Every other week I see folks complaining that this or that new web series is trying too hard to be edgy and memeable, why are we giving money to the worst effluvium of the Newgrounds generation, etc., etc., and then I actually watch whatever they’re complaining about and it’s literally just a mid-1990s-to-early-2000s Saturday morning cartoon with a bigger animation budget. Like, if these people think The Amazing Digital Circus is edgy tryhard bullshit, any randomly selected episode of The Tick (1994) would probably make their heads explode.
(To be clear, this is not specifically about The Amazing Digital Circus. There’s a discernible pattern of self-styled influencers reproaching contemporary web animation as edgy Newgrounds trash when literally the only thing distinguishing it from the cartoons I was watching on network television thirty years ago is that you’d never see that many female characters with speaking roles in anything that wasn’t specifically trying to sell fashion dolls. I tend to take arguments that we’re currently experiencing an unprecedented wave of conservatism in media criticism with a grain of salt, but then I see this sort of sour-faced condemnation of cartoons whose content would have been considered unremarkable in 1993 and I start to wonder.)
the tumblrina is, by nature, unemployed in spirit — even when trapped in her place of employment, encumbered with obligations, she disregards them, firing off mediocre posts across all subject matters at great speed. thus posting is revealed not as a ritualistic-spiritual practice, as theorised by historians in previous eras, with less access to source material, but rather as the (strikingly contemporary!) 21st century laborer’s attempt to break free of the shakles of alienation, even if only for a moment. even a zero note post is fifteen minutes not spent on admin, as some of the primary sources remark.
