The Amazing Digital Out of Ideas Already

The fifth episode of the Amazing Digital Circus has come out, and I really can’t help myself but think a lot about how it’s being written. It’s like picking a scab. I know I shouldn’t, but like an itch, the Youtube algorithm kept pitching the new episode to me. “Come on, Greg, you know you want to watch it. It’ll feel good!”

And I knew I didn’t want to. Part of it is the same reason I tend not to watch or listen to my own productions – because I can’t sit back and be non-critical. I can’t just enjoy it. I hear my own voice and analyze my deliveries, worry if I really wrote a scene that well, and so on. Normally you’re not supposed to do that when watching or reading something somebody else made, but once you write a lot and get comfortable with certain conventions, you notice certain mistakes, and the second you do, it yanks you right out of the story.

This doesn’t happen with everything. It’s also not always that bad. My wife is stunned that sometimes we can sit to watch a movie; I’ll lean over within ten minutes and then give her an accurate synopsis of the whole story without having been given any other information. A lot of it has to do with the principle of “Chekov’s Gun”, where because screen time is so valuable and everything is so expensive, if something happens on screen it almost has to be important, and that means once you’ve seen a few elements, you know they have to come up again and you can pretty well piece together the parts they’d play.

Longer works of media can violate this a little bit. A book is hundreds of pages, for example, and it takes so long to produce that sometimes a writer will put in an element that was important in the first draft, but becomes irrelevant in later drafts. If it’s a multi-volume series, sometimes the writer even forgets that they said something. One really funny example is when JK Rowling mentioned in her earliest book that Dumbledore’s brother was disgraced after getting caught having sex with a goat, and then several books later he’s supposed to be this critical character that everybody takes seriously. Then, she read that first book as part of a public event, and when she got to the line about the goat sex, she fell over herself, laughing, because she realized what she’d done and it was all too late.

I enjoy a broad variety of fiction. I like non-fiction as well. The videogame “Deltarune” never really pulled me out of it mid-sentence, and when I think about what it’s doing with its writing and what it might be going for, it’s often after I’ve closed the game and I’m not actively playing. While I was reading “A Song of Ice and Fire”, I didn’t spend a lot of time analyzing GRRM’s writing technique (except for during Jon’s chapters, because he’s such a little Mary Sue, and he’s a weird, upward-failing Jesus allegory). I did analyze the hell out of the “Hunger Games” series (it was so bad I started annotating the mechanical problems and narrative fuckups, which I’ve never voluntarily done before when reading for my own pleasure), which was written terribly but was popular anyway for reasons I’m not going to get into in this essay*.

*Okay, look, I’ll throw one** at you. In the first book, at one point Katniss says, “I put on a green shirt and pants.” I know those of you who don’t write often figure this is fine, you know what the author meant. She puts on a green shirt, and then a pair of pants that probably aren’t green. However, as a writer, this was a very frustrating line to read. She should have said, “I put on my pants and a green shirt,” so that it would be absolutely clear it was just the shirt that’s green. The book was popular, some people loved it, I get it, but the book was not well-written. That particular line has buried itself in my memory for years now.

**Sorry, I’ve got one*** more. Right after the “green pants” thing, Katniss is discussing her theoretical combat skills with another character, and she demonstrates she can throw a knife with deadly precision. She explains that she throws knives sometimes in order to kill wild boars, which is insane. Boars are killing machines. They were known to run up the haft of the spear to reach and gore the person stabbing them. Clearly the author did not know anything about boars when they wrote this. However, I thought I could see what was happening here. Surely the author was establishing now that Katniss can throw knives, so that when she did it later the audience would already be informed she had that ability and they wouldn’t get yanked out of the story wondering how long she’s been able to do this. But then Katniss didn’t throw another knife for the rest of the book and I’m pretty sure the author completely forgot she apparently could.

***In this same exact scene – and I am sorry, but they made three movies based on this book and that blows my mind sometimes – but in that same exact scene, another character named Peta explains that he’s a professional baker who decorates cakes with frosting sometimes, and he speculates that this might be useful because the skill could be extrapolated to creating camouflage. This incredibly stupid and naive assumption then becomes plot-critical and is the sole reason Peta survives the rest of the book, because he creates a bunch of meticulous camouflage to hide himself****. This was the moment the author used to establish that Peta would know how to do this. Peta could talk about how he used to go hunting, or he was a conscript for a few years, or anything plausible, but instead the author had Peta say something profoundly childish that really just raised more questions than they answered.

****I once got drunk and spent a half hour ranting about this to our waitress at a Denny’s. She sat down at the table with us and kept encouraging me to go on, so I think she was having fun. That or she wanted to date my friend – that happened a lot, girls thought he was cute.

Anyway, where the heck was I? Oh, right. “The Amazing Digital Circus”. So in the fifth episode of this thing, they’ve clearly just run out of ideas. They’re kind of blazing through a bunch of different scenes and settings and have no real desire to utilize them as much of anything. The first setting they come to is a safari game, but they are legitimately wasting their screen time.

It goes on for almost a whole minute, which is going to be about a page of screen play. And I get it. It is easy to write out a page and think not much time is being wasted, but you can pack a lot of story into one minute. The only thing that matters is that at the end of the scene, everyone votes that Jax, the rabbit guy, should be vegan, and apparently it’s a big revelation that they can do this because Cain had previously said he could not change anyone’s personality nor their thoughts. However, Jax doesn’t realize this rule has been violated until a later scene, and actually it tells me they could have cut this minute, and within a single line of dialogue could probably do that vote and have the revelation. They didn’t need to do the safari at all.

Then they do this skit where Pomni is the President of the United States, and it’s just dead time. It lasts for two minutes and doesn’t really serve any purpose. Now, the point of a character-driven show is that, often, you can place your characters into any scenario and the audience can enjoy how the characters react to that scenario. However, that would require having strong characters with really firm personalities, which Digital Circus does not have. Unfortunately, when Pomni is the president, she just does what she always does – she asks why she’s there, asks what she’s supposed to be doing, vaguely resists doing any of it, and that’s it.

What Pomni’s character does is what we call a “no sell”. In pro-wrestling, a “no sell” is when another guy pretends to hit you, and you refuse to act like you’ve been hit. You don’t “sell” the punch to the audience, you don’t try to make them believe it. In a way, Pomni does have an excuse. She’s supposed to be some random person who doesn’t want to be here and who doesn’t care about any of this, and that would be fine if we did focus on anything she did care about. As it is, these episodes are usually 90% about things the characters don’t care about and that they don’t try to sell to the audience. If they won’t really get into it, then we can’t really get into it. The bottom line is, the characters don’t really care about this scene, they don’t try too hard to sell it, and it doesn’t matter.

And then we get to this. And you know what? The animation team at Glitch is phenomenal. I think if you’re an artist or an animator, you could do some solid analysis and learn a lot from what these guys are doing. Digital Circus looks great in motion. It’s very expressive, you can read actions really well, the framing is good, the composition is good, lighting is good – it’s good! I think the animation team is carrying this entire production on their backs.

The sound is great too. Foley is on point, and the music evokes the right feelings. I think without the music team, the show could never get away with some of the stilted and vapid bullshit they keep throwing at us.

This is such a nice use of color. It’s a nice warm scene. Pomni looks cute. They’ve got some sketches of their other shows in the background, but speaking of that – the writing in those other shows suck too. And this is the pattern I think I see with Glitch. They’re an art and animation company that doesn’t seem to have any real writers. Everything about them is professional except the writing, which means that every time you look at something they’ve made, the art gives the appearance you’re going to watch some amazing show.

Instead it’s some crap about a prophesy and a girl with black blood, and beyond that it’s just action and visual artistry. It all looks great, but there’s no real substance.

The online fandom does sometimes project character into what winds up being blank dolls. For example, I’ll see people talking about Jax having a “gamer personality,” or being depicted as a slim sexyman. Whatever appeals to people. The online fandom can just run with it, because there’s nothing really in Jax while he’s on screen, yet as an almost empty character you can put a large variety of thoughts and motives in him while he’s not on screen.

It’s so… essential to the modern way media gets sold to us. The thumbnails look great, but it’s up to social media to actually describe what this product is or what it means to us. It makes me wonder if the show were more clear with their characters and we all knew exactly who they were, would it actually have thirty million viewers in the first week?

Another minute passes, and now we’re trying to do a star-gazing scene where the characters actually discuss their motives and feelings, but it’s clear the writer doesn’t know how to do this, so instead the characters weirdly trip over these subjects like a toddler tripping over cracks in the sidewalk.

Now, heart-to-heart scenes are something Digital Circus keeps trying to do, and it doesn’t seem to know how to do them. We’re five episodes in and still struggling with it, and I’m going to say the problem is that they didn’t figure out who these characters were before they started writing the show. See, the thing with a character-driven scene is that it’s sort of up to your characters how it should play out. You can’t just put them in an empty room together and have one of them say, “Ah, now that I’m the dark, my memory has returned and I’ll explain my backstory,” which is what happened in the third episode.

If you’re a good character writer, then you should know how your characters would feel about things. Again, this is why a character-driven show is fun, because no matter where your characters are or what they’re doing, you know how they’d feel and can get a good sense of how they’d behave. That includes a situation where they’re having a heart-to-heart or a personal conversation. If you don’t know who the characters are or how they’d feel about things, then instead you have to resort to weird external mechanisms, or odd segues into a topic nobody has any reason to discuss.

During this scene, Ragatha brings up something about how Jax doesn’t have friends. “Not anymore”. This appears to anger Jax, who then doesn’t want to talk about it. They kind of awkwardly stumble into this by saying lines that were clearly written by someone who wasn’t the character. Then they kind of stumble out of it, awkwardly changing the subject. Then they stumble back into it a little, then back out again. The transitions in and out of the topic are extremely awkward and brightly visible.

When episode two came out, I talked about how it was sort of dumb for Gummi to exposit like he does, and this is still more of the same problem. This is telling the audience things without quite having the core emotions behind those things. We’re telling the audience Jax used to have a friend. We’re telling the audience this is some kind of conflict between he and Ragatha. It doesn’t feel at all like a natural conversation.

This scene could actually be a good time for Pomni to pull Ragatha off alone and talk to her in private. Not to receive an exposition dump about why Jax “has no friends”, but to learn what Ragatha is feeling. Even if she doesn’t tell Pomni exactly what’s going on there, Ragatha might tell half of the story, obfuscating the worst details to try to put a positive spin on it. Those of you who don’t write might not see much difference between what I’m suggesting and what the show actually does, but the difference is as broad as the one between “I put on a green shirt and pants” versus “I put on my pants and a green shirt”.

Good writing is about figuring out how to do lots of the latter while avoiding the former. Conveying as much information as you can with as little time as you have. The former is great for the kind of bogus Youtube “analysis” that’s rampant today. The line is badly written and winds up being ambiguous. Did the author mean that the pants are also green? Compared to the second version of the sentence, obviously no, the pants are likely not green, but the shirt definitely is. If you wanted the audience to know the pants and the shirt are both green, you’d write, “I put on a green shirt and some matching green pants.”

The good writing won’t really be discussed as much in social media. It’s clear what you mean. It’s clear what you intend. The bad writing, however, is highly open to interpretation. I personally think that wearing a matching set of green pants and shirt would look a little silly, but maybe they could be different shades of green. Maybe the shirt has some design that sort of breaks up the monotony of the colors, and you can envision something that works. I don’t know. We can disagree. We can fight about it on Twitter.

What is Pomni feeling at this time? Are Jax and Ragatha former friends? Do they care about each other? I don’t know. The scene doesn’t convey that. It doesn’t convey any feelings very accurately. Jax seems angry about it, but he also seems willing to talk about it. Then again, he’s not willing to talk about it. I can’t tell you anything conclusive about this scene or what it means to anyone, but if you love social media analysis then we can absolutely jaw about this shit all day.

Then we go to an “intermission” scene because Caine is having an existential meltdown about everyone enjoying the stargazing more than they like his adventures, and I actually think this is my favorite part of the episode because it’s the Glitch studio goofing off and having fun with animation. As I mentioned above, they’re good animators, so this whole section is pure joy.

Moving on, they go for a sort of noir bar scene that really nails the art direction and then just wastes a lot of time. They try to humanize Zooble a little more so that you remember she isn’t just a sucky, misanthrope stick-in-the-mud, but that she was also a tattoo artist and a bartender on top of those things. She and Jax have a really bizarre back and forth that doesn’t sound human because both of them feel like they’re trying to wrap their dialogue in a mystery box that you can unpack in a Youtube analysis video.

Jax will say something like, “I knew you were a bartender.”

And Zooble will reply, “It sounds like you’re trying to imply something.”

And Jax does say it like he’s trying to imply something negative about Zooble, but honestly I’m as confused as Zooble. You get the sense it’s supposed to be insulting, but I also don’t know, in that second, why you’d guess someone is a bartender in a condescending tone like that. It feels like we’re supposed to wonder about it, and wonder why Jax is talking like this, but you know what, Digital Cirucs?

Fuck you.

I’m starting to get kind of annoyed with this. I don’t watch the Youtube analysis. I’m not invested enough in these characters to be reading the fanfiction that fleshes out their personalities better. If Jax is going to imply that she worked at a gay bar or something, then just have him accuse her of working at a gay bar and let them fight about it. I’m not really sure what other kinds of bars you could be ashamed to work at, but I also think if someone worked at a gay bar then they might not be that ashamed of it, and that could have been an interesting character interaction that we didn’t get because we want to be mysterious and promoted in the SEO.

Instead of having a real argument with real character conflict that would tell us a lot about who they are, Ragatha exposits about her overbearing mother and informs everyone that the reason she tries to be so nice is because she doesn’t want to be mean like her mom. Wow, Digital Circus, way to dodge an actual character moment so that we can once against feast on delicious hamfist.

This is almost the longest scene of the episode. It lasts about six minutes, during which Jax notes that Cain made him vegan, which was supposed to be impossible. There’s some “lore” gristle for the Youtube channels to chew on, so congrats for them. We also now know that Jax “had” a friend, Zooble did tattoos and worked at a bar, and Ragatha’s mom was a bitch. Oh, and I guess Pomni worked in accounting but moonlights as an abandoned building explorer for Youtube, which is probably how she found whatever terminal got her into the Circus.

Generally we just learn factual things. Unless you read more deeply into all of this and want to really see characters where there aren’t any, we don’t learn all that much more about what these people are like. Having a bitchy mom isn’t, you know, personality, exactly. It’s not a voice. It also surprises me that Pomni enjoys the thrill of exploring abandoned places since her whole personality is just to “no sell” all the environments she’s placed in, and she’s never expressed a desire to explore around the world or check things out – which, by the way, WOW. Imagine if they did use that motive at any capacity and Pomni was curious enough about her surroundings to justify the show’s setting. It’s like a peek into what could have been.

Then they play baseball and everything is just completely irrelevant, it doesn’t matter. It goes on for seven minutes, and it probably would have saved them a ton of budget to have not done it at all. There are a couple of funny bits, like when they have a centipede using all of its feet to applaud enough to sound like a stadium, but I don’t know if those bits were worth thousands of dollars and seven minutes of everybody’s life. Clearly, the time you spend watching the baseball scene is better spent than time you might use watching almost any other content on Youtube, but that is such a low bar.

And I get the sense that a lot of us who are invested in Digital Circus might be invested in it on that principle. As harsh as I may seem throughout this article, I’d be even more upset if they quit producing it. As much as the writing keeps pulling me out of the immersion and even frustrates me at times, this is still a show that’s obviously being made by artists who actually care about it and who are creating their own original idea instead of cynically cashing in on some algorithmic trend.

Even if this one show doesn’t have the best writing, what if we got another show? And another show after that? What if one of those shows had all the fantastic art and animation, but also a compelling story that would move and inspire a bunch of people to make even more stuff like this? We don’t want to not have stuff like the Amazing Digital Circus. We want creativity. We want new ideas. We want people to try.

However, at the same time, I also wonder how much of this show’s success can be owed to the very systems we’re sick of. Digital Circus isn’t really asking much of us. I have a young child, and none of this show seems to go over his head because there really isn’t that much to grasp. Peripheral content in the form of Youtube analysis makes it seem deeper to those who’d like to believe it is, but on its face Digital Circus is really just a colorful cartoon about nothing in particular.

I said I wouldn’t go on about why the Hunger Games was popular, but that book asked its readers what they would do if you were thrown into a world that told you to kill children for sport. It offered a lot of easy moral questions, and ways for the audience to say, “no”, so that they could feel heroic for realizing it was bad to stab an eleven-year-old through the heart with a rusty trench knife. It’s very digestible, and its poor writing made it accidentally a simple read because of how unelaborate the whole thing was, but it grabbed people because it hit some emotional resonances and asked you a couple of really stupid, obvious questions.

I guess that the Amazing Digital Circus is asking its audiences, “What would you do if you were trapped in VRChat with boring people, and all you can do is hop between worlds to keep yourself entertained?”

I just wish it developed more on that thought. I tell you what I do – I explore worlds, and I pay attention to stuff the artists did to make the worlds interesting. And what do I do when I get surrounded by teenagers trying to get a rile out of me? I talk back to them for a while, tell them they’re stupid – they just want the attention. Sometimes I let them know I’m almost forty now, because the kids love feeling like they’re getting one over on an old man. We can all have fun socializing for a while, just playing our parts.

VRChat is a chance to play a character. To kind of present a fake, exaggerated personality. Over time, however, you can’t keep up that fake persona, so if you talk to people long enough, eventually the mask comes off and you’re just you, even though you might be wearing the avatar of a purple bunny or a stuffed doll. You can say, “the person I am in this digital world isn’t really me,” but it is you.

I don’t know. It’s just food for thought. If you were going to write the Amazing Digital Circus, what would you bother asking your audience to think about? It doesn’t have to be sophisticated, but if you know what you’re trying to ask your audience, you can maybe start trying to write an actual story from there.