Nightmare Fuel / The Amazing Digital Circus

"...you completely lose sight of who you are and why you're even alive, and when you reach your breaking point, something really terrible can happen."

In The Amazing Digital Circus, anything can happen, and that includes the horrifying. Especially given that it was based off of I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.

As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

---

Episodes:

Pilot

• One would be forgiven for thinking the Digital Circus is a fairly innocuous if weird in-universe show at first... Right up until the introductory song starts glitching out. The "day after day" part repeats itself twice with a jarring transition, which hints at the digital hell the "performers" are trapped in.
• Pomni hasn't even been in the Circus for ten minutes and she's already forgotten her name. This has happened to every single individual in the Circus.
• During the tour, Caine explains that there are all kinds of activities one can do at the Tent, but right when he's about to list these activities, his eyes become Blue Screens of Death and his voice is replaced with dial-up noises. That... doesn't bode well...
• Outside the tent, there's a floating island with amusement park rides and a water park. Outside of that small island, there is nothing else. Or at least, so it seems. Even being stuck in a tiny patch of land not fit to be a Baby Planet by itself is an unnerving idea, but the idea it's not empty isn't comforting either.
  Caine: Weeee don't venture out into the Void. Not even I know what's out there.
• Jax considers Kinger as the closest to go insane next to Kaufmo. He later pairs Kinger with Gangle to start on the Gloink adventure, sarcastically claiming that they are the "most mentally stable and capable characters" to be together, despite Ragatha's concerns. Kinger begins violently shaking for a moment, which doesn't bode well for his mental state at all.
• Kaufmo the Clown introduces the concept of Abstraction in the series by being its first shown victim. The Digital Circus apparently cannot handle a mind completely cracking/crossing the Despair Event Horizon and the entity in question manifests as a glitched-out, multi-eyed tarpit mess that quickly and painfully distorts everything it touches, and that nothing except Caine himself can actually stop. Abstracted entities have lost it so completely they will attack anything that crosses their sights, unable to tell NPC from Player in the least.
  • That part about Caine stopping them? All he does is throw them in the "Cellar" of the Circus, with what seems to be dozens of other such abominations. Even in a complete breakdown, there is no escape.
  • Getting struck by an Abstraction causes the victim to begin glitching out and as Ragatha says when she finds Caine, this experience is very painful. To make matters worse, only Caine can heal anyone glitching and even touching someone who is glitching can cause the glitch to spread, as Pomni finds out when she touches the glitching Ragatha.
  • The exit that drove Kaufmo mad? It isn't a real exit, as Caine reveals. Caine made it because everyone kept asking for an exit but he had no idea what to put behind the door so he never bothered finishing it. Which means Kaufmo (and almost Pomni) went insane because they were given false hope of there being an exit, only to have that hope crushed.
  • More subtle but the overacted, almost sarcastic response Caine gives when the gang tell him what happened to Kaufmo. It's almost like he's trying to downplay it — or worse, it's happened so often that he can only act out being shocked.
    Kaufmo abstracted? Why didn't anyone tell me! *Comical sound effects.*
• Among the rooms Pomni stumbles across while looking for Caine includes a room with absolutely nothing in it but some eerie child-like laughing and a seemingly infinite tower of carousels spinning on top of one another and a bathroom with a wooden mannequin taking a bath. Who launches a screaming theatre mask directly at her. She quickly slams the door on it and it makes an impact dent on the door shaped like itself.
• Pomni finds the "exit" door she and Kaufmo saw and immediately goes through it. But all she finds is a bleak waiting room hallway with another exit door at the other end. She goes through it and finds herself in another room with another exit door on the other side. Desperate, Pomni keeps going through each exit door, hoping the real exit has to be behind one of them. When she sees what's implied to be her computer, she starts going Laughing Mad and for a split second, you can see her teeth have become sharp, as if her slipping sanity is causing her to transform... By the end, she's clearly undergoing Sanity Slippage.
  • If you pay close attention, once Pomni goes through the fake exit door, she doesn't say a word for the rest of the pilot. Other than quietly having a breakdown, she's utterly silent up to the end. Timing it, it's roughly 7 1/2 minutes of what is arguably the main character completely shutting down.
• The final look Pomni gives before the pilot ends. She just sits at the dinner table with a blank stare before slowly growing what looks like half an insane smile and half a look of pain, as if she's two seconds away from abstracting herself.
  • The music that plays during the ending sounds like it should be a Triumphant Reprise of the main theme, with its bombastic orchestral arrangement, but the discordance and overwhelming feeling create an undercurrent of despair as the reality of Pomni's situation hits her. It's the musical equivalent of the Uncanny Valley.
• The last few minutes of the episode imply that the computer the Amazing Digital Circus program is running on is the old, last-generation computer Pomni glimpsed during her attempted escape through the false office leading out into the void. An old, forgotten piece of technology still running in a room somewhere in the back of a building either abandoned or forgotten about with practically zero chance of any human life stumbling across it and being able to help the inhabitants. It's implied the circus program somehow became what it is in cyberspace because somebody forgot to turn off the computer and just left it running for years in the darkness and as a result, Pomni and the rest are now trapped in a prison with no escape, not even death itself. In a sense, the fact that somebody could come across the computer despite the low odds could lead to a similar sense of false hope that drove Kaufmo to abstraction.
  • Sitting alongside the old computer is the headset Pomni recalls putting on and panics upon realizing she can't take off. The one that doomed our main cast.
• The circus living quarters still house the rooms belonging to abstracted former residents, their pictures marked out with red X's. Other rooms feature pictures of blank, doll-like figures, most likely representing humans yet to become trapped in the Digital Circus.
• Kaufmo's room has 'Exit' written over every inch of the walls and ceiling as well as 'No Exit' and 'No Way Out' and a picture of himself fleeing from Caine's head. Then there are the paintings: creepy self portraits (one says 'What did the exit say to the clown'), exit doors, a bouquet of flowers with fanged faces, Kaufmo walking down an empty path, a pattern of Abstract eyes and a figure encountering an Abstract. Even Jax is shocked by the state of it.
• Word of God's clarification on what Abstraction is says that it's basically stripping any sense of identity or individuality from you, leaving you with no sense of self anymore. Oh, and the worst part? Nothing can be done to fix it. Abstraction is absolutely permanent.

Candy Carrier Chaos

• Pomni's Nightmare Sequence at the very start of the episode, where she feels herself starting to glitch and the screen starts to wobble... and then her entire left arm is abstracted, leaving a helpless Pomni running along before gravity shifts and she is promptly dropped into the cellar by Caine. The silhouettes of Caine, Ragatha, and Jax even taunt Pomni for abstracting not even after her first day, all while she falls into the cellar in despair. And then it zooms into her eye, which promptly turns into bunch of abstracted eyes, seeming like she's already about to join the late Kaufmo. Yes, it indeed turns out to be a dream but it's still a horrific nightmare for Pomni.
• While he provides most of the humor because of it, this episode definitely shows that Gooseworx's repeated assertions that Jax is an irredeemable scumbag were not all talk — throughout the episode he's downright bloodthirsty, up to and including sacrificing the entire Candy Canyon Kingdom to the Fudge, at first to finish the adventure and then just for his own amusement. The spirit of Niles is truly with him.
• After the chase ends, Gummigoo and Pomni are glitched under the map after the truck clips out of bounds, before he lands in a blue and black checkered maze. After exploring a bit, he ends up finding the map's Debug Room and all the models for the adventure stuck in their reference poses... including himself and his crew. At first, he seems to think his duplicate is a mere statue, but pulls back in horror after putting a hand on its face and realizing that it is him. After Pomni arrives, he realizes his mom isn't among the models, and then realizing that he doesn't even remember what she looked like, because she's just part of his backstory. He then asks Pomni just what he is... and once we cut back to them, he's gloomily sitting down and clearly suffering an existential crisis, moping about how nothing ever mattered because he's just an obstacle for the gang to overcome.
• The Fudge is a giant, hungry Blob Monster made out of candy that eats other candy people, and outright says that he does other, even more disturbing things in his spare time. At one point, he says he can still hear the delicious candy people "calling to him", and as he says that, we can hear them screaming.
  Ragatha: Oh god… that just sounds like murder…
  The Fudge: Is it really murder if it's delicious? Answer me that.
  • At the end of the adventure, The Fudge is free to cause havoc on the Candy Canyon Kingdom thanks to Jax leaving the gate unlocked, with the last thing being seen of the kingdom are the citizens screaming panicked, and covering in fear as they heard The Fudge's evil laugh echoed through the entirety of the town. We never get to see what happens next...
• Gummigoo's death. After being set up to be a Sixth Ranger to the gang and brought back to the circus, he's exploded into a bunch of confetti by Caine, who doesn't want to start losing track of who's human and who's an NPC before leaving to go drink some water. Pomni obviously doesn't take this well.
  Caine: I know you guys love your NPCs, but if I start losing track of who's a human and who's an NPC, who knows what... [sotto voce] could happen...
  • The absolutely haunted look in Caine's eyes when he explains why he had to kill Gummigoo makes it even worse.

Other media:

Other Media

• In POMNI WAKE UP TIME TO GO ON AN ADVENTURE, as Pomni blankly looks at the ceiling, Caine suddenly pops in, which can certainly catch viewers off guard in a first time watch.

---