I wish now that I had never heard of The Amazing Digital Circus. I wish I still knew it only from random fanart on tumblr that gets crazy popular about twice every year, just like every other series that people watch; staying completely ignorant of the entire enterprise, knowing it only as "that tumblr stuff". I can't keep doing this, gamers. I can't keep hearing the show's theme in my head and breaking apart thinking about Jax pleading in futility not to die right before she does. I can't keep thinking about all the trans sisters we've lost, whichever side of the closet door they were on. I can't keep seeing fanart on tumblr from people pretending Jax isn't dead, censoring themselves so the openly transphobic moderators don't nuke their accounts. I can't keep doing this. I need to revert to an earlier version of my consciousness where The Amazing Digital Circus wasn't there.
I'll admit to only watching episode 9 on the surface. I'll also admit to watching the entire programme of Avatar: The Last Airbender on the surface, because this is exactly why I don't interact with new media anymore. It's not just a show, or it's not just a game, or it's not just whatever it is; for me, it's a full emotional investment. I have to interact with new media on the surface level only, or I get swallowed up into it and it becomes my entire life for an indefinite period of time. Once I rewatched episode 9, opening myself up to everything below the surface, it hit me like a train. Abstraction is suicide. Leeroy Mateo was abused because she was trans. Lee became Jax and wanted to open up, but was afraid of being abused again, and so became the abuser. And when it turned out that Jax was just a brain-scan, and she realised that her realspace self was probably still in danger, arrested, dead, or worse, she isolated herself from everyone and then abstracted. Abstraction is suicide. Even though she wasn't real, the story of her character was probably based on a real person's story, or several real people.
We lost another trans sister, and it makes me grieve for the real ones just a bit harder now. Leelah Alcorn, Eden Knight, Nex Benedict, certainly; but also people like Rabbi Kalonymus ben Meir, a 14th-century rabbi who wished he could have been born a woman. Despite the rampant transphobia at the top levels of government, we live in a time of miracles, where medical science has developed a working understanding of how hormones work to the point where we can straight up re-balance the hormones in our bodies. But, the aforementioned transphobia that is not only ignored but encouraged by politians and evangelists, and the abuse that we put ourselves in a position to suffer by coming out and saying "I may have been born as a boy, but I want to be a girl," is just too much for most of our sisters. So she stays in the closet, watching cis women taking their femininity for granted and being so burningly jealous that she can almost taste her own bile, listening to all the family updates where her cisgender aunts and cousins are having children and it tears her up inside, hearing bloviating windbags like Charlie Kirk, JD Vance, and Donald Trump saying shit about "corrupting transgender ideologies", and deciding she can't do this anymore, and she locks herself away and kills herself.
I don't really know what to say next. I've been cry-typing this whole time. I guess the next most important thing to take away from episode 9 is, you need to check up on your friends. Trans or not, queer or not, you need to check up on your friends. Even if they're just online friends, you need to check up on them. If they've begun isolating themselves, believing that nobody cares about them enough to reach out, and your DM or your email or your text message shows up on their phone, it'll at least make them put down the knife for a moment. Maybe it will be enough for them to not kill themselves at all, if they were planning to. The point is, we don't know until we reach out.
The other reason why Jax's story is hitting me so hard is that, I also isolated myself. For most of my 20's, I was too depressed to even go outside most days, I would just sit in the dark and play GoldenEye or Doom or Smash Bros. all day. I wasn't immune to emotion exactly-- I still laughed at funny stuff, I still got inspired enough to write music, or paint, or draw, or whatever else. Sometimes I did even venture outside, where I would drive out to Nature Preserve Park or climb the observation tower at Racist State Senator State Park. But these were all palliative measures that didn't address the main issue: my depression. They were just bandaids covering up a bullethole. I felt unloved, ignored, unworthy, and left behind by people I once called "friends". They were all living their lives, which looked so much better than my own, whilst I stayed stuck in my childhood home, playing my childhood videogames, well into my 20's. I almost killed myself at several points in time. Once, I went to the observation tower with the sole intent of jumping from it. As I climbed the tower, each step got harder and harder as I realised what awaited me at the top. However, a bus from a nearby daycare arrived and they all started trouping up the tower and I realised that, if I carried out my plan, I would give lifelong trauma to at least 24 kids. Not much made me cry back then, but I felt so guilty that I went back to my car and cried for most of 15 minutes. At that time, I considered myself to be bisexual. Transfem hadn't occurred to me just yet. Unlike Jax, however, I didn't have anybody reaching out to me to see if I was all right. I never let my mum know that there was anything wrong (she probably knew, but she had her own life) and I cut all ties with my past life in high school the second I returned home from college. I always used to say, "My phone number hasn't changed, there's no reason why they couldn't ring me up," and then getting upset when my old friends wouldn't ring. But I know (both then and now) that, even if they did, I wouldn't have picked up.
I don't really know what stayed my hand. I got so used to the idea of killing myself someday that it became a standard plan of action in the case that all other plans failed. I got flippant about it, throwing around deadlines for myself to do something I knew I wasn't capable of doing, and if I didn't do it by then, I should kill myself because, clearly, I'm useless. I think the thing that scared me the most was that, if I died, it would pass unnoticed. My mum would tell the rest of my family, there might be a police investigation, but none of the people I wanted to see me die would have. For all I know, they're the ones who killed themselves and I simply don't know it because I cut all ties to them in 2012.
In far shots of everybody rebuilding the Circus Tent while Jax is looking on forlornly, it was too easy to put myself in her place. In POV shots where Jax is looking at the crossed-out door portraits, I felt myself closing another door on another old friendship, and whenever anyone offered to be someone she could talk to, I felt myself hearing people say that and then beginning to close the door on them too.
I guess that was the point of episode 9. You were supposed to identify with somebody. Pomni, Jax, Ribbit, or Kaufmo. I identified with Jax for the above-stated reasons, but I also identified with Pomni. After I started this website, I discovered that I was consistently reaching people. It didn't take much time for me to read someone's microblog post or profile post about something bad that was happening in their own life, and then giving words of encouragement. Something big happened in March 2025 with Gremlin and my words of encouragement turned into pleas to seek help, and I sat up for 5 hours, refreshing their profile page over and over again, waiting for any indication that they were getting help. I wrote at the time on my (now deleted) hidden diary page: "I worried, I felt it in the pit of my stomach, I felt it at the base of my spinal column, my temperature went up, my temperature dropped, I cried, I felt like I would throw up. I wanted to ask her where she lived so I could leap into the car and drive there. I wanted to hold her hand, I wanted to be [there] with her, I wanted to sit up with her all night." I had never felt like this before. When the ordeal was finally over, I could relax and return to my own business. Just on a whim, I decided to send them an email about a week later; you know, make some small talk, mention how expensive the Switch 2 was going to be, that kind of thing. I won't go into their response too much, but apparently, I and 1 other person from Neocities were the only ones who had reached out. Later, when things started going the wrong way with their ex-boyfriend, they reached out to me because they knew I would be there for them. The only reason that Riza and I are living together is that I reached out at the right time. I used to lie awake at night worrying what would happen if they couldn't ring me, or if they rang and it went to voicemail. What if it was a crucial time when they needed me the most and I wasn't there to help?
Pomni spent a lot of time trying to convince Jax that she was a friend, but by the time she was able to get through to her, it was too late. Sure, Jax is to blame for not taking anyone at their word, but in the lamppost scene, I had the misfortune of relating to both characters at the same time. Jax as someone who isolated herself, Pomni as someone who now reaches out.
I still wish I could go back to an earlier version of myself who has never heard of The Amazing Digital Circus. I can't keep crying like this over a fictional character. So it would cost me a fanfic, who cares? On the other side of it, it drove the "trans girls die in the closet" point home and crashed it through the back wall of the garage. I mean, I was aware that it was happening, but I didn't really understand why. Also, Jax's reaction to her realisation that she is going to die is not uncommon. People who survive suicide attempts often report a sudden wish that they hadn't done it, right before it hits, after it's too late to do anything about it. It took Riza helping me to realise this, but it also made me understand how important personal connections are. Do not assume that someone else is going to reach out and risk having no one reaching at all. Don't wait for a crisis to reach out, be proactive about it. Send them an email. Send them a text. Ring them up if you still do that. Let them know they're not alone.