stray-tori

She doesn't look spirited or enthusiastic at all when she's talking about who she was. The immediate assumption is that she's mourning the life she lost, but we never learn any critical detail of her life that motivates her to keep going or strive to find an exit or anything makes her the way she is. Nothing about her old life was important enough to be a relevant motivation for her character and that's so telling in a way I've hardly seen anyone comment on.

"Well, I... sometimes got bored of things, and I would seek out mild thrills, like... exploring abandoned buildings, you know?"

Everyone else's characters are deeply informed by their old lives in a way that is immediately obvious when you hear about it. Gangle was (and is) passionate about her art. Zooble wanted to figure out who they were and leave a mark on the world in a way that they can't now. Ragatha's people-pleasing tendencies come from abuse she faced growing up. Kinger worked for C&A and had a wife who entered the Circus with him. Jax's attempt to come out of the closet went so badly that she's living the rest of her digital life thinking she might have accidentally killed her mother.

Pomni was a supermarket accountant who broke into an abandoned office building out of boredom and put on the same headset everyone else did. She uploaded videos of her explorations of abandoned buildings, videos that the narrative deemed necessary to have her say that nobody watched. This is the only explicit pre-Circus backstory we ever get for her. We don't know anything about who she was, who she wanted to be, or who she hung out with. We don't know anything about her hopes and dreams or anything that happened to her that might have shaped her into who she is.

I see a lot of people say that the lack of focus on Pomni's life is purely because she's the POV character as opposed to Jax being the main character, or even that it's an example of bad writing. I think there's more nuance to it than that. Nothing was the thing that made her who she is. Not in the sense that she's the well-adjusted one next to all these traumatized weirdos, because I really don't think she is.

"It's a lot for anybody to go through. But while the others took weeks—hell, even months—to get used to everything, myself included... you found your footing in a matter of days."

I don't think "well-adjusted" is the appropriate word to describe the prior mental state of someone who has their entire reality ripped away from them forever and replaced with a CGI cartoon nightmare world and is okay enough to keep moving forward four days later. Doesn't Pomni have friends or family she misses? Anything she wanted to do with her life that she'll never get the chance to do? Anything at all to be hung up on wanting to go back to?

Pomni was just as messed up as everyone else when she got here. It's just that her particular brand of messed up happened to make her exceptionally suited to seek happiness in the Circus.

"Pomni. Abigail Brooks. She's still an accountant, but she seems to have opened up more and is hanging out with new friends more often. She even has some of them in her videos with her, which she still posts on occasion."

Everyone else's human counterparts are working through their traumas and reaching milestones they never thought they would when they put on that headset. Meanwhile, Abigail is in pretty much the same place in her life with the exception that she has some new friends, with the wording seeming to imply that she doesn't post urban exploration videos as often as she used to. It sounds so underwhelming compared to the others, but Pomni looks just as touched to learn about her other self as the others are to learn about theirs.

I think Pomni was living a lonely, empty life when she put that headset on. She wasn't sad, but she wasn't happy, either. She didn't know what she wanted in life and it bothered her. She's easily startled and can't handle horror, but her life was so utterly mundane that she put on a random headset she found in an abandoned building just to feel something. She has a nightmare about abstracting and being forgotten after her hobby of exploring abandoned and forgotten places gets her trapped in the Circus. She empathizes with the existential terror of a self-aware NPC and tells him she doesn't want anyone to feel like they're nothing.