Follow-Up Recap: I Was Wrong on Digital Circus, and What We Got Instead

(First posted June 5th 2026 8:24 A.M. EST)

I have few words to offer this one. I was wrong. Every writing pitfall that I factored the ending would need to swerve from, the show "Digital Circus" drove straight into by the end, because it also did something I didn't fully account for; pridefully insist and double-down that what they did instead is good, and great, and "for-the best" all at the same time. Spoilers of course.

I thought the grand reveal would be that the digital world existed as a necessary item that the characters had to use for being frozen-in-cyrosleep for space-travel, on an emergency journey, to keep from becoming braindead. The writing would dictate that the characters are real people with a purpose, because, by any other conceivable means, it would be unfathomably cruel to create exact digital copies of yourself to live in a computer for eternity, and unfathomably wicked to do so deliberately and without good purpose. We don't get a purpose, they gloss over all this.

To be explicit, with words that will not reach the other camp; what the series got counts as a good ending if you are a transgender athiest, like the author is. Serves me right, I trusted the writing. Earlier information that should have been misdirection are now being looked at by fans of the ending as "obvious clues" and "hints" to how it would pan out.

To make a basic case on it, I could start with either with why it's wrong or start with where I come from, which directly leads into *how good the writing could be*. Understanding that this is still less openly-persuasive especially to the other camp, I will start with the latter.

I take a very liberal lens to fiction. I am also grounded as a Christian. What do I mean here by these two things; as an example, a very basic stress-test would be, "Is Harry Potter satanic? Is Harry Potter anti-Christian?". The answer to both of these is "no," because as Voldemort could beat Harry in a battle against evil and good, and rule tyrannically for 2000 years, Voldemort is still not more powerful than God. The semantics could overrun many of these stress-tests**, the most simple point here would be to say that any characters "evil over all man" is not a negation for God, and characters more powerful than the average man (even exponentially, like wizards) still conceivably are not more powerful than God, unless the fictional work goes out of its way to define it otherwise, unilaterally and by rules of its universe. I generally try to apply the G.K. Chesterton "walled playground" logic where possible in the world and think things are only the better for it.

Dystopic works are often mental exercises, and do not always have good or uplifting endings, but even within my lens, to the extent that any feel real (aside from cautionary tales), rarely are any so dire that they feel as grounds to negate the existance of God. George Orwell's 1984 paints a terrible gridlocked scenario for the state of humanity under a trinopoly of all-encompassing tyrannical governments, but if a mega black-plague came in and killed 80% of their population, things would shake up. That's not to be uplifting or clever (or all-indiciative), but there is a small freedom when the statement "if it bleeds, we can kill it" is true and when tomorrow truly is another day.

The ending that Digital Circus got instead makes all of the worst people militantly prideful (not all being as insufferable as some, of course). The two pieces of fiction that are regular vocabulary-words for these people are "SOMA," referencing a videogame they never played, and "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream," a short-story they've never read.

"I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" is a wonderful thought experiment, that also ends before it overstays its welcome. I will assume any readership here has read it, but its plot in a sentence is that a poweful sentient A.I. is torturing the last five people on-Earth, in a type of virtual matrix, and then tortures more intensively the last person after that person mercy-kills the other four yet cannot kill himself. Taken to its literal ends; would a Christian God intersede on such a thing as "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream," if He exists, even presupposing His character as a generally silent God? Especially on a long enough timeline, such as a billion years?". I think we have to say "yes, confidently, and He would intervene a lot sooner than that," on this one, unambiguously. A person, trapped in a universe separate from the one he was born in, under a very visible, tyrannical, omniscient entity forever; *that* is far away from a battle of good-vs-evil on global scales. That is a question of the proprietorship of a soul. Some bad-faith windowdressing can always be given in-favor of such a thing in longform, "Oh, well this universe just has powerful rules that let that be so, that's just the story we wanted to tell!," but there are other indicators to re-iterate that Christian considerations were all cut. The other element of "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" that makes it an entirely moot comparison to Digital Circus is that it is obviously terrifying for its whole story, and isn't insisting that its result instead is, or ever could be, a forever-good thing.

"Soma" is a videogame that goes a little deeper, though the LGBT liberal fans of Digital Circus have grasped in-so-far as they found out that some characters in that game try to deploy a space shuttle at some point with digital copies of everyone's brains, into space. The *entire game* has a bleak tone and it takes a while before that concept is even visited. I encourage either playing this game to anyone uninitiated, and at some point reading Philip Reed's paper on it here to any interested; some select but deeper spoilers will be mentioned for this game in the remainder of this section. Basic reasons for why *that* comparison is wrong, is that its entire runtime is bleak, and that there *is* no world left for people to return to. The decision is made painstakingly by the characters, in this work of fiction, to launch it, also based on several presupositions and themes throughout the story. It does not insist that the endpoint is good, or shows us that it is; it is hope, unfleshed-out. A story about that shuttle would require a very different set of criteria. Something like timeskips to show that the shuttle is really doing o.k. on the inside, centuries-later, for starters.

"The Amazing Digital Circus," by everything I've read***, for starters, has the deuteragonist Jax (one of only two straight male characters) flashback for half the episode, allegorically commit involuntarily suicide off-screen, and then has his mutated corpse decide to live in a doghouse. The central antagonist Caine (self-proclaimed as god and visibly the cause of all the prior conflicts) also comes back, lobotomizes himself, and then interacts with all the characters again as he had before, which we're told fixes things. Then we get a post-credits scene which amounts to a closed-door sex scene of the two main lesbian characters while other characters walk past. This show also sold itself as a children's and pre-teen show unremorsefully, partly to sell more merchandise, and never did much to correct people otherwise.

You say, "forever is a long time," and these people say "yeah but we have each other," because codependence doesn't exist until it goes badly for them. You say, "this is kind of a cruel experiment," and these people say, "Really? Cause it's all we ever wanted," which in many ways it is until it goes badly for them. You say, "Isn't it kind of uncomfortable to have a character yell 'I am god!' in the second-to-last installment of this series?," and they go, "Really? I'm not a Christian," if it's even given that level of charitable acknowledgement.

So it flew too close to the sun. It's divisive, because it picked existential religion over sci-fi, *badly*. If your own core beliefs aren't grounded in factory-settings liberalism then Good Luck, because the side of the audience that falls that way doesn't have to face any comparable tonal whiplash or hang-ups with the logics and particulars of the ending they chose instead.

Though I haven't thought about it enough at time of writing to be willing to condone it, the guy who leaked the ending to this movie is a hero. Good. You want to jerk an audience along for two years before skin-shedding into what you really wanted to say all along, and that final thing is said in the most anti-Christian way possible; I shed no tears on that.

**On stress-tests, regarding possible criticisms on the Harry Potter example. Someone could make the claim, "Voldemort wanted to live forever, which is god-like, right?" and sure, but he wasn't so powerful that he couldn't stop Harry running through the forest with his friends for two movies, and in some ways the prolonged life mechanism was a more convoluted "One Ring from Lord of the Rings" set of plot armor that eventually someone else could do or overthrow, not easily, but in-theory and certainly on a long-enough timescale. There may be a desire for parts of this readership to twist these words into a false-equivalency on Digital Circus, "well the show didn't *say* eternity, it's at least until the simulation's batteries run out!," "Well maybe the mutated dead characters come back, the show never said it was impossible!", but then any honest person first has to consider tone of what we got instead, delivery, and to some extent creator statements outside of this work, which all insist on one thing and gleefully push away from the other.

***Regarding "everything I've read," yes, this was pieced together from reading about it rather than seeing it. I was set on a specific theory and it fell through in thr worst way possible. I will not be supporting the official release nor will I be paying $20.00 to see a half-hour "movie." It seemed more pertinent to get this post out now than sit on it for weeks and then debate putting it anywhere. Many writing drafts sit in my notes from similar. If anything happens after I see it, that I feel is worth separate documentation, I will likely then revisit in some form, but I'm not anticipating that at time of writing this.