Why Indie Internet Animation All Sounds the Same

2026-06-22

I saw a video title recently asking why indie animation has developed such a specific voice. You know the voice and can probably name a few shows that fit this mold. Characters will overexplain their emotions, telling the viewer how to feel instead of trusting them to feel it themselves. The humor often leans on shock and swearing. The central trope is more than likely that a cute, innocent thing is actually deeply disturbing. I made it about two-thirds of the way through The Amazing Digital Circus before I tuned out, and I think I finally understand why: creators are afraid to go outside of internet influences.

By this, I mean creators are afraid to engage with other people’s work closely enough to be influenced by it, because influence today gets misread as theft. “Stealing” versus “being inspired by” is a topic that deserves its own conversation. But avoiding the question by avoiding the source material entirely is worse than the disease it’s trying to prevent.

You need exposure to bad art and good art. Across literature, film, music, and history, bad work teaches you what not to do, and good work teaches you what’s possible, and sometimes the line between them is blurrier than you’d think. When your entire diet is internet animation referencing other internet animation referencing internet trends, you get a closed loop. No “new” material is entering the scene. Of course, it all starts to sound the same; it’s drawing from the same shrinking well.

I’d like you to know that this isn’t a “kids these days need to go outside” type of argument. To me, internet-trend humor has its limits. It works well with an audience that already lives online, but it doesn’t translate to anyone standing outside that bubble. A piece of culture that only works for people inside can only go for so long before becoming stagnant.

“Show, don’t tell” applies to symbolism as well. However, this connects to a smaller, more specific gripe of mine: nobody uses symbolism anymore, or when they do, it’s the laziest possible version. Water as a cleansing metaphor, with the same three colors meaning the same three things: white is good, black is bad, and red is violence. Nobody touches something like the language of flowers, where individual flowers carry centuries of specific meaning. Maybe it’s out there and I just haven’t found it. But I suspect it’s rare, because it requires research most people aren’t doing.

The same shallowness shows up in how these shows write difficult topics. Writing a character with depression by purely skimming a WebMD article is poor writing, no matter how you argue it. Heavier topics such as mental illness, sexuality, or even grief have an enormous, rich body of both fiction and nonfiction on every one of these subjects. If you’re going to write something rooted in history, go actually read the history first. Build on real material instead of your Pinterest inspiration board.

The internet isn’t a substitute for the world. I don’t think people on the internet are somehow “not real,” even though it’s tempting to say that sometimes. But I think there’s a version of a person (or a creator) whose entire frame of reference is the internet, and you can feel that thinness in the work they make. Oh, you put your character in a maid outfit because it was a trend like 3 years ago? How… cute?

If I had to land on one piece of actual advice instead of just complaining, it’s that the best work comes from asking, “What do I actually want to see?” Hyper-specific, niche work is often the strongest work there is, because specificity is where passion lives. I was obsessed with David Dastmalchian’s Dr. Fearless persona for a long time because of how weird it was. Is it good? Not really, but seeing Dastmalchian’s love for the horror genre through this character made me also feel that love. To experience the same joy the creator probably had making something is what solidifies something as “good media” in my heart.

Go outside the feed for your answers. Watch a film that’s not American. Go find work from other cultures and eras. Learn history, not as trivia but as why this happened and how it still shapes things now. Watch a comedy special instead of a compilation of clips from one. Read a printed comic. Talk to people who aren’t online. The internet can be a tool, but it’s a terrible sole source.