What Have You Done
This is your fault.
[ID: Digital painting of Jax from The Amazing Digital Circus looking blankly at the viewer as she holds up her left arm, which is painted in a yellow glow. The background is a mix of blues and purples at the top half with a firey red, orange, and yellow at the bottom, giving the impression of things burning down. End ID.] I can't explain just how much Jax has come to mean to me as a character. I know her character reception has been, very divided, and I definitely see where a lot of it comes from, but Jax for me, hits a lot of personal nerves that when watching TADC, it felt like I was watching an alternate version of myself, a version of myself who continues to stagnate and never heal. For this piece, it comes a lot from the emotions of the moment, and the subsequent memories, of realising you've done something you cannot reverse, of when the impact hits, and when you now have to deal with the consequences. Jax's themes of someone being so caught up in their self hate, internalised transphobia, treating things as a joke so that the reality hurts less, wanting to push others away in order to not be further hurt or not hurt others, are all things I am too familiar with. It comes a lot from being a traumatised angry kid to a traumatised adult and not wanting to be hurt, and then seeing I was hurting others from an anger misguided and other issues, then was trying to push others away, not realising that in of itself was hurting others. I don't think I was ever as... at the deep end as much as Jax, but watching her felt like something was peering into me, all the worst mistakes, decisions, and so on I made and the guilt I feel from them still, and saying to me, straight into my heart, 'You can't keep going on like this, your self hate is not noble and it will hurt others, this stagnation is killing you, you need to get better'. It's easy to hate yourself and think yourself as someone undeserving of love and recovery, it's so so easy, but it takes so much more to realise things don't have to be that way, that you deserve recovery and happiness. It's scary to face all your worst mistakes and the consequences, and realise in the end... you are still worth love, and you can be so so lovely. So you have to get better.
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