#and everything is so vibrant and colorful and lifeless. do the set designers have fun anymore

[ennobaka]

Kinda miss the era of wuxia in the 2000s where everything is rugged looking and men were allowed to be big and have facial hairs and women were allowed to have shapes

[sunhowler]

i only watched it once and im not doing it again so i may be misremembering some things here or there but... man. youd think that a show with the aesthetic it has would be exciting or new in any way but its unavoidably bland. the characters and the plot arent that engaging, yes, but i think my biggest gripe is that its one of those narratives that thinks being self aware and pessimistic is quirky and enjoyable. and like... i guess it is, given how widespread this damn pilot is, but for me its very grating. the whole "straight man character gets inexplicably sucked into a new universe where everything is silly and they dont know how to handle it" CAN be good!!! i think a lot about how what weve seen from this show compares to centaurworld (yes yes i know indie team vs netflix show i understand) which has a very similar concept. the exhausted female lead gets ripped from her world into a new, far more colorful one, with wacky characters that they initially have trouble getting along with, as they fight to get back to their own world. the biggest difference here, though, is that the centaurs are fun when we meet them!! they have a love for the place they live in!! and of course they have problems with it, of course its flawed, but thats something that gets expanded upon later on after the audience and the main character are already firmly invested in those characters. but when clown girl (my brain keeps calling her pawmi. thats a pokemon) gets to the circus, everyones fucking miserable. everyone hates it there, they all wanna leave too, and the whole time you have gods most wretched twink following along and making "ermmm... well that just happened" tier jokes. i cannot get invested in these characters, i cant get invested in the world, youve given me no reason to be invested. youve shown me that both the lead and the people inside the digital circus are miserable assholes (with like 1 or 2 exceptions) and that the setting is a temporary difficulty that has to be escaped from. but like, in just the first episode of centaurworld, the setting is already alive and vibrant and fascinating, and more importantly i think: horse's quest of finding the shamans is established. the shaman quest implies a long journey with concrete steps and exploration of both the setting and the characters. but tadc... does not have anything of the sort. it just plops the lead down into this lifeless place, has her go on a fetchquest that ultimately doesnt matter at all, has a character weve had no time to get acquainted with or attached to nearly die for some reason, briefly come across some sliver of random hope before getting it equally as randomly taken away, and thats it. its an exercise in futility, which could be an interesting thing to explore if this were a different genre. but it seemingly wants to be some kind of situational comedy or something, so the nihilism of it all is just very grating and trite. it feels like, for all its vibrant colors and character designs and wacky backgrounds, it should revel in its own whimsy, but it just doesnt. it feels like at every turn, the inherent silly nature of the digital circus is made fun of in a very marvel movie ass self referential way. the most prominent characters, save for the tooth guy maybe, are all unimpressed and jaded with their world. but, to compare it to centaurworld again, horse was the only character to be like that up until some of the last episodes. all of the centaurs took pride in their whimsy, didnt feel the need to be little shits about it, didnt have to joke about it to make themselves seem relatable.. thats how you get characters and audiences invested, not through some lame detached post irony bullshit.

i dunno. its a pilot, i think it has potential, but i will never like it unless it learns to be unabashedly whimsical. because without that sense of wonder and optimism it just feels really hollow and more like a project for the creator to show off their ocs than anything.

also i hate that stupid fucking rabbit i hate the "guy who sucks but the fandom loves him because hes sassy and tortured and (most importantly) skinny" archetype. die rabbit die

the problem with the amazing digital circus is that its not very good