I had a very busy week last week, as the demo of my studio’s upcoming game went live! As a self-celebratory demo launch treat, I attended a day of LA Comic Con to take a break from the development grind, enjoy some panels, and soak in the vibes of fellow creatives before I have to lock back in for demo patching.
When I first learned the phrase “third place”, I had some trouble imagining what mine would be. It’s important to have somewhere to go outside of your usual environment that is equally satisfying to visit by yourself or with others. But I’m not a bars or clubs girl (I learned while living abroad that I do enjoy a cozy pub, but that’s not much of a thing here in the US.) And I love libraries and cafes, but those are places for me to have what I call “social solitude” rather than directly connect with people.
Recently, it occurred to me that cons are my ideal third place. I have been to many over the years—sometimes casually, sometimes in cosplay, sometimes with friends or a partner, and sometimes on my own—and every time, it felt like I got a direct infusion of inspiration into my creative veins. Both creators and fans alike inspire me at cons with their talks at panels, art booths, and fantastic cosplays, and LA Comic Con this year was no exception.
During my visit, I had the chance to attend a small but very enthusiastic The Amazing Digital Circus panel featuring some of the voice actors from the show: Alex Rochon (Caine), Amanda Hufford (Ragatha), and Lizzie Freeman (Pomni).
The love these VAs have for this show is so profound. This is the first panel I’ve attended where one of the speakers teared up talking about their relationship with their character. But I’m not surprised, knowing how this cast interacts with TADC outside of the script. They lend their voices to various fan projects, they play games together, they stream group signings, and I learned that they’re planning an in-character DnD session DM’d by Alex, which I’m especially excited for. Just as I had hoped, I left the panel feeling deeply moved by their love for their art and freshly motivated to return to my own creative work this week.
While I keep on top of the animation space, I’m late to The Amazing Digital Circus party. I’m not sure if it’s the jump in quality that happened after the pilot, the sheer passion of the cast being infectious, and/or the steady and relentless drip of the Mere Exposure Effect, but it’s gone from being an inescapable Halloween costume to one of the most intriguing shows I follow right now.
What most stands out to me about The Amazing Digital Circus is how much it’s grown within the scope of 9 episodes. From a pilot that didn’t quite grab me, to episode 6 with tremendously expressive animation and some of the best voice work I’ve heard in an indie show, TADC has blossomed into its potential in a very short period of time. This post will discuss both the show’s narrative and its unique rapid quality jumps, as it’s apparent that the team and the show itself have grown throughout the creative process.
The Background:
The Amazing Digital Circus is an indie animated show created by Gooseworx and animated by Glitch Productions. Gooseworx was approached by Glitch to make the show, and she specifically came up with and pitched it for this purpose. The viral enthusiasm for the show’s pilot led it to be greenlit for an entire series. It has 9 episodes and is currently ongoing: the latest was episode 6, and I’ll be writing about it from the information I currently have.
For a bit of personal background: animation is my favorite storytelling medium after games. As I wrote about in my Studio Ghibli post, Spirited Away was one of my earliest story loves and continues to inspire my work to this day. I’m also a member of Women in Animation and take part in both the game and animation sides. Just last year, I was accepted into their Future Directors mentorship run by a Pixar director, where we were taught Pixar’s in-house method of directing an animated film (which I can’t talk about here due to NDA, but I’ve already applied what I’ve learned to my work as a game studio director!) Likewise, I’m always following the latest in the animation world from over here on my game industry rock.
The work of the show’s creator, Gooseworx, was familiar to me for one reason: I used to listen to her Spider Dance remix on loop (I gave it a relisten for this post, and indeed, it’s still a bop.) That wasn’t much to go off of. All I understood from the show’s premise was that it was an adult comedy drama about ordinary people going insane from being trapped in a video game designed for kids. What piqued my initial personal interest was both the vaudeville-like circus setting and the speculation around a particular character; Kinger, the oldest and “craziest” circus member, was theorized to be a developer who originally worked on the program. As a game dev myself that was enough to give me an appetite for the pilot.
The Deep Dive:
There was an undercurrent of real charm beneath the colors and craziness that I could detect on a first watch, but the writing wasn’t quite strong enough to grab me. I analyzed what it did well and what needed improvement with a fellow writer who also checked it out, and then I didn’t think about the show for an entire year.
When episode 2 came out, I expected a similar kind of writing to the pilot, and only watched it with outside prompting that I should give the show another chance. Sure enough, the characters in-story descent into the developer room paralleled a sudden depth that the writing decided to explore. Up to this point, the main character, Pomni, was shown to be an (understandably) anxiety-ridden butt of the joke caricature. Certainly entertaining to watch, and while she had her humanizing moments, I wasn’t invested in her journey at the serialized level yet.
But in this next episode, Pomni displayed a surprisingly gentle empathy that saw her take a supportive role for another distressed character. That wasn’t where the surprises ended. Her kindness was cut with a joke (RIP Australian gummy gator), but the credits didn’t roll after that, and the script ran to its end on a hopeful and joke-less note for her.
I liked Pomni a lot after this episode. In general, a character able to break free from their trope in order to help another character is like narrative catnip to me. The timid character assuring a more-frightened character that they’re going to protect them, or the loud character softening their voice when talking to a sensitive character? Delicious!!
In the podcast I keep talking about, Worlds Beyond Number, the often neurotic and overreactive Suvi had a moment like this when both she and a younger wizard in her care witness the brutal murder of a traveling companion by the Witch of the Wild Hunt. Player Aabria described Suvi as quickly and calmly holding the wailing younger girl in her arms, then sending her back to the airship. It was only when she left that Aabria dryly quips that Suvi throws up. I found this to be a very strong character moment for Suvi, who was able to hold her own reaction to make sure the character with her wasn’t left to process her shock without support. And similarly here, seeing Pomni compassionately talk someone out of an existential spiral while she’s freshly in the midst of her own existential dread endeared her to me.
Episode 3 came out soon after and had a similar thoughtfulness to it. It also featured Kinger which was an instant draw for me. In episode 2 we got a taste of his paternal role in the circus, and this episode served us a meal of it. (Jumping ahead, I love the moment in episode 5 when he lifts up Ragatha and spins her around like a proud father. For Ragatha, who we learn had endured an abusive childhood, that moment was both a sweet instance of inner-child nurturing and a strong buildup to their conversation in episode 6. But I told myself I would not make this entire post about Kinger, so capping that off here.) The episode ends with Pomni starting to make progress forming bonds with the humans around her in addition to the “NPCs”.
It was apparent that pathos was going to be a big part of the show. Diving into a sea of sincerity without the life-vest of a punchline terrifies many comedy writers, but if they can handle it, they have my interest. Likewise, it was at this point I started paying attention to the release dates of the next episodes.
The central theme of TADC is finding meaning in a stagnant life. It has a list of inspirations, from the obvious to the obscure—I should have looked into this earlier as I wouldn’t have been so surprised by the tone shifts. In particular, to name Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure as an inspiration (of which I also have a nostalgic fondness) indicates the writing must have a certain earnestness to it. That film is both absurd and packed with a slow sentimentality that would bore an emotionally restless writer. Likewise, Gooseworx has said that she enjoys writing long moments where characters just talk, and I wouldn’t be watching this show if this wasn’t the case, as I think it’s greatest strength comes from these moments. But execution is key, and I’m glad to say that she and her team have been able to pull it off so far. The heightened quality of episodes 2 and 3 continued in the next episodes. Quiet moments were animated with the most detailed of expressions, the dialogue felt natural, and the voice acting showed off amazing range. The latest episode, 6, had some of the best mix of the three above areas in the show. Michael Kovach, voice of episode’s focus character Jax, mentioned that in his scene of declaring how he sees the other circus members as his personal toys to manipulate, he was directed by Gooseworx to convey a sense of powerlessness. The scene delivered on this direction perfectly—it felt like he was claiming to be a puppet master as he tangled himself up further and further into a sailor’s knot of his own strings. The medium of animation is the ultimate team effort, and here, the skills were all improved at once. The writing, animation, and voice acting rose to the ambitious occasion to deliver a very impactful moment.
Circling back to the pilot: when writing stories with deconstructed elements, you have to be careful. Unless you’re setting up a legendary rug pull (think Puella Magi Madoka Magica), I always advise writers to plant the seeds of something being different as early as episode 1, even if you want to build up to that reveal. Otherwise, you risk doing your job too well: everyone successfully feels like a stock cartoon character, but the viewer doesn’t know you’re going to change that down the line, so the pilot ends up not hooking them. Gooseworx was new to writing dialogue when she wrote TADC, so I’m not surprised she initially got stuck with this. Also, pilots are notoriously difficult to get right. I would be very interested in reading a rewrite of the pilot once she’s had more writing experience. (That being said, I don’t believe there’s a specific length of time at the desk or particular education that makes a writer great. I got my Masters in Creative Writing, and have taken more creative writing classes in and out my degree than I can count. They can help, with the caveat that they’re most helpful for teaching writers how to give and receive verbal critique in a live setting, not unlocking the secret recipe on how to be a distinguished writer. In my experience, your storytelling is best honed by sharpening your media literacy. For anyone looking to write a pilot, I recommend watching a bunch of existing pilots for both shows that got picked up and shows that didn’t, and taking mental notes on what made them strong and/or weak on the narrative and technical levels.)
TADC has a symbiotic relationship with its team, where the creator and the work push each other to do better with every new episode. Apparently a separate animation crew joined in for the later episodes, but the improvements began all the way back in the second episode. While I would have liked to be onboard since the pilot, I do find the positive growth gives this show its own sense of character that it wouldn’t have if it was a storytelling masterclass out of the gate. It’s like the show itself had to grow out of its awkard pilot phase alongside the first-day-of class-energy of the characters, who have shown their own steady growth and added depth each episode.
This is a post about positive change, but I want to finish by discussing the one thing that is unchanging in this show in a positive way: sense of style. TADC’s themes and feel fit well with its absurdist dark comedy setting that knows when to take itself seriously. Possibly due to having a shared VA, I’ve heard many compare it to the surreal indie wonder, ENA. I’m gonna make a deeper cut and say TADC reminds me a lot of a LimboLane title (they’re a game dev duo who make some really strange and neat stuff like Smile For Me and Great God Grove.) In general, “Weird with Feeling” is one of my favorite flavors of media; there’s some real literary magic to be made when absurdity meets sincerity. I’m fortunately well-catered to in today’s artistic scene as “metamodernism”, a term used to describe our current art movement, reflects my personal taste. (Read more about the movement here and see if your favorite modern media has elements of it: https://whatismetamodern.com/about-metamodernism/)
Gooseworx has written a comfortably metamodern work with TADC. Another creator who takes this oscillation to a fascinating extreme I haven’t even seen in adult animation is Megan Dong. Back in 2021, an utterly unhinged yet deeply emotional animated musical came out called Centaurworld. I’ve described it to my friends as a Saturday morning slapstick cartoon turned 19th century opera. The final episode has content ranging from a character attempting to drown a split off/rejected part of themselves, to a 30-second fart joke (wild flex from Megan, by the way; I’ve been told Netflix is notoriously stingy about finale lengths and every moment of animation counts.) It’s one of the wildest shows I’ve ever watched and also happened to make me cry, so I highly recommend it to any animation enthusiast. It shares a lot of DNA with TADC, up to the show creator having a voice credit as one of the characters. Horse and Pomni also play similar roles in their stories (including getting ‘toonified) and carry the same ratio of comedic to sincere story weight. Though TADC is much milder in its strangeness compared to CW, if you can imagine that.
I’m excited to be following a work with a similar style to CW with the freedom to fully explore adult themes rather than heavily allude to them. I love watching writers treat their writing desks like labs where they mix together genres, themes, and emotions that often never get the chance to touch in stories. In this case, it feels like a candy heart from the Raggedy Anne & Andy movie and a tooth from the mouth of a Jhonen Vasquez work were stirred into the TADC batter, creating something wacky, dark, and deep.
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My writer friends and I often joke about how we’re like trained bloodhounds when it comes to plot twists: we memorize their scent from the first whiff of foreshadowing and track them to our often correct guess of a conclusion often long before they are revealed (when I was shown my first clip from The Good Place, my immediate concluding comment was “they’re in the Bad Place”, long before that came to light.) It’s a lot of fun, but it does mean a twisty reveal feels more like catching a running target than having the floor fall out beneath us. So what I most look forward to about TADC’s narrative direction is how much I haven’t got a clue about where it’s going. I only know episode 7 is ambitious enough to have required multiple rewrites on Gooseworx’s end to make it work. I hope it’s as big as everyone is speculating. TADC would greatly benefit from some huge swings, because nothing’s been too off the rails yet. I’d love it if episode 7 and beyond delivers on that potential. And I hope Gooseworx and her team continue to use TADC to (squash and) stretch themselves as creators, pushing themselves alongside the show to come up with something truly unique and powerful. Whether it lands on a good ending, a bad ending, a bittersweet ending, or some secret fourth thing, I’m hungry to see how it all concludes.
(As for what I think the circus would turn me into…I imagine a Fisher Price-style sentient suit of armor who appears stoic and aloof, but lifting the visor reveals the most emotive Marvin the Martian-style cartoon eyes you can imagine.)
Today’s Tea: This is actually going to be a separate section because I need to talk about my favorite discovery of the con: Many Worlds Tavern. This delightful booth was popped up right next to Glitch’s display. I had paused to take a photo of the giant Pomni, and when I spotted the neighboring booth name, I gasped.
I proceeded to pour pore over an endless selection of wonderful teas wrapped up with care in gorgeously illustrated packages, before settling on the blend I drank for this post: Nectarean Stream.
I chose to drink it without honey to enjoy the natural subtle sweetness. The girls running the booth were so kind when I told them how much I loved their shop, and mentioned more could be ordered online. Check them out if you want to add any new tea or coffee to your collection!:
https://manyworldstavern.com
Tea Drinking Stats: I got to the bottom/it got cold/I went back for a second cup
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