Perhaps it’s just the circles I’m exposed to, but The Amazing Digital Circus was like something that just suddenly spawned one day as the internet’s new favorite show. People seemed to be in absolute love with this jester character, Pomni, with all the requisite fanart that entails.

There have been a lot of cartoons with similar levels of pull that I hadn’t paid attention to over the years, but what convinced me to actually check out TADC was just seeing the wildly varying reactions to its conclusion. Some seemed angry about it to the point of regretting their fandom, and in completely different ways. Others were angry at those who were angry, and still others were profoundly moved by it. Notably, the person whose impressions really made me want to check the series out was VTuber Dr. Nova(e), from V4Mirai, who mentioned in one stream that she left the theater in tears.

A girl suddenly finds herself in a virtual world with a hazy memory and an appearance resembling a jester. She learns that she’s one of a handful of inhabitants of something called The Amazing Digital Circus, run by a ringmaster named Caine, where the goal seems to be simply playing different games, and where escape is said to be impossible. Unable to recall her own name, she’s assigned one—Pomni—and begins to learn about this “circus” and its “performers.”

Strangely, I find it difficult to separate my thoughts on the show itself from the fandom surrounding it—something that I was able to do even with My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic back in the day. I still want to explore my thoughts and impressions of it as just a piece of fiction regardless of whatever audience it has garnered, but I think a lot of its draw comes from presenting a world for fans to speculate and bring themselves into, and so ignoring it entirely wouldn’t be right either.

With that said, I have two basic impressions. First, I find TADC to be a neat personal project on the part of its creator, Gooseworx. Second, it feels like a 2020s-era cross between two animated works: Steven Universe (silly characters who are deeper than they appear) and the much older Reboot (a game-world setting with mini-games as a narrative device), Heck, Caine is like a spiritual successor to the latter’s Mike the TV. Given that both of those series have been host to some very intense fanbases over the years, I can see why people gravitated towards the series, especially with a culture both on and descended from Tumblr-esque aesthetics. The characters are quirky nervous wrecks and the world they’re forced to inhabit creates a lot of questions as to what the hell is actually going on. Together, these aspects make for some fertile spaces for  people to plant and cultivate their imaginations into overdrive, and I think that’s why it has both thrived and had its fair share of fandom controversy.

Based on my viewing experience and no outside knowledge about the creation process, TADC comes across as a work with an ending in mind, but uncertainty as to whether it would reach that ending for sure. The result is, up until Episode 9, a story that drops tidbits of info in a sparse yet enticing manner. As the pieces add up, you get both a sense of their own individual histories from before they entered the space called The Amazing Digital Circus, as well as their histories with one another, as well as the nature of this world they occupy. Central to all this is the idea that the characters are all deeply affected by their memories or lack thereof, whether they’re something lost that needs to be found, a source of comfort, or the cause of deep trauma.

I think the fractured response from the fans is because the series has a definitive ending that carries both a sense of finality and an openness that closes the door on certain types of speculation and leaves room for others. Certain characters get more development than others—notably Jax and to a lesser extent Kinger—which makes the overall narrative of TADC into something more focused and precise at the possible expense of being that space for viewers to play around. The fact that Pomni ends up acting almost as more of a “player character” in the sense of being the figure through whom the mysteries of the circus are discovered, means those who connected mainly to Pomni might not get the emotional catharsis they would be seeking through her.

I personally enjoyed and appreciated it, but I ultimately did not form a powerful attachment to The Amazing Digital Circus, for better or for worse. I think I’m at a place in my life where I don’t connect to it that way, though I can easily see why it grabs people of all ages.

I want to end off with a bit of an anecdote and a thought that came to mind. Prior to watching TADC, I had seen comments that it actually has quite a number of younger fans, and that the theatrical releases of the final episode saw a lot of kids in attendance. I could understand this intellectually, but I don’t think it hit home until I literally saw a young girl one day with a Pomni backpack. What I’m left with, funnily enough, is the notion that TADC (especially that final episode) may be this generation’s version of The Transformers: The Movie now 40 years later—an animated work whose general kid-friendly appearance ultimately leads them to experience their first trauma through fiction. I’m curious to see if that will be its legacy in ten years’ time.