Melanie O'Hara's Erotica Emporium

Corinne managed another groan and sat up a little. “Ow,” she mumbled.

“There's a coffee on the table to your right,” the bard said. Corinne couldn’t remember her name, but she was grateful for the coffee, which was too hot but helped soothe her raw throat and aching jaw.

The bard started playing again. She expected the noise to rattle her brain but the bard was clearly threading some magic through the strings to help with the hangover. “I'm working on a new piece,” she said, “called: ‘The Lay of the Priestess’. It's about you.”

Corinne rubbed her eyes with her free hand and took another sip. “Oh lord, I don't remember anything that happened last night.”

The bard laughed. “Fortunately, I remember all of it.” The next words were sung, to a lilting tune that sounded less like a lay and more like a tavern reel. “After one drink, she'll smile and laugh; two drinks, she'll dance with the lads! Three drinks and she's groping herself, one more and it's everyone else!”

“Oh no,” Corinne whined, as a memory from early in the night came back to her. A haze of alcohol and a buzz of happiness as she put her hands on anyone who would let her - and a lot of them were happy to let her. A lot of them put their hands on her, too. Strangers’ hands on her hips, on her tits, squeezing and massaging and tugging at her robes.

The bard kept playing but stopped singing. “That's not a word that came out of your mouth all night.”

“Did that really happen?” Corinne asked, but already knew it was true.

“Wait until I get to verse three,” the bard said with a smirk.

Corinne rolled her eyes. “Does it explain why I'm sticky?”

“That's verse six.”

“Six?! How many are there?”

“You gave me a great deal of material. I think I have enough for twelve.”

Corinne whined and slid down in the bed. The longer she was awake the more she remembered. She had been dancing - to the bard's music, no less - and letting the people in the tavern touch and grope and squeeze. Then there was more drinking, and her robes had fallen open. Someone had poured wine over her tits and she'd laughed and moaned when someone else licked it off her. Things got out of hand fast after that. According to the song, which was making her blush crimson, she had ‘drunk the dregs and spread her legs’ and let someone put their tongue on her. Her hazy memory was of cumming quickly and messily, and then kissing the woman who had done it to her. She was too embarrassed to correct the bard's rhyme about their gender. The verses continued, and exposed every one of her sacrilegious, debauched activities. They were things she had dreamed of doing in the convent, but never had the nerve to. She had kissed and touched before of course, but never publicly. Never with strangers. When the bard sang of how she had been passed around a table to raucous applause, her mouth wrapping alternately around wine bottles and members, she remembered why her jaw was sore. She didn't much like the taste of cum, but she found sucking incredibly fulfilling, and washing it down with more wine was a delight.

After the blowjobs was verse five, when she had laid on her back and taken anyone who approached. She remembered there had been a line of eager men and women, elves and humans and tieflings, touching themselves listening to her coupling, excited to do the same. Alcohol was poured on her and into her waiting mouth - whenever it wasn't full of something better - and she was left dripping seed for someone else to clean up with their tongue.

“It just keeps going,” she whispered, aghast, but undeniably aroused by her own behaviour.

“You just kept going, Priestess,” the bard said, in a break in the chorus. “The priestess, the priestess, wine and gin and beer; the priestess, the priestess, she'll fuck everyone here!”

Once the clientele of the tavern had enjoyed her to their fill, they put her on the ground by the fireplace, put a tankard in each hand, and stood in a circle around her.

“Oh, that's why I'm so sticky,” she mumbled, as the memory of cum splattering her naked body and filling the mugs. She hadn't swallowed it like they wanted, but they’d all been delighted when she poured it down herself.

“It is indeed.”

According to the bard's song, she ended the night crawling into the lap of the party's enormous half-orc barbarian. He hadn't touched her all evening, she could remember that, and she was a little sad that he hadn't enjoyed it. As soon as she put a hand on him through his leathers though, it was clear he was plenty excited. She remembered him helping to open the drawstring of his pants so she could ply his enormous member out. It was too big to suck. In retrospect she thought it might have been too big to take inside her at all, but drunk beyond reason, fuck-drunk, and drenched in cum, she didn't care about that. She had laid against his chest and worked his cock inside her, and according to the bard had fallen asleep then and there, with the biggest cock in the tavern stretching her. That wasn't true, she had just been too happily filled to move. She had stayed there, unmoving, while the party whiled the night away in conversation.

“Goodness me,” she said when it was over. “I should stay away from alcohol.”

“Nobody else thinks that,” the bard said, strumming a final chord and laying down the lute. “Everyone had a wonderful time.”

“Including me,” she admitted. “But wait, you said there were twelve verses. That was only eleven.”

The bard smirked. “Ah, you've caught me,” she said. “I was hoping to find the inspiration for that last verse with you personally.”

Yes, it is a part of the plot. Escaping the circus is the motivating force of episodes 7 and 8, but it’s only a vehicle for character drama. The revelation that escape is actually physically impossible comes early in the final episode and while it is clearly devastating news to the characters, it ultimately doesn’t change the stakes of the story for the audience. The whole narrative purpose of the possibility of escape is to provide a reason for Jax to be afraid he might have to return to the real world after all, and face the consequences of his actions. His panic attack in episode 7 and selfish decision to force everyone to remain in the circus is entirely motivated by the fear of returning to the real world and facing both the consequences of the argument with his mother and coming out of the closet, and that is the entire point of the ‘escape the circus’ arc.

After the finale was released, I saw a Reddit post that argued that the pilot episode failed to set up the show as a character drama and instead pulled the rug out from under the audience by pivoting. It even implied that the show was always intended to be the mystery story they wanted, and at some point Glitch or Gooseworx or both changed the idea. This demonstrates both a confidently wrong conception of how media production works that personally makes me want to rip out my own teeth and swallow them, and a wilfully ignorant reading of the first episode.

In that episode, we’re introduced to the rules of the circus at breakneck speed. We’re told in the fastest exposition dialogue I have ever seen everything we need to know: there is a headset, they can’t leave, Caine is in charge and can do anything. After that, Ragatha explains the other salient points to Pomni, the narrative point of which is to establish the concept of abstraction as a symbolic representation of psychotic break and suicide, which is neatly tied up just in time to meet abstracted Kaufmo. Any explanation of the circus is in service of understanding the characters’ motivations, and the ‘in house adventure’ is almost entirely inconsequential and is solved by abstracto ex machina without any input from the characters. It was always about the people. The circus has always been a convenient narrative backdrop to put these characters in situations and see how they react. The show never pretended or implied or wanted to be about solving some mystery of how everyone came to be there or why.

Over the course of the show, we’re given all the information about the circus. Pomni sees the headset and visibly recognises it in the Exit simulation in episode 1, Kinger explains how it all works in his exposition about Scratch and Caine in episodes 8 and 9, where we also see Caine taking control of Abel and building the circus. We know for sure how everyone except Ragatha and Gangle found the headset, but even if we didn’t it wouldn’t matter at all. How and why is completely unimportant to the plot. We don’t need to understand how they got there, because what matters is the people they are while they’re there. When we find out what the people who became the circus characters are doing in the real world, it isn’t because that solves some piece of the puzzle, it’s to demonstrate Caine’s growing understanding of humanity, provide closure for them never escaping, and make the overarching point that even if a part of you thinks you can’t ever change or make an impact on the world, there is a version of you that absolutely can.

That should be the lasting lesson of The Amazing Digital Circus: that even if you feel trapped in a version of yourself that you hate, there is always a version of you that can move on and be better. Not where specifically the server is that runs Caine’s program, or if abstraction is a metaphor for uncompressing a large file, or if Caine tried to remove the tumour from Scratch, or what relevance the number 57 has. Those are all real posts on reddit. Those are the things people took away from the ending. I have not seen a single post discussing why it was the blue Abel part of Caine’s AI that caused his psychotic attempts to make everyone like him and not the red Caine part that was boxed for being unconventional. I have seen constant arguments about whether Jax is good or bad representation for trans people and if having a traumatic explanation for his behaviour redeems him or not, and (except on tumblr, the last bastion of people knowing what the fuck they’re talking about) no analysis of what that says about his characterisation. People legitimately do not understand why Jax has a panic attack in episode 7 about the possibility of leaving the circus. There is a theory with legitimate traction and believers that Caine interfered with Jax’s mind in that moment. That is a real thing actual human beings who watched this show believe.

Jax makes for an interesting case study. Plenty of people completely rejected that he was trans (I’m using he/him pronouns for Jax because that’s what’s used throughout the show, and by the end Leeroy is still boymoding and I respect the egg prime directive) after the finale, and plenty of people had spent the entire run of the show documenting every little detail that suggested he was. Just for fun, I went back through after the finale ended and did a close reading myself and found a few things I think other people have missed. They’re not important to this point, so I won’t talk about them here, but it’s been pretty clearly implied the whole time. The point is that the people who reject the trans Jax reading of the show are not doing the same close readings. They have made liking Jax’s cool tumblr sexyman attitude and casual cruelty a part of their personality and now they can’t disentangle themselves from a trans woman. I have not seen a single example of a non-trans Jax reading of this show that makes any textual sense, or even has textual examples beyond Jax clearly lying about being uncomplicated.

Putting all the points in this primal hallucination of an essay together, it exposes something a bit troubling in the landscape of media consumption: an unwillingness to engage with a text on its own terms. People can trot out ‘death of the author’ arguments all day, but in textual analysis and close reading, intent and context are indispensable research tools in understanding the meaning of a piece of media. There might be a gulf between what the author meant and the meaning you take (Tolkien and how The Lord of the Rings relates to world war and environmentalism is a great example), but that difference can only be justified with accurate and evidenced examples from the text itself. Instead, people are constantly saying things that are provably, obviously wrong about The Amazing Digital Circus with the confidence of god. Someone argued that the show ‘barely passed the Bechdel test’, which is both literally impossible (the test is a pass/fail, there is no grading system) and not even true by their own metric (yes, a couple of conversations between non-masculine characters start with mentioning Jax or Kinger, but they aren’t about them). This kind of surface level, shallow understanding of analysis pervades the online discussions of this show and reminds me of the prevalence of completely misunderstood therapy-speak in condemning or excusing the behaviour of real people.

Wivenne was not from the order. After a dragon attack had driven her party to flee, they had all become separated, and Karinea had found herself defending a group of survivors from the local village against the kobold horde. Wivenne was the tavern bard, and had taken up arms to defend her home. The injuries she had suffered in the battle were not serious, but Karinea had invited her into the private room the innkeep had granted her for her help nonetheless. The Lord of Pleasure let no suffering go untreated, after all.

"By all the gods, what is that?" Wivenne demanded, taking a step back towards the door.

Karinea clutched the holy symbol to her chest protectively. The glass tip was pleasantly warm against her chin. "It's the Wand of Valentus," she explained. "The blessed symbol of my order."

She wore a simplified version of the Wand on her chestpiece, though in fairness to Wivenne that was a lot more abstract and less... anatomical. The relic she carried was almost 8 inches of carefully cast glass with threads of gossamer thin gold woven throughout. Those represented the veins, and the liquid core of holy seed that ran through the center issued from her god himself. The handle at the base was wrapped in simple leather, and Karinea's first lesson as a novice had been to learn the various grips.

"Is it now," Wivenne said, a sceptical eyebrow raised. She folded her arms. "Whatever happened to good old 'Lay on Hands'?"

Karinea brightened. "I can do that instead, if you prefer."

Wivenne opened her mouth to answer, and then paused. "When you say 'Lay on Hands', am I right in thinking I'll still need to disrobe?"

"Oh no, of course not," Karinea said, going to put the Wand back in her pack. "I can just slide my hand into your leathers. I don't need to see what I'm doing, I'm quite talented." It was a brag, but she knew she was a good healer. All her instructors agreed. She slipped her index and middle fingers into her mouth to wet them and stepped forward. Wivenne put a hand on her shoulder to stop her, with surprising strength from such a small woman.

"Sweetheart, I think you're in a sex cult," she said. "Look, you're very pretty and I'm flattered, and maybe if my ribs didn't ache so much this might go a different way, but do you have any way you can heal me that doesn't involve you putting anything inside me?"

Karinea was a little hurt at the cult accusation. Valentus was a real god, his blessings felt around the world, the healing power of his touch pure and unmistakable. She let it slide though, because prioritising the safety and health of others was His first command, and there was still a wounded elf in front of her.

"Of course, there are a number of rituals I can perform on myself," she said. "I can direct the power of Valentus into you, you'll just need to hold my hand while I do."

"And these rituals...?"

"Oral, vaginal, or anal," Karinea explained brightly.

Wivenne sighed heavily, and then winced.

"You're in pain," Karinea said softly, and took Wivenne's hand in her own. She had been so caught up in her duties, than she had forgotten the poor injured soul in front of her and the physical toll she was suffering. Pain wasn't antithetical to pleasure of course, she had studied its relationship and the joy it could bring, but without commensurate satisfaction there was suffering, and the Lord of Pleasure sought to defeat suffering wherever it was found. "Please let me help you, Wivenne."

The elf woman sighed again. "You know what? Fine. Suck the damn thing."

Karinea couldn't suppress a little gasp of happiness. She drew the Wand again from her satchel, and arranged herself on the bed. Wivenne awkwardly refused to look at the holy relic and blushed violet, but Karinea was just excited to fulfil her role as healer.

"Come," she said. "Hold my hand, while I worship the Lord of Pleasure, and channel his prowess into healing your wounds through the pleasure of my mouth."

Wivenne's blush deepened, but she sat next to Karinea on the bed, pointedly looking away, and slipped her fingers into Karinea's palm.

Three Body Problem: philosophy, physics, and a total lack of character development

The Three Body Problem as a scientific principle is relatively easy to understand in basic terms. Three objects orbiting each other (outside a handful of proven starting conditions) will move so chaotically that their paths cannot be predicted. There are too many variables, too many inconsistencies. The problem appears in the book as the driving motivation for the Trisolaran civilisation's plan to invade Earth, as their planet caught between the orbits of Proxima Centauri, Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B has no chance of survival. Having been contacted by a transmission from Earth, the Trisolarans hatch a plan to inhibit humanity's scientific development and recruit sympathisers on Earth to shape society. While we get the information out of order - as the protagonist learns it - the premise is ultimately very simple.

What follows (and makes up most of the book) is dry astrophysics explanations for various plot details, delivered in the same bored tone of a student reciting for an exam by every single character. When there's an element of the alien plan that needs to be elaborated, there is Ye Wenjie to flatly tell us everything that happened; when the mysteries of orbital mechanics need to be solved, Wang Miao is there to enlighten us. Most egregiously, when it becomes necessary to explain how the Trisolarans are able to affect physics on Earth – the entire crux of the first third of the book – we travel to their homeworld for an extended lesson on theoretical quantum particle physics delivered in dense explanation by the leading minds of the alien invasion force, who remain entirely unnamed throughout. While the Trisolarans are described as intentionally emotionless and pragmatic to ensure the survival of their species, their actual affect and characterisation barely differ from the named human cast at all.

Nominally, Wang Miao is the protagonist, though he shares storytelling duties with Ye Wenjie. We learn in chapter 3 that he's a keen amateur film photographer, and soon after that he has a wife and child. After the narrative utility of these details are fulfilled, he never takes another photograph and his wife and child vanish completely from the story. After his photography session, he never looks at the world with the attitude of a photographer, never describes scenes or events in artistic language, and never engages in anything other than the plot and occasional massive alcoholic crashout over the impending end of human civilisation. Ye Wenjie serves as the protagonist of the far more interesting Red Coast chapters, which explores her evolution from the daughter of a teacher cruelly murdered in the Cultural Revolution to the enigmatic commander of a powerful alien-backed cult, but her story is bogged down in the scientific minutiae of running the secret project to search for alien life. While interesting, those details detract massively from any opportunity for character development. The reveal that she has completely given up on human civilisation and invites the Trisolaran fleet to invade is entirely unexpected for the simple reason that we see a lot more of her opinions on the quality of the machine components than her fellow man.

Like Ye Wenjie, every character who espouses their political stance (which is most of them) is firmly convinced that humanity is evil beyond redemption and cannot possibly solve their own problems any more. Unlike other philosophical positions, and even scientific principles, this stance is never justified or elaborated upon in the text. Mike Evans, upon inheriting more than four billion dollars, resigns himself to failure because that amount of money surely must have been spent on conservation efforts in the past. While it would make perfect sense for a multi-billionaire to give up on humanity and pursue their own esoteric and destructive interests, his decision does not invite reflection – not from the characters, readers, or seemingly the writer. The characters in the book fall into three factions: Adventists, who believe the Trisolarans should wipe out humanity; Redemptionists, who believe the Trisolarans can absolve humanity of its sins; and the Battle Command Centre, an organisation run by the Chinese and American militaries, CIA, and police. While the Adventists and Redemptionists oppose each other, their philosophies on human nature align. The opponents to this myopic world view never espouse much political opinion: they are simply against the alien invasion for the preservation of humanity. The lack of exposition about the driving political motivation for the protagonist's faction is extremely out of place in a book that takes great pains to explain every astrophysics concept in excruciating detail.