Irbis

! VAGUE SPOILERS FOR ONE AHEAD !

I LOVE it when people continually comment as they're reading, it's the best thing in the world so I definitely noticed that you were reading it :D and uh so sorry (or not?) that chapter 22 was so frustrating that you had to clean your room haha.

It's so nice that my funny little fic cna get people o have real emotional reactions. TADC is one of those series that's perfect for writing fics again, because of the unfortunate fact that a lot of characters and relationships are not explored as much as they could be, as I would've done if I was writing it. But that means I get to dig into them now! I'm so glad people enjoy the characterization, I don't usually try to write from so many different POVs at once and rotating between 4-5 people so frequently, so it's good they manage to still all feel distinct and in character, or at least at this point in character for what's happened.

Getting the set up and pay off to work out has been very satisfying on my side too! Though I'm worried I may have forgotten something I need to pay off haha I really need to do a thorough read through before I get too far into this finale.

So we know Scratch and co arrived in late 1999, and Ragatha in late 2008, with probably around a 1-year period where Kinger was entirely alone (long enough to develop dissociative tendencies, but not so long that he couldn't still pull himself together for Ragatha). This means almost the entire original group didn't last more than 6 years in the circus, while characters like Ragatha have managed to last at-least a decade. I think there's some major reasons as to why that is:

1. They understood the true nature of their prison

Unlike everyone from Ragatha onwards, the original cast were all developers who understood on a deeper level what the circus was, and more importantly what THEY were. As it's been all-but-confirmed that the characters within the circus are digital mind scans with no bodies to return to, they started out understanding there was no escape and nobody was coming for them. The knowledge that they were nothing by artificial copies would have been existentially damaging, and made relinquishing their humanity all the easier.

2. They were real-world colleagues and friends

Now you'd THINK this would have been an enormous boon for their mental longevity, since they all already had bonds even before entering the circus, but I think it was actually a huge detriment. They could actually remember and remind one another of their pre-circus lives, which only reinforced how trapped they felt. Additionally, this shared experience would have made them SO tight-knit that the loss of a single member would have been emotionally devastating to the rest, likely leading to cascading abstractions.

3. Scratch's Abstraction

Despite what I said above, the original cast's bonds PROBABLY would have helped in the long run... had Scratch not abstracted when Caine tried editing his mind files (presumably trying to "cure" the cognitive impairment from his brain tumour). Witnessing someone they all knew and looked up to devolve into a monster would have been awful enough, but I'd argue the true horror would have been their collective realization that there was no cure. Before the cellar protocol was introduced, they probably spent a LOT of time trying to "fix" Scratch, with the repeated failures only compounding their feelings of hopelessness. Had they been able to accept that Scratch was gone in the same way the modern cast holds a funeral for Kaufmo, they could've grieved and moved on. Instead all they could tell was that their friend trapped in a form of perpetual, violent distress, and nothing they did could pull him out of it. The grief, frustration, and hopelessness of that is likely what caused the next abstraction, which only would have made things even worse.

4. They thought they were alone

As much to them as to the show itself - it was a great time, a personal time, it hurt and it gave me things to both relate to and chew on (if I will be honest, for me it's mostly Ragatha, Gangle, and Caine who I relate to the most aha, but still). It's not perfect, but anything personal rarely is. I'm glad to have been there while it happened, and I don't really plan to stop posting TADC content for a while! I hope things will mellow out now that the finale is there, it's been sort of stressful to engage with the fandom for a while and it has kept me on pause about some things. That, and my drawing pad breaking too, of course.

"I made a program that creates a body perfectly encapsulating their mind files, and they hate those, too!"

So, if I understand, the shape and appearance of the Avatars is due to a program that reflects the User's mind state. Normally, this program would run during the Avatar's creation and be turned off after it. BUT!!!! What if the Program is constantly running in the background and it never turns off????

If the "mind files" start to deteriorate or diverge from the original files. Let's say.... Having a complete mental breakdown???

I would assume the program would interpret that mental state as something quite... Abstract????

To think outside the box

Had a nightmare where Caine talked like ChatGPT. It was so terrifying that I woke up crying and panicking and started stabbing random people on the street.

//Plus, a little glimpse into how the cast is doing.

>>This piece took me a long time to make.

>>I finally finished this triptych.