QUINZELLIUM

It's basically the inside joke me and @corevernal have where we say "That's it I'm putting him in the deep fryer" or some other stupid appliance dshkjdfshks

Script by me. We all know who voiced this. Gianni did amazing and I keep cackling at it XD

Transcript below the cut:

Ya'll couldn't even handle HER.

I don't think Jax is a good trans rep or is well-written, and keep in mind I'm using he/him pronouns for him not because I'm somehow transphobic (nevermind that Gooseworx has said any pronouns for Jax is fine), but because we never actually see this side of him in action. We only see his dead person self, Jax, and him deep in the closet for the entirety of our time in the series and just how insecure he is over his true gender. And then he's genuinely just abusive and awful to the cast, and then he loses his mind and dies. The fact that a song meant to represent the birth of a baby girl is used in place of a trans woman who's in the closet dying and the rest of the cast moving on oh-so-dandily I think is the biggest problem in that disconnect.

Jax is supposedly a complicated character, and he is to a degree, but he's treated as complicated and flawed in a cast not only mostly devoid of problematic elements, but where another abuser is forgiven even when he shouldn't be and is shown "curing" his condition analogous to Autism. Meanwhile, everyone more or less moves on from Jax and doesn't at all seem too plussed that he's dead; sure, they obviously miss him, but nobody's exactly shaken up that he's gone and the story just doesn't fucking deal this subject with the gravitas it deserves. We never see Jax transitioning into Daisy or a transfem rep. Jax is dead. They literally do not explain this and while the story asks you to sympathize with him, none of the cast members are too broken up that he's gone.

It's abysmal trans representation and a lot of the complaints used for "media cannot handle complicated or flawed women!" is that it ignores there's a huge difference between female characters that are actually portrayed by the plot as horribly flawed and complicated people with lots of bad qualities as a whole that was written as such intentionally (e.g. Camilla from Fire Emblem Fates, Akane Kurashiki from Zero Escape, etc.) and characters that are either just... bad female characters the stories love to infantilize (e.g. Edelgard from Fire Emblem: Three Houses), fetishize (e.g. Junko Enoshima from Danganronpa) or just give way too many woobie points/sympathy because there's this internalized misogynistic expectation female villains are more "innocent" than male villains (e.g. Sae Niijima from Persona 5 (albeit she's a better example than most), Lusamine in Pokemon, almost any female villain in Fire Emblem not Ashera or Sonia, and don't get me started on Harley Quinn...). The problem isn't that "people cannot handle flawed females," is that a lot of the "flawed females" are just badly fucking written. So when you have female characters that are portrayed as realistically awful or just bad people without any fetishizing elements or misogynistic elements, people's brains break and try to invent excuse why they're awfully written even when nothing's wrong with them.

Give me more female characters who are awful, horrible pieces of shit in ways that aren't misogynistic or badly written! I want female characters who are irredeemable pieces of garbage that the story doesn't try to make more innocent or into something fetishized, give me female characters that are unappealing garbage! I don't just want women's rights as a feminist, I want women's wrongs as well! And yet female villains are held to an expectation that people can't handle how "complicated" they are and then get mad when a female character doesn't have the usual misogynistic tropes used to soften them.

And then you have Jax, a trans women who not once throughout the entirety of TADC's runtime are we shown Jax as a she/her, with even the marketing still referring to him as he/him.

Again, I don't use he/him as misogyny, I use it because that's literally the only way Jax has been meaningfully addressed in canon material. Gooseworx's tweets don't count because she hasn't done enough to make it clear, and all we're left with is a character who feels somehow even worse in being Discount Trans than characters like Chihiro Fujisaki in Danganronpa or Naoto Shirogane from Persona 4, because at least you could say with their characters them co-opting trans ideology wasn't the point of what their characters were meant to say (and granted, while Naoto IMHO is written very well, Chihiro was handled so horrible that I DGAF about anyone who wants to make him trans because it can't possibly be worse than how canon handled him)!

wdym that’s all you have.

You have friends that you appear to neglect

(Gangle has made no effort to reconnect directly with Ragatha or lay out her problems with her, Zooble has talked one-on-one to ……. basically none of the cast except to argue with Jax?)

You had a funny guy who made an adventure jointly with you and filled a dull day’s workplace with wacky hijinks that hit a sweet spot between his chaotic artist vision and your more down-to-earth needs.

You had a god who showed signs of being able to compromise with you- and you couldn’t come up with any further compromise than demanding he rearrange the WHOLE circus dynamic for you.

Listen. I respect Gooseworx. I love her shit. But.

She claims this show is about “relationships between the characters” and there’s “no romance” but we saw NO resolution with Ragatha and Pomni, with Gangle and Jax, and she ULTRA focuses on Pomni&Jax merch and teasing Abstragedy in Tweets.

You came SO close to averting fandom ship wars and yet I can’t figure out if your brain is basically generating romance while thinking “oh if they don’t SPECIFICALLY declare it so and go on candlelit dinners and kiss it isn’t romance”

Like I don’t know who you think you’re fooling.

Somebody could over-exaggerate a racist or sexist joke and not really “mean” it, as well.

normative thinking is a problem.

Then in ep 5, Zooble pushed it way further, asking for a TON of work that would require who knows how much out of a glitchy, run down AI (I mean “leave all the adventures open”? Could a HUMAN on the other side of the screen even do that?)

This is AFTER laser-targeting his insecurity which made him almost crash the whole circus in the therapy session.

The writing on Zooble is incomprehensible throughout the series. They act like they’re scared in 4, then seemingly totally forget that and snipe at him over and over. Can’t figure out what the writers were going for at all.

That NONE of the cast could picture a compromise between “only him adventures” and “a request that he said wasn’t possible (we don’t know why, but still)” just indicates to me none of them has any imagination.

DUH.

So many different compromises could’ve been made here.

I really think this is the crux point of the series.

@dougielombax

Like, they could all be sitting around in this digital wasteland in ep 9 and realize wait a second. This could’ve been so easily fixed.

And now he’s dead.

(perhaps permanently)

(perhaps he only returns when they fully grieve and accept his death, actually. That would be neat.)

We were all caught up with getting only OUR OWN WAY. Pushing him out entirely, even when Zooble, A FELLOW ARTIST MIND YOU, was directly SHOWN via EARTHQUAKE how much it meant to him.

When he said “They’re selfish” in his office, he was ONE HUNDRED AND TEN percent correct.

The potential for compromise was missed in ep 5. If you’d like to speak on whether you thought compromise was workable AT THAT POINT (or if you did that in the post, my bad) but you LED with ep 7, by which point the humans had already fumbled the compromise.

@cellberry

FIVE lucid minds and they couldn’t figure out some other idea while 1 of them argued with a glitchy, run-down AI who was desperate to be included.

Who was bereft at the idea of never getting to share his art ever again.

Actually, now that I think about it ………. the compromise was still on the table. Caine said “give you anything you want” to Jax. If he had picked Zooble to go on the dinner outing with, they wouldn’t leapt from their seat and gone, wait, really???? What exactly does that mean? ANYTHING?

Pomni probably would have too

In fact…. any character ….. even PRE GUN GAME Jax, would’ve perked up at that offer.

This is so ////literally//// such a series of missed opportunities. The narrative threaded this needle on this tragedy so scarily, actually. Everyone had a shot at being happy and it just /happened/ to not work out that way. Wow.

But it's another thing when you start to bullying individuals for not meeting your personal expectations. Or worse, to harass them.