impressions. spoilers for the thing
glitch felt weirdly unconfident navigating the 'theatrical finale movie' format. after sitting through the mandatory 20 minutes of ads and trailers, the humorous warning not to give spoilers (which isn't doing much, from a quick survey of this website) and series recap seemed a bit of an awkward way to start. the "exclusive" merch plug at the end even more so; obviously merch is glitch's main business model but 'hey, buy our plush dax in the maid dress' seemed a little tonally off, considering. 'tv show + theatrical movie' is by now a well established model in anime, with the most popular (kimetsu no yaiba, chainsaw man and the like) setting records, so it was a little surprising.
i would say that for me, TADC got more interesting over its run; the writing and performances broadly became more confident and it got clearer what goose was doing, so while part of this was just the amusing absurdity of showing up at a cinema for a web series, i was broadly looking forward to this. episode 8 is of course already out, and it did feel like half a movie with a cliffhanger at the end, although they do actually run a version of the title song at the break into episode 9 so it's not just like one big movie.
and as for episode 9... well, I'm going to assume you've seen it, so there will be spoilers.
there are two real arcs to it. the first concerns jax; perhaps like me you had heard certain rumours going in. the second concerns more the lingering questions about the premise (like how the characters relate to the outside world) and resolving the core conflict between caine and the rest.
the former is definitely stronger. it felt increasingly apparent that jax was a character whose conflict goose is particularly interested in. the sequence in question calls back, at least visually, to the surreal abstract sequences in her earlier works like the elain the bounty hunter series and little runmo, and it has some lovely abstract visuals that got pretty demo-y at times; i appreciate that when it comes to depicting jax's hostile shield persona to push everyone away it does not pull its punches.
of course you probably care more about whether jax is officially a girl, right? the show certainly offers material on this front but stops short of declaring it outright (though the visual language in the bow scene is hard to mistake). I'm sure people will be arguing about it forever. the reading is easy to make; the story also seems quite personal, tho i am not going to speculate more than that; goose has a right to leave this open to interpretation, god knows the girl has enough eyes on her right now.
given abstraction has been set up as a metaphor for suicide and is played very explicitly that way in the film, the story can't really walk it back without undercutting the metaphor. you don't get to get people back from a suicide. unfortunately, having pomni get rescued at the last minute after insisting on embracing jax does instead end up somewhat undercut her choice to pursue jax even at risk of her own abstraction. that, however, is nothing compared to caine inexplicably coming back, reformed somehow by his time alone in the void, completely negating the twist at the end of episode 8. it felt like they spent the last few episodes setting up for this scene but afterwards were painted into a bit of a narrative corner.
so it ends up a sweet enough fan serving happy(ish) ending; we learn about the 'irl' versions of the cast, and they make peace with being uploads living in this world that they now more or less control. there are some cool sequences, like the match-cut staircase scene, but it is a pretty low-key ending and honestly the questions that were answered still leave a lot more that are also not very thematically important, like how all these random people got brain scanned.
but yeah, turns out the biggest problem was less the existential void of a pointlessly cycling existence of meaningless activities and more the annoying flying bastard fucking with them all the time. it's pretty chill after he gets his shit together.
a pomni cosplayer i overheard talking after the movie said it was cute but she wished it was more depressing, and honestly, fair lmao. I'm not sure exactly how i would have ended it, but this definitely feels like playing it pretty safe.
nevertheless, overall I'm glad goose and the rest of the team got the chance to make this show seemingly without much compromise besides yknow having to be a vehicle to move merch, and I hope that whatever she makes next can be a less stressful experience than this seems like it turned out to be. in particular, there's a lot of really fantastic character animation throughout the series, and of course it's gonna cast a long shadow on web animation to come; this one took glitch onto an entirely different scale. we'll have to see how long their formula works. and on another level, i look forward to the wave of people surely inspired by tadc to get into animation - it's nice to see a model like this working.
