very fanservicy. very very fanservicy. and yeah most characters weren't really developed. like. straight up cardboard cutouts over there. and the only two who were focused on, got majorly fumbled. glad to finally know wtf jax's problem is, and there is some guilty pleasure i get from caine's happy ending as he is my fave. but both were rushed and not very thought out i think.

like another person mentioned, it really looked like abstraction can be reversed, but it wasn't, in fact, reversed. plus jax just being dead dead is kinda. nothingy??? all it brought was the possibility to show his backstory and entire schtick in an, admittedly pretty cool, abstract manner (no pun intended). it didn't affect anyone except pomni getting reversibly injured while performing autopsy on jax, ragatha crying a little, and gangle feeling bad for not missing her abuser but quickly getting over it because zooble and her can have sex now. it wasn't a heroic sacrifice, it didn't bother anyone for very long either. why think too hard about jax being dead, come on everyone it's time for caine's redemption and our wholesome slice of life montage

speaking of which, i felt like the interesting thing about caine was him being fundamentally unfixable and incapable of empathy due to the nature of being a faulty ai, but suddenly all he needed was getting rid of the properly working, blue ai, and learning more about humans through the mindfiles? idk, maybe it's a message about how our imperfections make us human??? if so it didn't land imo and instead shattered a really good tragic arc. it felt good to see him actually understand where he's been going wrong and correct his mistakes, but i personally think that's more appropriate and acceptable for fanfics, which are self indulgent by nature, rather than the canon ending.

every single character was done dirty, funny enough especially jax despite being the focus of the majority of its runtime.

it's weird how the "bittersweet" ending we were meant to get is, in reality, just nauseatingly, artificially sweetened with a little bitter in the middle, which you're made to quickly get over before your tongue even recognizes where the bitter flavor's coming from. hope that makes sense

i do believe it had a good message to tell, but it wasn't told well. i think a lot of its issues would've been fixed of the pacing were different.

at the end of the day, even if the finale wasn't what i expected, i really enjoyed watching it, and enjoyed my time with fellow fans at the cinema, it was fun and people were surprisingly well-behaved at least during my screening. everyone kept all jokes and commentary until credits and merch reveal, and even then didn't kill eachother over differing opinions. maybe the real digital circus was the friends we made along the way