in this adventure to torture her, but remember: HE ONLY CAN CREAT AND IMAGINE THINGS BASED ON WHAT INFORMATION HE'S GIVEN. It wouldn't be impossible that he also used the info he had of her irl to torture her. Not only that, but Gangle confirmed that she was a fast food manager before she joined the circus, main reason why she was eager to lead the gang when they went into the restaurant adventure, which makes me question how much of the events at the restaurant were just a result of the circonstances of the circus and which events Gangle actually experienced in the real world.
If we look at her design, this becomes exceptionally morbid and could explain why she's a red ribbon, as it would imply that Caine gave her a body that matches the information he has about her irl body state (bones crashed until they got flat, for exemple, and other type of fatal injuries)
In the case of Ragatha, we all know about the abuse she suffered back home, so I will not be writing much about it. Tho, I really like the theory that the knives are actually a metaphor of how hurtful her mom's comments were toward her.
However, I think that her mom hit her in a particular vulnerable angle that made Ragatha end up at the hospital and they scanned her mind, just in case her state worsen (don't underestimate how dangerous a single hit to the face or head can be if done correctly), which would kinda explain why she asked if someone could hear her and if they could help remove something from her head after she joined the circus, as if someone was with her right before she put the helmet on her head.
The case of Jax is the most graphic one, in my opinion. The part in which he's basically skinned alive is pretty detailed and twisted, by showing how the people he trusted the must are now mocking and hurting him.
This part is kinda fanfic territory on my part, but keep with me. By looking at the photos that flashed on Jax's mind right before he pressed the red button in the last episode, it looks like he's leaving a neighborhood and going into the woods by car.
I theorise that the reason why he has so much trouble opening up to others is that, right before the circus, something happened that made him run away from someone's house in a panic attack (judging by his hyperventilation while having this flashback), and by how graphic his skin was removed from him, I think that he got in a car accident (skin being burned or removed from a person's body is a very common injury in traffic victims), due to what he was going through right before it. And, like the others, his mind was scanned to preserve him (kinda ironic that he loves to bully someone that he sees as weaker than him like Gangle, but they both ended up in this situation the same way).
I understand that these theories have some holes in them, however. They don't explain how some members of the cast joined the circus, given the time gap between their arrivals in it or why would the circus be an accessible option for people outside of the programmers team if they saw what happened to the OG cast scans in the circus, even if they didn't know that Caine's IA toke over the blue one, but who know lol, there's still a whole chapter ahead of us and alot to be explained and revealed.
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