Three Kids in a Trench Coat

A few weeks ago, days before I was running a 4 day festival (we run a by-friends, for-friends shindig for ~150 people each year), a friend messaged me about a show they really thought I should watch.

That show was The Amazing Digital Circus.

It turned out it was a series on YouTube, but that I wouldn’t be able to finish watching there anytime soon, because the finale was out in… cinemas? WTF?

So, I figured I’d get round to the meat of it after the festival, but I stuck the first episode on to see roughly what the deal was with it.

It was pretty intense and weird. I like intense and weird but was… ehhh… not sure.

But then next night I put another episode on. Then another. Ok, I was really starting to dig it…

Fast forward 2 days, and I’d finished all 8 episodes on YouTube, gone down the big Vue cinema down the road and watched the finale there.

Safe to say, the show grabbed me, and I think Gooseworx & Glitch have created something pretty neat.

The finale got a mixed reception from fans, but that may be a combination of there being ‘woke’ themes (which obviously is a plus for us – ‘woke’ pretty much means ‘not heteronormative’ and/or emotionally aware 90% of the time), and being ‘unfair’ in terms of which characters got what outcomes story-wise… which entirely misses the point, because if you look at how much screen time & emotional weight the endings got… yeah, great characters had hard hitting endings.

Life isn’t fair. There’s bittersweet emotional complexity; there’s bleakness… but also rays of hope & humanity.

Which could not be more fitting to the themes of the show.

I didn’t really have time to process the ending at the time, what with a week of setting up, running, participating in, and tearing down a festival…. but it feels like it’s time to explore The Amazing Digital Circus, and in particular Jax’s story.

Anyway, let’s take a closer look…

Spoilers for TADC, including episode 9, below.

Looking out for it

So the way that the show got recommended to me, I kind of assumed off the bat that I had some idea that one of the themes / stories that was coming would be multiplicity-related.

Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of special interests I’m very open about – being gay/pansexual, trans/genderqueer, polyamorous, a psychologist (le gasp), various kinks… but in our circle of friends, most of those things apply to a good few other people too (apart from psychologist I guess, idk I hang out with a lot of tech nerds).

One thing I’m open about in a pretty singular way (ironically) is plurality.

So when someone recommends something as, “You should really watch/play this”, I can usually tell when the underlying subtext is, “Because it gets parts-y AF….“

Similar recommendations from other friends have put me onto the likes of Severance, Identiteaze and most recently, the excellent Disco Elysium inspired game Esoteric Ebb – so I’m not complaining!

So my guess as I watched much of the show (right up until the finale itself) was that the Circus was going to turn out to be, in some fashion, the inner world (digital or otherwise) of a DID system, with the cast as parts/alters in that system.

That turned out to be wide of the mark, but in the finale we do get to meet several of Jax’s parts in one room, in a story about gender and inner conflict that struck a particular chord with us.

For us, it took parts who were previously unaware of each other developing a speaking/writing relationship with each other to get out of the very dark & emotionally isolated place we were in about our own gender presentation(s), and it wasn’t a simple journey – so we appreciated the candour & emotional complexity used to explore those themes here.

In some ways we’re still exploring what gender means in a system, given how wildly different some of our preferred presentations & ways of holding ourselves in the world are.

Before we get onto Jax specifically, let’s take a moment to more broadly mention…

TADC as an exploration of complex trauma & learned helplessness

I could write a lot on this topic, but as we’ll be focusing on Jax, I’ll keep it brief:

Every cast member of The Circus seems to have some form of complex trauma background. There’s also a lot of queer energy going on across the board, and we find out that the ‘real life’ cast members all frequent the same inclusive, explicitly LGBTQ+ friendly bar in the outside world.

That whole “digitized version built from a ‘brain scan’” thing… y’know what, that plot point pretty much missed the mark for us, but you can basically forget about it, without it affecting the story & character arcs much at all.

One way that the “built from a brain scan” thing does affect things; it establishes the boundaries of the world for our digital cast members. While the cast think they’re human beings with organic bodies somewhere ‘out there’ to be reunited with, they initially struggle and strive to find an exit, fruitlessly, over and over, day after day… but as Caine well knows, and as we eventually learn – there is no exit to find.

And so, they never find one.

That inability to affect your environment, or change your circumstances, despite your efforts creates ‘learned helplessness’ – which is to say, you slow down your efforts; you lose hope; and eventually, you stop trying.

While the circumstances of the circus lend themselves to learned helplessness in the present, the cast also seem to have a lot of baggage from childhood.

When you learn helplessness in your relationships and broader life as a kid, it can form part of your fundamental blueprints for how you interact with the world. Learned helplessness is (pretty much) always a feature in the origins of complex trauma & dissociation.

What happens in the helplessness of the circus seems to be something akin to retraumatization, especially once Caine starts targetting the casts’ specific fears as a way of tormenting them.

For example, we see:

• Ragatha’s fear of being abandoned, apparently abused and berrated by a narcisstic mother. She learned to people please & keep herself useful & her own needs small as a result.
• Gangle’s extreme emotions, and difficulty regulating her own feelings – unsure of what she ‘should’ be feeling, and constantly out of sync with the emotions of those around her (at least early on)
• Zooble’s difficulty accepting the parts of their body they don’t like – given Zooble is non-binary, and the form they’ve been ‘cursed’ with in The Circus, on a surface level at least, it reads a lot like gender dysphoria and/or body dysmorphia.

Etc.

The most troubled of all the main cast members in the series, from the perspectives we’re shown, appears to be Jax.

So let’s talk about Jax.

The struggles of Jax – complex trauma, gender confusion, dissociation, and parts

Jax acts like an asshole for much of the show.

Let’s just get that out of the way, this isn’t about giving carte blanche to someone who treats others like shit.

Still, let’s try and understand Jax a little a better. He’s a complex & very human character, despite acting like the most cartoon-y of all the ‘humans’ in the digital circus.

Right off the bat – I’m going to use “he/him” for pronouns, because while there are obviously very clear signs that there was more to his inner gender identity, the closest we get to stated preference for how he wants to be treated, we get from lines like, “Like it or not, this is what peak male performance looks like!” and the rejection of the bow Ribbit puts on his head, things like that.

He ultimately reacts very, very poorly to his internal confusion about gender being recognised by another human being, so I don’t think it makes sense to switch up his pronouns for him, however differently things might have gone had Jax had more time after Ponmi embraces him post-abstraction.

Honestly, the sadness of finding out that maybe he wanted things to be very different on that front after he’s already ‘gone’ is something that hits us hard – the idea of something similar happening to us was big fear for us at one point, before we opened up about our own gender several years ago.

Anyway, let’s get into it, starting with…

Depersonalisation, derealisation, disconnection, oh my!

Jax spends a lot of the show acting like a cartoon character. He’s hyper aggressive, mean, rude, violent, and just generally a jerk. He’s “the funny one”, “chaotic evil”… he just wants to see other people suffer.

At least, that’s how he acts when he’s disconnected from himself & the world around him.

When he’s being laid back, regardless of whether he’s kicking back, or kicking his friends down the stairs… his pupils are huge, swimming cartoonish, unfocused… like he’s letting the whole world wash over him like it’s nothing. “I’m an open book”, his eyes say, “Who cares?”, “None of this is even real”.

Except, obviously Jax does care. And when he does, we see his pupils narrow as he focuses on what he’s looking at, when he’s feeling a feeling inside of pushing it aside. Within the show, that usually means when he’s in a survival response – so the only time he’s feeling, is when he’s feeling too much. In the scenes where he’s actually getting curious about his feelings about others, his pupils are wildly shifting between these huge smooth swimming pupils (that, at times, remind me of what people’s eyes do on MDMA)… and those small pupils that, in the hellscape of the circus, usually indicate worry, concern, panic.

There’s some interesting science to this. When people are dissociating, their eyes tend to unfocus as the person disconnects from the world around them, and/or from their own internal experience… inside the feeling can be one of floating away or of everything becoming swimmy & blurry…

You can see this with Jax many times over. Perhaps one of the best examples is when he’s talking about Ragatha and his pupils are constantly changing shape as different parts of him seem to be arguing with each other, trying to understand how she can be nice to him, when, from his childhood experience, people aren’t good, people aren’t safe, and the other shoe is always going to drop sooner or later…

Re-experiencing the painful emotions of his past as he tries to make sense of people, based on the blueprint his parents gave him, doesn’t compile. Doesn’t compute. There’s clearly dissonance between the part of him that longs for connection with someone who’s only ever been kind & considerate towards him, and the hyperaware protector parts that constantly want to remind him that Ragatha just hasn’t betrayed him yet.

… and then we see him suddenly sit up, pupils huge & unfocused, rictus grin on his face, and he says, “And also she looks funny and smells weird…”.

Disconnection from the feelings.

None of this matters.

It’s easier this way.

It’s such a stark difference that you can almost use his expression as shorthand for seeing when he’s acting from a “protector part” that pushes people away, and when he’s being vulnerable and genuine.

Shoutout to this vid for doing a breakdown of how this plays out throughout the show so that we don’t have to:

I don’t straight up agree with everything in this vid, I think of Jax’s behaviour less in terms of, “masks” and more in terms of depersonalisation, derealisation, disconnection from himself (there are a few scenes where this does matter), and in terms of parts – but ultimately they do end up being quite similar things in his case in the show.

Partsapolozza

Throughout the show, we’re introduced, at times, to more than one Jax on screen at once, and to quite distinctly different ‘versions’ of Jax.

During the baseball game in episode 5, there’s a very young & innocent sounding, seemingly authentically vulnerable version who just wants everyone to have fun. Then there’s the version in the maid’s outfit. Etc.

In episode 9, we meet all these different versions in one room in Jax’s abstracted mind.

The young, nervous, sweet version is sitting chained to a piano. They declare, “Don’t forget about me, I can play the piano!”… before they’re immediately shut down by a cutting comment from the maid version. The angry drunk version shouts, “Yeah, shut up and play you idiot!” and throws a bottle at them.

Given what follows, it seems pretty reasonable to assume that the maid and the drunk are at least in part, representations of his mother and father. Or parts that hold trauma from those relationships, and Jax copes by adopting many of the same behaviours, enacted (or at least represented), by distinct parts.

Note on the eyes in this scene: Check out how different they are between the different parts… and what happens to maid, drunk, and zany Jax’s pupils when whoever is behind the chained-up fifth door knocks partway though…

We know from the conversation with Ribbit that Jax’s mother was dismissive of him whenever he showed vulnerability or sweetness, and that his father was abusive and mean, just like the maid part & the angry, drinking part.

So if we assume that these voices are those of Jax’s parents… why do they look and sound like Jax?

Well…. that’s how this goes so very often for so very many of us. So many of the dismissive, critical, and abusive conversations we have with ourselves, of the beliefs we hold about ourselves – are the voices from our early life, often people we depended on for love, safety, and survival.

Except once we’ve internalised those voices, they often stop sounding like they’re coming from the other person… over time, we learn to believe that the story is coming only from within. We confuse what we were told about ourselves as kids with what we felt then, what we feel now.

The nagging voice in our heads that tells us we should be better stops sounding like our mothers, fathers, or teachers… the voice that tells us pathetic stops sounding like our older siblings or our bullies… they all just start sounding like “me”.

These are the voices we end up talking to ourselves in. They even start to be voices we use when we talk to others. We push those voices away and hold them close for protection at the same time.

As Jax tells Ribbit about the way his mom treated him, “It was confusing”.

These parts of us are sometimes experienced as an ‘inner critic’, or (particularly among dissociative folk) as distinct parts, which sometimes are referred to as, “persecutor parts” (there’s a good argument to be made for why that term isn’t entirely helpful, but either way, it has been commonly used in the complex dissociation literature & community for a long time).

However the critical voice or voices are experienced – being emotionally (and/or physically) abandoned, and treated in confusing and inconsistent ways, by the people who were supposed to love you unconditionally, who you depended on for survival, and looked up to as your source of, “Am I ok? Is the world a safe place? Can I trust other people, and can I trust myself?”…

… that’s where so much complex trauma comes from. And it’s complex because it happened over and over, inconsistently, over years, and came from the people who were supposed to love and protect you, to teach you about the world, and to support you as you grow into your own independent person with all the tools to step out into the world.

When instead what you receive is coldness, anger, criticism, inconsistency, projections of your parents’ own traumas, and are used to satisfy their unrecognised emotional needs…

… it is confusing.

All I want to do is be more like me and be less like you

What this all leads up to in episode 9 is a very clear cut ‘subtext’ (if you can even call it that). When Jax was young, after his abusive father had left, he was treated like trash by his mom. She mocked him for being sad, and accused him of being abusive like his father when he was mad.

One day he tells her something really important, really vulnerable, really tender… and she laughs at him.

Judging from Ribbit’s reaction, and how that reaction initially lands with Jax (not to mention everything the creator has explicitly said about the finale, the use of “Isn’t She Lovely”, etc), the thing he told his mother was about gender identity.

We’ve been there.

For Jax, it didn’t end there – his mom laughed at him. Then mocked him. Tormented him. And then… hugged him?

I’ve burst out uncontrollably crying a few times while watching or thinking about this scene. It takes me straight back to being 8 years old and telling my mom about wanting to marry my best friend when I grew up. Laughter. “No I don’t think so”. No explanation why. I’m pretty sure there was never any explanation of why we just didn’t talk about certain things. I think I even asked. Just… the memory ends with that shutdown.

That’s the one thing I remember ever telling my parents about my sexuality, gender, anything like that, until many, many years later. That doesn’t mean I didn’t tell them anything else and experience similar shutdowns – as I’ve said before, I remember very little of my childhood.

It’s just one of the few things I do remember, that gives me some clue as to what things were probably like the rest of the time, with gender, sexuality, sex, anger, putting your own needs first… anything that spoilt the family or religious image, anything that you could potentially imagine fitting the sentence, “What would the neighbours say?!”… whether it was private or not. Your inner world treated like a potential source of future family embarrassment & disappointment, something to be dismissed before the idea had any chance to corrupt you any further. End of discussion.

“A Reston never fails” our neighbours used to say.

What does a kid learn when you tell them their feelings are wrong, bad, or not happening at all, over and over? They learn that what they are feeling is wrong, bad, or that they must be mistaken – that they don’t know what they’re feeling, even if they were able to feel it, name it, and say it perfectly well before they told you.

They learn their feelings aren’t safe – that disclosing them risks being emotionally and/or physically abandoned by the people they depend on for love, comfort, and survival They learn to disconnect from what they feel.

The kid learns to abandon themselves.

They learn that they need to find something more acceptable to feel, or at least more acceptable to say they feel. They learn to say, “I’m fine” when they’re falling apart, “Who cares?” when they care deeply…

… and, they learn to push people away when they get too close to seeing ‘the monster’ that’s lurking below the surface. “It’s for their own good” they tell themselves, “And mine, too” as the numbness and disconnection from their own wants and needs for connection & love take hold, time & again.

They instead learn to put on different masks that may not fit underneath, but as long as no-one on the outside can tell, what difference does it make when you can’t tell what you’re feeling anyway?

People are all wearing masks.

Everyone’s playing a game.

Everyone’s rotten underneath – some people are just better at hiding it than others.

Intimacy is just a trap, anyone trying to be nice is just doing it so that when you feel safe with them, their betrayal will just hurt all the more

Everyone’s just a cartoon version of themselves.

Who cares?

None of this is real anyway.

(btw, Gooseworx, the transfemme creator of TADC also voices Bubble, which just makes me love her all the more...)

“I don’t want to go”

We get glimpses throughout the show of Jax without his huge grin & gaping wide eyes… his vulnerable kid self in the baseball game in ep. 5, & chained to the piano in ep. 9, making innocent bids for connection… or when he asks after Gangle & shows curiosity about whether she can be happy…

… when he tells Ribbit about how things were for him as a kid, and how his mom laughed at him.

But, Ribbit got too close to what he’d spent most of his life believing was a ‘terrible truth’ that made him a monster, that saw his mom reject him in a heartless and cruel way… so he abandoned her first.

In the montage of moments of Jax between rejecting Ribbit & his own abstraction, we get him looking in the mirror, saying, “You’re not looking so good… you gonna cry… looking like this?”

It feels like Jax may be literally repeating something his mother said to him when he confided in her… that maybe he showed her how he prefers to dress, and that was one of the many cruel things she came out with in response. Knowing that that was the straw that broke the camel’s back, and that he’d been treated that way as long as he can remember…

Breaks my heart.

Gooseworx said Jax was the story of how things could have turned out for her in a darker timeline. We’ve lived through that, & 100% get it.

It took a lot of effort, time, & grace for the femme & the masc parts of us to make peace & learn to co-exist.

—

Abstraction is a really sad ending to Jax’s story. I’ve heard abstraction likened to suicide. It really does seem to be like a point where a person gives up so completely that there isn’t any way back. It’s not a direct analogue – the fact Pomni can get through to Jax in the dark & have a conversation with him is the rules of this digital world not behaving quite like our own – but it really is like someone is gone in so many ways.

The sad reality in the real world is that among trans folk, and folk with complex trauma, particularly complex dissociation, suicide rates are much higher than the general population. That by no means is to say that one can’t have a good life when one or more of those things is part of your experience, but the risk factor is there, especially when people become isolated, lost and confused about how things could ever get better.

Jax finally rejects everyone and gives up on being seen even by Pomni, his closest friend in the circus, right before he abstracts. And that’s the reality for people who struggle in isolation so much of the time.

We need other people, we need connection. It’s extremely sad when early life experiences make that difficult for so many of us, but it’s worth fighting for.

So yeah, Jax’s story is an extremely sad one.

But I think it’s extremely important to not brush it aside as a ‘lame’ ending because it ‘wasn’t fair’.

Out of the night that covers me…

Life often isn’t fair.

But as long as we draw breath, we can each choose to be the captains of our own ships, masters of our own fates.

As Viktor E Frankl puts it:

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

You can see Jax wrestling with his response over and over throughout the show. And we know that out in the ‘real world’, Leeroy is still alive & still has the capacity for growth. I like to think that in less cruel circumstances than The Circus, Jax would have been able to do the same… and who knows? Maybe abstraction isn’t really the end for someone.

If Caine can be forgiven by the cast of The Circus, maybe Jax can find compassion for himself, too…

If they do find a way to continue Jax’s story, I’d love to see them learn to give themselves grace, treat themselves and others better, and thrive as a plural character with both femme and masc parts, co-existing as a happy and healthy genderfluid system – but that’s just our personal bias, obviously 😉

Until next time,

Take care of yourselves, kiddos ❤

Riley & fam x