Dust yourself off, proceed

First of all, I was very satisfied with the story. Regardless of the outcome of the plot, this is a story that from beginning to end was told with love, conviction, and absolute intention. I keep coming back to this quote by gooseworx from 2024:

I went into the finale expecting this message to prevail in the ending, and it was addressed immediately. The cast wasted no time in coming to the conclusion: they are all brain scans. Digital snapshots of themselves, a full consciousness with no avenue by which to return to the real world. The cast deals with this revelation by embracing community, with the exception of Jax.

Jax. Leeroy Mateo. He was 22 years old when he put on that headset. In his outside life, after his adventure to C&A, he started improving. Found a stable housing situation, a job, was able to pay rent. He found a group of friends, people he could trust enough to join him at Zooble's bar. He was able to engage with queer community at his own pace. In a couple of years, he may have felt comfortable enough to acknowledge his transfem identity. Confide in his closest friends. Consider another name, other pronouns. Continue to grow and become the person he wants to be.

That is not the place Jax was in at 22. The version of Jax's mind captured in the circus is ruled by paralyzing fear. Fear of ridicule, fear of his transfem identity being perceived. He is incapable of trusting anyone who shares that knowledge, however kind and well-intentioned, however close of a friend the person may be. He doesn't intentionally come out to Ribbit. He wasn't ready. He wasn't ready.

Jax can't handle someone else having that knowledge, and so he panics. Launches hard into old defense mechanisms. Pushes Ribbit away, refuses to ever acknowledge their conversation, eventually refuses to acknowledge they had any connection at all. Coerces the group into ostracizing her, until Ribbit's guilt and isolation leads them to abstraction. It's a sad story. It's the only story Jax could let himself enact at 22.

One thing the finale made me realize about the characters, was that although new experiences, new people and new adventures in the circus do allow them introspection, do allow them to forward connection with others; the members of the circus are not afforded the human life experience and cultural atmosphere to allow for radical personal maturation and growth. At their core, the characters are still a snapshot from a human brain, now completely removed from the context that molded it. There's people they'll never meet, classes and jobs they'll never take, major life events they'll never have, loved ones they can never reconcile with.

I feel a major factor creating that environment was the atmosphere of the circus, the nature of the adventures. It's gotta be hard to feel connected to your humanity when you don't have human anatomy, when you aren't bound by human physics, maintainance or mortality, when every day is a fully immersive cartoon fantasy video game. No wonder Jax never felt like anything was real. In many ways, it wasn't.

In the end, Jax was not saved. Not because he wasn't afforded opportunities for emotional connection, not because he wasn't included and forgiven by those around him, not because he was not worthy of love and redemption, but because in the end, Jax couldn't choose to save himself.

In this life, there are so many things we can't control. To cut straight to the chase, it's dangerous and ostracizing to be a queer person in the United States right now. The people who hate us would gladly see us lay down and die. We have to choose to fight for ourselves. Even if that looks like just choosing to stay alive. Just holding our heads up enough to weather the storm.

The message I took from The Amazing Digital Circus was that in a world out of your control, where it may feel pointless to even stay alive, you can find meaning in your connection to others. We have to be there for each other; sometimes we are all we have.

If I had to voice a critique of the finale, I will say that I wish the story offered a way to recover the characters who abstracted. It was a bittersweet ending knowing that Jax, Ribbit, Kaufmo, Queenie, and Scratch can never be brought back. Are they all suffering the same way as Jax is, isolated forever in their separate mindscapes? Do abstractions feel any comfort from being lovingly shepherded into a blanket fortress? Are they at peace, drifting freely through the aquarium, viewing the faces of the people they used to know? I wish they were afforded the closure the surviving cast was given, being shown who they are in the real world, and how their human selves have been able to change and grow. I suspect many fix-it fics to address this element of the finale are now, or soon will be, voraciously in the works.

As some final, semi-random notes; while I know that gooseworx has stuck by her resolution of romance playing no role in the main tadc plot, I will be taking the end credit scene implying abstragedy lesbian sex and running. This is canon to me now and you're not getting it back because I've already put it in my mouth and I'm too fast and you'll never catch me.

Last but not least, as a STL native it was a great surprise, joy and disbelief to see that the entire cast is apparently based in Saint Louis??????? Sitting in a theater full of Saint Louisians, hearing it audibly dawn on all of us was a crazy experience. Somehow the location feels right; somewhere urban, kind of grungy and disheartening at first glance, but down to earth and full of culture under the surface. Somewhere you can make it, if you hang in there and fight for it. I would love to be able to visit the Triangle bar in person, I can see a sleek neon shopfront, flanked by ferns and fairy lights, in the dying rays of sunset tucked into the streets downtown. I can see Kinger visiting the Butterfly House and Insectarium at the zoo, I can see Zooble and Gangle dressing up to catch a show at the Fox on the weekends. I can see the horse farms on the edge of the suburbs, the country roads winding through rural towns where Ragatha left her mother behind for good. The location context makes the story feel more real to me, it's something special that I wasn't expecting. "There's that relatability!" Lol.

Overall, I think the TADC series was a thought-out and precise story with a satisfactory ending. I see where people will have their grievances, but I thank gooseworx for sharing her characters with the world, and I hope she is spared any drama that may come with the wide audience that will receive her story.