Yes, I watched the leaked copy of TADC in badly subtitled Portuguese. I know, I'm an evil monster who hates art and artists, I should be sentenced to eternity in The Circus, etc. Throw your tomatoes. When you're done, here are some thoughts.
§ It's good! ^
I'm not particularly active in online communities, but it seems like a lot of people were disappointed by the finale. I'm not really sure what they were expecting. (I hope they will give it another chance on final release. I'm sure there are tons of small details, translation errors, etc., that will add up to a very different viewing experience.) It maintained the same tone and quality as the rest of the series, although it leaned very much to the dark and serious side of things like episode 8.
If anything, it filled in way more gaps in the backstory than I expected. The creators could have easily just left everything ambiguous and milked the show for the next 5 years, making it up as they went. This unsatisfying approach to storytelling is common in television. If you're disappointed by TADC, did you ever watch, say, Battlestar Galactica?
I think fans build a series up in their head and love it so much that they expect the finale to transcend the entire medium and totally blow their minds, but that just isn't a realistic expectation. Maybe you're sad it's over --- understandable! --- but it isn't the show's job to be so amazing as to overcome that emotion.
In my opinion, the finale successfully threaded the needle of an ending that isn't too sad or too happy. I like a bummer ending, but a lot of people don't, and that's fine. They're characters we care about. We must imagine Pomni happy. But the happiness has to come at a cost.1 Speaking of...
§ Jax ^
I really like how they wrapped up Jax's story. It did not go at all how I expected and it undercut a lot of dumb tropes. For the last few episodes, it seemed like they might be building up to a redemption arc for him. There was a big focus on the poor asshole's feelings that I just didn't really care about. There are a lot of shows that encourage us to sympathize with abusive men,2 a phenomenon I've seen described as "himpathy". The finale swerves hard away from this perspective despite spending a lot of time on the character.
I'd had this idea for a while that Jax was the way he was as a response to the trauma of losing his friends who abstracted. The finale shuts that the fuck down and shows us he was a piece of shit long before that happened. From what we see in his memories --- granted that he's psychotically depressed and likely to blame himself for everything --- he's the reason his friends died (abstracted). He killed his girlfriend Ribbit with relentless abuse and this in turn took down Kaufmo. Even worse, he did it to punish her for caring about him and allowing him to be "weak". He feels immense guilt about his behavior but repeatedly chooses to double down and torment himself instead of improving as a person.
This made the show more realistic. Abusers all have a sob story for why they act the way they do. They don't really change, and certainly won't unless they want to. They can't be fixed by being loved harder. The best you can really do sometimes is try to limit their blast radius. This is made quite literal in the show when they pen up abstracted-Jax in a pillow fort. What else can you do?
There's a scene where Pomni makes one last effort to reach Jax after he's abstracted and it seems like she's going to succeed, that the power of her love will overcome. If this had happened I would have really hated the finale! It would be so trite and confirm my worries about this series as a himpathy generator.
But that isn't what happens. And because of that, the scene is so much more powerful. We're shown that Pomni still cares about Jax despite what a piece of shit he is, and she's brave enough to be vulnerable to him... and it doesn't count for jack shit. It moves the focus off of the sad shithead and onto Pomni, with her fierce willingness to love and not give up on her friends. Jax refuses to change, and that's sad, but it doesn't really matter. There will always be harmful people in our lives and it can be a real challenge to maintain your ability to love in the face of that. Pomni succeeds.
§ Caine ^
Unlike Jax, Caine does get a redemption arc. Or rather, he gets a redemption reprogramming; all he really had to do was expel the blue code bubble. I can understand this aspect being unsatisfying, since it doesn't fit with what we'd expect from a human character, but I think it actually makes perfect sense for Caine. He's not a digital reincarnation of a human, he's a digital native. He may be sentient, but he's much closer to code than they are.
Caine actually is the god of The Circus. He's facing the same existential terror and personal insecurity as the rest of them, but with full responsibility for everything that happens. He could collapse under the weight of the guilt like Jax, but he doesn't. Unlike a human (or bunny rabbit) he can just split off the part of himself that tells him he's worthless and everyone's worthless and he shouldn't even try. And he does! Go Caine! Unlike the rest of the characters, as far as we know he never had a life before The Circus. He's still growing up.
My only real gripe on this aspect is I feel they kind of ruined the elegant abstract AI animation by bashing viewers over the head with it. We can easily infer that the red bubble is Caine and the blue Bubble is another AI he "ate" without the quick cuts between the 2D shapes and 3D characters to drive home what they represent. It's not subtle at all and felt like they were trying to cater to fondleslab-touching mouthbreathers who don't understand anything that isn't spelled out for them.
And yeah, I mean, I would have preferred he stay dead. He didn't offer much to the story besides a "your outie is..." session. The humans could have figured out how to access Google themselves with their newfound computer powers. But it does kinda balance out the loss of Jax.
§ Keep thy mind in hell and despair not, or: the horrors persist but so do we ^
You could describe The Amazing Digital Circus simplistically but accurately as a show about people trapped in a digital hell. Certainly Caine's efforts throughout the series pushed it in that direction. And yet, by the end of the finale, we see that that isn't quite accurate. The Circus is hell in the same way real life is hell.
The only people doomed to eternal3 torment are the ones like Jax, whose belief that they're trapped in hell becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Pomni is the hero of the series because she recognizes this. She's a natural leader who transforms their entire situation by her willingness to adapt to difficult circumstances and to tell people how she really feels --- by sharing both her love for her friends and harsh truths for Caine. Pomni is an absurdist hero who really does love rolling rocks around.
"Life is what you make of it" isn't exactly a new idea, but it's refreshing to see it engaged with in such an unflinching way. We are all trapped in this world and it sometimes seems to last forever. We will all eventually die and it might be absolutely horrible. People we love will die and there's nothing we can do about it. Sometimes people make our lives hell just because they can. Sometimes we make our own lives hell and never recover.
I have a great deal of experience with severe depression. It's easy to look at fictional hells, in any form, and map them onto real life; when you're suffering, you're in hell, by definition. It's easy to identify all the ways the world has made you suffer and conclude that the world is just hell. (In fact, I've developed this notion as a pet theory and have some ideas about making a game with the premise; see Anubis.) But how can you account for the people --- the many people, in fact --- who are happy in spite of it all? If they're living in hell, they must have found a loophole. Pomni is one of them. By exploiting the "loophole" --- caring about people and speaking her truth --- she shows they were never really in hell at all.
I'm not a Pomni, but I don't think I'm quite a Jax, either. I'm more like Ragatha or one of the others who need Pomni around to remind them there's always a loophole. I suspect most people are like this. The great thing is, you don't have to be superhuman to be a Pomni. She's the hero of the story, but she's not really all that special; she's naïve and insecure and ultimately just another rando. She still needs a little help from her friends. She just tried her best.
§ Footnotes ^
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One of the complaints I've seen is "why can't they un-abstract people now that they have admin powers?" Well, for one: that takes away the stakes. There would be no emotional sting to the abstractions. This isn't hell anymore, but it ain't heaven either. Two: the finale strongly suggests that it's up to the abstracted person to decide to come back. Three: use your imagination. Maybe it's really hard to fix them but they eventually figure it out. Or at least manage to delete them. Write a fanfic or something. <-|
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The finale confirms that part of why Jax is such an asshole is toxic masculinity and repressed femininity (hence why he reacted so strongly to being force-femmed in the baseball episode). We see a mental version of him in the maid outfit being nonbinary "ironically". We learn his dad was an abusive patriarch and his mom enforced the same strict masculinity on him. The moment that causes his big break with Ribbit is not only when he opens up to her about his past, it's when she puts her bow on his head, he likes it, then Kaufmo at the door makes him panic and take it off. These are familiar experiences to transfems, and it's tragic that he couldn't grow a spine, grow the fuck up, stop the macho bullshit, and take some damn estrogen. <-|
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We don't know exactly how fast time passes in The Circus compared to the meat world, but it's probably safe to assume someone will switch the server off eventually. It seems that nobody is even aware the program is running. <-|