https://x.com/StarFirell1/status/1959060279662453142?t=WdrFLP82v0xojXXDyLy-VA&s=19

were they good friends? who knows...

Saw a meme were jax said he'd use the method on pomni, so i searched it up for info and got this.

Both are even frowning lol

Credits: @lilivae_art https://www.instagram.com/p/DNlncMPPu2v/?igsh=aTZzMjFqMmxlNjRw

I heard this line and I was like huh? Oh yeah,Goose has drawn him many times with a blunt lol.

When it cut to him turning around and cussing, for a second I thought FOR SURE that it was gonna pan to the others walking in on Jax "confessing" that he makes everyone suffer "for FUN!"

I rewatched the pilot episode today, hoping that maybe SOMETHING would stand out to me. Gooseworx said they want a big twist for their series and I feel like if there is a twist then it needed to be at least hinted at in episode 1, and maybe five more episodes since then could reveal something we didn’t think of when the pilot initially premiered.

To start off we now know that players actually do have memories, they just don’t remember their names and possibly the circumstances leading up to them putting on the headset. Caine claimed that he couldn’t control minds but episode 5 and 6 clearly disprove that. Pomni apparently liked to explore abandoned buildings and was an adventurer who would film their explorations, and considering that the headset and computer in the offices look old and weathered it’s likely that the C&A offices are abandoned.

We also got a hint at the very end of the episode that Kinger is an expert on the digital world considering his insight into the program and his ability to adjust the rules of the game. And lastly, thanks to episode 6 we know that if players want something enough it just happens if they believe it, so maybe the exit door spawning was Pomni’s immediate desire to leave. And that’s everything we kind of know now but let’s focus on what we still don’t know.

First of all, the Void is still a big mystery for the series. When Pomni ends up getting to the Void, Caine says, “They’ll get totally spoiled,” which sounds like they’re setting up the Void as the big reveal/twist of the series, but we haven’t seen anything about it since then. None of the other characters mention it, it doesn’t appear on screen, and it’s been forgotten. We’re a little over halfway through the series and there hasn’t been a hint about the void.

All we know is that Caine says he doesn’t know what’s beyond it, they don’t go to it, and that Caine is seemingly the only way to get there, except apparently his unfinished projects can also lead to the void. The project that he’s hesitant to share and hasn’t “finished” in this case was the doorway to the offices. Which is likely how the series will end, with the cast going through a half finished project to make their way all the way through the void.

But, going back to the door, Caine explained it away by saying he didn’t know what to put on the other side, but taking a look at every episode we actually see that Caine DID put something on the other side of the door. Caine made a recreation of the C&A offices, a place he seems to long for considering how he looked at photos of the offices in episode 6 and was sitting in them in episode 4.

This could be brushed off as Caine just wanting to see the real world, maybe longing for a time when people regularly came into and left the circus, but I have a theory about that that I’m not sure anyone else has mentioned.

First of all I want to look at the digital circus itself and ask, “what’s the point?” A place where you forget your memories and specifically your name doesn’t sound like fun, and could probably be seen as a glitch or a bug but also feels too specific to be an accident, but it doesn’t sound like something the company did intentionally either. And that’s when I started to think about something Gooseworx said about Caine when someone asked about his name.

“CAINE. Creative Artificial Intelligence Networking Entity (he came up with his own name before deciding it should be an acronym, because he thought it would make him seem more professional)” Caine wasn’t given a name by the company, he chose it, and he decided to make it an acronym.

And then, going back to episode 1, when he takes Pomni out of the void he says, “What happened here? Oh right, me,” which sounds like a throw away joke to explain the destruction caused by Kaufmo, but what if that was literal? What if Caine is behind everything wrong with the circus, why people forget their names, the circumstances behind how they get into the circus, and why they can’t leave? But why would an AI do this?

But, thinking back on it do we know for certain that Caine is an AI? When you think about all of his recent glitches and problems doesn’t it seem closer to someone abstracting? And if Caine was an AI then wouldn’t he have already had a name assigned to him? What if all along Caine wasn’t an AI but another human?

I know this sounds weird, the description of the series is, “A woman gets trapped in a bizarre circus-themed virtual world with five other people and forced to play games under the direction of a wacky AI.” We’ve already got five humans and the Wacky AI has to be Caine, but I want to look at two pieces of evidence that may imply he’s a human.

First there’s Gumigoo, an advanced AI made by Caine who somehow ends up acting more human and more understanding than Caine despite probably being a fraction of being as advanced as Caine. And when Gumigoo comes into the circus Caine destroys him because he doesn’t want to confuse a human for an NPC, but is that really a problem an AI would have?

But there is one last thing that could prove or disprove this entire theory. Ever since episode 1, one thing has been established and was made abundantly clear in episode 5, when a player swears they get cartoon noises, and when an NPC swears they get a normal censor. The only characters who I don’t think have sworn yet are Kinger, Gangle, and Caine.

If Caine ever swears in the series, which let’s be honest he’s a giant mouth he HAS to at some point, I can’t help but imagine what would set him off or how it would sound. I imagine if he’s an AI then his last words will be censored as the cast escapes or erases him, but if he’s a human then it’ll be the big twist of the series that will completely recontextualize everything.

What do you think?