EDIT: fwiw I hunted down this thread and it turns out that OP actually did some self-crit, which was more positive than I was expecting https://www.reddit.com/r/TheDigitalCircus/comments/1ucu9hl/jax_being_trans_and_my_opinion_as_a_cis_straight/
this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2026
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i am once again vindicated for my incredible ability to enjoy something without interacting with The Fandomβ’ in the slightest 
wait isnt Kinger still a straight cis man, what is blud waffling about
Yes, but he's a non-toxic father figure. What dudes liked about Jax was specifically her mask of cynicism and cruelty and emotional distance, ironically all the stuff that first broke Ribbit and Kaufmo and then Jax herself.
very reassuring that i didnt like her until the mask started slipping. thought she was just comic relief jaded asshole until then. god i love that fuckass rabbit
EDIT: fwiw I hunted down this thread and it turns out that OP actually did some self-crit, which was more positive than I was expecting
Yay, friendship is magic!
I mean, OP still has some bad opinions it seems but they at started thinking about how their views might be problematic. Maybe. Hopefully.
OP originally didn't want to watch the show cause his friends said it was gay. Coming off of that I didn't expect much growth and honestly I'm just glad there was some instead of purely doubling down.
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Wow cant imagine how it feels to watch a work that doesnt include any ppl from ur demographic /s
Every trans coming out story is a cis erasure and that's just great.
Good ending: Wonder why this "man" identifies with boymoder 3000 so much?
Normal ending: toxic men seek out representations of token masculinity to reaffirm their own behaviors.
He felt connection to the character that wears toxic masculinity as a mask to hide her identity and feelings behind so she can stay sane and function the way the world expects her to. It's not an experience unique to trans people, but I hope he really does try to unpack what relating to Jax means for him. It sounds like he has some shitty homophobic friends, I'm sure he feels the pressure to perform toxic masculinity to fit in. Even if he is just a cis guy, I can see how that would make him relate to Jax and I hope he finds a better circle to roll with.
I think I get it. They've watched the show for years and felt part of the fandom and then suddenly the only character they can personally relate to turns out to be something they can't relate to. Kinger isn't relateable to a 16 year old kid.
I understand feeling like that. It's just not a story written for a 16 year old straight cis boy, but with a time period of literal years for the product to be created and released you'd pick up a lot of those people until the reveal at the end and then they feel suddenly spurned.
This is different to if a show is released over a season of 8-12 weeks and then disappears forever. There's a different investment. These straight boys that became emotionally invested in Jax over the period of years that the animation was releasing for (along with fan art community etc) suddenly find themselves unable to relate at the very very end of it and feel a bit lost because of that. Not necessarily because they've got anything against trans people, but because something they invested themselves in for a long time suddenly becomes unrelateable at the end.
It's a problem not with the show or with the straight cis kid posting this imo. It's a problem with the very long development and release process that creates a fandom on social media like this where people are investing themselves in it for multiple years.
I think he uses some shitty wording in some of this but I'm not going to cyber bully a kid for not having great phrasing.
Time to put a copy of The Catcher in the Rye on this kid's desk so he can finally have a story about a straight cis teen boy wearing a mask of cruel cynicism and emotionally distant toxic masculinity, and see what happens!
Yeah you're not wrong there either but it's a kid, I believe most of them change. I think some straight cis kid hanging out in queer fandoms at 16 learning what he's learning has a better chance of turning out ok compared to the ones that aren't.
Oh, absolutely, there's no question about that.
It's a problem not with the show or with the straight cis kid posting this imo. It's a problem with the very long development and release process that creates a fandom on social media like this where people are investing themselves in it for multiple years.
Millennials who browsed Newgrounds way back in the day learned this. You wait until the entire series (or season) gets released before you watch it all at once. A lot of those series either never get finished or botch the ending or just have a massive tonal shift. The zoomer OP is learning this the hard way.
I think you make some great points, but I also agree with some of the commenters in the thread in that you don't really need to 100% identify with a character to identify with certain aspects of their character. I think finding ways to identify with people and characters not like you is important for developing empathy and really learning about other people.
Also, yeah, after reading through the actual thread I don't want to be too hard on him. It sounds like he really did learn at least some things from the discussion which is positive.
I also agree with some of the commenters in the thread in that you don't really need to 100% identify with a character to identify with certain aspects of their character
Yeah I agree too.
The thing is that this kid is looking for the self-insert and there isn't one for him. The self-insert he was looking for turned out to be a trans person.
He's probably better off with Shonen anime.
He says that as if it's a bad thing.
I don't know or care about this character but this digital circus shit seems like the most gen a bullshit since the skibidi rizzler
I tried watching the first episode of TADC years ago, and I'm pretty sure I stopped watching after like the first few minutes because it seemed like, as you say, "Gen Alpha bullshit" β I rejected it for the style before I could even taste the substance, like the voice acting and writing and "ooOOooOOoooh early 90s CGI, so spooky!" stuff just gave me a headache. But a lot of TADC fans in my experience are honest to God millennials if not older, and the story is notably inspired by "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream", so maybe if I can just get over myself for a moment I'll be able to appreciate it. Who knows. Not everything is for everybody, anyways.
My own preference for independent animation is like this:
- Sparkle on Raven: The Life of DrillGirl is awesome, as are most of the works in the "fanime" scene that inspired it.
- Pretty Pretty Please I Don't Want To Be A Magical Girl also fucks, and I look forward to seeing the fully animated version of episode 1.
- Hazbin Hotel is⦠tolerable? mostly? Carcharodonna is actually doing a watch party for it right now, but the sex and violence and "oooOOooOOOoh cartoon said a swearie" purely for the sake of it just didn't appeal to me, so I ended up dropping out by the end of season 1.
- The Amazing Digital Circus is⦠well, I already told you how I feel about it, but I haven't really seen enough to judge it accurately.
We can call this the "Paint-Funko spectrum", in any case. I.e. independent animation that leans more into looking "unpolished and amateurish" (fanime like SOR, animatics like PPP) versus independent animation that leans more into looking "professional and marketable" (Hazbin, TADC). The spectrum is so named because the former end consists of 11 year olds on YouTube in 2009 making cartoons in MS Paint and Movie Maker, while the latter end consists of shows you can find cheap plastic toys of at Walmart. I guess my point is that there's sort of an "uncanny valley" effect that makes certain works of independent animation seem like Gen Alpha bullshit: the Gen Alpha bullshit cartoons try to look like actual big-budget, big-studio TV cartoons, and they have the resources and experience to get most of the way there; but they fall just short, and the discrepancy between what they are and what they're trying to be is what ends up giving you a headache.
But a lot of TADC fans in my experience are honest to God millennials if not older, and the story is notably inspired by βI Have No Mouth, and I Must Screamβ, so maybe if I can just get over myself for a moment Iβll be able to appreciate it.
Honestly I'm surprised people younger than me (mid 30s) like it. The animation constantly references old loony toons (Tex Avery) cartoons (which had a revival in the 90s). The second episode is entirely a Mad Max Fury Road parody (obviously the millenial's favorite Mad Max movie). The overall plot explores cartesian skepticism/dualism, much like the Matrix (and I Have No Mouth...). And of course the cgi reminds me of the cgi I saw as a kid (albeit with more pixels)
This was my impression skimming through some of the episodes and watching a bunch of video essays. It's very millennial-coded. Apparently, a lot of people in the production had their start in Newgrounds which is probably where the millennial-codedness is coming from.
I haven't watched the series in its entirety though. I don't know if the target audience is millennials with a gen alpha/zoomer fanbase that organically tagged along or if the target audience is gen alpha/zoomers with the millennialness being more about the generation the artists came from.
It's very much the former, though Gooseworx herself is sorta in the fuzzy 'Zenninial' zone between the youngest millennials and oldest Gen Z.
Zoomers were probably part of the intended audience, but from what I've gathered the massive popularity among Gen Alpha was a complete accident that kinda blindsided everyone working on the show. On a personal level Gooseworx actually seems to kinda fucking hate that things played out that way, actually, though I'm sure all the money she's gotten out of that happenstance is a cushy silver lining.
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I started watching it because my daughter and her most sparkly of friends were all into it. I was looking for a way to take my old school media metaphors and pin them to something new for her sake.
It was a nice shiny little hypersigil for a while there. Lots of cool little life lessons packed into a weird container.
I felt like something off started creeping in around episode six. My daughter noticed it too. The shift between episodes 8 and 9 lost her interest. It had nothing to do with any of the character identities, and everything to do with the feedback loop taking place between the creator and the fandom. Wherever the story was going, the author's aim got jiggled enough that everyone in my daughter's social circle agrees it missed the mark, even if all their opinions differ as to why.
We used to call this sort of turning point "jumping the shark".
Then again, for as much as I didn't like the ending of Seinfeld when it aired, I absolutely love it now. I wonder how TADC will age.
Gooseworx mentioned that Jax became a deuteragonist around then, and it shows. I do think he's an interesting character worth exploring, but I really wish Zooble got some more time. I guess they were the most well-adjusted character from the gate that couldn't drop lore like Kinger could
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Im X-ennial and I felt the same until I watched it. It's prettt good, actually, but stay far away from the fandom
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I'd care for the trans Jax thing more if she wasn't voiced by a racist and have her girlness celebrated by erasing the blackness from a song about celebrating the birth of a black baby girl and covering it by a racist pedophile.
what does this mean, google isn't helping me
IDK anything about the voice actor, but they're talking about the Stevie Wonder song in the finale. And IDK who covered it. But it did seem extremely out of place since the rest of the series has original music.
Are you talking about the giggling over nega thing?
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Everyone's fighting about Jax, am I the only one who thought Caine's arc was badly truncated? His whole problem was that he loved the humans as an audience not as people. Having God like power over the circus, he had no need to ever listen to someone else or treat them as an equal. I thought it fell flat that he was able to resolve that just by talking it through to himself. They hinted at the blue AI throughout the show and I was hoping that it would force Caine to confront someone as an equal for the first time but instead it shows up after the character growth and literally just putters off into the sunset. It needed another 20 minutes.
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Edit: Oh. Damn it.
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