Reasons to Love: The Amazing Digital Circus

What a nice wagon we have here. There's a band and everything. Now to be clear, I don't join a lot of bandwagons. I prefer to evaluate things on their own merits. And I can tell you that this indy CGI series has a lot of merit.

The Premise: An otherwise ordinary person is isekai'd into a colourful, PG version of I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.

Pomni, our introduction to this world, is faced with a number of colourful characters and a cartoonish, toybox world that she cannot escape. In fact, the first episode shows that fact. [Watch here]

There's six humans (allegedly) trapped in this world, including Pomni, but not including the uncountable souls trapped in "the cellar" after they "abstracted".

Learning about all of this in the first episode, we're told and then shown that abstraction is a literal nightmare. For the one who suffers it, and the ones around them. In fact, the second episode begins with a nightmare about it.

Victims lose their identity, their body shape, and their ability to communicate. They become literally animalistic. A quadrupedal spiky shape covered in strobing eyes. They can infect others with painful glitching and will attempt to destroy any moving thing in sight.

It doesn't take long to realise that this seeming kidvid is soaked in angst juice and carries a not-so-subtle undercurrent of body horror and existential terror. Oh, and the theory bait. My giddy gosh, the theory bait. And there's a heaping helping of nightmare fuel.

And that was before the third episode came up with a blatant horror theming to the show.

So I'd better talk about the characters in order of appearance. Assuming you didn't come back after watching those links above.

But first: A little bit about the setting. The whole thing takes place in a retro-web game environment. If you were on Neopets in the 1990's, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Just about everything in and around the circus is inspired by toys of the 80's and 90's.

Caine - The ringmaster/AI/being in charge of the circus. He's initially zany, whacky, and over the top. His design is also inspired by wind-up chattering teeth. He controls almost everything in the circus.

Bubble - As you might expect, they're a bubble. A bubble that happens to have black dot eyes and a mouth that's a perpetual grin of sharp teeth. They also have an intermittently present tongue. They will occasionally pop, but that doesn't seem to do them any harm.

Gangle - A tangle of red ribbon with a tragedy/comedy mask. The personification of the traditional sign of the theatre. So far, her comedy mask is broken or otherwise taken off her and she spends the rest of the episode sad or otherwise upset. That might change when it's her time in the spotlight.

Kinger - Based on a king chess piece. Nervous, anxious, the Cloud Cuckoolander until he's in the dark. If you've seen the third episode, you know about his tragic past. His very life in the circus is nightmare fuel.

Zooble - based on one of those assemble-a-thing toys. They're a non-binary character who's one of them Theys as I like to say. They've spent most of their time so far off-screen, and we discover in episode 3 that they have... issues. None of which are helped at all by being an assemble-a-thing creature in a place like the circus.

Ragatha - Based on a Raggedy Ann doll. She has a patchwork dress and one button for an eye. She's the ray of sunshine, team mother, and optimistic hype machine trying to keep everyone's cheer intact.

Jax - The arsehole. He's a purple rabbit-humanoid with a pink coverall. Not based on any specific toy from the last decades of the previous century. He lives to cause trouble and irritate the others.

Kaufmo - Possibly based on a soft toy clown. You know the ones with ceramic heads? One of them. We don't hear much about his personality because he's the one who introduces the threat of abstraction.

Pomni - the new clown in town. She's just trying to adjust to her new life in this digital hell and she's not rolling with the punches terribly well.

The cool thing about the show is that Netflix has picked it up, but they actually let the episodes air on YouTube first. That's incredible. Usually if Netflix picks something up, that's the last you see of it without a paywall in the way.

Considering the quality and depth of what's there already? This could mean a change in the way things go. Creative folk have had short shrift of late, what with all the generative AI slop going about. It's very nice to see someone make something for the joy of creation and then get a helping hand from a much, much larger organisation. I mean, precedent declares that the small creator is much more likely to be ripped off.

It's a hopeful moment in a cloud of exploitative executive meddling and just straight up theft.

Here's to having some more of that.