It seems pretty obvious to me that Goose was planning on being le epic troll when the movie came out and people found out that all this shit was pointless. He's been robbed of that by the leaks, which compounds with the fact that he doesn't seem to be capable of taking criticism.
On another note, it’s kind of ironic that GW wrote Gangle — a character who never managed to make peace with failing as an artist and always wondering "what if" — while simultaneously crashing out on Xitter because TADC became really successful for views to the point that they couldn't handle it anymore.
Plot twist: GW "Abstracts/41%" because success is more cursed than failure. Maybe TADC was the result of a monkey's paw wish.
Oddly, it is the one lesson he should have learned from his characters; just give up, you don't have the strength of spirit for success if you happen to stumble into it. Be content with being nothing.
Lazy af still to have all the abstracted look like the exact same eye covered horse btw. I know theyre supposed to be refrences to the ihnmaims slug but still.
If anything if they were all gonna look the same it would make more sense to have them look either like plain humanoids (bringing them back to their real basics compared to something caine wouldve designed for them) or something more computer-y like a missingno if you wanna go full inhuman. Instead they just turn into weird wolves or whatever??? Even if you wanna focus on becoming feral/base animalistic instincts wed still at least be some kind of primate and not a horse/dog that looks like a mario galaxy fodder monster.
Like imo something like this would be wayy more menacing looking to have running around the main cartoony cast. Trying to reason with someone not even remotely recognizable as a person/organism anymore even compared to a chess piece with googly eyes.
As a medical man, there’s actually a real good chance Jax’s mom is dead or retarded. A middle aged lady cracking the back of her head on the floor and not waking up is a problem, best case scenario she had a concussion and was able to recover. Worse case scenarios mean a brain bleed, a TBI, or even death are all on the table.
In fact, the police not looking for Jax could indicate that nobody found her body for a while and it was decided a slip and fall while she was alone, after all we never get a follow up on her, who knows but the police and their activity doesn’t mean much of anything.
I bet you Goose wanted to have Jax unambiguously be a tranny who killed his mom out of angst, but had to work around that for the ratings and Netflix overlords so he made it ambiguous.
imo, the way the finale handles jax after he abstracts is one of the biggest flaws of it.
consider if, instead instead of being kept around as a pet, jax got treated like any other abstracted character. the other characters held a traditional funeral for him, what remained of him (canonically entirely devoid of his personality) got sent to the cellar, and at the end of the series, pomni has an emotional scene where she places a rose in his room or something. i feel like this version would piss people off way less.
one major issue with the ending is how the presentation clashes with what actually happens.
we see abstracted jax being kept around by the crew, being given a new home in the tent, and you understand that it's supposed to convey how his fate isn't all that bad & he's still a part of the group no matter what, but... from what the movie explicitly tells us, we know it's all completely pointless. abstraction is irreversible, and we quite literally see jax's "soul" getting destroyed in his last scene (as in, when pomni gets thrown off & we see during her fall that the inner world jax is now abstracted too).
this heavily undercuts the emotional impact of his death, dehumanizes him in a very literal way (pet on a leash), and creates a tonal dissonance - the characters pretend he's still there somewhere, when we know for a fact he's really not. it almost feels like it's intentional in how blatantly delusional it is, but then it never ends up getting challenged and the movie just ends.
it's meant to be bittersweet and tragic, but just comes off as incredibly frustrating. jax never really gets a proper sendoff, instead he gets replaced with a beastlike creature everyone pretends is him. it ends up feeling like a worse, not better ending, and heavily reduces the emotional impact of the entire thing.
Also the scene between Jax and Ribbit in her room really felt like it was designed to end in making out*, which they wouldnt be able to take anything because just kissing and cuddling because they dont have sexual features anymore, which should add to the horror of staying at the circus because you are denied something so natural but essential for pairbonding. Jax would grow frustrated at this and storm out, or they know they'll need to hide this and, naturally, its frustrating for someone like Jax. The scene afterwards where Ribbit tries to apologize really also invokes the feeling of an attempt at sexuality that went wrong and Jax acts like nothing happened. And he keeps avoiding her because their "love" only reminds them of their current situation and make it all hurt more, not noticing/caring that this distance is hurting Ribbit even more. And Jax's character flaws and immaturity really begin bubbling hard to the surface when she tries to force a conversation because he knows that this will lead to the frustration that they cant go beyond friendship, they can never have a marriage, some white picket fence and then a kid, they will NEVER have that so why bother? His sheer nihilism laid bare.
And it dawns on him far too late that he hurt her so badly that he abstracted. If he just accepted what they had despite the risks and limited or had just been more mature in rejecting it, she would have been saved. He choose his own nihilistic comfort zone over her and that guilt haunts him intensely ever since.
Also it really felt that, at least in some version of the story, they would have been able to reverse the abstraction process like it seemed like Pomni would be able to do with Jax when going through his mind. Either that or the pillow fortress whatever would have possibly been it to show the healing process is a conjuctive effort? Really feels like if they wanted to have the drama/therapy angle, setting the focus of the plot in the abstraction of Jax and others being reversed would have been a good way to give it a meaningful visual effect on the world.
Also also not have chad gummy-gator appear and help out was a mistake a reminder this shit is garbage.
*The way Ribbit removes her ribbon almost seems like the closest thing she can do to "undress" and giving "concent" to it
While that's an interesting idea if explored by a skilled, sane author with a healthy grasp on sexuality and without a documented public history of proudly posting creepy fetishes online, I wouldn't trust Crazy Eyes Gooseworx McGee here to write this without intentionally or unintentionally making it creepy.
As a woman looking into those eyes, it makes me believe demons are real. I've only once in my life seen an expression like that on any human in person. It was (surprise, surprise) a guy I knew at school who thought he was a girl. He'd loudly proclaim with laughter and giggles how he wanted to make video games where he cut up and destroyed vaginas with knives, too eagerly wanted to tell me all about his "deformed penis" when I was a near stranger to him, and he'd often hang out in the girls' bathrooms at school and stare at the occupied stalls at the mirrors at the sinks.
I don't even want to think about how Gooseworx would write in detail about a sexually frustrated Jax.
Ah wonderful, the sheer quantity of people who are about to get raped by the spoilers in notifiations after smugly claiming not to have seen any will be increased quite greatly now.
It seems pretty obvious to me that Goose was planning on being le epic troll when the movie came out and people found out that all this shit was pointless. He's been robbed of that by the leaks, which compounds with the fact that he doesn't seem to be capable of taking criticism.
I'm reminded of probably the last good Syfy series to ever air, called "Dark Matter", created by one of the showrunners of Stargate SG-1, Atlantis and Universe, where the premise is that 6 individuals wake up on a derelict spaceship who have all lost their memories, and strive to figure out who they really are. In the first episode they first attack each other, each one thinking the other is responsible for their memory loss. After finally agreeing to work together, they discover a hostile android who they need to subdue and reset to be more friendly -- inadvertently giving the android the same kind of mind-wipe that they received.
With the help of the android, they regain control of their spaceship, and their first act in the first episode is to save a mining colony from an evil mega corporation. Fairly standard Firefly, Trek, Stargate kind of stuff. The mining colony sequence goes down the way you expect, there is drama, they are on the ropes, almost get got, but emerge as the big heroes and save the day. Whatever. You end up thinking "I can see how this continues, episodic content, they are gonna travel from place to place and get little hints to figure out who they really are. They are gonna become friends and save the universe, one world at a time. The big mystery the series is built around is their identity, it's gonna be teased throughout and maybe revealed in the end."
And then the android reveals their full names, past identities, and that they are actually brutal murderers and wanted criminals. Their objective was to kill the colonists for the corporation, not save them. Mystery solved.
The show actually subverts your expecations in a satisfying way. Rather than blueballing you with mysteryslop, it reveals its cards right away and gives you a much more interesting premise -- namely, how can 6 people who no longer possess the memories that defined their whole personality return to their old lives? Do they even want to? And are all of them really being honest about the mind-wipe, given that they were evil shitheads in the first place?
The reason I bring this up is because the framework is pretty similar to TADC. 6 human characters plus an AI, and each one represents a typical archetype. There is an element of memory loss, of no longer remembering what really happened. But where TADC sticks to the initial premise and these archetypes, Dark Matter completely mixes things up, has real character development and goes places you'd never have expected just from the first episode.
Rather than hyping up any obvious mysteries to be revealed at the very end, Dark Matter actually resolves them continuously and builds its story using the resolution of those mysteries as further plot elements. It uses them as stepping stones to keep the intrigue going, and set up the bigger overarching plot.
The bitter pill? It got cancelled before its final season. Because of course, we can't have an actual good scifi story with satisfying character development get a proper resolution. Queerslop gets infinite funding, but good scifi gets cancelled in favor of Sharknado trash. It's been 8 years and I'm still pissed.
this isn't really true, there's a good chance that all the abstracted people are just in permanent mind-hell, fighting themselves and shit. because cooper never explained jackshit, we can't know.
