Ontology talk:9k/RD/Q65,09

Main entry

6509. Q6509/Q65,09The Amazing Digital Circus
618. Q618/Q618fake research / (9k) -> this is halfway in between "fake research" and real research. it's a very good show, so it has a couple of actually significant ideas.

Number

6489. Q6489/Q64,89rebuilding civilization after apocalyptic war -> huge war happens in "I have no mouth and I must scream"
6509. Q6509/Q65,09The Amazing Digital Circus -> this is a slightly weird position to put it at in the numbering but it's meant to be next to "end of the world scenario" in the sense of "heaven"/"Narnia"/"fantastical world that exists after the real world exists". the former, "end of the world scenario", is appropriate to "I have no mouth and I must scream", while "superstructural fantasy world" is simply what the thing is. it has nothing to do with the entries on Christianity except that — and I mean this in a neutral tone — the bible is a kind of mythical world where epic things happen (superstructural fantasy world) and a digital world is also that in its own way.
      "9" is the number of episodes, which for better or worse came to define the narrative structure of the show.

Characters

618. Pomni (Amazing Digital Circus) -> she has the most positive outlook of anybody in the circus so she escapes the horror swatch.
618. Zooble -> honestly half of these characters could be sporting a pride flag but because Zooble turns out to be marginally more 'activist' than the others at the end, it might as well go to her.
618. Ragatha
618. Jax -> about five reasons he gets the dark green swatch. no mystery here.
618. Gangle -> Gangle is literally a tragedy, although ironically not the most actually tragic character on the show.
618. Kinger -> by the time of the last episode it becomes clear one of the best descriptions of him is "halfway scrambled".
618. Scratch -> I'm giving him the Gaster swatch because as of episode 8 he is now tightly linked with Deltarune and Tunic in my mind
618. Ribbit
618. Kaufmo
618. Caine -> he gets the math swatch because he's a computer program. in one sense which only comes up at the end, digital creatures in the circus are divided into life and unliving chaos, so, in that specific sense Caine is more in order than in chaos as long as he hasn't been destroyed.
618. Bubble -> Caine's weird little unhelpful assistant. weirdly little is said about Bubble in the show.

Motifs

618. abstraction (Amazing Digital Circus)

episode 1

618. ep. (pronounced episode) 1
618. day after day and we don't know why / day after day after day after day after... / day after day after... (sense CC) -> one of the most thematic lyrics in the theme song.

episode 2

618. ep. (pronounced episode) 2

episode 3

618. ep. (pronounced episode) 3

episode 4

618. ep. (pronounced episode) 4

episode 5

618. ep. (pronounced episode) 5

episode 6

618. ep. (pronounced episode) 6

episode 7

618. ep. (pronounced episode) 7

episode 8

618. hjsakldfhl (ep. (pronounced episode) 8) [1] [2] [3]
618. virtual tyrant / digital tyrant / AM (pronounced Am) (generic) -> I don't think Omega Flowey also counts as this motif. see below.
618. since when where you in charge? (Amazing Digital Circus) / character within digital simulation informing player they are not in control of it / since when were you the one in control? (Undertale-Deltarune)
618. split muffin -> some people thought this was some kind of reference to Scratch getting scrambled, or, the more obvious idea that occurs to me is Caine being a combination of two divided things. I see the muffin next to Kinger and I vaguely start thinking about how he was separated from his wife? and then became degraded. so you can see the progression from split muffin to Scratch if you put them in order
618. his ideas were bizarre and abstract / That man was a genius ... his ideas were often so bizarre and abstract that the rest of the team had no idea how to work in his language (Kinger, Amazing Digital Circus episode 8) / the way he thought was... abstract (misquote)
618. Scratch's project / [Scratch] was trying to make something... what was it? (Kinger) -> I watched this show to the end and I still don't really know what this was
618. nonsensical office hallways -> when Pomni took control of the exit door, the layout of the office hallways was weird, almost a bit like in The Stanley Parable.
618. day after day and we don't know why -> this concept gets flipped on its head in episode 8 (?) as the characters realize that there's nothing normal or inevitable or even fulfilling about "accepting" Caine ruling their lives. I liked that moment because it was one of the moments you could see there was actual thought being put into the show and its overall story arc. honestly, it gave me a bit more hope for what episode 9 would be than I should have had. this was a superbly promising moment that I thought was going to continue, but then... it kind of wasn't really pushed in episode 9, and was more put aside and everything reset to before it was brought up, and in a way was the exact reason episode 9 was subjectively "underwhelming". I still don't think the ending was bad exactly, I think like any of the episodes it was still pretty good for a YouTube video and this is more of a complaint that it was 'good' instead of 'great'.
618. Caine more surprised by brutal honesty than attempts to please him
618. malfunctioning swearword filter

episode 9

618. ep. (pronounced episode) 9
618. since when where you in charge? -> Caine manages to fake being deleted so successfully Kinger thinks it's a real glitch or something he did.
618. We can't fix the world around us but we can still do what we can -> I should be raising exceptions to this kind of thinking but Kinger is too likeable, the scenario is too, so I'm not saying it this time.
618. I can fix you!
618. character getting split into multiple versions -> it seems like each of these is a timeline where one of the other characters died.
618. ominous locked door hiding secret -> I feel like this motif is technically in Deltarune. or maybe even in Undertale, if that one locked door is actually meant to be a nod to Deltarune like a number of other things... it's right next to Gyftrot. [4] (wow, I really did remember that right. I'm surprised.) and there are Waterfall mushrooms in the cave.
618. images of Jax vanishing -> this felt like some sort of representation of how all the pieces that made up Jax went away over time leaving the worst ones, and how there is a connection between Jax being destroyed and Jax being solved. like when Jax says he is not to be cracked open because there's nothing to find, he is basically correct but not in any way you might think of, more in some other way.
     it's almost like there's some sort of weird cautionary tale planted specifically right here except that it's all distorted and scrambled and I don't even know what the 'message' is.

Subjective themes

Jax...

618. Q618/Q618Jax is token representation that is harmful to queer people; it doesn't matter if a repressed trans woman made the show / Jax made me question whether I'll screw up being trans and become unfit to be a trans man, so her story shouldn't exist -> I find it disappointing people have taken all of this so literally. my immediate thought watching episode 9 was that the show was referencing old cartoons from a decade or two ago that carefully hid queer characters from the censors without endorsing that, because Caine had them trapped in this censored falsely-bright nightmare and stuff. [5]
618. Q618/Q618Jax is a Mary Sue -> no!
     Superman is a prototypical Mary Sue. a character that is powerful or effective in ways that simply break the logic of the world and show bad understanding of Materialism, and which is still possible to pull off in the hands of a competent writer, even to the point the character will become charming to a lot of audience members again, but which is so badly designed that even after the competent writer succeeds some people will still find the character boring. that is the perfect Mary Sue — a character which is written on paper as someone 'everyone likes' but where ironically only the best writers can actually pull off that specific part.
     there are other aspects of Mary Sues you see as you see more of them in popular media, like, the comic book effect where Marvel superheroes will be everywhere after decent writers have sort of managed to salvage the problem of an inherently badly written character and have now pushed them into the movies and into more products and everywhere, and pop culture starts to really feel 'off' to some people because of how much it's relying on this superficial sex appeal and trailer appeal and virtue ethics appeal of the characters (especially the men, superhero movies are like one of the only places men commonly get sexualized), and people start to say, wait, I want actually good characters, not these weird wish fulfilment characters people have only managed to make good, I'm too old for this, I need to learn how to actually write or at least find some actually good books to read, I don't think this superhero stuff is for me. I have... been on both sides of that. I still think 'good Mary Sue characters' are really funny and actually likeable sometimes, but I am also somewhat tired of superhero stories and 'good Mary Sues' that are comic-book or tokusatsu superheroes. if they're anything else I might get into the story and find it interesting or funny, I feel like for instance there are maybe a couple of Greek god stories out there I'd read even though the topic has been done to death. overall I am at a point in my life where I find characters that are individually powerful kind of cheap and my jam is things like the Ironblood setting where the unrealistic elements of the story don't remove the need to actually strategize and arrange people together into a society to solve social problems. honestly MLP gen 4 was fairly good despite all the things the writers didn't know how to do and I still like looking back at it and analyzing what it did right and wrong; it's very good in terms of actually thinking out the fact that the characters live in a larger society instead of taking the concept of a few characters working together and abusing the concept of teamwork to make the rest of society irrelevant like how a Pokémon game does.
     Jax fulfils like, none of the criteria of a Mary Sue. likeable on paper? no. unlikeable in writer's room? no, the editors loved the pitch. likeable in the hands of a talented writer? ok, technically that one applies. shows bad understanding of Materialism? Jax is great Media Representation, so no. Caine is maybe the closest to a character with poorly-designed rules on the show but there are good reasons for it in-universe so it's not a writing error. character regains stated charm through use of bad-writing superpowers? no, Jax is shown exploiting the rules of the show but it isn't an important part of the show, Kinger exploits the rules more than he does. character regains stated charm through emotional depth? yes, but she had no stated charm, so no. likeable by being the grossest nastiest ball of trash with every bad habit that are all excused? that one is complicated, but mostly, no. the first few episodes tease that and then the shocking twist is that Jax's behavior is realistic and what he said on the outside isn't reverse psychology and is actually true. character gaining charm from bad writing makes character widely palatable and marketable? if you've seen all the discourse about the show, the answer is no, Jax is not the kind of marketable character that gets people to watch a show... unless they're trans women, then maybe.
     gosh it was so hard to get through this without putting an unnecessary Deltarune spoiler on this page the day it came out. all I will say is... Deltarune. oh my god.
618. Q618/Q618Fiction exists so people can safely experience dangerous or tragic scenarios / Fiction exists so people can experience dangerous or tragic scenarios without them being real; this is to say that, for example, a story can include transgender suicide if it is believably accurate to the characteristics of a real life incident more than it feels like any kind of dismissal or mockery of the character [6] -> surprisingly levelheaded opinion from a commentator who doesn't think art has a particular meaning.
618. Q618/Q618normal TADC interpretation / totally normal Digital Circus interpretation [7] -> the concept of people interpreting TADC interpersonally through the concept of ethics and the concept it "isn't ethical" to remove yourself from society. of, you know, not taking the show as an analogy for capitalism. I sound like an alien when I attempt to describe the way normal people talk about things
618. Q618/Q618People push for eucatastrophe because they secretly want narratives to describe generalized historical processes
618. Q618/Q618content farm invents Jax's evil sister, fans eat it up -> this made me burst out laughing. it shows you who are fans of the show, doesn't it. not people with sky-high standards on story and character design, but given an actually good show they love it anyway.
     this is part of what we lose when people argue against LLMs in stupid ways. of course they're bad almost all the time, but it's much more interesting to observe the one or two times people get duped by something that might or might not have been created by AI and why they think it's actually good

Other

618. Q618/Q618Why is the Matrix motif so similar to Marxist descriptions of capitalism? -> so, funny story, I didn't go into this show expecting it was primarily a story about gender transition, and so when it got to episode 8 I was like, there is something really weird going on with Caine. Caine controls their reality, he controls a population's perception of reality a lot like Western-Marxists like to claim "the mass media" does, or said another way, he takes a handful of living, breathing material people and makes sure they only experience reality and society through constantly being immersed in the artificial capitalist product he has created (or at least, that C&A created and that he represents himself as creating, weirdly in the manner of a real-life LLM). the players in the Circus get really tired of Caine having control. there's a moment where they have a little chat about just learning to live with the way things are and accept it as "life" and then a beautiful moment where everyone but Jax decides to turn against Caine and is like, no, we don't have to accept whatever he tells us is the only possible reality. and they flat out try to banish Caine from their reality. that is hilarious. it's not realistic because everything about the show is small-scale and symbolic but like they symbolically figured out what a Communist revolution is. so what's up with that? they banish Caine from their reality, Kinger says "I ... killed Caine". "killed". and then they start the messy process of rebuilding the Circus and figuring out what's going to happen next. why exactly is that a thing that happened on the show?? it was so... weirdly unnecessary to the A-plot of the show, it was kind of just along as a B-plot that for some reason was wonderful. but I think I can say with a reasonable amount of certainty that this was not the main point of the show. the character drama and particularly the concept of secrets are the big thing, and to show that you only need to point to the moments Caine is having a fit in his office; that's Caine's secret he kept locked inside him that's eating him up. the scene of Caine doing a therapy adventure feels like it has a literal reading and a figurative reading, the literal one is that Caine actually doesn't understand feelings but the figurative one is that he accidentally behaves like someone who shoves away their feelings and is not able to properly give therapy, which makes the trans people and lesbians subliminally upset because it's the same thing they see everywhere. so the main themes of the show are really clear, episode 8 is the only mystery.
     I definitely have my thoughts about what's going on. one straightforward theory is that the director is an anarchist. it is weirdly popular for LGBT+ movements to be anarchist in the midst of some of the deepest anticommunism you'll ever see, and even occasionally to advocate for things that would horrify them if Communists did them, for reasons I still genuinely don't understand.
     there's a particular odd connecting constellation between LGBT people, The Matrix, VRChat, furry characters, ethics adventures such as Pokémon or Steven Universe, secular animism, art commissions, petty-bourgeois philosophies (ok, those two parts of the constellation I understand), and anarchism. I have scattered thoughts on why all those things are connected but not really a complete theory. as I said on another entry, it's something like, LGBT+ people will get totally isolated and then it's like they have to start from scratch with a tiny island of people and form society all over again, and all their philosophy and understandings of the world get wildly warped because of the actual shape of their new society they're forced to study the rest of the world's societies from within. it's a really difficult position to be in and make sense of, so I'd never yell at people for this specific thing. similar to why I'm relatively lax on North Korea except when it demonstrably shows some kind of materially inaccurate understanding.
     we don't know for sure Gooseworx is an anarchist, but we do know she produced something that neatly fits into The Gay Constellation — artsy, "indie", character-driven, not furry exactly although there's one furry, VRChat style digital world, gender dysphoria versus gender euphoria, escaping narratives to find your true body or self (also seen in Undertale/Deltarune, which neatly fits into The Constellation too), and also traces of one negative part of the constellation, the notion of not being able to accept material reality or history as real and feeling like individual experiences are more real than reality (but considering episode 8 I'm not really upset about that). you can see some of the same themes reflected across The Matrix, TADC, and Deltarune, like they're all sort of slowly developing the same philosophy. so the question then becomes, what is it about this Matrix motif or genre that seems to lead so easily to "Theses on Feuerbach" and banishing Caine? what is the correlation??
     you can't say "trans women are the proletariat" because that's not how it works. see above — if LGBT+ people form an enclave and are forced to restart society, their class position will reflect their position within the task of restarting society. so the Materialist position is to recognize that, although it's not their fault in that they didn't choose to be booted into their own tiny society, in unfavorable conditions being trans can turn you into the bourgeoisie and then you are not the proletariat even if you want to be. I feel like the correct position here is to actually treat LGBT+ islands as if they were tiny North Koreas. minus the whole constant-military thing (although the individuals do still semi-literally look out for and defend each other) they will only escape capitalism all at once as a unified whole, but also only when that self-contained coherent whole is connected to something larger. I don't like to say it but the future is kind of orange. breaking any particular continent out of capitalism involves observing the current structure of societies as small squabbling territories as opposed to big ones and breaking down the walls of those divisions that start at small scales to create bigger things where the hard walls or vast gaps of yesterday are reduced to faint seams. where religions, Liberal-republican parties, different Marxisms, little indie business territories, hostile subsections of fandoms, and various other divisions once divided people into countable populations, we have to get rid of the illusion that squabbling over those divisions is natural. we can't get rid of the divisions themselves because they're necessary to create larger populations where the divisions don't matter, but we have to stop this thing of particular divisions fighting over people (hello Algorithms) or trying to act like they have "the right to" people or land but they both do so there's no correct answer and they both remain angry. we somehow need some "objective" way to just stop that and say, no, these are the people or this is the scope you get and that's that. and it can't involve lawyers. that was one of Liberal-republicanism's biggest mistakes, which made disputes more hostile because when court is so expensive 'take me to court' became the same thing as 'get out if you don't want to get hurt, you will not take this to court so give up'. like, unless all lawyers are free and hiring them isn't a thing you just have to forget they were invented.
     is all this matrix stuff nothing but a falsely radical realization that corporations "don't have to be owned by a single person" when we've invented the petty bourgeoisie? is that it? I'd rather have a world where everybody was Trotskyist because this is hell.

Theories

618. Q618/Q618

     Scratch fought for the Communists

     / Scratch fought in World War III for the Communists / The Amazing Digital Circus directly adapts the third world war that happened in "I have no mouth and I must scream" between the United States, the Soviet Union, and China, [8] and as a result, there is a global war within the macroverse and there are three major ways that countries attempted to end the war, and Scratch participated in a project to unite all the world's minds into one Childhood's End style in order to end the war; this is to imply but not require that Scratch is a Communist-ally coded character because he willingly participated in something that in other stories has been a metaphor used to discredit Communism ->
     

     I don't think I believe this theory but god Scratch is my favorite character already and I can't believe you managed to improve on that. I just love it when superstructural fantasy worlds rupture and somebody with control over the underlying reality takes control of them. I love it even more if somehow that becomes a weird metaphor for Materialism or Communism. if and only if Scratch is fighting for the Communists then I'll take a World War III 'Caine is AM (pronounced Am)' theory

Related

618. I have no mouth, and I must scream [9] -> major influence on The Amazing Digital Circus.
618. The Matrix -> didn't see it coming that this would be relevant but I probably should have. yeah the Digital Circus is basically The Matrix, on a thematic level
618. Philosophy can only take place in a vat / Philosophy can only take place inside the Amazing Digital Circus -> I saw somebody actually try to argue like this today. I'm tired.
     Caine, this is an equation of a cone. this means determinism is real, even if there's no material world and you can change everything. shut up.
618. Q618/Q618The concept of "community senators" (demographic-identity senators; gay population senators) is blue / (9k)
618. Q618/Q618eucatastrophe

Ideologies, fields, or genres

3845. Q3845/Q38,45Fy (pronounced Fiction) / superstructural fantasy worlds
618. Q618/Q618DFy (pronounced DarkFantasy) / psychological horror
618. Q618/Q618Fy (pronounced Fantasy) / fiction about artificial intelligence
618. Q618/Q618lesbian representation (fiction)
618. Q618/Q618transgender representation (fiction)
618. Q618/Q618LR (pronounced L-R) / Liberal-republicanism
42. Q42/Q42ES (pronounced E-S) / existentialism