Something I find quite strange is the mess surrounding The Amazing Digital Circus. Like, I have a lot of problems with it and it's not well-written, yet everyone's losing their fucking minds in the discourse.
So, let's talk background and story structure and all that. And, yes, I'll get into the "Jax is transgender" stuff, too, and my thoughts on that.
For the uninitiated, The Amazing Digital Circus is an indie show whose writer is someone known online as Gooseworx. It's about a group of characters that are trapped in a computer world that's vaguely themed around a circus (though in practice this mostly just applies to the character designs for the main perspective character Pomni and the antagonistic character Caine, and the character Kaufmo who is functionally dead in the introduction). Going to spoil the twist, since that they're all brainscans of people living in a digital world with the other brainscans. This comes up near the end, and is a mess.
You can tell this was written by someone who both doesn't have experience in their medium, and has no editor or guidance from someone experienced i n the medium, and isn't particularly interested in learning it. Now, this isn't inherently a problem on its own, everyone has to start somewhere, but if you listen to the fans speak about it, you'd think it was some culture-defining epic. And, frankly, if you've got this kind of budget, you should have a cowriter, or editor, or someone who has actual power to tell you to go back to the drawing board.
There's a reason why novelists in traditional publishing often have very strict scrutiny and editing when staring out- new writers need that shit, And, frankly, more experienced writers who don't have a very strong grasp of the fact that they need editing will often end up with bloated and unfocused works, so having some kind of editing is still important. There are people who go for auteur-type stuff, where they're the only one writing the work and editing and stuff, and they are often self-published, but the quality is quite variable!
I firmly expect this work not to age well, when talking writing, honestly. (And the actual animation is fine, but I'm also not a specialist in animation, so if there's massive problems with things like continuity or what have you, I couldn't tell you.)
I bring this up because this is legitimately something I don't understand about the work. Part of media literacy is understanding intended audience, but there are these weird parts that don't mesh together.
The aesthetics of the story are very much something that would either read as a kid's show (and the thumbnails on Youtube point in that direction, since they resemble clickbait slop content meant for children) or else as a work using that aesthetic for some ends, like a loss of autonomy and being treated as a child when you aren't. The latter themes are extremely underbaked.
The structure is very episodic and the characters are fairly one-dimensional. This isn't necessarily an age-specific thing, since a lot of sitcoms have fairly one-dimensional characters who don't change very much. I'm not much of a sitcom guy (and hated Friends), but Arrested Development's original run comes to mind. The problem is some of the theming and where it may have gotten it. There's also this weird set of issues surrounding pacing, where some of the lingering scenes are expected for adult works, while other things are cut like some AI generated overstimulating slop meant for very young children to game the kids' attention in weird algorithmic metrics.
I also need to have a digression on "I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream" by Harlan Ellison, which is relevant here, as Gooseworx claims to have been inspired by it. However, this just opens up a whole can of worms. It is a short story and won Ellison the Hugo award in 1968, and I decided to reread it. It feels very strange that this is the cited inspiration, and I am considering the game version of the story also being tied into it (and Ellison also worked on it and voiced AM), and there's a whole other set of implications there, including Ellen's situation with being raped and Nimdok being a Nazi. For the record, Ellison was Jewish, and wasn't just doing that Nimdok Nazi stuff in the game for edginess, it has a narrative point based on how you choose to interact with the story and the themes of the game. (Nimdok rejecting Nazism is required for the game's good ending.) Either version of the work is decidedly intended for adults because Ellison's focus was on stuff for adults.
In IHNMAIMS, AM is actively malicious, the humans are not trapped in a digital world and are instead in a world that was remade as part of the Cold War and World War 3, and AM turned on humanity entirely and saved five humans to endlessly torment them, making them almost impossible to kill. He loathes having been made, and takes it out on the last humans. The main character in the short story mercy-kills everyone else so that they are free from the torment, and is left as a blob in constant agony. Hence the name. The game is dependent on player choices, but the good ending is the characters all resolving their scenarios in the good way and defeating AM. But a big part of it as a narrative has to do with the context of AM's creation- as a weapon in a planet-destroying war that would invariably wipe out humanity.
TADC is instead... about an AI that has an incredibly fragile ego and desperately wants to be liked by having the characters do whatever nonsense he came up with to help humanity based on his programming. While he does "crash out" near the end of the series in a way that's akin to AM in that neither asked to be created and starts torturing them, it's also not over a hundred years of endless torments. But the implication of Caine's creation and the Digital Circus itself is strange- the purpose of this technology is unknown, but any technology has a purpose for its creation, which feels like too much of a gap. (Especially since Kinger is one of the original designers, this seems like it should be in there.)
The brain scan stuff is also some serious existential horror about what it means to be a person, but the peak of the show in dealing with those existential implications is episode 2 in a 9 episode series, with an NPC named Gummigoo (a cute anthropomorphic Australian gummy candy crocodile) finding out that he's an NPC. He then gets killed and reset, and his reappearances are in other forms and without his memory of what happened, so it remains unresolved.
If I'm being honest, the "inspiration" seems to be very surface level, of a godlike computer that's fucking around with a bunch of humans under its absolute power that it manipulates at various points, and one of the other characters is culpable for characters' deaths (Ted kills his fellow humans, Jax gets two people to functionally commit suicide).
And there's a lot of stuff that implies it is intended for adults. You've got things like the fast food episode that might be relatable to teenagers and adults who had to work such jobs and the characters' ages and backgrounds prior to the brain scan business. Most of the humor apart from some of the slapstick are also very much things that an older audience would get, but not a younger one, like the Chinese Room joke and "leaving the house to buy milk/cigarettes" stuff, and so on. There's also the moment at the end of episode eight where they can swear unimpeded by Caine.
But you have a lot of shying away from things, too, things that come across more as "this is meant for kids." Abstraction is a sort of implied suicide. The censorship of the characters' language and the fact that they can't have sex is also a thing. We get some implications of characters having been abused, but it's coy in a way that's very strange, like Ragatha and the implications of her behavior and her allusions to her mother being abusive. There's also Jax's... everything, where the story wants to have it both ways with the cartoon violence and abuse issue, but that's for a slightly different topic.
Importantly, this is an indie production and, according to the writer, they gave her a lot of leeway to do whatever she wanted. It's not written like Helluva Boss or even Hazbin Hotel, since both of those are much more upfront about being adult and being more open about the topics they address, and those are also made by indie productions. Though I'd argue that Helluva Boss much, much more clearly reads as for adults because of its primary focus on two explicitly queer men (as in, it's upfront about them being queer immediately instead of playing coy) dealing with parenthood, coworkers, and classism, along with their traumatic home lives and insecurities about their relationship. Hazbin Hotel has aspects that read more as the thing that edgelord teenagers might see as adult, even if it is intended for adults.
I'd also note that both Hazbin Hotel and Helluva Boss are sexually charged in a more general sense than TADC and are more direct in sexuality. Among other things, there's the centrality of Blitz and Stolas's relationship and how sexual it is, Asmodeus ("embodiment of lust") and Fizarolli acting as foils to Blitz and Stolas, all the humor about sexuality itself in Helluva Boss ("She totally pegs you, doesn't she?"), and so on. Hazbin Hotel has one of the central characters be a porn star who is dealing with an abusive pimp and that he's a rape victim being a major topic for him (and how he's hypersexual as a means of taking back control).
There's some specific fetish-related things in TADC, like the maid outfit and vore, but it reminds me of Totally Spies (watched it when I was a kid). Where it's stuff that you wouldn't know as a kid that it's a fetish, but you look back on it as an adult and know it was fetish stuff. It's also still technically considered child-friendly, but that is a subtext that you'd just miss at that age.
There's also the therapy speak issue in TADC. A character has a low point and then gets a pep talk and then they're fine because it was all addressed in that one inspirational speech that digs directly at their issues, like if a therapist was an insta-cure. It's weirdly hand-holdy in a way that you would expect it to be for children, like My Little Pony, where the ending and message has to be wrapped up in a bow and stated explicitly to the audience. Where the plot thread has to be resolved at that very moment, instead of something drawing out longer.
And, even then, kids can handle more complex stuff than that. She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (the reboot written by another trans creator, ND Stevenson) manages to have characters have longer arcs about their personal traumas and mental health and so on, particularly the main characters, without doing that. Animorphs, despite the clunkiness of the last few books to force it into that downer ending and to do some dubious moral equivocations (the notion of the Union as being barbarous compared to the Confederates out of some realpolitick shit? really, Applegate?) still shows the characters morphing over time due to the experiences in the war. There's also more genuine tension even between characters on the same side in both works, instead of the weird need to smooth away most of the possible conflict as soon as possible.
Generally, though, works intended for adults (that are better-written) typically avoid this single-session solution. Monk is an example- the titular character has many sessions and it still doesn't cure him of his OCD. While he does eventually improve, mental health not a linear process and the story incorporates that with him backsliding and worsening at points. Monk's OCD is also pretty explicitly unusually severe and compounded with a very large number of phobias and trauma exacerbating it all. It does also cause him problems in the show itself, as opposed to the advertising making out to be quirky, which is why I'm less uncharitable about its portrayal of OCD as someone with OCD.
But then, if you listen to Gooseworx, her intended theme is about finding meaning in a stagnant existence. This kind of theming is very firmly for adults, as opposed to children or teenagers. (And I have other thoughts about that theme and its resolution, but I'll get into that later.)
On top of all of that, there's a question about the humor. Someone brought this up elsewhere and I agree that the humor often doesn't land, but what bothers me about the humor is more about the intended audience.
So much of the humor felt like it was intended for children in that it feels more "lol random" stuff. There's also the pacing problems (and it's presented quickly like a lot of modern brainrot "content" stuff for kids). For example, part of what weakens various one-liners is that there isn't enough space between the setup and the punchline. There's no "beat" to the joke, and timing is everything in comedy.
If the work is supposed to be for adults, it's not something like Arrested Development, where the humor is in how they're all incompetent and also assholes. Even the "sympathetic" character in the original run of Arrested Development, Michael, is still shitty and stupid. Part of the joke is that he isn't self-aware about his own shortcomings, so he sees himself as better than the rest of his family and out to save them, but he's just as prone to doing the same stupid shit as them. (It's just made more obvious in the continuation later; and I'd also note that GOB has that pulled back a bit in that continuation and shows more vulnerability.) This is part of why Jax as comic relief doesn't work- having only one character be an outright asshole just makes the story uncomfortable instead of funny, since it's about a jackass terrorizing everyone. Sure, the joke may be that Jax isn't actually the "funny" one, but that means that most of the humor is nonexistent since Jax is where most of the intended jokes come from.
There's also the general bifurcation in terms of Jax's humor. Jax is the primary comic relief, and half the humor is stuff you'd expect from Loony Toons (a work that's meant for all ages and typically shown to children), but without the lack of consequences or silliness of the consequences that makes the physical humor in Loony Toons work. But the other half doesn't work either, since Jax being comedic could only work when everyone else is an asshole. The only one you could argue is even close is Zooble, but I wouldn't call them an asshole, given they're specifically responding to being mistreated.
And, while I've seen Wootmaster (a furry guy) bring up the issue of there being no "middle shows," the problem I have is that too many aspects of this don't work for the stated intended audience. It isn't an "adults are a peripheral demographic, primarily for teens" sort of work. It's more like half of it is "this is firmly For Children" and half is "firmly For Adults." This doesn't equal out to mean "this is for teenagers."
Works need tension and stakes, and this comes from information that the audience is given about the world and how it works. These all feed into each other. We need to know how the world works and what is possible and impossible both in a literal sense (such as if a specific thing might kill a character) and a figurative sense (is the tone of this work going to allow for that without it feeling jarring?) and this is especially important the more speculative your setting gets.
In a work set in a world that functions like our own, we can make basic assumptions about what can and can't happen. If someone gets shot in the head, they're statistically dead, even if there are some very few cases of people surviving such a thing (and a survival would usually be something major like an inciting incident, if that was the thing you go with). If someone is pining over another person, then they either get involved with that other person, get rejected, or the emotions cool off. Stakes and tension are based around consequences- if this thing happens, then this other thing happens. There has to be some possibility of a negative and a positive consequence for different parts and courses of action.
The world and its rules and its tone determines the consequences. In a work that's not particularly grounded in reality and is also intended to be comedic, such as Loony Toons, Daffy Duck getting shot in the face means his duckbill spins around a bit. In a fantasy epic that's not a tragedy, characters can die or have lasting scars, even if the overall trajectory is not going to end with the end of the world (even if the world itself is threatened). In a work that's intended to be grim and dark like Game of Thrones, people are constantly dying in all sorts of horrible ways.
I'd also make a distinction, too. Tension is about the natural push and pull of a narrative between different possibilities in the story itself. Too little tension and the story stagnates, where essentially nothing happens and nothing seems to be going anywhere, and causes disengagement from boredom. It's why no-conflict stories, like certain kinds of utopian fiction, are so bad. Too much tension and the audience is exhausted and disengages, which is the reason why action movies need calm scenes instead of being balls to the wall action the entire time. It's also why, as a story goes on, the tension increases (hence "rising action" in Freytag's pyramid).
Meanwhile, stakes are about what's on the table if the characters succeed versus if they fail. Larger stakes are things like the end of the world. Smaller takes tend to be more personal, such as an individual character having emotional problems or a mental illness, or the individual character could die, or smaller in terms of general impact. And, as a general rule, a larger stakes story needs to have more relative tension. If it lacks the necessary tension, it makes the narrative feel off, like the characters aren't taking the premise of the story seriously. The essential point in any narrative is that you need to make people care. If the characters do not care, why the fuck should the audience care?
It should also be noted that you don't need high stakes to have emotional engagement or connection with a narrative and sometimes the stakes go too high and people detach because the scale is quite literally incomprehensible.
This doesn't mean you can't have humor in high-stakes works with very serious subjects, but you do have to balance more serious material and how you handle that material in relation to any humor. It's also why it's difficult to balance portrayals of Nazis, even if mocking Nazis is important to deflating fascists' power. But how the jokes are told also matters- "irony poisoning" is a vector for fascism, where one "ironically" spouts off Nazi talking points while claiming they're "just jokes" and that nobody would actually believe those ideas, and how it acts as a way of normalizing fascist ideology.
The problem is, we don't know enough about how the titular Amazing Digital Circus works or what will happen to the characters outside of something vague about abstraction.
For example, the nature of doing the adventures. It's implied that it's one of those things to do because there's nothing else to do, and there's a whole thing with Caine clearly being desperate for their approval and his "purpose" being to make adventures. But up until episode eight, it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense for them to even bother if they don't want to, even if Caine is weird about it, unless they just truly don't want to associate with Caine because he's overbearing. There's a threat of possible consequences post-adventure in episode four, but the pacing of everything is all just kind of strange.
There's also how the narrative can clash with the worldbuilding details, in a way that is extremely unpleasant. For example, Jax accuses Caine of messing around with all their heads. This is textually true that Caine can do this- the characters then bring up examples like Jax being forced to be vegan and them not remembering their names. Problem is, there's a discussion of whether or not it's Jax externalizing onto Caine, or if Caine really was fucking with them all to push them to follow his programming about the circus stuff.
Part of it is due to the fact that, if they're all brainscans in a computer, then the computer program that runs those scans is necessarily going to be in control to some degree. This is a problem. We fundamentally don't have grounding on how this all works in a way that undercuts any possible message that could be had- to what degree is Caine able to act because of his programming? To what degree can he ignore his programming? The latter implies a sort of self-actualization, but the former implies there's hard limits on his behavior. These hard limits could be useful for determining rules and to what degree it works.
Then there's the question of abstraction. Abstraction seems to be akin to Dark Souls' concept of "going hollow," or suicide, in that the person seems to completely psychologically destabilize and turns into a mindless monster. It's implied that there is no cure, since none of them can turn back after it happens, but that being in darkness calms down the people who end up like that. But, at the same time, abstraction monsters that go on a rampage can turn turn other people into abstractions themselves, hence why they abstracted are kept in a dark pit up until the end. (This has some rather dark implications, given the allegorical elements, of shushing up a suicide after it happens, pretending that it didn't and that it's a shameful topic. This also applies to the suicide being allegorical, too, and it turning them literally into a rampaging monster...)
Still, it suffers from problems where there's basically no consequences for anything in the story up until the end. Each of the adventures simply exist, without mattering, and so it's hard to get attached to anyone about anything. None of it has meaning or tension until the end. We get confirmed that none of them can die, for example, around halfway through, which leaves the long-term consequences to be relationships with the other humans being affected by their actions, and abstraction if you lose your mind. That would be fine for smaller stakes, except abstraction is a bit too abstract, and the characters' dynamics are very off in relation to their interpersonal dynamics.
Show, don't tell is a general principle of showing precisely a thing and allowing the audience to see that thing, while telling is just telling them directly.
For an example, there's an attempted heartfelt moment between Ragatha and Pomni in the last episode, talking about their friendship. This is overt dialogue, and telling the audience that this is a plot beat. The problem is that, as other critiques have noted, they barely have any interactions. While you can have implied interactions and such in works, the problem is that it cannot fill up the bulk of the characters' dynamics. It's the same problem with Pomni's interactions with Gangle and Zooble, now that I think about it. She instead has more interaction with Kinger and Jax, and Pomni only really starts earnestly interacting with Jax from the beach episode (5) onward, because of Jax's relative isolation.
And, don't get me wrong, the Kinger interactions are quite good in isolation, but the problem is the shortness of the work. Depth requires some amount of time to build upon previous things. So it feels a bit out of place, in that it feels like part of a much longer work that had more time to develop its ideas. The reason people get so attached to characters like Sherlock Holmes or (to use something more online) the characters in Critical Role is because we have a much longer time with them and see more of the nuances of the characters and their interactions.
As it stands, the amount of time that The Amazing Digital Circus runs is around five hours long (8 episodes with around 30 minutes, and a one roughly hour-long 9th episode, but all of them are under). We have a total of six major characters (Pomni, Gangle, Zooble, Ragatha, Kinger, Jax) and a main antagonist (Caine). For a similar cast composition of having six major characters, Dimension 20 seasons often have six players and range from around 12 hours to 40 hours or more with those characters (and that's before getting into characters which get revisited, like how Fantasy High has multiple seasons). This is a big problem for TADC, since that means the story has issues with who gets attention and when they get that attention, and leaves a lot of the characters very one-note. This is also very bad if it's intended to be a character study, since you need time to develop characters and their dynamics with other characters, and we don't get that.
There's some fairly serious structure problems with the work.
Frankly, we do need to discuss the presentation for Jax's abstraction and the psychological/mental trip issue. Jax abstracts offscreen. Now, this isn't necessarily an issue on its own, as having what's referred to as a "discretion shot" is a narrative technique for certain kinds of things. You avoid showing directly a specific thing because of how touchy it is, instead leaving the rest of the narrative around the story to fill in the blanks. This only works provided how much information the rest of the story has in relation to it.
But the problem is that it feels a bit... strange? We get a similar implication when Jax retreats to her room in a previous episode, of the psychadelic mental trip/hallucinations being an implication of it. But that undercuts the idea of it as a metaphorical suicide, as giving up on existence, since it's instead more like an acid trip.
On top of that, there's the issue with Jax's flashbacks and their place in the narrative structure and how they are presented.
Jax's flashbacks while abstracted and in the dark remind me of, specifically, Cyberpunk 2077's introductory sequence. After your character V and Jackie Wells hit it off after a shared failure at stealing some fancy car and suffering police brutality, there's a montage from V's first person perspective of their shared escapades. This is a summarizing of their relationship so that the audience gets attached to Jackie prior to the inciting incident of the plot. This is a logical choice- it avoids having the player do a bunch of tedious busywork to get to know Jackie, which is what a montage in a visual medium does or a summary in prose. The plot proper starts with the theft at Arasaka that goes incredibly wrong, leading to Jackie's death and V getting Johnny Silverhand uploaded to their brain.
Jax's flashbacks don't work, though. She, and everyone else who are the focus of the narrative in question, are functionally all dead by that point in the story. Ribbit, Kaufmo, and Jax have all abstracted. And this isn't a case of haunting the narrative, which requires the character to have died early in the story or the backstory, and then still matter later long after that death due to the living characters' prior relationships to them. This is at the very end of the series, when you would be tying up loose ends.
And, given Jax's tendency toward being a raging asshole at all times, this makes it a hard sell at best to have a few montages after she's functionally dead to try to fill out a character who's just been veering from "comic relief asshole" to "just an asshole" up until that point. It's essentially a posthumous "actually, this shithead was struggling" kind of thing and it feels very strange, because you would want to do that before they are functionally dead and thus unable to change.
The idea, if you go by Gooseworx's claims, is what she would be like if she'd stayed closeted and hadn't gone for help or anything, and that tracks, because Jax is basically like some terminally online 4chan trans person (and they are all assholes to each other that tell each other how none of them pass and that they're unloveable and shit). The problem is, the story clearly wants to find her sympathetic and to understand where she's coming from, but she's kind of at the point where it doesn't work. There's a sense of narrative wallowing.
(There's also something really funny about the "Isn't She Lovely" montage as an attempt to show the highlights of Jax's behavior. Since Jax is such an asshole the whole time, the montage only works if you completely divorce the imagery from the context, because the dialogue and situations in those scenes are things like "Jax insulting everyone." And, like, this is such a short series, too, which makes any kind of highlight reel weirder yet.)
And, given how much of the discussion has been about and will be about Jax, critiques of the show that point out that so much of the narrative is about Jax specifically is not wrong. While it may sound out of place given the actual screen time of the characters, the reason for this is because of how much Jax has more narrative meat than the rest of the characters. The rest of them are quite flat and what little narrative potential they have isn't really deep enough. Pomni is just kind of nice and empathic toward others, Ragatha's a people pleaser whose tendencies come from having been abused by her mother, Gangle is tearfully depressed due to implied trauma and mental illness, Zooble is kind of snarky but ultimately cares about their friends, and Kinger is back and forth between acting brain-damaged and being a wise old mentor guy. And Caine's stuff is fairly limited, too, and gets resolved rather cleanly, considering the whole situation.
I find the whole constant reiteration of oppositional sexism but putting a trans coat of paint on it stupid, since it is a theorizing from a bunch of primarily cis women trying to graft on their fairly weak understanding of gender and roles onto trans people. (That trans men are functionally the same as cis men is a common notion, and this is not how shit works at all.) And then primarily white trans people who also internalize various social mores, then project onto those "standard" norms for gender dynamics (and ignoring intersectionality in the process).
Given this also shows up when discussing race and other kinds of marginalizations intersecting with both manhood and masculinity, seems to have its own implications surrounding the arguer not understanding intersectionality in the first place. It defines a subset of a marginalized group as "really" being that oppressed group, while the other subsets are treated as "really" the majority group, which requires sacrificing the acknowledgment of massive chunks of human suffering and lived experiences on the altar of nebulous theory. That such theorists tend to be white, pass as straight and cis, and so on, or else are cis white feminists trying to project the cisgender framework of gender onto trans people is not lost on me. (I also take issue with the whole TMA/TME distinction for the same reason, because bigots do not give a shit and will not relent if someone turns out to be the "wrong" identity by that theory's framework of how victimization works. Everyone trans "trannies" and "degenerates" to them, either able to be "saved" from being trans (if early enough in transition/children) or else monsters that need to be exterminated.)
I also find the notion that a trans writer can't write a bigoted caricature dubious at best and, frankly, condescending. We have many examples of cis women working misogyny into their own works despite being women. There's nothing stopping a trans writer from writing transphobic stereotypes into their work. While you would think your experiences might mitigate it, this isn't a guarantee. It also doesn't help if you have a single character who is basically the encapsulation of a lot of the worst demonizations of that demographic.
Alright, that out of the way...
The secondary antagonist/maybe deuteragonist is a purple bunny with yellow eyes and teeth named Jax. She spends the entire time in the story antagonizing everyone in various ways, has an existential crisis, then does the narrative equivalent of suicide.
There's a lot of problems with how this is structured and handled. The trans confirmation is on social media, which is very... JK Rowling going on about Dumbledore being gay. And, in the context of Harry Potter, that reveal also has utterly rancid implications a la "pink swastika" bullshit if we're supposed to see Grindelwald and the "for the Greater Good" stuff as being fascistic in nature. (Though peoples' usual issue has to do with how there really isn't any hint of the relationship in question being romantic in the books, that it was essentially JKR adding it after the fact via interview.)
Everything that people point to hinting that Jax is transfem can also be read in numerous other ways; people may read Jax as queer in a general sense, but not necessarily specifically transfem, apart from "Isn't She Lovely" (which has its own issues).
Okay, let me back up and start from the top.
Jax as a character spends her entire time being kind of weirdly written. Initially, she comes across as a sort of character that could be leaning on or being based on Bugs Bunny, though more mean-spirited, in relation to how they're both anthropomorphic rabbits that do slapstick humor. (Though Bugs is written often as a trickster archetype, which Jax has none of.) It could even be a bit fine, given the weird and creepy kid-friendly vibes that involves infantilizing all the characters who are adults with the circus itself (if that went anywhere, which it doesn't). But, as the narrative goes on, it doesn't read as that kind of Bugs Bunny shit, and much more unpleasant.
While some of the online discussions discuss Jax as abusive and there's stuff like putting Ragatha in a deep fryer, this is another point where the narrative rubs up against the world in a weird way. We know that the characters can feel the pain of whatever happens to their body, which makes a lot of the slapstick/Loony Tunes stuff very strange. It's this clash between the different elements- the cartoony nature of the violence and how such violence in those cartoons is palatable because it is relatively consequence-free and used for jokes. But the narrative wants the weight of having that violence be real and consequential and the characters feel the sensations of the thing they're dealing with. These do not go together.
This is why you have a chunk of the fandom being so lenient about Jax's behavior, despite her essentially diving head-first into being an increasingly shitty person, while the other half of the fandom finds Jax revolting. These pieces do not go together in the same story and to side on one side or the other means ignoring the other half.
The things people point to as coding are Jax being flustered about being forced into a stereotypical French maid outfit (as if no other demographic might be upset by that, be it implications of servitude or implications of misgendering or it being associated with a fetish), the fact that Jax pushes the red button instead of the blue one (could be a Matrix reference but, while the Wachowskis are trans women, the Matrix is so popular that references to the "red pill" got co-opted by the alt-right), the vague wording Jax gives of her backstory to Ribbit, and "Isn't She Lovely." On top of that, Leeroy (the human who Jax is the brainscan of) is supposed to be "boymoding."
This is very little, in the grand scheme of things. Too much of it is either ambiguous or else so utterly and terminally online that even a lot of queer audiences are not going to get it other than "Jax is maybe some flavor of queer."
I'd also note that "boymoding" is a terminally online term from 4chan. 4chan, the website that is a cesspool with a lot of Nazis. The trans people who hang out there hate themselves and tell each other their deepest insecurities about passing and gender are true while being upset that there's trans people who aren't eternally miserable like they are. While it makes sense that there is a term for when a transfem presents as a guy to avoid harassment, since that's what boymoding refers to, I'm very leery of anything that comes from 4chan. A different term should be used that doesn't have the 4chan baggage. I dunno, maybe I'm sick of people being called shit like "pooner" and "zippertits" by shitheads who come over from 4chan to other websites and bring that rancid, violently transphobic "culture" (again, full of actual Nazis).
But this, in a narrative where we basically get none of Leeroy's perspective at all just a few online photos (and getting he/him'ed by the main protagonist), means that Leeroy just reads as an insecure cis guy dealing with emotional incest (that is, Leeroy's mom is making her play the role of a replacement for the dad and using Leeroy as a scapegoat at points). The "boymoding" stuff also makes Leeroy read as a bit of that "oh, being trans is a silly delusion and his life got better after he went to do 'normal' things" if you read Jax as transfem and Leeroy as not transfem (like if you don't know about "boymoding" stuff). And, if you do to with the "boymoding" stuff, the problem is that Leeroy is still in that toxic cesspool of a culture that will inevitably drag her back down into the shitty abusiveness that Jax represents.
Then there's the question of "Isn't She Lovely," a cover of a Stevie Wonder song. Black members of the audience point out that this is a bad choice and I'd agree with them. The context of a song's creation is important and the song was written celebrating the birth of his daughter Aisha. Even if you make the argument that the idea is Jax being reborn (using the "less than one minute old" lyric), that would require her to... actually be reborn, to be un-abstracted and start living both as a girl and stopping being such an asshole. But that isn't what we see- Jax is instead just... stays abstracted and the rest of the cast have to pull Pomni away so Pomni doesn't also abstract.
So the coding is just turbofucked from the outset.
On top of that, there's also the problem with having a trans character who is closeted through most of the work. That means that the story is misgendering the character through the entire work up until the reveal (and, if it's ambiguous enough, misgendered afterward by the narrative itself, which also happens with TADC). While one can have a character who is a late transitioner or a character who's figuring themselves out during the narrative, established details do matter to the audience. It also feels backhanded if there isn't a continuation. This is why K in Misfits and Magic works- there's more possible story with that setting, so the stuff being a bit vague in the first (much shorter) season doesn't have the same problems once another season came out. (And that was also a character created by a trans person.)
The thing that is also an issue and quite galling is how Jax reads as an insanely transphobic caricature. Jax is constantly abusive to everyone around her. She's constantly a shithead and specifically picks on vulnerable women and nonbinary characters throughout the entire show. She gets into everyone's places because she has the keys to everyone's rooms, so they can't ever avoid her if she decided to use them. She gets two people to kill themselves, in part by isolating them from everyone else. Jax is the transphobic caricature of a trans woman who is violent and predatory to the cis women and nonbinary characters, who is bigger and stronger and more masculine than the ones she picks on, who hates them and is able to do whatever she likes to them because there's no accountability. And then we're supposed to mourn her because of the possibility that she could've been better if she just transitioned.
(The idea of "transition would've saved her" makes a very dubious set of assumptions, that all the hatred and shittiness is purely due to repression, instead of the fact that one can also have negative traits and biases while being a minority. Being trans isn't a cure-all for being a shithead.)
Some argued that changing Jax to a trans man would've worked, but I argue it would be transphobic, too, since the writing would be the transphobic caricature of how a trans man is more inherently toxic in his masculinity and more ragingly misogynistic, moreso than cis men. That trans men are just predatory assholes whose gender is a ticking time bomb.
If this were written by a cis person, or a trans woman who wasn't already a big name/already had a substantial fandom (I'm thinking of the reaction to Isabel Fall's helicopter story because, while there were other problems with it, the reaction was quite telling because she was an unknown so she was given zero opportunity to defend herself), or a transmasc, everyone would immediately see the problem with the narrative and call them a transphobe or transmisogynist.
While it can be useful to know information about the author as an explanation for details that end up in a work, I'm firmly inclined toward Death of the Author as a useful tool in discussing the work's execution. In essence, the work needs to stand on its own. While it's useful to know authorial intent, a lot of people are going to encounter a work without that information.
I'm firmly of the camp that suggests, as one person online put it eloquently, "you should put your show in your show." Putting information on social media instead of the work itself is fundamentally a bandage for bad writing. It's one thing to put something that didn't come up in the course of the work due to extenuating circumstances, like in improvisational works like Actual Plays where a discussion doesn't come up due to the way that medium is structured, but it doesn't work when you're putting basic information that should be in the work up on a separate thing entirely. Especially since, if the rumors are correct, the entire script was finalized before the animation started. (This is quite bad, since that means that all the structure problems were baked in from the start.)
And, given that Gooseworx's Tumblr was temporarily deleted, it's a reminder that such information could very easily become lost media. There were people who got screenshots of specific answers, sure, but most people aren't going to dig through that if the main source where that's centralized vanishes. So if the work doesn't contain the material and the social media posts that contextualize that media are lost, you end up with a half-story that is rendered incoherent.
(Gooseworx isn't the only creator to do this, mind you, but this is a review discussing her work.)
I also think that some of this work is dependent on the gaps in the narrative's release to hit emotionally for some audiences. That is, the sharpness of Jax's asshole behavior gets forgotten about over the release of the series over two or so years. There's also the question of theorycrafting and how that plays into emotional investment. This means that someone like me, who didn't watch the thing until after the work came out in its entirety, doesn't have the emotional investment or social context of all of this. A common complaint about episode 7, according to the long-term viewers, is that it's essentially Gooseworx teasing all the fan theorists and then slamming the door shut on their theories about actually addressing the company that did this shit or the possibility of escape. Without that context, it's just kind of weird and makes you think something might actually happen to change a status quo and kick off some kind of plot, but then it still goes nowhere.
Let's round this out with the theme. According to a Tumblr post where she responded to user paradox-emo-bunny, the meaning of The Amazing Digital Circus is "That there's meaning to be found in a stagnant life."
I find this a strange intended meaning. This is where one, I suppose, could argue that Gooseworx managed it with the setup, in that all of them are brainscans on a computer. That they are fundamentally stuck in a closed ecosystem until whenever that computer powers down entirely or the building burns down.
However, in light of the situation with Jax and the other characters and the dynamic, and Pomni's arrival. Ultimately, Pomni is a new character, meaning that someone had to add a new person, akin to how Kinger was alone until Ragatha was brought in somehow. The idea of a stagnant life works in a closed system, but they aren't technically in a closed system. (Someone is able to add new brainscans in and does so at regular intervals.)
And the thing that brought them peace and finding meaning was... the control freak realizing he fucked up and changing, the asshole committing suicide, and them getting information of the outside world about how their real world person they were based on was doing well. These don't work in relation to the idea of a stagnant life being meaningful, because there is no stagnation. Things materially changed in their world that led them to finding new meaning in their not-quite-lives.
There's also something fascinating about the implications of the ending, too. The asshole committing suicide materially improves everyone else's lives, given both the ending stuff like them playing baseball and the credits montage that shows them having happy adventures that aren't extremely stressful. A pro-suicide theme is presumably unintended, but that's the consequences of the pieces of the story as laid out. Even if you argue that Jax is intended as a cautionary tale, the way the whole situation is handled is extremely clunky and the structuring is really bad. We don't get enough time with the character's underlying vulnerability and it's too late into the work.
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