Shaggy✨ 🪿

Isn't she lovely?

we know jax's way of coping with everything she's done was believing her reality is fake and they're just cartoon characters. she viewed her and gangle as a comedic duo, similar to popee and kedamono, the characters they were inspired by. popee regularly torments kedamono but despite that kedamono likes being around popee and considers him a close friend.

she reduces her to a one dimensional cartoon character: a sad character that's the foil to the funny character, and they stick around because they actually like each other and it makes for a funny show.

she wants to believe that's all everyone is, so she can put herself at a distance from reality. to delude herself that everyone she cared about aren't really people so she can put a distance between them and her vunerable emotions, and the way she treated them was actually fine because they're not real. she imagines herself going even further with this coping mechanism if gangle abstracts

jax and gangle are also alike in many ways, they have masks to cope with how they feel about themselves. she breaks her comedy mask to have power/control over her, but also probably because she hates being reminded of her own coping mechanism in such a blatant way (with gangle's face literally being a mask and all). jax believes none of gangle's positive emotions are real, and that she's always sad and hating herself just like jax hates herself

and because of that, she feels confused when she sees gangle happy

as for gangle being codependent with jax and viewing her as a friend. gangle had very low self esteem and when your self esteem is that low it's common to let yourself recieve a lot of negative attention from someone. even if it's toxic, it's still someone willingly choosing to be around you and giving you attention, and to many that can seem like the better option than being alone.

when you have no self esteem it also feels impossible to make your own decisions and do things by yourself, and gangle felt like it was easier/better to just let jax drag her around on a leash and do what she says. and also because she feared what jax would do if she made her own choices, of course.

gangle lost any sense of autonomy the moment she stepped into the circus and jax picked a name for her

and i'm sure she eventually caught on that jax is struggling in her own way. she probably downplayed/excused the abuse she received because she knew jax was suffering too and she felt like deserved to be the outlet for her issues anyway.

it wasn't until she got close with zooble that she fully realized just how fucked up that friendship was, and the severity of the impact jax's abuse left on her. and that perhaps she can actually have healthy relationships after all