There’s a Pattern in Jax’s Eyes (And It Changes Everything)

Comments · 1.7K

• JA

  @JaxxAH12 · 8 months ago · pinned

  has anyone EVER told you, you look like markiplyer?

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• FE

  @Fezzen · 8 months ago

  I propose that he wasn't actually looking for the bowling ball at all, he just improvised a quick excuse to get away from everyone.

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• DR

  @DRVGQN · 8 months ago

  The star gazing scene... His pupils are dilated for a lot of that even before his voice goes into funny mode. You seemed to equate that to him not really understanding... I think it's the opposite. He understands all too well. He lives under the mask just like ragatha. He has to put up his mask while talking about her like that or he has to admit that's what he's doing as well.

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• EV

  @EVTGGamingOfficial · 8 months ago

  To me, I feel like Jax’s eyes are more like indicators of how intense and controllable his emotions are. For example, with his crashout at Caine or Pomni, his eyes grow very small. But when he’s feeling less intense emotions, or putting on his persona, his eyes seem to be large. (Like when he’s putting on his “funny one” persona.)

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• ST

  @stickmaniac672 · 8 months ago

  Unironically his cartoon eyes are so big you can see them even when it's blurred beyond belief.

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• JE

  @jeremycook6295 · 3 months ago

  After watching episode 9 Jax looking at his hand and pushing Pomni away makes so much more sense

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• BR

  @brianda_aranda · 8 months ago

  If the eyes are the windows to the soul, Jax's pupils are wide open when it's a "safe" emotion to show, one that sticks to his "funny" persona, one that isn't going to hurt him because the others will see something they expected from Jax. He's Jax, of course he was going to do something borderline cruel or make a joke. But when he needs to shut everyone out, his pupils are tiny. He cannot allow them to look inside, because they would see that deep, deep, deeeeeeep down, he does care, and he's every bit as scared as anyone else. That's why I think his pupils were so tiny during his confrontation with Pomni. He can't let her in, so the windows are too small. I don't think that it's a real vs not real thing, I think it's a vulnerability thing.

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• ME

  @meghan143x · 6 months ago (edited)

  I think you&apos;re right for the most part, Jax has big eyes when he&apos;s masking and small eyes when he&apos;s not, but you treat them a little bit too much like whole personality shifts. Jax doesn&apos;t only mask when he has big eyes and he doesn&apos;t only act genuinely when he has small eyes. Jax tries to mask by acting as a character and that he doesn&apos;t need to take the situation seriously. It&apos;s a coping mechanism for him so he doesn&apos;t have to face the fear that if he cares about others and something bad happens, it&apos;d break him like it did with Ribbit. Essentially his pupils turn small when something is actually getting to him and he&apos;s struggling to pretend he doesn&apos;t care in the moment.<br><br>An example is his argument with Pomni. He shows two completely different coping strategies in that argument. The first was his normal silly, nothing matters coping mechanism where he pretends and tries to convince himself that the bond he was forming with Pomni wasn&apos;t really that important, so that if she ended up ever rejecting him or abstracting it wouldn&apos;t hurt him. And he wanted to convince Pomni to stop trying to get close to him so he didn&apos;t have to worry about losing another bond that would hurt him. You can see even with this masking strategy, his eyebrows show the truth, it was hurting him to say those things. It&apos;s his default and safest coping mechanism. He isn&apos;t trying to hurt Pomni&apos;s feelings with anything he says here, just trying to convince her to move on.<br><br>He then goes full mask off when he thinks Pomni&apos;s accusing him of being responsible for Kaufmo&apos;s abstraction. He&apos;s being 100% genuine here with no lies and tries to slip back into his safe character mask once he realises what he&apos;s doing.<br><br>His second mask is after Pomni asks why he didn&apos;t fight back. I don&apos;t think he&apos;s being honest here at all despite having small pupils. His first, safer mask wasn&apos;t working against Pomni. She wanted to see the real side of him. So he presented to her an image of him he knows the likes of Zooble see him as. The asshole. The one who doesn&apos;t care about anybody but himself. The one who enjoys seeing people suffer. Somebody not worth getting close to, the one who doesn&apos;t want any friends. He pretends to drop his mask and show who he really is by taking everything to the extreme. But nothing he said here was genuine. And to be honest, I think he hates being seen as that kind of person, but it&apos;s safer than being vulnerable and risking being rejected or losing someone he cares about. After saying all of that he instantly drops his act and shows immediate regret and pain and just despondently pleads to Pomni to stop putting him through this.<br><br>Essentially with his first silly mask he is in a constant state of cognitive dissonance where he wants to genuinely believe things don&apos;t matter or affect him, even if he doesn&apos;t entirely believe it, it&apos;s comforting and something he wants to believe. Or he treats things like fun and games and wants people to just play along and not take it too seriously. His second mask is just him lashing out when people dig too deep into him to give them a fake image of the real him so they don&apos;t get to see the actual vulnerable side of him. The real him is someone exhausted, lonely and scared.

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• AL

  @alexxisix · 8 months ago (edited)

  When Pomni hugs Jax, he shows genuine emotion, via the eyebrows, his smile and yes, his dilated pupils. Just because his pupils dialate sometimes does not mean they&apos;re always hiding emotion. Remember that when he was genuinely wanting to talk with Pomni in the bar, his eyes were dilated, he was taking in information, asking questions about her, genuine ones. &quot;How&apos;d you get here? Where did you work before this? A supermarket chain? How did you end up here?&quot;

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• MI

  @midcoregamer7625 · 8 months ago

  I&apos;d say that you extrapolated a bit too hard there. Jax&apos;s pupils are clearly more of a mood ring than a polygraph. Sure, he was showing &quot;real&quot; emotion in the argument, as opposed to the carefully curated persona he usually uses, but that doesn&apos;t necessarily mean he&apos;s telling the truth, or even that he himself believes it. Rather, he&apos;s saying what he believes will hurt Pomni, because he&apos;s genuinely scared of being close to someone again and wants to push her away. And as for the half-dilated pupils in the Chinese Room scene, he&apos;s letting the mask slip a little bit, but is still acting &quot;Jax enough&quot; to not go full-dot.

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• NA

  @nance486 · 8 months ago

  but he was incredulous and genuinely UPSET that he was right. Listen. Jax strikes me as a very intelligent character... with really low emotional EQ---by choice. He&apos;s basically destroyed his own emotional intelligence to make the circus survivable for himself, at SOME point in his tadc tenure. But he is consistently correct about deeper patterns within the circus. I don&apos;t think he is a CNA employee. I think he was an intelligent young man (with A LOT of issues) who already suffered severe emotional damage that made him want to turn himself &quot;off&quot; emotionally. Something happened that made emotional processes feel unsafe, so he steered away from emotion and invested hard in the cartoon identity the circus provided him. And when someone broke through his previous defenses on top of the defenses he built in circus to survive it? He formed strong bonds... which he then had to deal with losing, possibly due to his inability to deal with their own problems in circus on top of his problems and emotional difficulties outside of the circus... that he never resolved. He put those on pause, and tried to leave them on pause.<br><br>my guess is, Jax is a character who was already really damaged before the circus, then gained a sense of hope through friendships with Ribbit and Kaufmo inside of tadc... only for that hope to be utterly shattered when first Ribbet abstracted, and then Kaufmo. Again, possibly due to his own pre-existing emotional need to distance when he feels things are getting dangerous for him.<br><br>Judging by the fact that he is the only character who gets a close up following Ragatha&apos;s slip-up/reveal of what sounds like severe emotional abuse from her mother... his reaction is silence and dejection/somber contemplation. This is NOT typical of Jax. I think it says something about Jax&apos;s own backstory that this was his reaction to Ragatha&apos;s truth, when he refused to give everyone his own true story. And also, why was he the only one to be given that close-up reaction? There&apos;s SOMETHING there. Maybe I am reading too far into it, but thus far &quot;camera work and positioning&quot; has seemed significant. I have no reason to believe otherwise in terms of this scene, &nbsp;and it might be lampshading(?), kind of. Like, how he hates his own vulnerability, guards it closely, and overcorrects so hard when he does actually show it. <br><br>I dunno, folks. Jax reads to me like a really damaged person who is protecting himself at all costs. To the point that he is fully able to hurt others by protecting himself, never mind if it hurts him to do so himself. Someone who is so desperate to protect themselves has definitely been hurt enough times to fear further pain, and definitely enough to push other people away even when he does want connection. The priority becomes... exactly that. Protect yourself, no matter how much it hurts---because if you don&apos;t, you stand a really good chance of being hurt even worse.<br><br>He isn&apos;t &quot;just the funny one&quot;. He&apos;s also &quot;the terrified one&quot;. And... he&apos;s so, so fucking young. His coping mechs? Absolutely do not read as &quot;built in-circus&quot;. they read as built outside, and refined within.<br><br>Sorry for the novel, guys. Love ya!

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• DE

  @DeGourdBerryFunnyCake · 6 months ago

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpSBQMulpCQ&amp;t=1085">18:05</a> ok kinda off topic but the way Pomni looks at Jax shows how she feels him and cares about him she didn&apos;t vote yes cuz she thought Jax would feel uncomfortable in that dress

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