Hey. I saw your post and am curious about that rant
Im going through the same thinggggggggg. I know the real analytical people are just waiting to see the ending so they can properly finally start critisizing this show already. While others are glazing it right now and will realise how bad it actually is years later when the hype dies down. While others arent speaking up exactly because theres so much glazing that turns defensive and smothers any criticism that arises with a "you just dont get itt its great"
I just wanna say i, too, sometimes feel like im going insane, because i literally dont see how in the hell has this show ever gotten this much praise and i also am afraid of shittalking something that brings people joyyy, youre not alone and this is your chance to speakkk upp i wanna hear more voices about this righttt noww
Write that rantttt
Haha, this made me smile. Your emotions are soooo felt and I'm glad that I'm not alone on this!! Thank you SO much for sending me this ask... you have no idea what you've unleashed.
So, big fat preface that if you're a TADC fan, that's great! more power to ya. please, like what you like, and don't let some rando on the internet make you feel shitty about something that brings you joy. i think it has a lot of really cool concepts and there are aspects of it that work well, and no matter what i think, it is SO fucking cool that in 2026 a piece of indie media has become this big. that being said… rant below.
The main thing that bothers me about The Amazing Digital Circus is that it’s started to remind me a bit of Pretty Little Liars, where none of the “twists” in the story connect to each other, are foreshadowed/hinted at properly, or make any sense in any meaningful way. I feel like they’re just there to shock the audience.
A lot of the fans are acting like the finale is going to be this grand piece de resistance that’ll make all of the puzzle pieces click together, and solve every mystery, and I straight up don’t thank that’s possible at this point. There are so many dangling plot threads that go absolutely nowhere and were clearly just added to be red herring theorist bait. It’s an issue that will just get worse and worse with every rewatch when people start paying more attention to the plot holes, and going, ‘huh, that seems really important and they never bring that up again,’ or, ‘but that contradicts something someone says later,’ and finally realize that there actually was no plan for any of those ideas. I’m prepared for the finale to raise way more questions than answers.
TADC also tries to have a dark, emotional core, but it’s rarely actually acknowledged (like, there'll be a scene of jax acting mysteriously sad or whatever and then it'll just cut back away to the gang and be unexplained. that stuff was fine at the beginning, but like 6 episodes in, it just gets irritating). Then, when it is acknowledged, everything is SO heavy-handed and on the nose. Jax during the stargazing thing wondering why Gangle wears her comedy mask, and then Pomni going, “I… thought you didn’t care about anyone in the circus,” with her awkward delivery and vocal fry made me feel like I was watching a Barney episode. I audibly sighed. The infamous ‘you are my playthings’ rant is also particularly egregious. Zooble’s stuff isn't as bad, imo, because its hinted throughout the show before they reveal it, but Caine being like, "why don’t you like my adventures? and zooble casually being like, "i don't like my body" is kinda like. ??? oh. i guess we're just saying this out loud now. ok.
I guess I could get into the humor here, too. This is just a personal taste thing, but it really doesn’t work for me. People made fun of Hazbin's jokes, and for good reason, but I'm shocked that nobody has ever turned the same blade onto TADC. It has one of the worst cases of millennial comedy I have ever seen. I feel like every joke is some iteration of 'random = funny,' or, 'Character A: Something WaAaACkY!!!!!! Character B: Erm… d-did h-he really just say that?' An Instagram reel about this (with a decent amount of likes!!) popped up for me the other day and I felt so vindicated. Also, I get that Caine and Bubble are intentionally written that way, but it's still a hard watch for me, sometimes.
There are also points where I’m not sure what the show is trying to say, exactly. The scene with Kinger in the dark where he tells Pomni, “one of the worst things you can do in this world is make someone feel unloved or unwanted,” felt like a really weird telling not showing moment. Like, is that supposed to be the thesis of the show? Sure, you see the characters lonely and ostracized on some occasions, but much more of the emotional weight seems to come from the elephant in the room of there being hella abstracted/dead people in the basement, and everyone trying to move on from that. Some of the best visuals in the show are Jax’s silent near-abstraction with the kaleidoscopic visuals of Ribbit and Kaufmo. It seems like that should be the thesis of the show; I have no clue where, “one of the worst things you can do in this world is make someone feel unloved or unwanted” is coming from.
Then there are some issues I have with the characterization. I feel like the show tries SO hard to show you different aspects of its characters’ personalities/internal struggles that it has them act completely different episode to episode sometimes, to the extent where they feel like a whole other character. Bubble randomly becoming evil and manipulative towards Caine (and DON’T give me the whole ‘Bubble was faking being kind the whole time, and the audience just couldn’t tell!’ This isn’t real life, this is media. If you’re gonna give a character a personality twist, you need at least some setup). Zooble going from being icy and apathetic to attentive and emotionally available with Gangle. Jax’s constant ping-ponging between being a laid-back prankster, drowning in depressive self-loathing, being best friends with Pomni, and then outwardly cruel/antagonistic towards everyone. It's just EXHAUSTING. Caine's meltdown is earned, but he goes from 0 to 100 so quickly that it's just really... jarring? The characters also occasionally do this thing where they'll go from being super hostile and all over the place emotionally, to like. using therapyspeak all of a sudden and handling complicated situations perfectly, as if they're writing a Dear, Princess Celestia letter in My Little Pony. It feels very stilted and unnatural to me. Tbf, I have known people as mercurial as this, and I know that people are multi-faceted, but that’s not what I’m getting at here.
Even though we’ve seen so many different emotional swings, I feel like eight episodes in, we also still know next to nothing about the characters’ motivations and lives. In episode 8, Zooble laments, “I had dreams!” What dreams? We don’t know! I feel like the show is sacrificing important storytelling to keep clinging onto a half-baked “mystery.” How have none of them spoken to each other about their lives before the circus? Why hasn’t anyone had a serious discussion about the abstracted characters who were there beforehand? It feels like those should be some of the first conversations people would have in a scenario like this. Similarly, how does nobody else know about Kinger’s sanity when he’s in the dark? Why wouldn’t Pomni tell anyone? The lack of communication just feels like a lazy way to keep the “mystery” going.
Also, the finale hasn't been released yet, but even if it did somehow answer every question, it’ll make the pacing and tonal whiplash even more messy than it already is. As it stands, we have eight episodes of everyone messing around in the circus, and then a final episode where everyone has an existential crisis after killing Caine that presumably gives everyone’s backstory and wraps everything up in like an hour? That seems like a disaster waiting to happen.
Honestly, I don’t think much of this would bother me at all if the general consensus was a little more like, 'eh its kinda cringe but has some interesting ideas' or 'she a little confused but she got the spirit' but everyone online acts like it’s this brilliant, subversive masterpiece, and I just don’t get it.
When you get this, reply with your favourite five fics that you’ve written, then pass on to at least five other writers. Let’s spread the self-love. <3
Charmed (Steve Rogers X Reader)
Bring me to life (Steve Rogers X OC, Brock Rumlow X OC)
(🎃) thoughts on the portrayal of the characters in fanfic/the fandom in general?
i'll separate these:
portrayal of the characters in fanfic:
if i'm being honest (i've said this before), fanon > canon. i'll always love canon because obviously it laid the foundation and gave us the characters, but fanon has filled in the gaps and fleshed out the characters in a way i guess soman thought he never had the time to do? when i say i like tedros, i don't like misogynistic idiot tedros from canon, i like himbo sweet tedros who has a beautiful cute relationship with fanon agatha in the fanon. soman gave us the core traits and the fandom turned it into something much better than what it was, especially after he took them all sorts of directions i hated in one true king.
fandom:
there are three sides to this fandom.
there are the dormant fans who read this book in middle school and promptly forgot about it. they might come back and be assimilated into the new movie slice that i'm sure will appear once the movie starts filming, but they're not here right now.
there's most of the instagram fandom and tumblr fandom, which is relatively calm and nice and will not slit your throat if you don't understand their inside jokes (i'm looking at you right now, website kids. call me a condescending son of a japeth if you want. i will go to war). they make beautiful pieces of art and long in depth analysis posts and memes that are overall very fun. i like to think i'm part of this slice.
and then there are the website children/youtube kids. i'm not going to pretend ALL of them are necessarily bad, because i know some of them are just kids wanting to write their self-insert fanfictions and move on with their day. but there are some that are just demonic and will tear you apart if you come for their ship. this is also the slice that contains the racists that love to bash sofia wylie. not cool.
i personally like to believe that most of the fandom has no ill will and are just overall good people, and i think that is the majority. but after the casting announcement i've become much more cynical about the overall state of fandom. there are much less "good fans" than i initially thought there were. by good fans, i mean people who are not racist bullies.
If you get this, answer with 3 random facts about yourself and send it to the last 7 blogs in your notifications, anonymously or not! Let’s get to know the person behind the blog! 💖
Ummm ok well!
1) I got my first summer job working at a car dealership
2) I'm almost always tired for seemingly no reason
And 3) I have an adorable little kitty named Harley despite being alerhic to cats!
A few years back-- this was when the second season was about halfway through airing-- I was looking for something new to watch and I kept seeing ads for this show called Steven universe on cartoon network. I thought it looked fun and figured I would watch an episode or two but ended up loving the show so much, I binged all of the episodes that were out for the next two days straight haha!
