The Amazing Digital Circus is the best existential horror since SpongeBob SquarePants: Season 1, Episode 17 “Rock Bottom”. In particular, I understand the feeling of being “abstracted” very well – I’ve been on that brink of falling into oblivion, and I can see that the author experienced exactly that, and he conveyed it perfectly.
The idea is cleverly universal – based on this premise you can explore any topics and tropes you want, just by making a game inside the Circus about it.
We have another series with the same kitchen sink approach of “anything can happen and any story can be told on this basis”. I mean, of course, Rick and Morty, with its “infinite universes, infinite possibilities” approach.
But the TADC scheme is different in a very important way. It’s not nihilistic.
The Rick and Morty universe is fundamentally empty – everything can happen at any time for any reason, for every Rick who is smart there’s another one who is dumb, for every delicious sandwich there is a disgusting one, if we screw up this universe we can go to the next one over, there is no truth, nothing exists on purpose, nothing means anything, let’s go and watch TV. When everything is equally possible, nothing remains.
The TADC universe, however, has a truth, a reality check. The Circus is a virtual space where nothing has any meaning and there is nothing left to do but LARP and cope. But, very explicitly, the real world is there, and the hope is there, and even if everything around is farcical, there is something that is not farcical, something you can hold on to. The heroes are in a virtual world, but the world isn’t itself virtual. I am surrounded by NPCs, and I myself am not an NPC. I am on the edge of oblivion, but I have reasons not to fall into it. You can trust nothing, but you have to trust something.
This anchor allows us to contract the real and the fake. An NPC is experiencing a breakdown over learning that he is a mere NPC, Caine’s plaything, only there for the decor? This only means something if the players are, and the real world is, and there is something relative to which you are mere. In Rick and Morty, everyone is a plaything, everything is pointless, there is nothing that isn’t mere – so the feeling of existential dread is diluted. If nothing you do has a point, you can just find your own meaning, gaze into the Absurd. This might be scary at first, but then? Enjoy life, push your rock up the mountain, or don’t, I’m not a cop. In the Circus, though? You keep looking for the point, for the anchor, for the reason. You want to fall into despair and go watch TV? Rick and Morty says – OK, that was always allowed, watching TV isn’t fundamentally better or worse than anything else you could do. TADC says – this is but dark before the dawn, don’t give up, or else you’d get abstracted, and your friends would cry, because that would be a real, meaningful loss. On the gates of Rick and Morty it says “All hope abandon ye who enter here”. On the gates of TADC it says – “keep hoping, suckers!”
This contrast let me understand where exactly Rick and Morty jumped over the shark. It started adding meaning to the universe. It now has an overarching arc, and the arc has stakes. Rick got an origin story, got a reason, got a goal. Rick lost Diane – and he can’t just shrug and get a new one from the next world over. He is trying to enact revenge on Rick Prime, who exists objectively and non-fungibly. At the start of the series the characters fucked up the Earth and just swept it under the rug – but now they come back and bet bitten in the ass by their errors. Rick is no longer gazing into the Absurd.
And yes, people were happy about the fanservice of Rick’s origin story and are excited about how the global arc would develop. But also, they notice that the story changed its tone into less zaniness experimentation. I think this is the reason.
I hope that TADC won’t make this mistake and won’t introduce a plot point that ruins the stakes. The fans are playing with theories that maybe one of the main characters is an NPC, or that the real world doesn’t even exist and Pomni appeared out of nothing with all her memories last Thursday. Giving us reasons to look for deception? Yes, that’s a cornerstone of the genre. Confirming it, even indirectly? Would ruin everything. The best here is to not violate the basic premises of the setting, never reveal anything about the true nature of the Circus, never show the real world, and never give the characters any global goals. Instead, they should just keep pumping interpersonal drama within the established decor. The potential of the idea – covering various plots and themes against the backdrop of existential horror – won’t be lost.