Chronic Character Understander

I think this cut, from the players gathered on the couches to Caine sitting in his office chair, is one of the most important ones of the episode, for what it has to say about the players’ solidarity vs. Caine’s solitude.

Starting with those couches: throughout the series, this lounge area is where the players come together. Whenever we see them all together outside of the context of an adventure, it’s here.

And in “hjsakldfhl,” it’s where they go to reflect on the cruel plot twist they just got served in the previous episode. Here, the players have what’s basically a strategy meeting: “That was a tough loss… what do we do now?”

They convene, they check in with each other, they argue and debate… and eventually they come to two solid conclusions:

We are not going to focus on trying to leave any more.

We are going to stick together and make this hell into a home.

As a group, they come to the conclusion that solidarity is the best strategy available to them.

Then, the episode cuts directly from the player’s circle of couches to Caine’s desk chair. The couches are reminiscent of a down-to-earth, community area, like a family’s living room or a lounge in a coffee shop.

The couches face each other, facilitating roundtable-style discussion, and they also allow people to sit directly side-by-side.

This creates a feeling of intimacy and connection that wouldn’t be there if the players were all in separate seats.

However, an upholstered leather desk chair is a very different symbol. It hints at something a bit more illustrious than a couch: something with power, but also something that stands alone.

The chair also dwarfs Caine, much larger than someone his size would actually need. His legs don’t even reach off the edge of the seat, much less all the way to the floor. This further emphasizes that he is, figuratively and literally, unequipped to fill the space he’s trying to fill.

When the episode cuts to Caine on his chair, it shows that he’s going through a personal crisis parallel to the one that the players are. He’s experiencing his own upheaval, trying to come to terms with what just happened. But unlike the players, he is making his decisions alone.

I mean, okay, he has Bubble. But it’s debatable whether Bubble even is a separate person or just. More of Caine. A fragment of his mind reflecting his own unruly thoughts back at him. And even if Bubble is a separate consciousness, Bubble’s… “advising,” of Caine is clearly not the same as the players’ unity with each other.

Where the players are, metaphorically, all in the shit together and trying to find a way to higher ground, there’s no sense that Bubble has any personal stakes in what Caine decides, or any desire to take on some of the burden. Bubble acts less as a peer and more an advisor or consultant— and a bad one, considering…

Y’know.

So, the couch-chair cut mirrors the main conflict of the episode. We have two bird’s-eye shots of the characters: one of the players on the couches, a source of community and solidarity, and a second of Caine in his chair, physically and emotionally isolated.

“We’ve Been Together for Every Team Adventure in the Past”

For starters, Gangle and Jax seem to have been… something of a package deal, in the pre-canon Circus? I say this mainly because Gangle’s friendship with Zooble, and her corresponding attempts to distance herself from Jax, are treated like a shift in the group dynamic. In “Untitled,” Jax directly comments on this friendship like it’s something new:

Her comedy mask still breaks every say. Does she think hanging out with Zooble is gonna magically fix that? (8:01)

The implication here is that, by spending time with Zooble, Gangle is breaking some status quo; in Jax’s eyes specifically, she’s going outside of her role (the Sad One) and trying to have something (happiness) not meant for her. In the following episode, Jax not only tries to team up with Gangle as if it’s habit— which it apparently is, if “we’ve been together on every team adventure” is anything to go by— but tries to outright force her back onto his team when she elects to go with Zooble.

This leads me to believe that Gangle and Jax were closer at some point. This isn’t to say that whatever connection they had before was good, or that they were best friends or anything (notably she isn’t among the silhoutted attackers in his torture scene in “hjsakldfhl”), just that there was a time when Gangle and Jax being side-by-side was taken for granted.

I’m also very interested by the line “She likes when I’m mean to her, though!” (“Untitled,” 8:13). This is certainly not the case in any interaction we ever see; there’s no sense of playfulness or familiarity in the way Jax teases Gangle, and it becomes explicitly clear in “They All Get Guns” that Jax’s treatment of her makes her feel scared and dehumanized—

Zooble: “You’re a human. you’re not his toy.”

Gangle: “It sometimes doesn’t feel that way.” (14:48)

But I do get the sense, from how the former line is delivered, that Jax believes what he’s saying— or at least really wants to. So, why? Why does he say this, how can he believe it, why have him say this line in the first place?

One way to take this is that, while it isn’t true now, “she likes when I’m mean to her” was true in the past. I find this… not impossible? It’s not outside the realm of believability that Jax and Gangle used to have a more lighthearted, bantery relationship, where Jax would tease Gangle with far less bite, in a way that didn’t make Gangle feel less than human. Maybe their relationship degraded from that into… this, as Jax spiraled into the worst version of his coping mechanisms.

But I tend to think that this line has more to do with Jax’s understanding of his fellow performers as living out archetypes: they all have a role, and staying in it is the only good that anyone can accomplish in the Circus. And since he’s the funny Bugs Bunny type and she’s the perpetually depressed Eeyore, then his constant picking on her is only natural, right? She must secretly like it, right?

This is all, obviously, Intense Cope on Jax’s part. I don’t think that Jax is someone who, with his mind in normal working order, would have any issues with his sense of right and wrong. I believe a massive part of why he cannot, ever, divorce himself from his archetype-based worldview, is that if he ever let himself make the connection between “these are real people with real emotions” → “I have hurt these real people and their real emotions very badly,” the guilt would crush him. He can’t handle the thought of dealing that guilt, especially not alone. And he has made himself so very alone. So, she likes when he’s mean to her. She has to.

“How Are You Supposed to Like the Part of Yourself That Just… Makes You Worse Than Everyone Else?”

Adding onto the weird almost-bond these two seem to have shared, Gangle and Jax also have a lot in common. Mainly, they’re the two characters in the show most associated with the idea of masks and masking.

Gangle, obviously, has her mask avatar gimmick: a default tragedy mask face that she tries in vain to cover up with a happier comedy mask persona. The gimmick also continues with the manic mask in “Fast Food Masquerade,” where it becomes a stand-in for the concept of her masking her emotions in a situation (i.e. work) where she can’t take it off.

It’s less immediately explicit with Jax, but as the show goes on it becomes clear that Jax’s default smiley jerkass expression is itself a mask, not just in the sense that it’s often a cover for what he’s really feeling, but in the sense that he can essentially “turn off” any other expression and slip into this persona at any time.

[VD: a close-up shot of Jax's face from "They All Get Guns." He starts with an angry, disturbed expression, then suddenly pauses as his face shifts unnaturally to an eerie smile. End VD.]

Symbolically, a mask is insincerity, covering up your true personality with a lie for the sake of safety from (real or perceived) threat. In the language of this show, a mask is a pretty universal negative: despite the security a mask offers, hiding under a persona like this actually keeps the mask-wearer from achieving the humanity, connection, and internal purpose that allows for long-term survival in the Circus.

For Gangle, I’ve already spoken at length about how the mask gimmick her avatar came with dehumanizes her to herself and those around her. And Jax’s insistence on wearing his mask keeps him locked in a self-destructive spiral that also pushes away anyone that could see him as human.

It’s telling that in Gangle and Jax’s respective Danganronpa executions, both of them revolve around their masks:

Gangle is surrounded on all sides by easles painted with her comedy and tragedy masks. The easles, symbolic of Gangle’s art and authenticity, get covered up and taken over by what the masks represent for her: on top of literally being a dehumanizing cartoon gag, they’re heavily tied to her memories of her unfulfilling past life and the emotions she constantly had to mask to perform her job. These symbols are painted on top of the easels, literally filling up all the space she’d normally use to express her true self.

Jax gets the outer later of his skin torn off by a cackling crowd, with special emphasis given by the camera to his face as it slowly peels off. With this outer layer gone, Jax loses the ability to put on his default Jackass Face with its signature wide, blank grin. For Jax, the idea of going maskless makes him feel stripped down; there are clear parallels here to his crippling fear of vulnerability. There’s also something to be said about his ears and tail— “kind of the pinnacle of masculinity”— getting ripped off with this mask, showing that what he’s so scared of revealing is that his true self lacks these things BUT THAT’S NOT THE POINT OF THIS ESSAY AND OTHER PEOPLE HAVE ALREADY SAID THIS BETTER THAN I CAN but anyway transfem Jax is canon in my heart.

Of course, Jax and Gangle’s shared mask metaphor is experienced differently between them. Gangle’s disguise is a glass theatre mask: brittle, obvious, and constantly on the brink of shattering. Meanwhile, Jax’s disguise is a rubbery second face: much more hidden, durable, and comprehensive in what it covers.

Thus, Gangle doesn’t actually succeed at hiding much of herself. She spends the earliest episodes of the show defined by her efforts to mask, and yet she’s still better known for her tragedy face than her comedy persona. Pomni is well-aware that Gangle has “issues” she’s dealing with as early as their first genuine interaction in “Fast Food Masquerade” (16:23), and the archetype Jax assigns her is The Sad One. Her mask started cracking down the middle long ago, to the point everyone can tell it’s there, but she still clings to it because without a support system, there’s nothing else she can cling to. But it’s a double-edged sword, because clinging to it prevents her from actually seeking the support she deserves, or from feeling as fully human as everyone else.

Meanwhile, Jax puts on a much more persuasive performance; he has Pomni convinced there’s nothing more to him until “Fast Food Masquerade,” and he has Ragtha convinced that he’s a genuine monster who hates her and will corrupt Pomni to spite her up until “They All Get Guns.” Note that while I’m saying these conclusions are factually incorrect, and the audience should know that, that’s not me saying that these were unreasonable conclusions for these characters to come to given the information they had. Jax plays a skin-deep jackass very convincingly, and this also keeps him from having any kind of support system, because understandably, no one wants to be around him long enough to try.

That being said, while the themes and details differ, the ultimate pattern remains the same for both of them. The masks leave them distant, dehumanized, and unable to seek support from others.

On top of this, it’s possible that Gangle might relate more to Jax’s less-than-healthy coping mechanisms than it would seem on the face of things. After all, the Gangle we know is pretty sweet and gentle. However, from what we see of Gangle in “manager mode” in “Fast Food Masquerade,” she’s also… not the boss most of us would want to have in a food service job. Of course, there’s the arguable influence of her Manic Mask and the general cartoonish nature of the Circus escalating everything— this is not me saying that real-life Gangle was as unpleasant to her employees as how she acts in the fast food adventure, much less that she was ever Jax-level mean.

That being said, there are definite parallels to be drawn between the way Gangle acts when she does successfully mask in manager mode, and how Jax treats people, well, all the time (and, giving credit where it’s due, this point was heavily inspired by @j-shrine’s comment on this post. Thanks btw, your comment really helped jog my thinking!). The intensity changes for sure, but there’s the same forced smile, the same denial of anyone’s emotional depth in favor of the roles they’re all playing:

Gangle: We can’t spend all night out here talking about our feelings, we’ve got work to do! (“Fast Food Masquerade,” 16:44)

Jax: All we are now is a bunch of cartoon characters… so what’s the point of pretending we’re not? (“They All Get Guns,” 10:04)

To be clear, this isn’t equating Gangle and Jax’s actions, or their impact on others— this is more to point out a similarity in their psychology. They have this shared tendency to fall back on plastering a smile, even when it’s to the detriment of themselves and the people around them.

“It Wasn’t Real… So It Doesn’t Matter(…?)”

There’s one scene in this show that makes more sense when you take into account the parallels between Gangle and Jax, a scene that I think is commonly misunderstood: the couch scene in “hjsakldfhl.”

I’ve seen people characterizing this as 1) Gangle forgiving Jax, or 2) fawning to appease him, and to be honest I don’t see either of these ideas.

First off, saying that someone is right, in a factual sense, is not forgiveness. Not wanting to see the only people she has left tear each other apart over a trick Caine played on them, because of a situation that wouldn’t have ever ended well? Also not forgiveness.

And the tone she uses in this scene just doesn’t convey fear or empty fawning to me. As previously established, Gangle is a character who wears her heart on her sleeve more than she wants to. If her words were supposed to be insincere, please-don’t-hurt-me appeasing, we’d hear that. And we don’t.

So I take Gangle’s words in the couch scene to be a genuine attempt at conflict resolution and empathy. We could, of course, argue until the sun explodes over whether Jax deserves anyone’s empathy, or whether he deserves to be mired in conflict with the others until everyone abstracts— ultimately, I think “deserving” is kinda fake (especially since we are talking about characters and not people) and the more productive question is this: What is Gangle actually trying to accomplish by speaking up in this scene? More than that, what is the show trying to accomplish by having the scene go this direction?

For example, in this scene, Gangle getting Zooble to back off isn’t even really about Jax, not specifically. After the first line— “he’s right, though”— she conspicuously shifts her language to be more group-oriented, taking the conversation away from being just about Jax— “we could argue about it and hurt each other all day long, but that’s not gonna help anybody.” She lands not on the conclusion that “what he did is fine, actually,” but on “we need to take care of each other,” a statement directly in line with the show’s thematic core.

Not only that, but what is Gangle actually doing in this scene? Not plainly agreeing with Jax— it’d be impossible to get from Jax’s assertion to Gangle’s conclusion. Jax sure doesn’t think they all need to be there for each other; the idea probably makes him nauseous. Gangle takes what Jax says and redirects it, going in a completely different direction than where Jax was trying to lead the group.

It feels poetic to me that Gangle, so similar to Jax and yet so different, would be the one to snap off the first half of what Jax said and attach her own ending to it:

Jax: “The adventure didn’t matter” → SO → “Leave me be, don’t you dare have any feelings about it or accuse me of having my own.”

Gangle: “The adventure didn’t matter” → SO → “How we treat each other is the only thing left that does. Let’s not lose sight of that.”

“I’m Actually Gonna be on A Team with Zooble!”

There’s something really compelling to me about the fact that this show has drawn parallels between Gangle and Jax time and time again, and yet very deliberately hasn’t taken this avenue to forge any lasting connection between the two.

Whatever dynamic Gangle and Jax may have had in the past, and whatever it had become by the start of canon, their relationship is almost nonexistent now. For Gangle, one of the most important parts of her character growth has been the personal distance she’s created between herself and Jax. Gangle’s arc of learning to see herself as human again despite the Circus’… well, everything, has coincided with her simply no longer giving Jax the time of day.

What this also means is that, as Jax goes through his arc of spiraling further and further down, Gangle is not the one leading the charge on trying to save his life. She’s too busy making out with making art with Zooble to be point blank on his mental breakdown, and good for her. None of this means that she wants Jax to abstract or doesn’t care— she also looks concerned in “hjsakldfhl” when Zooble brings up the topic of him abstracting— but she has decidedly not made helping him her responsibility.

But even if these parallels aren’t going to lead to anything resembling connection or reconciliation for Gangle and Jax, their dynamic is richer because of them. For instance, the shared mask metaphor puts Jax’s anger at Gangle’s newfound happiness and confidence in a new light: he’s not just mad that she’s a less suitable target for his mockery, he’s seethingly jealous that she took off her mask while he still can’t let himself. There’s also more irony to be found in his downward spiral, because Gangle is right there giving him a fucking blueprint for how to unmask, but in fear, he chooses to double down instead.

Looking at their dynamic this way also adds another layer of tragedy. Gangle and Jax’s relationship was something terrible, but it didn’t have to be. I can see a world where Jax is even, say, 15% less awful, and these two are good for each other. The groundwork is all there for them to understand each other so easily, to just get the other’s pain without needing to explain it.

Plus, with their shared interests (I know Jax likes anime. Even aside from the specific knowledge of anime genres I just feel this one in my bones I’m afraid), I can see Gangle’s relative unabashedness in what she likes helping Jax tone down his insecurity. In turn, I think a kinder version of Jax could’ve actually teased some confidence out of Gangle, with more lighthearted, playful ribbing that encourages her to (metaphorically) hit back.