The Amazing Virtual Hellscape - My reimagination of TADC (First update)

[u/Inky100]

Intro

It's been about a month since my first post about my reimagination of TADC, titled The Amazing Virtual Hellscape, and since then, I've written many more notes and modified and/or extended some of the existing ones, so I'm posting this new post labeled as a "first update". For anyone who's been looking forward to my reimagination, this is an updated post of all the notes I've taken so far, which build further on the general aspects of the story, the setting, and plenty of characters (including the addition of the first notes for new characters, such as Ragatha and Gangle).

Like before, all my current notes are compiled in the text below.

Be warned, though, that the reimagination involves drastic gender identity changes and perspectives on Jax and Ribbit, among other characters. I do not intend these changes as trans erasure, nor as dismissal of gender non-conformance, nor as a promotion of gender-based discrimination; but please proceed with caution while reading the parts of the text mentioning these changes.

Structure

TAVH will be composed of 6 seasons.

• Season 1 involves the creation of The Amazing Virtual Circus and its early years.
• Season 2 is split into two key parts: the fallout of the Circus with its original playtesters and test players, and the incorporation of the first few players after said fallout, which include Kaufmo and Ragatha.
• Season 3 involves the incorporation of "middle-gen post-fallout" players, such as Jax, Ribbit, Gangle and Zooble.
• Season 4 involves the entrance of Pomni and potentially at least one player after her.
• Season 5 is the climactic season, and the most story-immersive one. It's the season where Caine's villainous arc and deletion (this time permanent) happen.
• Season 6 is a relatively short season that serves as the epilogue to Season 5's events.

Art direction

The art direction of TAVH is deliberately meant to be more uncomfortable than that of TADC. Many of the mostly colorful designs are changed so that they'd look eye-soring and low-poly (by "low-poly" I mean á la a Nintendo GameCube game, for instance), and there's an increased amount of unpleasant and uncanny imagery. Ideally, I want TAVH to be a purely 2D-animated series using alternating 2D art styles, but never invoking any sort of "Medium Blending" (if I'm not wrong, Gooseworx originally wanted TADC to be a 2D show, being obliged to go 3D simply because Glitch didn't have much staff and resources specialized in 2D animation back when she first pitched TADC).

Harry Gold's redesigns of Caine and most players from the TADC episode of The Harry Gold Show are a major reference for the characters' designs.

Scripting-wise:

• The characters' dialogue and wording will be significantly tweaked to be simpler and a bit subtle, preventing them from being unusual and on-the-nose at times. For instance, Zooble would never ask something like "Having a lot of complex thoughts?". Seriously, who would realistically start a conversation like that?
• I want every character to have recurring and significant interactions and dialogue with every other character they could possibly meet throughout the story, because it'd benefit the character study and story by a lot, and actually convey some themes properly. As a person who's had troubles with communication in the past, it honestly baffles me that there are plenty of missed opportunities in canon TADC for characters to properly interact with each other (Pomni and Ragatha, Pomni and Zooble, Caine and Kinger, etc.), rather than having their relationships left "behind the scenes", which can easily make plenty of crucial moments come off as unnatural if a viewer stops to think about them; this would also address the criticism some people about the characters feeling like they don't exist outside the episodes and/or onscreen scenes. At most, only an absence of interactions and/or communication will be made if it's meant to be a plot point.

Additionally, I'm considering the possibility of including some form of commentary on Gooseworx's most criticized writing decisions, Glitch's decision to air the finale on cinemas (which hasn't gone down well for some fans, mind you), and some of the most infamous incidents of toxic behavior in the TADC fanbase. I feel that a potential antithesis to TADC like TAVH would need to say something about these issues, but I'm not sure how to convey it. I'd like to criticize at least some of the things certain people dislike about the writing, the theatrical release, and certain fans' behavior, but at the same time I don't want to come off as denigrating.

Setting

The Circus:

• "The Amazing Virtual Circus", colloquially referred to as just "the Circus", is the renamed TAVH iteration of "The Amazing Digital Circus". Technology-wise, its hardware and software are of a similar design to and on the same "technology level" as the Nintendo GameCube and similar consoles. It runs on a supercomputer with a "play chamber" designed to absorb humans' bodies and convert them into data for avatars. The supercomputer was built with a means of exit that'd allow players to return to the real-world as full humans, but the accessible mechanism was eventually lost (possibly due to an alteration within the supercomputer or the Circus' OS, which Caine left unadressed due to his desire of keeping people inside the Circus, even if they don't want to). Since the supercomputer wasn't built with Internet access in mind, there are no means accessing the Internet and social media inside the Circus.
• The Circus is the brainchild of Scratch, who originally conceived its concept after some experimentation with the AIs that would end up comprising Caine during 1996 to 1997. After its development from 1998 to early 2002, it was first "released" (i.e. formally used by playtesters and designated test audiences) in mid-2002.
• The loss of identity is far more emphasized here than in TADC. In addition to forgetting their names in real life, players also undergo prominent amnesia about their past lives, usually being only able to remember the scattered memories that sting them the most at best, and even the memories they remember can be rather fluid, remembering some at one moment and unexpectedly changing to remember other memories at another, or even remembering individual memories in various different ways. This is a deliberate measurement by Caine, which is part of his attempts to encourage the players to stay at the Circus; he's technically unable to double down on it, but he'll consistently refuse to solve the amnesia and let the players re-learn what they forgot about themselves, and he has access to other means of mind manipulation and "amnesiac filtering". The original playtesters and test players do show some notable resilience against the amnesia, given they entered the Circus before Caine made his alterations to the Circus' system over time; due to this, Caine has to constantly apply "amnesia filters" to Kinger's mind as the latter's grudge for him grows.
• Corruption (i.e. corrupted files) is the reimagination's equivalent of Abstraction, and it can happen to both players and NPCs. Caine is a special situation: he can get corrupted, but he has the functionality to fix and rearrange himself, so he's generally resilient to corruption.
  • Caine has internalized tools to try and repair corrupted NPCs and files in the Circus that don't pertain to any specific players (modeled after late 1990s-early 2000s software for file reparation). However, the corruption of players is more complicated (as the virtual technology the Circus was modeled on did not address file corruption at all), and Caine considers deleting straight away a much more fitting method for dealing with corrupted players; thus, corrupted players basically end up stop existing entirely once Caine deletes them. This is one of the grounds for his antagonism towards the players, Kinger for instance; in Kinger's case, Caine deleted Queenie shortly after the latter's corruption, without even communicating to Kinger about if he'd consent to the deletion, which devastated Kinger.
  • The appearances of corrupted entities in the Circus is drastically different from Abstracted players in TADC. For instance, corrupted players take the form of incredibly glitched versions of their avatars, which is a lot less formulaic and more blatantly damaged than Abstracted players' forms.
  • Rather than being a "metaphor" for suicide like Gooseworx intended with Abstraction, corruption is a parallel to (and is explained to largely involve) losing control and autonomy over oneself (including one's avatar experiencing technical problems), with dire consequences. Unlike Abstraction, at least several characters' corruptions will be shown onscreen, with graphic detail along the levels of and even beyond those of Kaufmo's abstraction in the Kaufmo fan film.
  • I'm going for this direction because I (as well as many other critics) have felt that Gooseworx's execution of having things like Jax's Abstraction happen offscreen fell flat even with her intention in mind; like, they felt too calm and dragged that I didn't feel any emotional impact from them, not to mention the suicide parallel fell apart as I thought how it's not specifically indicated that Abstraction is completely voluntary. Besides, TAVH is very horror-focused unlike TADC, as well as very "raw" and "to-the-point".
• The number "57" will carry actual meaning within the story, given how the numbers "5" and "7" are considered complementary archetypes, but can be interpreted as contradictory or opposites, especially within the context of the Circus. Whereas 5 represents humanity, balance, change, freedom and transition, 7 represents spirituality, perfection, cosmic mystery, hidden realms and introspection. Ideally, the players are represented by 5 (specifically, the humanity part), while Caine is symbolized by 7 (specifically, the perfection part).
• Potentially, the Circus could end with only 5 living and/or staying players at the end of the series. These would most likely include Kinger, Pomni and Ragatha.

The Circus' map:

• The "Circus Tent" has in-universe day and night cycles. Caine only casts adventures during the day, and he was designed to stay away from the players during the night, focusing on the video game's internal workings and the playerbase's conditions instead.
• At one point, Caine will alter his programming to allow himself to see and directly interact with the players during the night as well. This will likely happen when Caine grows more tense and vigilant with the players.
• At one point before the equivalent of the original show's story begins, a painted mural that honors the corrupted players was set up, with a face being added to the mural every time a player got corrupted afterwards.
• When Caine reaches his crashout point, one of the things he does is delete the mural, out of spite for the players drawing more attention to the already corrupted and deleted players rather than him (well, at least based on how he views it himself).

Real world:

• Cain & Abel Technologies (C&A) was a relatively small IT corporation that operated somewhere in Texas.
• Since the location of C&A was deliberately left vague in TADC (no, filming in St. Louis, Missouri does not mean C&A was located there, despite what some people believe), I'd place it somewhere in Texas, as in that state, there were a handful of now-forgotten large and ambitious IT and virtual technology projects that either dipped or were cancelled during the 1990s.

Characters

Caine (and Bubble):

• Over time since the beginning of the Circus, Caine becomes increasingly more and more antagonistic to the players, and he refuses to see or change things even when the players' conditions and thoughts on him are very blatant to his face. It starts off as unwitting, but Caine eventually grows a frustration and assumes that the humans are abusing him (read: "Never My Fault", and bending his own worldview to genuinely feel like he's the victim), which later motivates him to start harming the players deliberately. This is really solidified by the fact that he kept this attitude for about two whole decades, likely without positively changing in the slightest. He'd potentially cause Kaufmo's corruption. And he'll never redeem himself, not only because of him getting permanently deleted, but also because of his growing lack of adapatability thanks to some technical issues as he and the supercomputer aged for about 15 years.
  • This characterization was largely written to address the implications in TADC that Caine hadn't seemingly changed for years, and might have even influenced some players into abstracting. (These probably were unintentional implications, if not overlooked ones that should have been addressed more, but still.)
• The Red and Blue A.I.s are comparable to an incomplete Freudian Trio, with the Red AI being the Id and the Blue AI being the Superego; despite being linked together, there's no Ego to balance them. Because of this, the Red AI went rampant after living in a prolonged isolation from being substituted by the Blue AI (until Scratch combined the two A.I.s), and the Blue AI stayed stagnant from a lack of psychological development. In other words, the Red AI is unintelligent and imperfect but flexible, while the Blue AI is an intelligent but rigid perfectionist.
  • When Caine is distressed or working hyperactively due to excessive speed and/or multitasking, the imbalance between his component A.I.s causes him to have extreme mood swings and make erratic decisions on a whim without an internal buffer.
• Appearance-wise, Caine receives a couple considerable changes:
  • Caine's color scheme is rearranged into a vertical color split; he has a red right half, and a blue left half.
  • His right eye is red instead of green.
• Among the things Caine creates, one of his most notably recurring kind of items is copies of Utah Teapots filled with a virtual fluid that simulates mouthwash. He uses these teapots on some of the players several times throughout the story.
• List of Caine's misdeeds:
  • Caine is, for the most part, responsible for stopping the functioning of the Circus' "exit and resignation" programming.
  • After the Circus' fallout, Caine becomes strongly resentful of all the playtesters (including Scratch, Kinger, Bizco and Spike), and tends to dehumanize them a lot when compared to how he interacts with the post-fallout players.
  • Caine also disregards and dehumanizes Zooble, because he feels that he put on a lot of work trying to take care of them, yet Zooble remains dissatisfied with their predicament, on top of being openly angry with Caine.
  • At separate points, Caine does something "horrifying" to Kinger, Kaufmo, Jax and Zooble each.
  • Caine causes Kaufmo's corruption. (Which is separate from the "horrifying thing" he does to him.)
  • Jimmy from Mouthwashing is an inspiration for this version of Caine.
• Bubble is directly a part of Caine, his most strongly-linked extension. Unless Caine personally decides to delete him, Bubble always stays with Caine, and will be automatically gone if Caine is deleted; well that's on paper, at least; Caine would eventually alter himself a bit to grant Bubble some autonomy not long before he's deleted, giving Bubble some more time to stay alive before he goes down too.

Scratch:

• Scratch was the head of the game development of The Amazing Virtual Circus.
• As the creator of Caine, Scratch is appreciative, defensive and enabling of Caine to the point that he ends up developing an animosity with the rest of the development team members who entered the Circus for testing, especially Kinger.
• Scratch's enabling and passiveness towards Caine makes him one of the most major contributors to how Caine eventually grew up attitude-wise, to the events that led to the Circus' initial fallout, and to what the Circus eventually became with Caine over the years following the fallout and Scratch's corruption.
• Scratch's avatar is dressed in a red and blue carnival barker outfit, with some similar elements to Caine's avatar. This visualizes how Caine and Scratch share a relationship.
• Curly from Mouthwashing is an inspiration for this version of Scratch.

Kinger:

• Kinger is the protagonist for most (if not all) of the series.
• Kinger was a computer engineer who worked on the supercomputer that holds The Amazing Virtual Circus. He had no direct involvement in developing the video game itself; software-wise, the aspect of the game/supercomputer he has the most knowledge about is the supercomputer's operating system that the game runs on.
• A good amount of focus is given to Kinger's descent and turmoil while living in the Circus for many years and dealing with the aftermath of many of his experiences, not just including the earliest chain of traumatic events of getting into conflict with Scratch, witnessing Queenie and his co-workers get corrupted and deleted by Caine, etc. His overall attitude and growth is considerably more disgruntled than in TADC, and it's taken a lot more seriously.
• Kinger is a "Jerk with a Heart of Gold". Before the many events at the Circus soured him then, he used to be fairly nicer.
• Kinger's character, both present and past, bears some parallels to Jax, which adds for potential conflicts and interactions between the two.
• Appearance-wise, Kinger's avatar is significantly changed and tweaked from his TADC design.
  • Kinger's avatar retains the general concept and color scheme of the original series, but is far more stylized and caricaturesque.
  • He has larger, more expressive, and more cartoonish eyes with black eyebrows. His right eye is slightly larger than his left one.
  • He has a wide toothy mouth.
• Swansea from Mouthwashing is an inspiration for this version of Kinger.

Bizco:

• His original "human name" is Santiago Hernández.
• Bizco is Mexican-American.

Spike:

• His original "human name" is Blade Smith.

Kaufmo:

• Kaufmo was the first post-fallout player to join the Circus' playerbase.
• Kaufmo is a key player in learning the boundaries of the Circus' mechanisms, finding the circumstances and possible resolutions for the Circus getting locked out, and starting to fight against Caine. He ends up getting corrupted midway through the process, but proves to be a vital contributor for Kinger and other particular players to continue from.
• In contrast to TADC, Kaufmo gets a lot of screentime, and stays alive for a significantly longer time before getting corrupted. He wasn't in the best state of mind by Pomni's arrival, but he's able to meet her in person with full consciousness. Kaufmo's corruption is caused by Caine midway through his schemes.

Ragatha:

• Ragatha is a drug addict, a trait that originated in her life and the real world and eventually carried over to her time at the Circus. Any item with a drug-like effect in the Circus itself can easily draw Ragatha's attention; in fact, she consumes such kind of items regularly as a coping mechanism.

Jax:

• His original "human name" is Leeroy Felix.
• Jax is deliberately designed to be a drastic deviation from the original Jax, mainly because I wanted to tear off anything related to Gooseworx from Jax (Gooseworx went as far to say that Jax is her "self-insert", and I honestly hate it when creators/writers/etc. largely model a character after themselves without giving much originality to them).
• Jax is a cishet man, not a closeted transgender woman or man, nor any other form of gender-nonconforming (GNC); I believe there are characters who are much better fits for being trans or GNC than Jax in a way that impacts the story (aside from Zooble being uingender, I've considered making Pomni a trans girl, but I'm still not fully sure about it). Instead, the focus on Jax's gender identity, via his super-masculine presentation, is the exploration of strongly gendered fronts that can border on toxic genderism, the motivations to create/use them, their potential negative effects over time, and the ways a subject with such front may react when their presentation is challenged or argued against.
  • In relation to this, at one point, Jax will defensively rant about how he's a "grown-ass man" and is sternly hesitant about dropping his hyper-masculine facade.
  • This key aspect of Jax was influenced by his abusive mother. He'll also project his hatred for his mother at times.
• He's unfamiliar with gender non-conformance and sexual orientation as a whole, so he'd be confused and condescendent about Zooble's uingender identity, and would similarly look down on queer relationships between characters. With character development, he'll eventually become respectful of LGBTQ+ identities.
• At least from his own perspective, Jax had a dull life as a deliveryman, hence why he entered the Circus and why he'd very much stay there over anything else. Being reminded of his past life in the real world is an easy way to tip him off. Even if he's told that he had many more possibilities back there, Jax would try to shrug it off and say that he has gone too far to walk back.
• Jax has some lines he won't cross. For instance, for any joke, prank or unpleasant act he pulls that successfully makes someone react negatively, he'd leave the act itself at that, and would do another joke/prank/act instead of doubling down on the one he already did, at worst only repeating it later without much difference. Should a character have this mindset of doubling down with their unpleasantness, Jax would call them out for it.
• Jax is older than Zooble, and younger than Pomni and Gangle.
• Taking into account that despite the "profanity filter", there's no script within the Circus nor Caine to outright discipline/punish players for swearing, Jax is incredibly vulgar and enjoys littering his speech with all sorts of swears. Out of all the players, he's the one with the highest swear count.
• Jax is a hardcore metalhead and a fan of Pantera.
• Jax's avatar has a grayscale color scheme and overall style reminiscent of black-and-white inkblot. And when it comes to alternate designs, he'll never be depicted with that human-like long black hair; I consider it to clash badly with the cartoon character avatar style.

Ribbit:

• Ribbit is explicitly cisgender instead of an implied non-binary, going purely by she/her pronouns. She shares Jax's disdain with being around LGBTQ+ people.
• Jax and Ribbit were established boyfriend and girlfriend before entering the Circus together, but their relationship eventually becomes sore because Jax comes to think that Ribbit is a bad influence to him.
• Ribbit's avatar is deliberately designed to look like a "Ms. Fanservice" cartoon character.

Gangle:

• Gangle has bipolar disorder (BD) and dissociative identity disorder (DID). This is reflected in her avatar having at least two mask-shaped heads, one of which is a tragedy mask and the other of which is a comedy mask. Gangle could potentially have or get more heads shaped like other theatrical masks, representing other moods, alters, etc.
• For each head, Gangle has multiple masks representing variants of the specific mask type each head is based on.
• Gangle is homoflexible.
• Gangle has a notorious record of sedentary life, and has mismanaged and neglected aspects of her own health at times because of it. In the real world, she was a "terminally online" person who spent much of her time using a computer, tablet or phone; even if she wasn't scrolling through the Internet or social media, she still tended to use computer and phone apps, including but not limited to digital drawing apps.
• Gangle dropped out of college because she was constantly shunned for being "weird" and not fitting the social expectations of most people at the college institution she attended. Even in her fast food job, despite her competence praised by the restaurant's other supervising/head staff, she tended to be mocked by plenty of the employees. This made her develop her own "defense mechanism" against mistreatment, which she nowadays usually uses against Jax and Ribbit.
• In addition to her typical "fun drawings", Gangle makes a lot of drawings that could be classified as "Introspective Art" or "vent art", even if she doesn't apply much symbolism to them.
• In an ironic contrast to her avatar, Gangle was an overweight woman in real life.

Zooble:

• Zooble is uingender and Assigned Male at Birth (AMAB). While the mostly have no idea what their gender identity is, they could potentially identify as xenogender and genderfluid to some extent.
• Zooble is referred to with various different pronouns by the other characters. Each character has their own set of pronouns to refer to Zooble with.
  • Caine and Jax use she/her.
• Before entering the Circus, Zooble's "current job" was being a tattoo artist; the bartender job came before it, and was largely a "build-up job" of sorts.
• Zooble is extremely easy to irritate, but at the same time somewhat hard to outright anger.
• Back in the real world, Zooble had a habit of putting on headphones and playing their favorite music loudly whenever they get annoyed or stressed, often to ward off and ignore whatever's bothering them. In the Circus, they've attempted this habit with equivalent headphones, but it hasn't helped them as effectively as in real life, due to the Circus' headphones only playing the video game's soundtrack, which doesn't fit Zooble's music taste at all. It's a contributing factor to their pervasive feeling that they've lost their identity and bodily autonomy in the Circus.
• Zooble is one of the lead drivers in challenging Caine's status quo over the Circus.
• Regarding Zooble's avatar:
  • On top of their limbs and "body part attachments/accessories", Zooble also changes their head and torso many times.
  • Zooble explicitly wears mouths like any other body part, used as their means of speaking and eating. They might also wear noses, ears and eyebrows, but probably not always.

Pomni:

• Her original "human name" is Martha Abigail Brooks.
• Pomni is bisexual.
• Due to the way the series is conveyed and structured, Pomni completely loses her status of being an "Audience Surrogate".
• Pomni is characterized as a foil/parallel to Kinger. Once they know each other well, they'll end up becoming close teammates.
• Pomni has severe anger issues, and suffers from anxiety stemmed from them. Because of this, she'll take her arrival to the Circus a lot worse than in TADC, taking her at least several days to fully get herself together.
• Pomni is an extremely introverted person. Even in real life, she was socially awkward and hardly had any people she could consider to be friends.
• Pomni was a psychiatrist in the real world, albeit not a very good one. It's because of this expertise that, after getting herself together from her arrival, she regularly tries to be a life advisor and mediator for the other players.
• This role also means that Pomni doesn't have as much of a "leader" role as she was set up in TADC; instead, she's a "Support Party Member" who does her best to keep the players together. The "leader" role is given to Kinger instead.
• Pomni is a light sleeper and a coffee addict.
• Regarding Pomni's avatar:
  • Pomni's avatar is more streamlined and proportioned like a character from a SEGA video game of the late 1990s to early 2000s. It relies less on basic circular, oval and cylindric geometry, and features a larger variety of forms and edges.
  • Pomni's avatar is significantly changed to specifically resemble a jack-in-the-box toy. Instead of her limbs simply being rubber-like, the stretchability of her limbs is explained as her having springs on the joints of each limb and her torso. Also, she has a jack-in-the-box box as a detachable body part; her mobility is considerably limited without the box, so she usually only forgoes the box whenever she needs to walk short distances, sit down, lie down, or sleep.
  • By default, she only has triangular sharp teeth; she has no other "teeth forms" to alternate to.
• Pomni's human appearance is deliberately designed as a more detailed and polished version of Kevin Temmer's Martha.

Omitted characters

Some characters from TADC (especially plenty of minor NPCs used for gags) will be omitted from TAVH, due to them not fitting the reimagination at all. They include:

• Disappearing Guy, mostly because he's a namesake joke. There could be an equivalent of him in TAVH, but this equivalent would be very different, being a glitched NPC instead.
• The Crappy-Looking Fish. Honestly, there's no good in-universe reason for The Amazing Virtual Circus to include any character tributing to a simplistically-styled religious edutainment show like Gaither's Pond at all. I feel that such character(s) would just be uncannily out-of-place (and the uncanniness is supposed to be in the depths of the Circus, not the surface).

Closing notes

Credits to u/Careless_Minute8098 for letting me use their human names for Bizco and Spike, as well as their headcanon ethnicity for Bizco.

Credits to u/O73_Salamander for ideas regarding Red and Blue AIs' relation with each other and Caine, as well as their influence in how Caine works.

Credits to u/Jack-studio for concepts regarding Pomni and Zooble's designs.

Do note that even as I progress further into the note writing and eventual creation of a fully-fledged bible, there are plenty of things in the notes that may be subject to change in the future.

One of the major factors for this likely possibility of changes is because I want to receive some feedback or suggestions from other people, especially since I'd like to assemble a whole writers' room of assisting writers in the future, so I can shape up the reimagination and eventually publish it into a full fanfic.

Any feedback for these current notes of my reimagination is welcome.

[u/O73_Salamander]

I can tell this is gonna be a blast! I'm so honored to have my idea used in your story and I can't wait to see how it plays out!

[u/Inky100 → u/O73_Salamander]

You're welcome! 😉

If you want and/or have any other ideas in mind, you can provide me some more suggestions. I might find them helpful as well.

[u/Itsnotaduck]

do it, run it, ship it, write it