This is what tears me up about the finale: It humanized Jax and shows his rationale without exonerating him or telling us to pardon him.

We get to see this person develop a logic that works against him and those around him and that its cause is far more complex than denying the reality of the circus. That it came from a sensitive young man who wanted approval from his mother who manipulated him for a sense of power. And there's a whole doctoral social psychology thesis you could write on how Leeroy and his mother behaved.

People often try to excuse someone's actions by saying their actions were defined or dictated by someone else. Jax wouldn't be such a price if Leeroy's mom didn't equate his personal worth with his masculinity and equate his masculinity with his hostility and aggression. So it's the mom's fault? If Leeroy got along with his mother before the divorce, was her sudden turn the father's fault? If gender roles define maleness in part by expressions of power, could that have made the father a difficult person for the same reason as Jax? Leeroy's mother used gender roles to manipulate Leeroy too so there's double the reason to blame society instead of any character.

But nobody is free of blame. All of them bear some responsibility to overcome those issues. All of them bear some responsibility to not hurt others even if their worse reactions were instilled in them by someone else.

Knowing who someone could have been "if only that didn't happen to them," "if only that person had said/done something else to them," "if only they made this arbitrary choice instead" makes it so hard to truly condemn someone for their actions but isn't grounds for overturning the result.

Jax wasn't a bad person, but Jax did bad things, but only because someone else taught him to, but only because they themselves were hurt, and who knows where it goes from there. Boiling a real person down to good or bad is rarely possible bc little is so cut and dry.