Sapphire Sapphics

Anyone who takes these posts as concrete evidence of goose being a terrible person is just showing the world how 1) dumb you are and 2) potentially transphobic you are.

You’re the type of people who would accuse Rebecca Sugar for being a Nazi apologist because she had the bad guys of her KIDS SHOW be convinced they were wrong.

zoey's positive reinforcement training 🐶

I saw this post and then this response and I think I can explain why the show DOES need media literacy to understand.

The scene in question is from Episode 6 “they all get guns.” Jax and Pomni are talking about archetypes, and Jax goes on to explain how each character in the circus fits into those archetypes. He describes Ragatha as the happy one, Gangle the sad one, Zooble the grumpy one, Kinger the crazy one, and himself as the funny one.

The MEDIA LITERACY part comes in when you actually compare his description to the actual characters themselves. We are 6 episode deep now and ALL of the characters have grown and changed. In this very same episode we see that Ragatha is not happy, Gangle doesn’t need her happy mask to be happy, Kinger is the most mature and intellectual one of them all, Zooble can display care and warmth, and Jax isn’t doing things just to be funny.

The media literacy part is realizing that his description is WRONG and understanding WHY he sees them this way.

So this criticism that the show has him “literally explain their archetypes” shows how little this person was actually paying attention. Because Jax is wrong. If you think the show is spelling out the archetypes because it doesn’t trust people to understand the characters, you missed the point of that scene and that’s just showing to the world that YOUR media literacy is what’s actually BAD.

I don’t care what your thoughts are about the quality of the show, that’s always up for debate and subjective as heck. But I DO know a lot about fandom culture and discourse and TADC is a very special case in that regard.

The show isn’t meant for kids. It’s distinctively an adult show about existentialism. The central premise as described by the creator (loosely) is “a bunch of people who hate their lives stuck in a place they can’t get out of.” The juxtaposition of early 90’s kid friendly computer graphics is meant to be intentionally jarring to the subject matter. And the creator herself is trans. So saying this show is meant for “analytic queers” is accurate.

But because of the bright colors, and intentional in-universe censorship (again a joke by the show forcing these adult character to abide by child like rules), the show gained a HUGE following by actual children. And once YouTube Kids Slop got their hands on it, it just spiraled out of control.

So now we are in a situation where this show, not meant for kids, has become one of the BIGGEST shows on YouTube making millions of dollars for Glitch, while their fans are rude, emotionally disregulated, disrespectful, causing controversy after controversy, and being downright AWFUL towards anyone who has a different opinion than themselves.

And while you will always find toxic people in large fandoms, this is exasperated by the fact that these KIDS don’t seem to have a basic understanding of simple storytelling and character growth. They’ve grown up on Disney+ and TikTok and YouTube Shorts. They are essentially children watching an adult show and not being able to respond in a mature way. Couple that with the media literacy in the world becoming worse and worse and suddenly you see that TADC is caught in that void.

The backrooms as an Internet horror concept has been degraded over time with the wiki and the TikTok slop content and 100+ levels and random weird ass entities.

Kane still does entities and weird rooms, but he uses those things to further his story. They become THEMES and NARRATIVE DEVICES. They exist to serve a greater purpose and not just give you a cheap jump scare. He actually puts thought into WHY the backrooms are scary and he doesn’t shove it in your face every 5 seconds.

And my point is that you can still do all of that while ALSO tying it together with a cohesive theme and narrative. Themes and narratives don’t detract from the liminal horror aspect. If anything they ADD to it.

Again, you don’t have to agree. That’s fine if you prefer layers or levels or whatever else. But if you’re making a major motion picture, with Hollywood actors, and are trying to appeal to the general public and get your average Joe interested in the concept of liminal horror… you need SOMETHING to hook them and tell a good story. Otherwise you’re essentially spending $20 to watch 2 hours of silent gameplay footage.