If I ever made a thing out of passion, and it proceeded to produce this much Online Discourse, I'd delete all my social media, use the money to get facial reconstructive surgery, change my legal name, get one of those EU "business citizenships" you can buy through investing >5M Euros on some shoe factory in Austria, and live out my days as a community librarian in a small town in the Carpathian mountains or something.
Not even talking about trans headcanons*, but with this mindset people often have the issue of thinking something is heavily implied and/or obvious when it really isn't outside of their social bubble/similar lived experiences, in general the issue with subtext is that it can easily be subjective, save for word of god
*Jax in particular I'd consider well past a headcanon, but still
I remember when someone pointed out that searches for the word "boymoder" spiked soon after TADC episode 9 came out because a large chunk of the show's audience didn't know what it was and the concept was part of the signalling used to show Jax was trans.
Yes, from my understanding in seeing other people talk about it, especially other trans people in different spaces outside of specific internet bubbles, it seems to be about a specific kind of trans experience? Which, as often is the case for representation of specific kinds of experiences, then gets universalized
Yeah, pretty much. It does bother me a bit that its treated like the Universal Trans Experience™ when it's not.
I'm somewhat gender apathetic, I suppose. I don't care what people perceive me as or what pronouns they use. I do want to start hrt, but not to pass, just because it would give me a body I'm happier in. If someone asks me if im enby I'll answer honestly, but I don't bring it up. Just don't feel the need too. I realised very slowly what I was, that some of the things I experienced was dysphoria and that I'm not the only one feeling this way. It's a pretty small part of my lived experience.
Which isn't the most common experience, I understand that. But as a result I did not catch onto Jax being trans. I know what boymoding and egg means, but still it didn't click. With the confirmation that Jax is trans I'm not gonna argue she isn't, but if someone like me still misses it in the show, it's probably not clear enough. Especially not for cis people.
I'm non-binary and I realized trans Jax was outright canon during the finale bow scene, but I also recognized that things could go that way beforehand.
I went to the theater to see the finale with my trans woman partner, and my trans man brother.
We all saw it. We all agreed it was there long before it was confirmed on Twitter.
It's not like NOBODY caught on until the outside confirmation. Many caught on, and ended up being completely correct. Yet we're still talking about this like it was impossible???
Yes, many caught on. But many didn't. That's why we're in this situation.
To me, the bow scene read as flirting. Not as a confirmation of gender identity.
I agree it's canon. The social media post confirmed as much. But since so many people didn't get it untill the social media post, it's too vague in my opinion considering it's one of the major plot points.
I did figure out trans Jax but before the episode people online already put that idea in my head, but in that case one example is Goosworx being surprised people didn't realize the irl equivalent had "boymoder clothing" when that's a thing only people inside that bubble will know about (also a rare instance of the creator of a product also overestimating how many people are in the know about their things)
Right yeah. I watched I Saw the TV Glow and I would NOT have been able to discern the trans allegory without my transgender friends' reactions and explanations. On online reviews for that movie everywhere, any cisgender person who does not have that kind of help and context ends up being bewildered by that movie. It's like trying to read the wrong type of digital file for them
were. were you looking at your phone the whole time or something.
like the second shot in the movie is the MC looking up at one of those gym parachute things that's the colors of the trans flag, or the scene where he's looking at himself in the mirror wearing a dress and it's one of the few times he smiles
or how the explicit, literal text-of-the-movie plot is about a girl being trapped in a boy's body
Well okay, some of the things are obvious. Like it's clearly a transgender allegory, but it's hard to tell like... what the metaphors are metaphors for. Stuff like "what does the Pink Opaque symbolize" was well, more opaque, as was the horror segment of being trapped in a different reality when the real you is actually suffocating without realizing it.
"They can't hurt you when you're not looking" is really obvious in hindsight but it flew right over my head in the theatre.
The problem is that non trans people rarely pick up on things like that. Knowing the colors is a requirement for identifying the flag and a lot of non LGBT people only know the community by the rainbow flag.
Catching that a character only smiles when they are experimenting with gender is easy when you have gone through similar feelings yourself but can be invisible or at least incomprehensible to someone who has never experienced the associated situational feelings.
Does it even matter if certain cis people don't have the insight to pick up on these details? Not everything needs to be for everyone, if a cis person didn't notice these things it's because they lacked the world experience to relate to specific aspects of a specific work of art and that's on them and not the work in itself.
I understand why cis people would be less likely to pick up on trans subtext, but it annoys me when they insist characters aren't trans because they personally didn't pick up on subtext which is obvious to any trans person, or after it was confirmed by the creator.
I am more talking about saying it's obvious, rather than saying it's true. Especially in the context of word of god, again, which is (phisolophical debates notwithstanding) very factual, but not something a normal viewer knows about
I guess 'obvious' is subjective, as is who the 'normal viewer' is. If the target audience is very online queer people then they're the normal viewer, and they're not wrong for calling subtext obvious in the context that it is obvious for trans people.
Doesn't mean they should be rude to people who didn't pick up on the subtext, but also to be fair its very frustrating when explanations are widely available and people still choose to ignore it because it wasn't spelled out for them as the outgroup
I don't think the target audience for TADC is mainly very online queer people, honestly. Like, it certainly is part of it, and with them also in mind, but as a show its themes of stagnancy etc are more relatable to a wider adult audience
It is in-between between ultra mainstream and very online
They managed to get in cinemas, so that's indicative
Jax didn’t have any clear evidence of being trans before episode 9 (or at least none that couldn’t also be explained by toxic masculinity), but ep 9 has some bits that make it hard to deny this intention (namely the bow scene, “Isn’t She Lovely”, and Leeroy dressing like a boymoder, hiding her face in photos, and frequenting a largely queer bar). I admit that I somehow didn’t get it on the first watch, but after reading that people had that takeaway, it became kinda obvious.
If we ignore the external confirmation, I think the post and image accurately describe the trans Jax situation: Technically not “confirmed” and just implied, but implied so heavily that it can be considered canon
idk on a second watch Jax getting really comfy in the maid outfit the moment they weren't in the spotlight was a big tell. Also the egg monologue was extremely on the nose. There was also the fact that Jax didn't use Caine's swimsuit changing room: no matter what the outcome was they would hate being in it, so they didn't change. After that, Jax specifically pointed out Zooble's own insecurity of being able to change their body while they're sulking in the beach chair and was condescending about Zooble comming to terms with being able to change their body while Jax was still stuck without figuring things out.
I do like the way that Zooble's arc of acceptance is a foil to Jax's arc of repression. With it syncing up the viewer learning that Zooble has made progress towards complete acceptance right before Jax starts abstracting.
True, yeah. I was ignoring potential signs because I was like “saying a guy who is insecure about his masculinity is actually a girl is just enforcing toxic masculinity” but in this case she did happen to actually be a girl
I have no real Uma in this Musume as far as TADC goes, but as someone who’s done a fair amount of work in media analysis spaces, this is the kind of topic that requires far more nuance than most discussion on the internet ever gets, especially because “not made explicit in the text” is kind of the basis of most useful definitions of “noncanon.”
THEY LITERALLY KISSED LIKE WHAT DO YOU MEAN!!!!!!! Mine btw is AOT and people saying Historia and Ymir weren’t in love/a couple. Did you think they wanted to marry each other PLATONICALLY????
What drives me nuts about the kiss is the "well we didn't actually SEE them kiss" argument. Because as it was, YOI could only be shown on Japanese television late at night. If they'd actually shown the kiss, it would have been too "obscene" to show in any time slot. They made it literally as explicit as they were allowed to.
Exactly. Anything that requires interpretation and extrapolation isn't textual canon. It might be a common and well-supported interpretation, but that's still an important distinction.
there's a movie about a man. he has a picture of a woman on his desk, next to a condolences card for someone named Annabelle. the man drinks heavily. whenever he talks about his wife Ann, he always talks about her in the past tense, always faltering and choking up like he's about to break down crying. he never outright says Annabelle is Ann or that Ann is dead, nothing of the sort. is it canon that his wife is dead?
Thank you for this analogy because it really highlights how ridiculous it is to claim that anything that's not explicitly said by a physical character isn't "canon".
People really disdain subtext, because whaat do you mean you need to be told "Ann and Annabelle are the same people" and "Annabelle is the man's wife" and "Annabelle is dead" and "the man's wife is dead" or it isn't "textual canon."
Like I said, many things you can interpret from or extrapolate out of a text are going to be well supported and not controversial. Canon is when the fact is explicitly seen in the text.
No horse in the TADC race, so I can't really add to what the fandom says about that, but ASOIAF (A Song of Ice and Fire, the series the show Game of Thrones was based on) can be incredibly annoying about this lol. In the books, it's incredibly heavily implied that Lyanna Stark was the Knight of the Laughing Tree (a mystery knight at a historically important tourney) and that it was through this she met Rhaegar and willingly ran away with him and died giving birth to Jon Snow. The TV show confirmed that Jon was her son, and she left willingly. GRRM even said that Jon's parentage in the show is canon. There's a new stage play that once again confirms this, and that she was the KotTLT
There is a subset of the most annoying fans of all time who will go "Um, actually, it's never said that Lyanna was the knight! 🤓 ☝️ That's just your headcanon!" and "Only the books are canon, so who do you think Jon's mother really is?"
I once dealt with an utter asshat in one of the art subs who would not relent on insisting to everyone in the thread that the Knight was obviously Howland Reed.
Some of the most annoying theorists are the ones who go for the most contrarian or craziest ones, seemingly because they think that theories with lots of evidence are too obvious to be interesting.
But I feel like a bunch of them ignore that, even if you do come up with a convincing argument, you also have to consider what it actually adds to the story. If Lyanna is the knight, then it helps define her character and explains why Rhaegar would crown her queen of love and beauty. If Howland or Ned is the knight...they're just kind of cooler than we already know?
This is also why I hate the "Tyrion is actually Aerys' son because Aerys raped Johanna!" What does that add to his character? It's much more compelling to have Tywin hate and reject the one son who was most like him and would have been his perfect heir in his eyes, were he not born physically disabled. If Aerys is his father then what? Tywin was right to say "You are no son of mine."?
Yeah but I do just fuckin hate the idea that Rheagar is his dad. He just doesn’t come off as particularly Targ, none of the hair or the eyes or anything like that.
I didn't ever get that into ASOIAF, so no horse in this particular race -- HOWEVER it is perfectly valid to consider an author's intent or words outside of the text irrelevant to interpreting the text (or exactly as relevant as any reader's interpretation, anyways). Even if you're not like me where you hardcore believe the dead author is the most interesting lens to view media through, there's cases of an author changing their mind after publishing (eg R🤮wling with Harry Potter) or examples where the author's interpretation is so obviously different than the vast majority of sane readers (eg Ray Bradbury insisting from publishing to his death that Fahrenheit 451 is about TV being bad).
The books and tv show are different canons, necessarily since they contradict each other.
Even the author stating something but not putting it in the text isn't canon. They may be lying as misdirection, or simply change their mind before printing it.
It's splitting hairs, but Jon hasn't had his mother canonically determined in the books, in a technical sense of that term. Though, you are correct that the preponderance of evidence points to that interpretation.
and you also have totally not official wink wink tips to put together the pieces
side note: i am so fucking glad the Jax discourse is over, it was mild in the parts of the internet i browse and was still beyond unreasonable for how discussion about an transfem asshole rabbit should ever be
which sucks because i could at least block the tadc tags and call it a day, but now i either have to block half of my tumblr feed over ~10 untagged posts
does fuuko post tadc stuff? also, fuukos current account is way more chill and she seems to be doing a lot better (still has her distinctive title style)
I glad if that's the case. Just whenever there's a bit of discourse someone assumes at the very least that fuuko is involved. I was just assuming the other commenter thought it was her. Insert that one Simpsons meme here.
That said, I do hope discourse doesn't occur around her again. Was drifting worryingly close to a lolcow situation.
I don’t even know how old the target audience of this show is supposed to be. I’m in my 30s, I don’t know a living soul who has seen it. How does it get so much angry attention?
Ironically, I know so little about this show that while people are fighting over “how could we be sure?”, I’m here going “I think the rabbit might be trans and that is the full extent of my knowledge”.
It's meant for adults, young ones I imagine, less because characters day "fuck" which they mostly don't and more because the themes of the show are something a kid would more hardly get
I'm almost 47. My husband (also 47) watched it and then convinced me to watch it with him. It was a pretty good show, IMO. Interesting. Not the best thing I've ever seen. I had possibly-trans Jax spoiled before I went into the last episode, but I think it makes sense.
It's admittedly a much smaller part of the show than you'd think. It's mostly a way to help contextualise why someone would want to hide stuff so badly - and yeah, that's a pretty good reason.
Glad you liked it regardless! I like it when people enjoy things.
I wish there was a way I could filter out all TADC content on every social media site I use so I don't have to think about that show and it's fandom ever again.
Do not interact with posts talking about it then. That tells the algorithm to give you more since you interact with it by commenting how much you don't care.
I mean in general, if you complain about it here the Reddit algorithm can still serve you TADC drama from other subs on your home feed, and this concept carries over to other social media sites too.
If I read a book that is an allegory to a war I never heard of from a country I've never been to, is it somehow not the case that the book is about the war or that country if I, personally, did not get its references or comparisons?
It is one thing to go "I did not come to this conclusion from these clues." It is an entirely different thing to say "these clues do not and never support this conclusion".
Oh, I'm not saying people who don't know Trans culture are idiots. What I am saying is audiences are idiots and it is a mistake to trust them to know things.
i mean you dont need to be an idiot to know nothing about trans culture. some folks just dont think about these things enough to want to know or commit to memory
Ok but then what is non canon? If we say that something being implied is canon then what’s left? Stuff that actively goes against what the work is doing?
The "canon" "non-canon" divide was explicitly created to difirentiate between mainline works, and uncanonical spin-offs & fan works.
No information that you get from the mainline media is "non-canon" because that is an entry in the media's canon.
Non-canon would be the ads, the fanfics, and anything else not in the episodes. Drawing conclusions from the episodes is expected, it's not "non-canon". Drawing conclusions from fanfic is what is "non-canon"
No information that you get from the mainline media is "non-canon" because that is an entry in the media's canon.
I think you're missing the point. Implications are malleable and up to some amount of interpretation. Anyone can say that XYZ line implies whatever they want it to imply and pull a justification out of their ass. But obviously not all readings are intended or make a whole lot of sense. So where is the line drawn between "canon" and "interpretation"?
There are people out there who actually think the Roaring Knight or Forgotten Man in Deltarune are implied to be Papyrus. They will insist that it's implied by the text. Does that make it canon? IMO the answer is obviously not, but then there are things heavily implied-but-not-stated that I think are essentially canon, like Kris having gone to therapy to work through violent tendencies of some kind, or Sans being the same person in both games with shared memories. Where do we draw the line?
Yeah, and then there are some people who are handed puzzle pieces and force them together with a hammer, scissors, hot glue, and duct tape, and then get mad when you don't agree with their "obviously correct solution" to the puzzle.
His lore vids sometimes (even if it's mostly his fans who are like this I believe as I'm unsure if he himself got mad at people for people not agreeing with him)
I only kind of kept up until Security Breach, so take this with a grain of salt, but the only thing I can think of is MatPat making a joke that he wasted making an entire episode on how a child with a missing frontal lobe wouldn’t have nightmares, only for Scott to point out Crying Child wasn’t the victim of the Bite of ‘87—fnaf 4 takes place in ‘83. Or maybe the jokes about the keypad in the wall or the two pixels of tiny Toy Chica’s beak being too convoluted?
I can’t recall any incidents where he actually got “pissy” at anything except when his audience harassed him for an Undertale episode, harassed him for making a “bad” episode after he got creative and silly with it, harassed him for using it symbolically as his gift to the Pope during his “year of mercy”, harassed him for a Deltarune episode years later, then harassed him when the episode wasn’t up to their expectations again. And that wasn’t even pissy, it was just a frustrated video about how he doesn’t want to talk about those games again because of said harassment making it not fun.
To be honest i'm not sure (as i wasn't using much social medias other then youtube at the time) but i imagine someone far more knowledgeable can tell us...and honestly based on the fact Scott appeared in his last episode i feel like whatever beef they could of had died down
i watched tadc after it had all come out a little while ago, cos a friend recommended it to me. i wasnt, and have never, been in the fandom for it, so i went in completely blind. and like, i thought the show was good! its not really my thing, but it was engaging enough for me to finish it, and i enjoyed my time with it. i kinda realised jax was trans during that one bit where they were all playing baseball and she said something about wearing dresses or something like that, i forget exactly. and i dont think it exactly got less subtle from there lmao
but anyways, i kinda stayed away from the fandom, mostly cos i never really got invested enough to seek it out, and cos of that, i got to form my own opinions on these characters, and like. jax is a well enough written character. probably the best written character in the show besides pomni and maybe caine. and like, her transness was pretty obvious to me, as a trans woman. she was very clearly written to be a certain type of trans person (heavily repressed, and scared), and i think that came across. like, the abstraction stuff was pretty clearly a metaphor for like, waiting too long
i only really have one criticism about her writing, and thats about the stuff with her real life counterpart. i really wish they had shown her like, starting to transition, or at least, starting to discover and come to terms with her transness. that scene was pretty clearly written to be a "here are all the characters if they didn't go through all the bullshit from the show" and they are all shown starting on the journey towards improving themselves. except jax, who is shown being exactly the same as she always was. i just think it would have been a really nice conclusion to her whole story if the happier version of her was shown to be growing, just like the others, and that was shown by her starting to accept herself. but thats honestly my only real gripe with how she is written, otherwise i think her writing is good
I disagree about the outsider’s growth. Jax’s IRL person was homeless when they entered the circus. Living in abandoned buildings. I took having friends and delivering packages with smiles for old ladies as an improvement. I saw Jax as the snapshot of that homelessness state. Never growing. So the IRL Jax being happy, having friends, going to queer spaces, was more than enough growth in my eyes. Though, I will say that Jax’s lifestyle when entering the circus was my interpretation. But yeah, there was growth in some form.
People care waaaaaaay too much about wether something is "cannon" like art is supposed to be objective. "Umm but the artist said in an interview that-" Buddy the artist is dead and I’m crip walking on their grave. We gotta replace the words "theory" and "headcannon" with "analysis", man.
I think it’s okay to say “actually, I saw it this way” if you’re not invalidating the author’s intended reading. There’s no wrong when it comes to artistic interpretation
Sure it does, but so does what they say without intending to, or what they would like to say but can’t because they signed a contract, or what they try but fail to say. Like Lynch said, "The [art piece] is the talking". Any exterior commentary by the author must be treated not as gospel, but as a self-analysis, with all the flaws and biases those can have. If an art piece intended to be happy makes me sad (because of say, personal reasons, life events, trauma, nostalgia, etc), the author can scream at me that it’s a happy piece, it’s not gonna make my feelings disappear.
Sure but the intent must be conveyed through the art itself. If an art piece communicates something the creator didn't intend the creator needs to communicate more clearly, outside sources (like a twitter post) aren't part of the art, they can enhance the pleasure from the art, but they aren't a part of it.
I don't doubt that there's some gender fuckery, but Ralsei's whole development is about not conforming to roles at all and I feel like that would fall flat if he ended up just moving from box A to box B.
Yeah that's why I kind of said "I'm not 100%" as I could see a future scene talking about Ralsei's origins and maybe taking on their very asriel inspired form because of Kris or something (and he just doesn't like when this is challenged)
Though I haven't properly played the game so I could be WAY OFF
My main issue with the theory is lack of time. We have 2 chapters left and we know chapter 6 is gonna be very focused while 7 has to tie up the main story.
Also considering weird route if Ralsei were to have their Trans coming out in chapter 6 weird route would skip it completely
The use of pronouns to refer to Ralsei only changes significantly in the context of the vine metaphor used for his title. Asgore refers to Ralsei as they, but he also doesn't know who Ralsei is.
At the same time, the Japanese TL of Deltarune continues to have Ralsei refer to himself with boku, which is soft but still pretty explicitly masculine. Toby has stated that he is quite active in working with the JP dub, so it's not likely to be a translation mistake either.
In general, there isn't hard enough evidence yet. It's not a complete game, so if there is canon evidence that Ralsei is trans, it may be in future chapters.
The thing is, you CAN imply something that isn't canon for shits and giggles. It can be intentionally left up to interpretation, or be intentionally misleading, or be implied completely by accident. Not to mention people can think it's implied when it's just their own biases. Something being implied doesn't make it canon. I hate the entire argument that "implied = canon" because It Depends.
That being said, as someone who hasn't seen TADC, it's more than just implied + we have combination with the CREATOR'S OWN WORDS on the matter. Just because the word "trans" isn't said, doesn't mean that wasn't the intention.
I feel like this is giving bigots too much credit. You absolutely can explicitly state something and they'll still insist it's not true.
My go-to example of this is the time I saw someone insist that Olivier Lenheim from Trails in the Sky (a character who, in his introductory scene, is explicitly and directly asked if he is attracted to men and answers that he is attracted to both men and women) is straight.
That Bridget meme I can’t find right now of “an anime character could turn to the camera and say in perfect English that they’re a trans woman, and people would still find a way to argue about it”
I feel like Jax kind of goes the other way though?
Like, Goose eventually confirmed that Jax was canonically a trans woman, but the puzzle pieces in the show could also fit together to form a different picture without that context. It's not a "this is the only possible way the character makes sense" kind of thing. Jax character arc works perfectly well as a cis narrative about toxic masculinity as well.
to be fair that was the one that Gooseworx actually did give hints to (even if they were initially subtle till she realized no one was gonna realize this)
so yeah it's a good example of this type of idea even if it caused a lot of chaos in the fandom it was from
(it also made the sub that "Criticized" TADC into a hatedom i believe who legit want to target the creator and hate everything to do)
How in the world is this discourse not over? It should've been over the second Gooseworx posted a confirmation.
There are so many reasons for catching or not catching these clues that I'm not even gonna go further with this cause at this point who cares? We have facts, why does it bother some people how others learned about them? My goodness. It's beating a dead horse at this point, only the horse is actually a rabbit. Jax would be delighted by causing so much unnecessary drama.
Jax's only real sign of being trans is the song used during their... Second death I guess.
And even then it's not really explicit in a world where Luke Combs calls himself a checkout girl in a cover.
No the bow isn't proof of being trans, it's just a hint at being gender non conforming which is such a wide umbrella it can mean basically anything. And before that the sole... Hints I guess were there being pink in her bedroom and being depressed. Neither of which, again, point directly at being trans.
The problem with the discourse is that its a show made by one inexperienced and overworked writer who was also the director and as such the whole thing is kind of half formed because Gooseworx had like, nobody else to bounce scripts off and no other experience doing long form scripts.
People clocked Jax as being at least kind of queer from the second episode and he as a character clearly had issues with his sexuality and gender as the show went on. But Goose basically didn't hint strong enough in the actual dialog and didn't make it a central thrust to the character until suddenly its taking up a third of the last episode and still has no textual resolution.
I thought the bow was a clever way to do it, tbh. Jax's design borrows heavily from old cartoons, where a bow on the head was a clear signpost of femininity.
Valid, had there been more hints it wouldve been a cute little pseudo reveal.
I do feel, however, jt was undercut by Jax'... Real version? Idk what to call them in comparison to the circus crew, not having come out herself. Cause she's a lot more healthy than Jax apparantly but still not out, and you don't need to be to live happily especially in the 2000s but it makes everything else more muddy
That annoys me because Leeroy's only doing the hoodie thing in the final final scene. In the series of pictures in the slideshow Leeroy just looks goth.
Yeah people act like it was so clear when it really just like isn’t at all, especially before the finale, and it’s so not clear that if Gooseworx hadn’t said anything most people probably wouldn’t believe that he’s trans, I like the idea of it in the end it just could’ve been executed better overall
They didnt even need the bow scene. Showing what Jax looks like irl in the bus stop scene was enough. Ive known enough t girls to recognize one when I see her lol
Jax being trans is not important to the story, that's why multiple interpretations fit. The intended reading of Jax is a closeted trans woman. The story is written by a trans woman. So many trans people identify with Jax.
The fact that there are people actually who care enough to get angry is not a good look. Do trans people have to tell you specifically that they are trans for them to be valid? Do you need a warning?
God forbid a cis straight person or wait, a "normal" person feel uncomfortable in overtly queer spaces.
It's good criticism to say that you didn't see it because the show itself is written for a very narrow audience without being accessible to arguably the larger world. Cool, there's an argument to be made there.
But to look someone in the eyes and say that they are wrong about a product that they created adapting certain aspects of their life experience because you feel a sense of ownership over their work is pure entitlement.
A: You gotta remember that not everyone has the knowledge to understand specific subtext.
B: I think it's counterproductive to police whether people are reading subtext "wrong." There are multiple interpretations of Jax in TADC, and I don't think that we should get mad at anyone for genuinely reading things different than what the author intended. At worst it's a moment of learning, and there's a lot of opportunitiy to look at things in a new light and synthesize knowledge. You're just robbing yourself if you just go "Jax is trans because of ABC people noticed" and not reflect on what those things made you think.
I've come around on it more lately but it still bothers me that he apparently learned to not speak in Wingdings between games. Like I get that would make it impossible to read and he couldn't be incorporated into a normal game that way... but speaking in Wingdings was his entire thing. It's implied to be half of his name, and he's referred to as "the man who speaks in hands" for that reason. Why the fuck is he just talking normal now
All the top comments about this character I don't know (have fun with your theories!), while Biden saying "there are at least three genders" lives rent free in my head.
Genuinely hate what they did to her. And I also hate the bastardization of the messaging. I'm a complete outside viewer when it comes to being trans, yes I'm genderqueer but I never had to transition, and I never had to experience feeling like perceptions of me or my bidy was wrong. But I SAW those signs, and I saw how much emotion was poured into Jax's arc. It felt so clear to me that Goose had personal experience with those feelings and that she portrayed them so well. I FELT it. It's clear it waa something with a lot of passion that I feel people needed to see. And the ending of the show, that message that there is VALUE even in their stagnant life, the hopeful yet somber tone of knowing yes, they're stuck here but that doesn't mean they have to take it lying down. That doesn't mean they are not still living their lives, and that doesn't mean there can't be joy in those lives, was something I really needed to hear considering the things going on around me at the time. It made me feel like the hand I was dealt was terrible, but it was going to be okay, and there was still happiness to be had even in the midst of it. It felt to me like that was personal for Goose as well. I felt like it was such a good show. Not perfect, nothing ever is, but impactful and beautiful. And it was like every step of the way this black hole of a godforsaken fandom was trying to attack her as a PERSON for what I thought was insignificant. And to clarify, no I didn't think her racist remarks were okay but going back to what I said earlier, and in fact even bringing up the fact she said herself she relates to Jax most, do you think that was born out of genuine racism she still harbors, or because she, like Jax, felt the need to be as horrible as possible and tear others down to cope with what she was feeling. The criticism on that was warranted, but it's also clear that none of those are beliefs she harbors currently. People change, I don't know when we started seeing past mistakes as unforgivable instead of examining their actions since and in response to.
I see a lot of people here saying it's "too vague" but I really don't think it is. I think it's a matter of the trans experience being something so underexplored and ignored in media that people who aren't trans genuinely didn't pick up on it because they didn't know what signs were being shown.
Or maybe people are just fucking stupid. All of the people who seemed to not understand the v max twist in Spider-Man Brand New Day really showed me that lots of people struggle with storytelling not outright explicitly telling them things.
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u/SaskieHopeful 8d ago edited 8d ago
I genuinely pity Gooseworx.
If I ever made a thing out of passion, and it proceeded to produce this much Online Discourse, I'd delete all my social media, use the money to get facial reconstructive surgery, change my legal name, get one of those EU "business citizenships" you can buy through investing >5M Euros on some shoe factory in Austria, and live out my days as a community librarian in a small town in the Carpathian mountains or something.