K I’m seeing many people yap about this but. Throwing in my two cents. I don’t think Caine is constantly messing with people’s heads and causing them to abstract. I think what this implies is that Caine originally saw one of the circus members was depressed as shit and he made a new program that would make the circus members happy when they got all hopeless mopecore. And then that program glitched the fuck out and Caine lost control over it, so now it’s the deadly program that kills you (it just makes you abstract).
Because I truly believe that Caine wouldn’t keep trying the same thing over and over, I just don’t believe he would still be giving these small effects like “Your Vegan now,” if doing that would kill the crew. He said if he “did anything more than that,” and I’m willing to put some faith in him and say that the only thing the Vegan Curse and other such stats do is confuse the individual it’s cast on.
When Jax was close to abstraction, he felt peace. Why? I don’t think it would be far fetched to say that the blissful feeling Jax felt was an intended effect, what was not intended was that it would be deadly. Jax said it himself, people suck to be around when they are close to abstraction. Kinger hasn’t abstracted even though he probably has had his fair share of random Caine given side effects, because he has people to support him. The effects themselves are likely an unintended red herring that I see a lot of people focusing on. Abstraction is based on emotion, we have always seen this and Caines line does not change this for me. “If I did anything more than that,” if he tried something more extreme. What I believe went down is that Scratch was feeling horrible and Caine’s new program to make them feel in tip top shape worked for a moment, before it was too much. because they are not in fact code, but complex human beings, and the program bugged, causing the first abstraction. A buggy program that Caine can’t remove that came from going too far with his status effects.
Caine is not stacking effects on people and killing them over and over again please chat please please please [HEARTBREAK EMOJI AA]
Edit: since this is getting a lot of attention. I was gonna keep this in the tag but “#IT ALSO TAKES AWAY FROM KINGERS MESSAGE OF. THE WORST THING YOU CAN DO HERE IS MAKE SOMEBODY FEEL LIKE THEY ARENT APPRECIATED. #Not the exact quote but you get the gist.” Because the whole show up till now has been giving the message of supporting your friends and the people around you, keep each other sane, that is how you can find meaning in the dull days, that is what makes it worth it, your community.
If this “Caine stacking effect” theory were true then it devalues that message. “Nothing you do matters because Caine can kill ya for funsies at random,” that is not the message the story has been building on thus far. Caine being the one to cause abstractions and being able to manipulate the cast whenever he pleases reaffirms Jax’s “We are all one dimensional cartoon characters and nothing we do in here matters.” Jax pressed that button voluntarily because he is scared. Scared to have to come to terms with his humanity, the distance and strain he has put on his relationships in the circus in an effort to protect himself. Scared of whatever happened outside of the circus. He is a coward and he is so utterly human. I like how he immediately realized what he had done, because if that were real he really would have just. Trapped them. And for a moment they believed he had, he believed he had. But that’s a different beautiful topic.
