The year is 2015, I’m 9 years old. While browsing my favorite creepypasta website after school, I stumble across an old thread of people discussing an off-putting YouTube video. Seeing as YouTube is my main source of entertainment, and horror my favorite genre, I excitedly go to watch the video. It’s titled “Don’t Hug me I’m Scared” (DHMIS), a puppet show that starts out as educational and wholesome but turns into something that’s creepy, confusing, and borderline gore-y. Now, if you’ve been around YouTube or any sort of internet culture in the past decade, you’ve definitely come across this web series at one point. If not in the form of a web series, then in the form of an actual TV show that was aired on Channel 4. There’s been this phenomenon on YouTube of videos like this blowing up into unthinkable proportions, some of the biggest examples of this genre from that period are Salad Fingers, Happy Tree Friends, and Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared, being insanely popular at their peak and still maintaining their familiarity after all the time that’s passed. The success of these truly off-putting and, for most people, hard-to-understand shows paved the way for the second wave of YouTube web series, with one major factor that differs from the first wave: Monetization.
Most of the well-known shows of this internet semi-horror, horror comedy, “everything’s fine” kind of genre are products of pre-2012 YouTube. Creators uploading at that time weren’t really doing that for the money, since there was no money to be earned (except by a handful of channels selected by YouTube). I’m taking 2019 as the start of the second wave because the would-be horror-shaped-hole in YouTube’s heart between 2012 and 2019 was dominated by alternate reality games and channels covering them. While it’s not so similar to the other shows I mentioned earlier, Hazbin Hotel is what paved the way for this genre’s newer shows like Alphabet Lore, ENA, Bugbo, and The Amazing Digital Circus. That last one was seriously painful to watch, it felt exactly like the producers just made a checklist of every popular trope to include in the show, and went over the points one by one.
The Amazing Digital Circus is, by far, the most calculated show I’ve ever watched. And this especially hurts me because going into it, I was expecting something similar to some of the older shows of this kind. Every second of the pilot is just a box ticked, one after the other, one of these is the cast of characters. They’ve got a quirky female lead, a host with a doctorate from the Four BFB School of Quirky and Sadistic Gameshow-Hosting, another random and quirky character, a few more random and quirky characters, and a random and quirky character who looks and acts like if you melted every Tumblr sexyman in a pot and froze it overnight in a mold shaped like the potential lovechild of Sans and The Onceler; because, you know, they’ve got to appeal to everyone. This show just seems like if you fed early 2010s horror web series and gen alpha-core YouTube content to an AI, then asked it to write you a western isekai anime. You can see how it falls flat when compared to the older shows.
Obviously, when created with monetary incentives, shows from this second wave of YouTube horror gain more popularity compared to the first wave ones. It was 11 years after DHMIS started when its new season started airing on network TV, compared to Hazbin Hotel’s 5 years to get streaming on Prime. Not even mentioning the sheer scale of virality this second wave has with the leverage of short-form content farms and children’s general attraction to horror. It took The Amazing Digital Circus like a week after the pilot’s release to get in my radar off-internet, and that’s a huge deal considering that not even a decade ago I couldn’t convince my (child) peers to care about stuff that was almost exactly the same as these, if not better.