Shoups

Most of Jax’s abusive behavior is undeniably towards the women in the circus, which, if you don’t know, follows the stereotype of trans women hating cis women and being abusive. This in of itself is already weird but it’s made worse by Jax sexually harassing these women. The biggest show of Jax sexually harassing the women is her “flirting” with Gangle in episode 9.

While I do see people say that it represents intrusive thoughts, that idea can be easily dismissed with how she is also abusive throughout the series. We see her sexually blackmailing Gangle, physically and mentally abusing Gangle, and we see that a lot of Gangle’s insecurities are made through how abusive Jax was. This isn’t even addressing how she treated the other women in the circus (because I’m lowkey too lazy for a whole rant on that).

With the abusive stereotypes out of the way, I feel like it’s also important to note how weird it was to not state Jax is trans in canon and to instead do it on social media. We see the amazing digital circus tell instead of show multiple times, so many times that I would argue it’s one of its main issues, so why did they refuse to tell us Jax is trans? I’m not denying her being trans or saying it was never hinted on but with a character arc so big, you would think we’d see more hints and maybe even confirmation within the show.

I feel like a good storyline for this that could still show Jax being a more mean and resentful character could be showing her as envious and mad instead of abusive. Her being envious of the women in the circus could not only hint better at her own gender expression but could also actually make her redeemable. Right now the story is just “abuse victims forgive their abuser because she died”, when the story could be so much more. There are good ways to write trans characters, The Amazing Digital Circus just doesn’t use them.

One of the most obvious examples of this is how it treats its women characters. They show how women are treated badly in usual superhero stuff via using costume design and media. With the costumes we see that Vought wants them in more sexual costumes, while they use the excuse of feminism and empowerment it’s very clear it’s just for the male gaze. With media we see that women are used as a tool for the media, one example is how they direct Queen Maeve to come off as the mean, powerful, woman character, ignoring her depth. While I do like this idea of theory, I feel like the show is hypocritical with it. They try to make fun of how women are treated in superhero media yet we see them mistreat their women characters aswell. We see Becca get reduced to the plot lines of the men around her, we see women in the story subjected to sexual assault for no reason except for edgy writing, and we see women losing characteristics of themselves for no reason.

I don’t just think this is an issue with women though, I think it shows through with their black characters. We see in the show that they try to show racism and nazism and how bad it is by making fun of it but on multiple occasions they used black people as just a device to continue white stories. the most prominent example I’ve seen is when Sorrmfront kills the black family. I think they could have gone about that a lot better by giving the black characters actual characteristics instead of just using them as a tool to show a white persons racism. I feel like my point is shown even more when we saw how much A-Trains story was cast to the side for Stormfront’s story. While yes he technically still had a story in season two we see it often times get thrown to the side for the white characters.

The example that I see get brought up the most during this conversation is about Starlight and her commentary on child actors and pageants. We see The Boys critique both of these things multiple times through her character, but, in S3 EP3 they have a child actor play little starlight. While child actors are a complicated subject, it is quite hypocritical to try to talk about how it’s bad then do it yourself. This could also be pushed further by the scenes shown, we see her singing and dancing to “Baby One More Time” by Britney Spears. Not only is this a sexual song, but with Britney Spears past in being a child star it pushes how ignorant they are even further. I feel like a better way to do the scene was to not show the children but instead show the adults watching. Not only would that have not used child actors but we would have gotten the adults reactions to children dancing on stage, which could have added more depth to how bad it was.

We didn’t see the mystery plot again until episode 7, which is my least favorite episode. They acted as if they would bring back the plot and ended up making a rushed fake out, which could have been interesting if they didn’t get rid of the plot in episodes 3-6 and if the idea itself lasted more than just one episode. It ended up becoming super rushed and ignoring a lot of nuance and drama within the characters to be done. I believe it’s almost made worse by how rushed episode 8 is. Instead of giving us this information throughout the show in clever ways, they just tell us it all at once. Along with being a pretty bland and rushed idea to put all the information in one episode, it also heavily broke the idea of show-don’t-tell, which, for a show trying to take on a horror idea, is kinda needed.