#receipts

But the way you are arguing why you dislike it feels more than a little disingenuous and feels very bad faith from you. Instead of actually saying you just weren't the target audience, you present "evidence" for your personal claim that leaves me standing in the gap of your cognitive dissonance.

The points suggests a willful choice to not engage with any part of the show. I'm not even sure if I can confidently say you even watched the show based on your argument. So allow me to break it down.

Gooseworx Made the Show She Wanted.

And I know some people are going to scream about me using Gooseworx social media while blatantly throwing out Medrano's posts. Someone somewhere will call it a double standard but then I must ask what the mission is, again.

Vivienne Medrano is telling a very plot-focused, character-driven drama comedy. Plot means there are structural conventions of narrative that must be hit to reach genre compliance. The genre is a dark romantic comedy. But nowhere in the show is the romance actually developed. We are told things happen in background details and tweets.

And half the time the tweets directly contradict or other make a worse interpretation of the events of the show.

If Medrano was only clarifying that her show was not meant to focus on serialization, that would be an entirely different situation. Instead she is telling me- as the audience -how I should interpret the characters so I- as the audience -feel the way she wanted me to feel about her blorbos and not how I- as the audience -have experienced her show.

Gooseworx said the show was not a lore mystery. The show finale was not a lore mystery. This is not a contradiction and the show successfully pulled it off. The series never hints that the lore is important either. Instead the episodes are all very Character-focused. All the way to posting this about the ending:

And here's a fair call out as I would do to Medrano:

I do think Gooseworx changed the ending. However, I personally think the change was the addition of the human characters. If that entire aspect was cut from the ending and replaced with character scenes of them bonding more, the finale would be exactly the same.

If you ever think the ending was changed, you should always consider the parts that were never necessary in the first place. The human characters and their relationships are meaningless. The only reason Human!Jax and Human!Zooble are even forced in each other's orbit is because that was the hint that Human!Jax is indeed a transwoman who has only barely started that journey.

The whole point is that we immediately understood Zooble was queer and nonbinary. Meaning they opened a queer bar. For the queer community. And Human!Jax is at the bar.

Because he's QUEER.

So I don't believe the claim that this is the EXACT ending Gooseworx was going for, but I don't think she was bullied into making the show she said she was trying to make.

Not a Horror ARG

This is what I consider an acceptable use of social media to correct the fanbase.

No one can claim Medrano wasn't trying to tell a story about abuse when she has repeatedly stated it on Twitter/Bluesky.

No one can claim Medrano is not trying to criticize Christianity when she has said she is trying to criticize (remove) the "weaponization" of Christian doctrine through her shows in interviews.

No one can claim that the shows are not meant to challenge morality when Medrano herself has explicitly stated that her stories are intended to be about grey morality in interviews.

No one can claim that she wasn't striving for a serious story with absurd comedy when she and her staff have repeatedly compared her work to Bojack Horseman.

And so when it comes to the show itself, I grade Medrano on her own criteria. This is what she wanted to be graded on. No one forced this for her, she did it herself. And when cross referencing with her shows, they don't match.

Gooseworx said the show was not intended to be horror themed. And your grimdark torture fantasy you wished for falls under that. You are upset a fish can't fly.

And to note, I am not on social media outside of Tumblr unless it's for research purposes. And even then, rarely. I am retroactively finding tweets to support what I have been arguing since I saw the finale: this was always the plan.

Going back to the music, Gooseworx makes music. She did background instrumentals for Hazbin Hotel and is very smart about her choice of music. So it wasn't disjointed, you just aren't allowing the music to matter because it isn't the story you wanted. The music does, however, matter.

The use of Isn't She Lovely is all about the birth of a new life. That is literally what the characters are experiencing at the end of the series. The rules of the cosmos have changed, the characters are no longer waiting for salvation, and they have chosen each other.

On the flip side, it also directly is a reference to Jax and his transgender identity. Though apparently that was still too subtle for half the audience. Because, and I wrote about this already, there is a fair argument that does align with themes to say that Abstraction isn't death/suicide.

You can read in my essay on Existential Authenticity in TADC that I deconstructed Abstraction purely through the show using first principles media analysis.

But I am nobody, so here is Alex Rochon tweeting about it from yesterday:

So if Abstraction is not suicide but the "corruption of self" as a visualization of mental crisis/collapse, Jax isn't dead, Jax is reborn. Which makes the reading that his abstraction come from finally accepting the reality of the harm he has caused narratively acceptable.

I'm not saying that's the facts, but I would be shocked if Gooseworx said that it was not a valid interpretation. Feel free to ask her yourself POLITELY, maybe she'll respond. I am confident enough in my reading of the show to not see a purpose to verify.

But the song is NOT disjointed. It is thematically coherent as well as being the emotional climax of the entire show. And if the song is supposed to be the emotional climax of the story, that means:

The therapy speak was the entire point of the show.

I can't believe I have to remind "fans" what happens in the show, but I'm trying to do this in good faith.

Episode 2: Pomni gives Gummygoo a therapy session just off screen after he realizes he isn't real.

Episode 3: Literal therapy sessions take up the A and B plots between Zooble & Caine AND Kinger & Pomni

Episode 4: Pomni and Gangle literally have a mini-therapy session behind the restaurant.

Episode 5: Group Therapy at the bar. Psychological warfare against Jax. Pomni and Ragatha therapy

Episode 6: Kinger has therapy with Ragatha after they lose. Pomni tries to bond with Jax through therapy with guns. Zooble literally gives a therapy monologue.

Episode 7: The one episode with not much therapy. But the whole thing is psychological warfare on the audience and cast.

Episode 8: They all sit on couches and have therapy over the last episode.

My brother in Baphomet, how did you make it to episode 9 and then complain about therapy talk? Have you been watching in a coma?

Here is Gooseworx herself, saying exactly what the point of the show was, since you seemed to have missed the entire thing.

And I would argue the show is still a horror.

This is for the adults. This is for the people who recognize that life is objectively pointless. Nothing you do matters all that much. Even the people we swear to teach about and learn with an explicit "Never Again" have left no objective mark on humanity.

No one is so evil or important that their life stops time. Nothing we do can stop reality from continuing. We are so unimportant that the world doesn't think about us.

So the horror is living in a digital circus where even your own self has moved on without you. Your sense of loss isn't even yours. You aren't trapped, you're unnecessary.

There is a cosmic kind of relationship between the humans and the avatars. A divine, unseen progenitor who gives them life and then abandons them to live it on their own terms. This is the point. The fact that the humans are NOT attached to the machine is what actually makes it disturbing.

And this links right back to everything I have ever written about religion. This is existentialism. This is existential horror. The fact there is no exit is the entire point.

The point is that everything is pointless, everyone dies, nobody matters.

Just like life you don't get to opt out until you die.

So Now What?

And before someone takes this out of context: no one is endorsing suicide. This is the same shit I've been writing about since day 1. This is existential humanism. The answer is radical empathy and existential humanism.

And like I said from the start, anon. You are absolutely free to write that alternate universe fanfiction that is entirely your own story made to fulfill the narrative you want using the TADC cast. No one will stop you. In fact, it may be exactly what your part of the fandom needs to find satisfaction.

You should write your story.

Just remember, it was never Gooseworx's story.

And just to be clear, I personally identify as a moron and an idiot.