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I was bracing myself for something bleak and soul-crushing so I was pleasantly surprised by how sweet, optimistic, and hopeful the finale felt in the end. Caine is alive and has shown himself to be capable of growth and evolution, everyone is healing and working together to rebuild their world, their real-world counterparts are all doing okay. There's even hope for Jax and the other abstractions, since it seems like now the gang is doing research and learning methods to pacify the abstractions and might eventually find a way to un-abstract them. I mean, the scenes with Pomni touring Jax's memories clearly imply that he's still in there, just currently inaccessible.

Also, transfem Jax was basically made canon, defying my expectations, and...I'm sure opinions will be divided, but I thought it worked pretty well. This was treated as simply another fact about Jax's character and not something that either defined or redeemed him (I'm respecting Eggman's pronoun preferences here). As I stated in my earlier post, I think Jax getting a last-minute redemption arch wouldn't have worked, it would have felt rushed and cheesy because the necessary groundwork wasn't really laid in prior episodes. But it was made clear that the gang still cared about him and that this isn't necessarily the end. Some fans are upset that Jax's actual abstraction wasn't shown, but...we already saw exactly what that would look like in an earlier episode, I don't know that showing it again would have contributed anything. The gang can't watch him every minute of every day and Jax has repeatedly shown himself unwilling to open up, so it makes sense that, despite their best intentions, this might happen "off-camera."

There was a lot of screentime dedicated to Jax's internal abstraction landscape, possibly more than was justified, given that he remains abstracted in the end. Like, obviously the stuff about Ribbit is important but did we need all the hijinks before that? I wasn't terribly bothered by it though, and Pomni's attempts to find and help Jax have narrative weight because this ties in indirectly to Caine's redemption, which is the one that actually matters in a narrative sense. Caine is observing all this happen from the outside, and maybe seeing Jax's ultimate fate (and the fact that everyone still cares about him in spite of everything) is what makes it finally sink in that he needs to change.

There were parts during the middle of the movie that felt a bit navel-gazey and meandering and self-indulgent, but I was willing to go along with it and have faith that it was all ultimately building toward something, and I do think that faith was rewarded.

Also, the fact that Caine can apparently connect to the internet now opens up all sorts of possibilities. It's not inconceivable that the gang could find a way to communicate with the outside world.

There's a lot of stuff you can point to. Gooseworx, the show's creator, is a trans woman and has described Jax as her "self-insert." Jax's bedroom is pink and girly (the rooms are presumably generated based on things about the individual's psyche). At one point Jax accuses Pomni of trying to "crack" his "egg," and given Gooseworx's identity it seems unlikely that that specific terminology was an accident.

And of course there's Jax's intensely flustered reaction to being put in a French maid outfit, which initially struck me as a bit surprising and ooc. He's a character who's very committed to his don't-give-a-fuck facade, so you'd think he would have developed some psychological antibodies to this type of mockery, like just making a flippant remark and rolling with it. But you could argue that he reacts so negatively specifically because it hits so close to home that he can't keep his cool. In response to questions about his reaction, Goose said Jax is "not ready to have that conversation." (Hmm?) And of course, there is the hallucinatory torture scene where Jax gets "peeled" and everyone mocks and laughs at his true form.

All that said, if you set aside Goose's commentary and just look at the show itself, all of these details are also consistent with a (more obvious, more mainstream) reading that Jax is a cis or mostly cis man who is ashamed of and desperate to repress his emotions and vulnerability, his "girly" qualities, because he's internalized the idea that these things are bad. I mean, we're all accustomed to seeing male characters who have this specific neurosis, this performative masculinity and self-imposed alienation which function as armor around a soft and squishy core (Rick Sanchez comes to mind). There's no shortage of men who feel a lot of anxiety about their own masculinity, and who respond by just repressing this anxiety and committing harder to the act, even as they crumble inside. (Of course there are women and female characters like this too, but you more commonly see this archetype with men.)

All that said, this doesn't rule out the trans reading. But I would personally be very surprised if this was made canon in the final episode. Partly because I'd imagine Gooseworx having some reservations about such a...well, problematic character being the only transfem rep. Which is not to say that it's wrong to have problematic queer rep. God knows I've written plenty of it. But a reveal of this nature in the last episode would be the fandom discourse equivalent of throwing a wrench into a beehive and then setting the beehive on fire.

Jax spends the vast majority of the show bullying and terrorizing the rest of the cast. Whether he's doing that because he's terrified of being vulnerable and being hurt again or she's doing that because she's terrified of being seen as who she really is, I'm not sure if that changes much on a narrative/structural/thematic level. Either way you've got a character who is abusive due to a deep inner pain. And since there's not enough time left in the show to truly explore what an out trans Jax would be like and how that would affect their dynamic with the rest of the cast, how would this really affect the story's outcome?

And it's being hinted at in some of the trailers and promo material that now that Caine is gone, Jax could become the main villain. Trying to narratively meld that with such a reveal...like I'm not saying that's impossible to handle in a respectful and nuanced way but it's kind of hard to imagine that going over well. And I also suspect that a last-minute redemption arch which thematically tied itself to this revelation would feel cheap. So I think this particular thing is likely to remain as subtext or a fan theory.

Mild spoilers for ep5.