I'm bored

TMSOURCE's Episode of the Week ↳ WEEK 88 ✧ 5x13 — "The Red Barn"

TMSOURCE's Episode of the Week ↳ WEEK 102 ✧ 6x08 — "Red John"

This particular passage stands out to me:

"A young man who I had mistaken for a delivery guy enters and turns out to be a delivery guy just getting off work. He goes to join the arcade group, where they have cheers and an Experiment waiting for him. He's apparently very good at Cruis'n USA."

I'm betting that's Leeroy.

Anyways. Everyone and their brother has talked about The Rabbit to death and he doesn’t deserve anymore time or space in our life or on this blog.

With that being said.

Things we actually liked about the finale.

We agree with the general consensus that while the finale and the show as a whole aren’t groundbreaking or the Best Writing Ever, the finale at the very least satisfied the Emotional Journeys of the characters.

WE AGREE THAT THE WOMEN AND ZOOBLE DIDN’T GET THE SAME TREATMENT FROM THE NARRATIVE AS CAINE AND JAX. It would’ve been nice if Pomni, Ragatha, Gangle and Zooble (as well as Kinger) were allowed the same depth and backstory and sympathy and care as Caine and Jax. With that being said, just because everyone didn’t get a big musical number with a montage of exposition doesn’t mean the characters didn’t have narratively satisfying endings.

Zooble’s Man Versus Self conflict is body dysphoria and dysmorphia, to the point they are unable to go on Caine’s Adventures due to their discomfort in their own body. This conflict is resolved when Zooble, through a conversation with Gangle, learns to love the parts of themself they hate and repress, because that’s the “part that’s real”. Instead of hating being made out of an infinite amount of exchangeable zoobles, Zooble learns to find beauty and acceptance in not being stagnant and freedom in change, autonomy and self expression. We as an audience see the payoff of this resolution when they say as much to Jax on the beach.

NOTE: we are not saying Zooble’s character conflict is resolved well, or resolved with care, or resolved with sympathy. We’re just saying it’s resolved.

Gangle’s Man Versus Self conflict is her mask. Usual allegories and struggles around masking, such as abandoning oneself to be accepted by others as well as repressing feelings of guilt and shame, aside Gangle fears she can’t be happy without her comedy mask, which is repeatedly broken, often at the hands of Jax. Ignoring the label that involves The Rabbit, Gangle’s conflict is resolved when, through a conversation with Zooble, that she can make her own happiness without her mask. She’s not defined by or dependent upon her mask, she can have a happy, fulfilling life without her mask. She doesn’t have to live in fear of her mask being broken. We as an audience see the payoff of this resolution when Gangle has a big, happy smile on her sad face while shooting the tommy gun, despite her comedy mask not being on. From that point on, she’s regularly seen smiling despite no longer having the comedy mask.

NOTE: we are not saying Gangle’s character conflict is resolved well, or resolved with care, or resolved with sympathy. We’re just saying it’s resolved.

Ragatha’s Man Versus Self conflict is her Fawn response/people pleasing/anxious-ambivalent attachment style. Ragatha feels personally morally and ethically responsible for everyone’s well being, at the expense of her own well being. This puts a strain on all her relationships, which just makes Ragatha Try Even Harder to Not Make People Uncomfortable and tries to love them more than they think they hate her. Ragatha’s conflict is resolved when, through a conversation with Kinger, Ragatha learns she isn’t actually personally morally and ethically responsible for everyone’s well being, and that she’s actually allowed, and should, prioritize herself and her needs. We as an audience see the payoff of this resolution when Ragatha expresses her negative emotions about Caine’s new adventures, and it goes much better than when she ripped into Jax during the softball game.

As a bonus, Ragatha and Pomni also have A Big Special Moment in the finale, where Ragatha hears with no uncertain terms that Pomni appreciates her, as is, and is thankful for all Ragatha has done for her. Ragatha expresses a similar statement towards Pomni. Ragatha is able to make a true and authentic friend, and it’s NOT because she fawned/people pleased hard enough to “earn” Pomni’s friendship and love.

NOTE: we are not saying Ragatha character conflict is resolved well, or resolved with care, or resolved with sympathy. We’re just saying it’s resolved. But. You know. Congrats to Funnydoll/RagaPom shippers 🎉

A couple MORE notes before we move on.

A.) Pomni doesn’t have a Man Versus Self conflict like the other characters. She only has Man Vs Man and Man Vs Environment. That’s probably why she feels so flat compared to the other characters. Kinger also doesn’t have a Man Versus Self conflict, and he’s horribly under utilized in our opinion ESPECIALLY for a character that has ALL the fucking lore!!!!!!!!!!!

B.) All the characters share the same Man Versus Man conflicts (chara vs Caine & chara vs Jax) and Man Versus Environment (chara vs Digital Circus). Our thoughts about Caine will be below. As for the Digital Circus as a point of conflict: this wasn’t that satisfying. The SOMA theory being confirmed felt more like the answer to a question, in fact maybe the ONLY answer to any kind of world building question within the entire narrative, opposed to having any kind of emotional investment or payoff. They already decided BEFORE the finale that they were going to give up on finding an exit, so the SOMA theory being confirmed, and Caine revealing their human names and lives felt more about Caine’s character arc, and for the audience watching, than anything having to do with the Character Versus Environment conflict, in our opinion. It didn’t benefit the characters much, and made the audience Feel Some Feelings about a bus stop.

And finally. Caine!!

So. We have two views to this and they can basically be summed up as:

1.) For purely self indulgent (selfshipping) reasons we like and appreciate Caine’s redemption and that he got a found family in the circus after issuing an actual apology and put in the effort to change. We think this is a good juxtaposition to The Rabbit, who was an abuser and then killed himself. That set of dentures is a cutie patootie and we’re so proud of that 2D man and his personal growth

2.) That’s Not The Ending We Wanted For Caine, and him being brought back feels like a cheap gimmick.

We went into the theater fully expecting Caine to be gone forever and for Jax to be the one to get redeemed (that’d make more sense to us, anyways. Let the tyrant who had all the control die the abuser, the abusive human gets redeemed, and then the humans reclaim the space that was a prison made by their abuser as their own and share it as a place of love and hope). So we were SHOCKED when we noticed the color in the circus coming back and Caine reappeared.

We personally were hoping that Caine would stay dead, but his arc would conclude during the finale via Kinger and Lore Dump Exposition, where the blame was placed on C&A for creating Caine in the first place AND the mechanism that allowed people to nonconsentually end up in the circus to begin with. It felt to us like there was a lot of building up to C&A only for there to be no payoff, and you have to suspend your disbelief about servers running for decades in an abandoned building that still has electricity going to it somehow in order to enjoy the show, as well as all these people getting the headset on to end up in the circus. We know how the first set of human beings got there, and Pomni. What about the others??

Anyways.

We like how Caine’s character was a handled for purely self indulgent reasons, not logical narrative reasons, and we ain’t even mad when people criticize it. We 100% feel like Caine should’ve stayed dead and Jax should’ve gotten the redemption, but Goose projected too hard on to Jax and it completely derailed what could’ve otherwise been a solid story.

Oh yeah. To fit the formatting of the rest of this post.

Caine’s Man Versus Self conflict was his ego. He refused to empathize and understand the humans he had under his care. Humans are like toys: they’re entertainment to be owned and played with until broken. This conflict was resolved when Caine was accidentally deleted by Kinger/Wacky Watch protocol or whatever, which was a wake up call for Caine. Humbling himself, he learned about the humans, realized his mistakes, apologized, and offered them the most amount of freedom he could to the copied mind files of humans living out in the real world.

Looking at this as a Caine yume, we like 👍. Looking at this as a writer… again, we personally would’ve given the redemption to Jax. Like you can pry Redeemed Found Family Caine from our cold dead hands. But we completely understand why people are made about it. The fake out death is THE most overdone and boring trope in our opinion.