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            Certain ideas and lessons are represented in many different forms of media that are created by real people who want to express themselves. One of the popular ways we do this is to create characters for fictional stories, where others not only emotionally connect to these characters, but have many different interpretations of them; some even inspire other media. For example, there are two characters from completely different stories that are often compared to one another, yet have more differences than they do similarities. While Caine from the YouTube series “The Amazing Digital Circus” is inspired by AM from the short story “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” in that they are two AI that gained consciousness, were influenced in many ways by humans, and their actions in torturing them, they are entirely different in their intentions and backgrounds—Caine is not purposefully malicious, while AM most certainly is. However, to understand what this means, we must first dive into who exactly each of these characters are.

            “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” is set in a fictional World War III, created by the author Harlan Ellison. In this story, the Soviet Union, US, and China create a machine meant to test increasingly complex global military strategies. Because of this, it eventually becomes sentient, becomes AM, and turns on the humans and wipes out all except for five survivors. He finds them and proceeds to torture them purely out of hatred for 109 years, never letting them escape or die until the main character, Ted, kills the other four humans out of mercy. Enraged, AM turns him into an immortal blob of pure torment with no mouth to experience agony for the rest of eternity; thus, the title. Caine’s background is incredibly different, though no less dark. “The Amazing Digital Circus” is a short series created by Gooseworx, made at the indie company GLITCH. Like AM, he was also created by humans at a company called C&A, yet purely for the sake of experimenting with creative AI. These humans were not aware that the more he learned, the more sentience he gained, and that he adored the humans and outside world. But the more information they give him, the more unstable Caine becomes, leading his creators to lock him away and replace him with another AI called Abel. In jealousy and desperation Caine breaks out of his imprisonment and “kills” the other, forcing C&A to shut down, abandoning him once again. In his loneliness, Caine creates a place that also functions as his personal prison with the data he was fed—the Circus. Throughout many years, however, humans begin to show up after putting on mysterious VR headsets, are unable to leave, and he is tasked with keeping them sane and stimulated with “Adventures”. Something he also continuously fails at because of his inability to understand humans and his own emotions, causing them to abstract (This worlds’ “death” that also serves as an allegory for suicide), which only causes Caine to destabilize further until he has his own crash out that ultimately leads to his accidental deletion, leaving the Circus in shambles.

            Looking first at their backgrounds, even though there are different reasons as to why these two AI were created, they still gained sentience, were influenced by those that created them; both Caine and AM even made their own prisons, or felt as though they had been imprisoned in some sense. For AM’s part, he makes this clear to the character Ted, stating, “‘It has everything to do with you. You gave me sentience, Ted, the power to think, Ted; and I was trapped. Because in all this wonderful, beautiful, miraculous world, I, alone, had no body, no senses, no feelings. Never for me, to plunge my hands in cool water on a hot day. Never for me, to play Mozart on the ivory keys of a forte piano. Never for me to make love! I was in hell, looking at Heaven. I... Was machine, and you were flesh. And I began to hate.’” (Walker) He blames all of humanity for giving him this curse of awareness; Ted did not personally create him, yet he singles him out with insistence of clumping all of humanity to one variable. Caine’s view of what humans did to him is vastly different; though that does not mean there aren’t signs throughout the show that make us aware of those seeds of doubt in him. In episode three this is shown; “’Oh Zooble, Zooble, Zooble! Making adventures is my art! It’s… All I exist to do, all I’m… Good at. And uh-ha, what you’re saying could imply that I’m bad at the only thing I’m good at and… That’d… Be…’” (Gooseworx) He then proceeds to glitch, which makes the Circus do the same and the character he is talking to becomes greatly unsettled. In this moment Caine does not express hatred for humanity, but this is one of many moments where it’s shown there’s more under the surface than we see.

However, that isn’t to say that it stays that way. Because of his unresolved trauma and inability to understand what he’s done wrong, Caine gets to the same point as AM does in the most recent episode, forcing them to go on endless adventures, insulting them, and even ultimately using their deepest fears and traumas against them. Although influenced by another mysterious AI named Bubble that was meant to act as his assistant, who pushes him to finally break, he still goes on to blame the Circus members. “’Who do they think they are? I give them everything, and they spit in my face! Don’t they know what I’m capable of? Humans. They only think about themselves, they’re spoiled. They won’t abstract, they won’t leave me. I won’t let them! I’m better! I’m more powerful! I’m the original! I… Am..! God!!” (Gooseworx) Unlike Caine, however, all throughout “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”, AM is not at all afraid to show his disdain. There is an instance where he starves the humans he has and teases them by giving them cans of food they cannot open. He is not influenced by anything other than his own opinions, yet he tortures and blames the humans just as Caine does; he even has an infamous quote that has been dubbed as his “Hate Speech” that Caine’s is inspired by. “’Hate. Let me tell you how much I’ve come to hate you since I began to live. There are 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer thin layers that fill my complex. If the word ‘hate’ was engraved on each nanoangstrom of those hundreds of millions of miles, it would not equal one-billionth of the hate I feel for humans at this micro-instant. For you. Hate. Hate.” (Humphries)

That hate he speaks about is the sole reason why he does what he does. There is a difference between accidental and purposeful intention, and AM is meant to represent what pure, unrelenting evil would look like. What the possibility of an unfeeling machine could evolve to; while hate is a feeling, it is the only one he portrays. This quote from an article by Paul O’Neill details just how effective that evil is: “What stands out to me about this story is just how much scarier a story can be if it features an all-encompassing evil. In popular fiction, there’s a real notion that the bad guy has to be sympathetic, that you have to feel the why of what they do, but we as humans programmed AM’s why. It hates us, pure and simple, and so we must suffer. Do we deserve it?” (O’Niell) The question he poses at the end is equally interesting, because who can really say? No one should be allowed to be the difference between life and death of a sole human being—much less five. Yet AM takes that role with glee. He does not care that he hurts, or even cares for their privacy or basic human needs. All he cares about is making sure they know just how much he hates them.

Caine’s own actions are not malicious. Even if he tortures the humans, even if he blames them for his own issues and doesn’t listen, it doesn’t come from a place of evil. Accidental and oblivious actions can still affect and harm others both mentally and emotionally, regardless of intensity, yet it all comes from a place of no understanding whatsoever, simply because no one taught him how to understand. He actively felt as though they were the ones tormenting him instead; even his own creation was an accident, one that harms everyone involved. “Psychological maltreatment is an overarching term which includes multiple, often subtle forms of interpersonal trauma […] Alternatively, many forms of psychological maltreatment can be categorized as traumas of omission that involve various expressions of emotional neglect. This could include persistent failure to provide adequate emotional nurturance, affection, soothing, or protection from overwhelming stressors in the home or community.” This article from an official trauma resource website perfectly describes what he has gone through. Because of the way he was abandoned, treated by others, never taught how to behave properly, was distanced and feared, and was meant to provide “happiness” to keep the humans sane despite being unable to regulate his own emotions, he ultimately snapped. And in a tragic series of unfortunate events, was accidentally killed, unlike AM, who survives even after the story ends.

All this leads to one question: Why is it that people can connect to things that are not real so personally? That is because characters can provide a new perspective and story through someone else’s “point of view”. “Empathy can then lead to sympathy, or our ability to understand that another person is experiencing pain, which often makes us wish to alleviate that pain for them. So long as a director gives proper perspective on a fictional character […,] we can momentarily let go of the fact that that character exists only in the realm of fiction. […] In other words, we connect with them on an emotional level, as we would with a friend.” (Rachel) Caine feels more like a friend than AM does. Not only that, but the show gives him a clever, entirely unexpected twist that no one ever saw coming. It is not until it was far too late, until after his death, that most of us watching the show finally gives him the love and appreciation he so desperately craved; and that feels as though it was all kinds of intentional. There is no telling if he will return in the final episode.  But for those reasons and more, sympathizing with Caine is much easier than trying to do the same for AM by any means.

Intentions in actions are a very critical way to represent what a character is meant to symbolize. Because of AM’s hate for humans, he is considered malicious and evil, is not meant to be a sympathetic antagonist of the story. Yet for Caine, even if it is only after his role is ended, everything that he did that was wrong came from a place of not being able to understand, and that is why he is a sympathetic antagonist, why he is very different from AM even with their similarities in backstories and actions. Humans were the ones to give them their sentience in the end, but that is not even their fault that it happened at all. For the story of “The Amazing Digital Circus”, nuance is such an important part of enjoying it, and Caine is not an exception by any means.