Thoughts on The Amazing Digital Circus

The last episode of The Amazing Digital Circus (#9) has finally aired on Youtube. I'd wanted to catch it in the theater, but unfortunately that didn't wind up happening. I did manage to completely dodge spoilers, at least, and so went in completely blind.

Without spoiling anything, my verdict is that I really wound up loving the episode. It did a lot to tie a bow on the ideas the whole series has been playing with.

I'm not sure whether I'll have more to talk about regarding this series at this point, so I won't preemptively flag this as a "part one". Check the tags for follow-ups, if you'd like.

On that note, below this point are going to be spoilers for said episode.

Here Be Spoilers

Okay, I don't want to bury the lede or anything so the first topic I'll address really has to be

Jax

Poor kid. Where to start? I suppose I'll have to break this down into two sections:

Abstraction

I was initially shocked that they had the guts to just go ahead and abstract him offscreen, but A) I suppose we've already had plenty of visuals of him nearing abstraction, and B) given what abstraction seems to represent... well, the suddenness of the event in this case isn't exactly unrealistic.

The fact that he didn't recover at all by the end of the episode surprised me a lot more. But as others have observed it's kind of a recurring theme of the show that it's not really possible to pull someone out of that sort of condition entirely externally. Someone who is unable or unwilling to reach out for help is rather difficult to pull back aboard, no matter how hard one tries.

There's a phrase often attributed to Robin Williams about suicide: "suicide is a permanent solution to temporary problems."

That's sort of a misattribution, oddly. It's actually spoken by a character he played in a movie, back in 2009. Worse, the movie's a comedy. A black comedy, to be sure, but a comedy nonetheless.

This may play a part in the fact that the first time I personally saw the phrase was in the title of an Undertale fanfiction from 2015. One titled Permanent Solutions to Temporary Problems, And Other Nice Ways for People Who Don't Understand You To Say They Never Will.

Mind the tags, as far as content warnings go...

I've never suffered from such problems myself (and I don't know one way or the other if the author of that fanfiction ever has), but I think that title says a lot about how that phrase might feel for people who do. Namely: not positively. And I've made a point of avoiding relying on it in those cases where I might have had cause to.

I'm still not totally sure I'm happy about the implication of the abstracted state being truly irreversible (or rather, the lack of an implication to the contrary). But with all this in mind I can at least accept that Gooseworx probably knew what she was doing with that.

Speaking of Things Others Absolutely Know Better Than I

So Jax is trans.

I'd briefly wondered about that, after his reaction to the maid outfit thing in Episode 5. But it wasn't enough to go on, and I didn't wind up picking up on any other clues.

There sure are enough clues now! And if you think otherwise... frankly you need to go back to school and relearn the basics of media literacy. Gooseworx has even explicitly confirmed it on their social media, if that helps the slower members of the audience.

Though speaking of Episode 9... cripes. Jax. Poor girl.

Quick Aside: A Language Note

Language is frankly still catching up a little to the existence of trans characters in media, especially regarding what pronouns to use for a character at various points in a work's timeline. If one knows a character is trans does one use the newer set of pronouns retroactively, even when referring to the character before they realized they're trans? What about between that point and when the audience has said trans-ness confirmed to them, if that ever happens? How does it change things if the audience realizes it before the character or vice-versa? An in-work pronoun switch will probably often count as a spoiler, in which case even tagging a character's pronouns as a spoiler probably would itself be an obvious spoiler.

I find this sort of analysis of linguistic change fascinating, but the upshot for this blog post is that I'll still be using "he" to refer to Jax, mostly since that seems to probably best fit with Jax's state at the end of Episode 9?

It's absolutely valid to go the other way, though, and use "she". There's certainly plenty of people writing up their own retrospectives that way, and it's not like they don't have a point on that.

There's even at least some sort of contingent of people consistently using "it" and/or "they" to refer to all the post-abstraction characters, given they seem to be somewhat... "depersonalized"? For lack of a better word.

I can kind of see where that group is coming from, too, but I've also seen some people very obviously just using it as an excuse to call a trans character "it" a whole bunch, which is truly bizarre behavior.

Back to the topic...

Simply put, the sequence between Jax and Ribbit was phenomenal. I won't recount every single detail of it, not least because that would be somewhat redundant but also because far more qualified writers than I have undertaken true shot-by-shot analyses of the scene.

There is something that I would like to highlight that a lot of those analyses seem to miss, though: heartbreakingly, Ribbit's overture to Jax almost worked.

That's not to say it wasn't at least a little manipulative, on her part. It's clear Ribbit was already extremely sure of Jax's transness, and was simply trying to bait it out into the open. So Ribbit shared something personal about herself, and then guilted Jax into sharing something about himself. And then continuing to share, beyond what he intended.

This isn't exactly a dastardly scheme by any real metric. But it's something to keep in mind: that Jax probably wouldn't have chosen to share this with Ribbit for a long time yet, if ever.

And it meant that Jax was in an incredibly vulnerable state when Kaufmo interrupted. Which resulted in Jax panicking and shutting the whole conversation down, and subsequently shutting out Ribbit. But before that point, in the few seconds between the bow being given and that interruption... I really do think Jax was actually about to open up.

But that's not what happened. And as a result, Jax withdrew into himself, viciously isolated Ribbit leading directly to her abstraction, and ultimately refusing to ever allow himself to be "vulnerable" to anyone ever again. Which pretty much made his abstraction inevitable, or at least basically destroyed his remaining hopes of avoiding such a fate.

This, of course, directly reinforces the show's main thesis that to have any hope of recovery one must first be willing to be helped, which involves being quite vulnerable for others to hurt. That's the infamous "mortifying ordeal of being known", ultimately. It's also the price of being loved, to paraphrase the other, less frequently repeated half that quote.

All of this has led to a great deal of (still-ongoing) fandom discourse on whether what Ribbit did was "wrong". Either on a practical level of being a bad idea or otherwise being a morally/ethically negative course of action in some way.

For my part I think it really can't be definitively placed one way or the other, and I suspect that was at least part of the point of the scene. As I mentioned above, I really do think that had Kaufmo not interrupted Jax probably wouldn't have freaked out and closed out Ribbit. In that world, Ribbit's conversation with Jax in that room would probably be one of the pair's most beloved memories.

But, also as mentioned above, that simply isn't what happened. And instead, it led directly to the abstraction of two or maybe even three of the circus members, and to Jax spiraling down into being a much worse person than he was at the start.

In a general sense, analyzing whether a fictional character's actions are "good" or "bad" is most useful when tied to saying whether a person in a similar situation in reality should take similar actions. After all, while it's unlikely that any of us will wind up as a brain scan in a digital circus, it's very much possible that one might at some point need to navigate an extremely sensitive conversation with an extremely dear friend.

And under that lens, the message TADC has for us seems to be decently clear: it's possible to commit no mistakes and still lose.

That's kind of bleak, in a sense. There's no retries, no retakes, no redos. Sometimes, the best of plans laid with the best of intentions go horribly wrong. Occasionally even in the truly archaic sense relating to "horror". Given what we all know "abstraction" to be a metaphor for I'm sure my meaning there is plain.

And yet, the implication of this cannot be to simply never have conversations deep enough to be able to hurt. The only way to really manage that is to avoid forming interpersonal connections of any true substance altogether. And what sort of way to live is that?

So, if one ever finds onesself in a situation where they could instigate a very sensitive conversation like Ribbit did... I won't say it's categorically wrong to do so. But it's a risk. A gamble, really. And the worst-case outcomes can be dire, even as the best-case outcomes can be beautiful indeed. So it probably simply comes down to whether one can live with being a little bit manipulative, and whether one thinks the target of said manipulation would appreciate it in retrospect.

Keeping in mind, of course, that if you're wrong you'll have done something truly awful to someone you presumably care a great deal about.

People generally don't appreciate others gambling with their well-being, even if it's supposedly on their behalf.