>Pomni mentions that she is into urban exploring in episode 5
>We never see her explore the circus in her downtime.

Many such cases

Digital Circus is a good example of why stories need writers who actually know how to write.

The best thing that happened in the show was Jax getting skinned alive

I like when the show gaslight you into beliving these characters had actual development and are now genuinely close to eachoter. Even tho we never saw any of that

For me, the hype was mostly generated by the concept.  It had apparently been done before multiple times, but I haven't really seen any of these "people get trapped in a digital world" stories myself so I was eager to see how it unfolded.  Up until about episode 5 it was interesting and fun to watch each episode as they came out.  In the end, it tried some kind of Evangellion style subversion where you expect something more dramatic and end up with something completely different.  Fans defend it by insisting that you should've known it was never about the lore or structure of the circus, it was always about the purple bunny, their trans identity and tragic backstory, but to me if that was the case, they shouldn't have started with a pilot that made it seem like it was going to be about Pomni dealing with the existential dread of being stuck inside a computer with seemingly no way out.

Seeing those old Y2K Screenshots where it actually looks like a late-90s PC game is disheartening man. That’s honestly where I expected the show to go down and instead of it being interesting, it just became another indie animation with the same issues as the others online.

"Who The Hell Starts A Video Like That,I Just Sat Down"

Remember when we all thought Ragatha was gonna get character development? Good times

My favorite irony of the show, intentional or not, is that Jax claims to be the funny one but I laughed at his "jokes" like, twice in the whole series. Meanwhile Caine, the guy none of the cast ever laughs at, made me chuckle from day one, despite actively trying to not make the insane robot my favorite character AGAIN. (It didn't work.)

It's literally tumblr drama from 2014 the show. Feelings. Crying about feelings. Pomni and ragatha staring at each other for 3 minutes as they walk away in the final summs up the show

The I Have No Mouth comparison is really funny to me. I definitely see where it's coing from, but I think it's a story more people have heard about than actually read and repeating this piece of trivia makes them feel smart. Having actually read it a lot of the conversation I've heard is pretty surface level. The guy who actually brought itup to me had no idea the adventure game was different from the short story, or at the short story's plot was basically 'they walk for a really long time and are psychologically destroyed by a can opener'.

The reality is that the show needed to be longer and Goose was too hard stuck in the self insert aspect. The finale proved that when she couldn't let go of her initial idea about what Jax was meant to be and how she essentially destroyed all the build up, tension and payoffs for the sake of finishing the show the way "she wanted". The show itself had a lot going for it but the finale revealed some ugly truths about Goose's current writing skills where for whatever personal reasons outside of fan harassment, she was fully incapable of actually writing something that made sense to end the show off. The random cuts to new scenes also felt like such a weird departure from how they did it before. The allegory of what people kept saying abstraction was meant to represent is genuinely worthless with what the finale shows, how Jax abstracted(nothing to do with it happening off screen btw), and Pomni's plus everyone else's characterization felt utterly broken apart whether people saw no issues beforehand with the writing or not. The show had genuine intrigue and Goose instead chose to ultimately make it, as I've seen someone else point out, nothing but a tumblr sad whiny story all because Goose thought she was cooking up something relatable to her not realizing that it does expose her quite a bit by using Jax as the stand in. This weird obsession with making him some anti self insert is the epitome of bad writing imo and what could've been fixed or recontextualized in the finale instead retroactively hurt basically everything before it. The icing on the cake was the incessant need to "confirm" things online making everything worse from a writing perspective. Honestly though, people still love it regardless. There needs to be classes taught on just how well Goose manipulated the emotions of the audience with that finale because the problems that came from it started very early on yet people don't even notice them. It's genuinely bad writing but I would not at all blame people for thinking otherwise given how people praised the finale as the last piece of the puzzle that made the show "amazing" when it kinda made it worse...by like a lot

I actually liked Jax before episode 9 because I was under the assumption we were getting a completely different character arc. I thought he was going to be an asshole that ends up having to break down his barriers and integrate into the rest of the group and either abstract while trying to make anmends or help the rest escape the circus, or actually just end up on friendly terms with the rest.

But that isn't what we got. Instead it feels like his entire arc was aborted at the very last second in favor of a "shocking" and "emotional" reveal and conclusion.

It ruins the entire series for me in retrospect because the series abandons so much to focus on Gooseworx's self-insert character, Jax, only to not have the decency to actually conclude his arc in a satisfying way.

Anyone else think the suicide metaphor is bs with that post confirming they can visit the abstractions whenever they want?

the show's biggest flaw to me is that the "grounds"* was mentioned in episode 1 as a place to visit in the future episodes but they NEVER mention it again and the closest we get to it is episode 5 where they stargaze NEAR it.

*edit: i meant carnival, not grounds

As someone who's been watching Gooseworx since Little Runmo, I am both proud of Goose for having the opportunity to make her own cartoon while also feeling immense pity for the amount of shit that she had to endure from the fandom.

33:15 finally someone says how unfunny the whole maid dress joke is

Glitch really is earning its reputation as the "realistic panic attack" studio

Jax would’ve been 10x more interesting if they literally were just an asshole, and Pomni is forced to realize that

i was boutta comment "i like the part when jax said you people are my playthings and then he played with his thing" but then i started to laugh REALLY DAMN HARD and i really haven't the foggiest idea why