23 - Jax and the death of the audience: a personal opinion

The release of The Amazing Digital Circus' last episode has sparked a lot of fascinating conversation just hours after release, mostly revolving around the character Jax and what her (or his) story means in that last episode. I'll try not to post spoilers at all here, but if you haven't watched it (and you're the type who enjoys watching independent animation), now's a great time to catch up on The Amazing Digital Circus in my opinion. It did (at least on Bluesky, I care about my mental health too much to want to know what people on other social media sites think) spark a lot of discussion about subtext, media literacy and something people brought up about "death of the audience". I assumed it's an antithesis of "death of the author", a something that speaks about the abysmal state of how we read, process and interpret a work of art. And to be fair, this mostly started coming into mind because of this hilarious post: I've since learned it isn't an entirely new concept that came about…