#deposts

iKOFF:

we've got the evil archetype, the violence-driven archetype. this is the most defensive part of her. it comes out in reaction to strong negative emotion. if ragatha had died, it would have brought out that part of her, because she cares the most about ragatha, so she has to bury those emotions down as deep as possible. it's important to note that this one embodies masculinity as it is associated with violence (violence that she would have endured from her peers. there's a reason she's traumatized — a word i do not use lightly! — enough to panic and break her friendship with ribbit on a whim). i think it would be fair to say this is the part of herself that she hates the most, but also the one that has protected her the most, especially outside the circus. it was implied that she was in the army, too. idk. you can guess just what she learned from the army.

the joker. the funny one. the one that embodies her existence as a fake person, a cartoon. nothing is serious, everything is a joke! nothing can hurt me because nothing is real, it's all jokes! i mean this was a core aspect of her character, and one that i think has been discussed the most.

the femboy. using that word very intentionally to refer to a large internet subculture. look i did my time in those mines and i made it out. specifically, this is the homophobic/misogynist group of femboys. the type to make ">be me >straight man" greentexts on 4chan. she engages with femininity under the guise of irony in order to do it safely, and reaffirms her existence as a man by putting down the outgroup of masculinity. see this section of the wikipedia page for the f-slur

evil jax. again, it's not the same color scheme, but it's the same character. (no room in this post for how each of the evil characters represent an actual component of that character's personality though) the same voice, the same timidness, the same genuineness. the most repressed. the part that was burned the most, and was buried the most. the second most effeminate.

disclaimer that i do not know goose at all nor do i know a damn thing about what's going on inside her head. that being said:

goose posted about that rule at one point, that abstractions don't come back. i think if you take that rule as a given it doesn't feel as much like the show is building up to her coming back. so i think that this is a little bit of the issues with word of god. telling people about your writing means you forget what's actually in the text itself, which matters above all else. tbh if you stayed off social media you would be forgiven for thinking that all the abstractions were going to come back. it is clearly a metaphor for suicide, but with how little knowledge everyone has about how they work and especially caine not realizing that the darkness mollifies them... and then the episode seeming to build to pomni pull jax back from the brink? like you never saw that tweet or whatever about how abstractions don't come back. and i do appreciate that finality, but (reiterating a point i've made for the twentieth time) the buildup to it feels so weird!

other thing is that i think goose was maybe overcompensating for what she felt was overindulgence. the idea that jax surviving and transitioning might have felt like a bit too much for her. she had already gotten a lot of shit over people who felt that jax was given too much focus in the narrative, so if she had survived and transitioned there would have been more of that. never mind what would have happened if she had came back from abstraction. so i think there's a "look, i can't let my own self indulgence and feelings get in the way of writing this" that overcorrects and the writing ends up worse for it.