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le0watch · 3 years

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i cant get this out of my mind so imma just type it out:

god au where the main characters of sk8 are sort of their own pantheon.

-Masai, Goddess of Fertility and the Stars. she gave birth to reki similar to the ways the old gods of north and greek mythology did- in unconventional ways. reki was born from a star, after masai touched its surface with her finger. reki formed inside, forming and being "born" just as the earth was created, and the sun came from the remenants of his formation. she wears a crown of tiny stars, and the edges of her cloak are dotted with the stars as well.

Children of Masai, lesser gods(still powerful beyond belief, however):

-Reki, God of the Sun and Warmth. reki is the embodiment of the sun, as well as the controller of warmth and heat. he controls the sun, similar to apollo, and makes sure that the earth revolves around every day. he is also the creator of fire, creating it while he was playing with the sun's surface. when people were formed, he gave fire to them as a gift. this helped people evolve drastically. he is constantly surrounded by a bright, godly glow, his eyes holding every color of heat and warmth. he has a halo of light over his head, created by his mother from the light of stars as a gift. he wears it proudly. he gives off a constant heat, proof that is was born from the star known as the sun.

-Koyomi, Goddess of Spring. she was born from a white cloud, warmed by her mother's touch. she came up with the idea of the first season on earth: spring. this was before the other seasons were created, and so many reptilians evolved rapidly under her touch. she is often found wearing green and pink robes, as well as a crown similar to that of reki's.

-Nanaka and Chihiro, Twin Goddesses of Summer. They were born from the petals of a flower, held gently in their mother's hands. They were small at first, tiny as a pair of seeds, and still have yet to grow into their full goddesshood. but that didn't stop them from "copying" their older sister's idea of a season, and they wound up creating summer, a season of heat and more heat. they asked their eldest sibling, reki, to help with the creation, and he gave in, but ended up sending a bit too much heat. reptilians continued to thrive beneath the sun's strong waves. they wear a matching pair of sun like crowns, gifted to them from reki, as well as robes of orange and red.

Nanako, Goddess of Space and Kindness. nanako was the first god or goddess to ever be born, and was brought to life along with the existence of space. she is the eldest of the gods, yet she is also the most kind and gentle. she existed alone in the void, until a nearby spark lit up, before bursting outwards, and masai came into existence with the stars. they worked together to create planets. nanako grew jealous of masai as she gave birth to children, but it was impossible for her to do it similarly, since she is not the goddess of fertility. she begged for masai to make her fertile for at least one child, and was told she could only give birth with the help of a mortal man. this is how she met and chose oliver, a mortal from the time just before the ice age, who was blessed with the most intelligence and wisdom over any other, recognizing her and treating her kindly. this is how langa was conceived. she too wears a crown created by masai, and wears a cloak as dark and unconceivable as the void of space, dark matter rising from it like smoke. despite her choice of wardrobe, she radiates kindness and love.

Child of Nanako, a lesser god:

Langa, God of Snow and Growth. though it may sound confusing as to why langa, god of the snow, also contains the ability of growth, it is not the growth of plants, since most die from his chilling touch. he is the god of growth in people and their abilities, helping to shape them and give them inspiration in whatever they chose to do. he is one of the gods that blessed mortals the most after his mother, blessing them with natural ability and adaptative personalities. he is also the creator of winter, somehow snuffing out the sun's heat from affecting the earth as much, creating snow and ice in the process. he has not yet met reki the sun god, and does not of his transgression, but the third season was created, causing the ice age the extinction of 90% of the earth's population. he is also the youngest of the gods, the others being born prior to the creation of men. he made himself a crown of ice, that is also snowing across his blue hair. he also wears a large coat, snow cascading from the shoulders like the fur of a wolf (he asked miya for the favor of creating wolves, and he stills owes a favor to miya in return). most of his wardrobe are blues, whites and greys.

Miya, God of Animals and Mischief. miya is the creator of every single animal that roams the earth. he started with the bacteria before he grew bored, and then created evolution, helping the animals to change into different variations of themselves, dropping different creations during the time before humans. he helped to make dinosaurs and birds and mammals and fish and bugs, until he grew bored of unintelligent creatures. he made human from the first monkey he saw, touching it with intelligence and watching it grow. he also loves to tease and prank the other gods and goddesses, throwing them for loops. his best friend, though he won't admit it, is the sun god himself, who enjoys partaking in his play every now and again. he has a wardrobe made entirely of the pelts of various unknown animals to humans, which are in the colors of purple and pink and green. he also likes to make a tail for himself. miya prefers to not wear a crown, but when he has to, it is a crown of bronze.

Kojiro, God of Strength and Wisdom. kojiro is the definition of brain and brawn, helping the animals miya made have both strength and the minor wisdom they needed to survive. when miya created humans, he asked kojiro to give the humans more wisdom along with the intelligence he gave them. kojiro agreed, intruged by miya's newest creation. he visits with mortals often, granting them strength and wisdom, or one or the other. he doesn't wear a shirt, much to kaoru's chagrin, but luckily, he does wear a pair of pants that are as soft as a cloud. kojiro wears a silver crown.

Kaoru, God of Art and Creation: every god mentioned above has at one point or another created something. this is the doing of kaoru, allowing them the idea of creating anything. he gifted it to each of the gods- some more than others (kojiro was given the least amount, as well as anoisuke), and brought art to the humans in their early stages, helping them reach their full potential of wisdom and creation. this led to humans becoming the dominant species on earth. kaoru was the one to create miya from the oil of one of his paintings alongside kojiro, and thus miya refers to them as his parents, much to kaoru's annoyance. he wears robes similar to the kimonos in japan, and he favors the japanese over most other humans, giving them many gifts of art and creation. he wears a golden crown atop his head.

because of this, kojiro and kaoru are often depicated together, and they are referred to as the patron gods of techonolgy, humanity's greatest show of creation with their wisdom. occasionally, miya is also depicted with them both, and they are recognized as the patrons of family.

Hiromi, God of Plants and Life. hiromi was the one that made miya and kojiro's ideas of life on earth possible. he created the first life on earth ever: a tiny, pre-tree plant. he gave it life, making it grow and breathe until the earth was inhabitable for the creatures kojiro and miya desired to create. his favorite creation of all is that of flowers. he made those with love and care, nurturing the first flowers to life with his hands rather than his godly power. he has a crown of flower petals, as well as a robe made mostly of flowers.

Anoisuke, God of Death and Despair. anoiskue has a long and twisted history with the other gods, and as such, was locked and chained to the underworld, where he could still properly preform his job of taking those who were meant to go. he is still a heavy subject among the pantheon, as well the mortals below. it is said that he terrorized the others of the pantheon before he was locked away, and even tried to kill the sun god reki, before the god of snow stopped him, freezing him in place. anoisuke had been planning to kill the sun god to put out the sun and throw the mortals into utmost despair, so he could drag them all to the depths of the underworld below. he also had a particular interest in the snow god, believing that with his power over cold, they could freeze the entire planet over, making it unhabital for any mortal. langa outright refused.

this was how the snow god and the god of the sun met, and eventually fell in love. the mixture of their heat and cold created the final season, fall, which presides on its own without the control of a god. one would think that they could be around one another often due to their opposing temperatures, but they would be wrong. langa is so cold that he could never experience heat, while reki is so hot he could never experience cold. when they are together, the mortals consider them the patron gods of love, and they are often depicted together, with the sun and moon merged together.

Minor gods (not apart of the main pantheon):

Oka, God of Trust. oka is the god of trust, making him popular among the true believers of the human race. he helps them to root out the toxic people in their lives, as well as those they can trust the most. he is also called upon to solidify promises that can never be broken, until the promise is fulfilled.

Tadashi, God of Servitude. tadashi is the patron god of past slaves, servants, and the blue collar workers of the human population. they pray to him to lower their work, and help them get through a long day. depictions of him are a lot of the time that of a black labrador retriever, the symbol of obidience in their world. as such, he obidiently retrieves the souls of the dead to bring to his master, the god of the dead. he is also known as the god of soul reaping due to this.

due to tadashi and anoisuke's close relationship, they are often depicted together as a warning to those working, as a warning to not be too submissive, or you will be undoubtedly taken advantage of. when a person wants ward off possible bosses who force them into an unfair working situation, they will wear a pendant of tadashi and anoisuke's combined symbols- that of a skeleton holding the chain of a dog.

???, God of Youth. this is a god that everyone has forgotten the name of, but refer to as Youthian. no one has a solid depiction of they, nor entirely what they truly are a patron of, but most believe them to be that of youth and the protection of children. this god is rumored to have once been the close friend of the sun god reki, before they suddenly vanished from the pantheon.

#oops this got out of hand #just created a whole story and world with lore #oops #wow i talk #sk8 #sk8 the infinity #snowgear #renga #langa hasegawa #reki kyan #miya chinen #kaoru sakurayashiki #kojiro nanjo #sk8 shadow #sk8 oka #if you know who i'm hinting at with the last god #you get a cookie

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shihalyfie · 4 years

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The 02 epilogue and “realism”

While the following thoughts have been something I’ve been thinking about for a very long time, the official Kizuna Twitter posted some interesting tweets this morning about the 02 epilogue that made me feel very much like I wanted to talk about this in detail today, so I’ve written this up. Considering how historically controversial the 02 epilogue is (or having an opinion on the 02 epilogue at all, really), I’m probably standing on thin ice by even talking about it, but I’ll do my best.

I think there’s no way getting around the fact that the 02 epilogue was really sudden for pretty much everyone -- it pretty much jumps at you without warning at the end of episode 50, a sudden 25-year timeskip when we had just gotten out of Oikawa’s death (and a very chaotic finale in general). But there is another quirk about the epilogue, which is that a lot of what seems “illogical” out of it...is most certainly illogical to someone approaching it as a kid thinking in terms of media tropes, but gains a very different nuance when you become an adult and have a certain degree of life experience under your belt.

(Note: This post does not discuss Kizuna, despite being inspired by something from it, so no fear of spoilers.)

Before we begin for real, I just want to get it out of the way that I’m not trying to “defend” the epilogue in the sense of implying that people are unreasonable for being blindsided. Like I said, it was sudden, and it was a giant timeskip where a ton of incredibly massive changes happened, leaving the audience likely to be disoriented wondering what on earth happened in the middle there to lead up to that. On top of that, although the rest of this meta is basically dedicated to “analyzing the meaning behind the epilogue writing choices from the production perspective”, I will be very honest in that, yes, I do think that, regardless of good intent, it may not have been the best decision to go ahead and make these decisions in this degree of lack of thought as to how the audience (especially one that was expected to be largely comprised of children) would take it -- creativity is a two-way street, after all, and communicating with your audience and understanding how your work will come off is very important.

Still, nevertheless, I’m writing this meta because I think, well...now that we’re all adults, and now that we’ve gotten a plethora of development information over the past twenty years, especially in the light of Kizuna, it’s worth doing an analysis about why these kinds of writing choices were made, because even to this day you get a lot of people who feel completely blindsided about it.

Everyone’s careers

Actually, the reason I decided to make this post was that I was inspired a bit by this morning’s post from the Kizuna Twitter discussing why, despite being a lead-up to the 02 epilogue, some of the cast in Kizuna seems to be in careers or aspirations that are slightly off from the careers we saw them in during the actual epilogue. (Most notably, Sora still working in ikebana instead of fashion design, Mimi being into online shopping instead of her future cooking show, etc.) The official statement was that Seki Hiromi (producer for the original Adventure and 02) personally stepped in and warned them that, in real life, a lot of people will end up changing their career aspirations at this age, and that it wouldn’t hit close to home if everyone had it exactly figured out by this point.

Kizuna is a movie about the Sad Millennial Adult Experience, so of course it is very important that it be relatable to adults in the modern era. But, in all honesty, this principle applies to 02′s epilogue itself as well. Back when the epilogue first aired -- and for the last twenty years, really -- you got a lot of comments like “why didn’t Taichi become a professional soccer player? why didn’t Yamato go into music?” and such. The thing is, though...well, this is a personal anecdote, but I first got into Digimon when I was a preteen, and, having already had an experience where my childhood interests had changed completely, I actually severely disliked seeing people say that because it felt too straightforward. Even that early, that kind of thing felt unrelatable.

Kizuna as a movie, right now, would be impossible to make in the form it is now if it hadn’t been for the 02 epilogue setting that kind of precedent -- because of the idea of your childhood hobbies not feeling as appealing as they used to be and being very lost about what to do now, feeling that everyone lied to you about that whole “having things figured out by adulthood” thing, and maybe you’ll never really figure it out. But even taking out the fact that the 02 epilogue most likely wasn’t written with the idea they’d need to make an adult-relatable movie 20 real-life years later, I think it’s easy to glean that this philosophy was behind the 02 epilogue as well. Especially since, well...Adventure and 02 themselves were both famous for this kind of writing, for depicting the lives of children in surprisingly realistic and close-to-home ways that avoided generic anime tropes.

Actually, Kakudou said it straight-out:

There were a lot of anime normally made with the idea that a given rule must occur, but I decided to do them while having doubts about whether or not it was a good idea to take on such given rules without any detail. Even if we went on with these given rules, I tried to take appropriate steps in showing why such things had occurred through step-by-step arrangements and reasoning. That is why I tried to add a little bit of realness each time to the characters, despite the restrictions that they are from anime.

So yes, that actually was the point -- no using anime tropes unless they felt they could feasibly happen with these characters. Daisuke is commented on as having “the most anime-like” and idealistic personality, but as I commented in my earlier 02 meta, he still doesn’t quite hit all of the check marks on the shounen hero archetype. So after going for a whole series on the line of going into a grounded take on human mentalities and thought processes...it probably would be inappropriate to suddenly shift into an extremely idealized fictional trope-ish depiction of everyone just going into a more exaggerated version of their childhood hobbies.

Again, that doesn’t mean that some of these don’t come off as really sudden -- the most infamous being Yamato becoming an astronaut. This was eventually revealed in 2003 and several times later to be a holdover from the original beta concept for a third Adventure series, so in that light it makes a little more sense -- Yamato probably would be the most passionate about keeping up the fight as a Chosen -- but nevertheless, it’s ambiguous whether that actually still holds (especially since the actual, uh, “third series” was...a bit different), and since we live in a world where that hypothetical Digimon in Space series never happened, it still blindsides the viewer.

On the other hand, though, both the tri. stage play and the official Kizuna profiles only took less than a paragraph to explain the disparity of why Yamato isn’t doing music anymore: he wanted to keep it in the range of hobbies. Which, incidentally, is an extremely common thing for many who experiment with creative work in their youth -- many realize that if they make it into their job, they’ll actually start hating it. Conversely, while I haven’t talked to a lot of astronauts myself, I really do sometimes wonder how many of them actually knew they were going to get into it from childhood.

So that’s the thing. We have no idea what happened, we’re left with very little recourse as to bridging the gap (at least, until Kizuna came 20 years later and helped us out a bit), and that’s why it feels implausible to many -- especially for a kid in the audience who may not have had that experience of having their hobbies change or feel less appealing. In the end, like I said, I’m not sure that going about it this way was the best decision when the very target audience was likely to be confused about this, and since, after all, fiction does have to have some acceptable breaks from reality for the sake of being a followable story. But at the very least, it is very much in line with Adventure and 02′s philosophy towards writing and its characters -- that things would be the case based on what would be these characters’ likely trajectory as actual people, and not as what you might expect “because it’s fiction” or “because they’re this kind of character”.

That everyone has a Digimon partner

I have a very distinct memory of, as a preteen, going around the Internet and seeing a fansite where someone made their “better version” of the epilogue, where their favorite ships got married instead and everyone got the careers they thought they should have, but one major thing that stuck out was that it had the now-adult kids still keep the existence of Digimon a secret, and that it’s kind of a “secret club” that they still have. In general, one of the biggest arguments against the “everyone has a Digimon partner” thing is that this, allegedly, diminishes how “special” the Chosen are when they’re not the super-amazing sole people in the world to have a partner.

When you’re a kid, being the “Chosen One” sounds romantic. You’re a special selected hero with fated abilities to save the world. In the context of Adventure and 02, however, this would actually be very contradictory to the constant reminders given by both series that magical powers selecting you out of nowhere means absolutely nothing if you’re not the one with personal will and volition to do the right thing with what you’re given. In fact, I’d say it’s actually the opposite of what all of those people have said -- if you did something amazing because of fate or because some higher power said you should, it says a lot less about you than if you were given abilities and choices and actively made an attempt to do something good and change the world, by your own volition.

But the other very important thing about the epilogue is that people keep seeing this development of Digimon proliferating all over the world like it was completely out-of-nowhere, to the point I’ve even seen conspiracy theories that the epilogue was a last-minute decision. This is especially funny because the epilogue was one of the first things decided in the entire series -- “the entire series” in this case being not 02, but Adventure -- before they’d even finalized the characterizations for everyone! The 02 epilogue was, infamously, intended to be Adventure’s ending, before 02 was greenlighted and they postponed the plan there resulting in 02 ultimately taking the fall for it.

Because it was a new television series, without an original novel or manga to use as its reference, we had to cut back on the aspect of explaining the character to each voice actor, something that we would usually do under normal circumstances. We only described their basic personality during auditions because it was likely that those personalities would change drastically in the future depending on the plot’s developments. We did not omit the explanations because there were too many characters. I swear.

But in exchange, we began post-recording by saying just this: “This story is one that’s being reminisced on by one of the children in the group who becomes a novelist 28 years later. The narrator here is that child as an adult.” Those who watched the last episode of the continuation series “Digimon Adventure 02” would know that this was Takeru, but back then, that information was kept secret. At the time of the show, it was planned that the last episode of “Digimon Adventure” would end with ‘where are the characters now’ 28 years later. However, in mid-run, production for its sequel “02” was decided and its story contents were established to be juxtaposed to the previous show, so we carried over the 28 years later scene to the sequel series instead.

(From the afterword from Adventure novel #3, from director Kakudou Hiroyuki.)

25 years after 02. 28 years after Adventure. We calculated that very precisely. In 1999, there was Taichi’s group of eight, and there were also eight other people who didn’t appear in Adventure. Before that there were only eight total, and before that only four, and before that only two, and at the beginning, only one. If they were to double every year, then it would be 28 years until everyone in the world would be able to live alongside a Digimon. Threaded through both Adventure and 02 is a story about humanity’s evolution. For everyone to have their own Digimon partner is the final step of evolution. Because there’s not much left for our actual bodies to change in terms of evolution, it is a story about how the hidden parts of our souls use the powers of digital technology to manifest in the real world, resulting in humanity’s evolution.

Statement from Kakudou Hiroyuki, from the Digimon Series Memorial Book.)

About Digimon 10: The initial trigger for humanity receiving partner Digimon was the Hikarigaoka incident in 1996, but at the time the Internet network was not ready and it was too early for anything to happen. The following years resulted in two and then four people getting involved, and after that it doubled every year (twice, because digital and binary). About Digimon 11: Twenty years later, in the world depicted in the final episode of 02, all human beings have received a partner Digimon. This is the ultimate result of Digimon Adventure’s story of evolution.

Statement from Kakudou Hiroyuki, originating from Twitter and later moved to his blog.)

While the 02 epilogue taking place in the year it did sounds like it’s because they just wanted to add an arbitrary neat number of “25 years later” to 02′s finale, in actuality, the original goal was not for that 25 years but to specifically hit the year of 2028 (not 2027, actually), where, calculating the number of humans that could be partnered to a Digimon based on the global population, everyone would have a partner by exactly 2028. The “doubling every year” principle was only brought up in actual anime-centric canon in a drama CD, and even then it was in a context of speculation instead of being stated as hard fact, but it should be noted that even Kizuna is compliant with this principle, since To Sora states directly that the number of Chosen Children as of 2010 is over 30,000, which is the approximate correct amount you should be expecting by 2010 under this principle. (So yes, really, despite ostensibly not being compliant with his original concept, presumably thanks to the nail added by partnership dissolution and how that ties into his theory of Digimon being part of the soul, Kizuna actually goes out of its way to otherwise be compliant with even the more obscure parts of his lore.)

But the really interesting thing that this epilogue concept brings out is that “the adventure of the Tokyo Chosen Children” actually had nothing to do with the proliferation of Chosen Children around the world whatsoever. From the very beginning, even since the original conception of Adventure, the proliferation of Digimon was something that was going to happen whether anyone liked it or not.

In fact, let’s look at what Koushirou actually says in the aforementioned drama CD:

Yes. I’ve figured it out… The meaning behind the term “Chosen Child.” The number of “Chosen Children” has been growing at a steady rate. Having a partner Digimon isn’t really that special. Being a “Chosen Child” means… to cease the hostilities that break out and inconvenience the Digital World. In order to do so, that child gains a partner Digimon faster than another. In other words, we are children chosen to fight. That’s what it means, isn’t it? ... Oh, is that so? That’s surprising. I didn’t expect that not even you would know what countries the Chosen Children come from when they go to the Digital World… It’s Qinglongmon that’s helping you, is it, Gennai-san? Do the other Holy Beasts who have revived not know either? The Digital World is still so full of mysteries. I’ll do my best to look for them over here.

I think a lot of people tend to have misconceptions about the nature of a Chosen Child, and those who picked them, because the way everyone became “chosen ones” is actually very different from how most media usually would play the trope. In particular:

Homeostasis, the Agents, and the Holy Beasts are explicitly not gods nor omniscient. Homeostasis admits their own lack of abilities in Adventure episode 45, and there’s a recurring undercurrent of the “I don’t know” coming from them and the Agents not actually being because they’re deliberately cryptic, but because they really don’t know. In fact, the Digital World itself is depicted as being about as confused about this whole human contact thing as the human world is.

Note that Koushirou makes a distinction between “being a Chosen Child” and “having a Digimon partner”. If you’re deemed someone who might be able to do something important in this very early time when the Digital World is still trying to figure all of this stuff out, in a world where humans overall still don’t understand Digimon very well, you get first dibs because you’re someone who can be a valuable pioneer. In other words, just because everyone else will eventually get a partner doesn’t mean your contributions aren’t still historical, valuable, and important.

The Digital World was mentioned in Adventure episode 19 as being approximately as big in scale as the real-world Earth itself. That means the Digital World is huge. Of course, its time and space doesn’t exactly match up with the real world’s, as demonstrated multiple times in 02 when the kids abuse it to circumvent travel distance, but nevertheless, there is presumably a lot of the Digital World that neither the Adventure nor the 02 kids have seen in their lives. When they meet Qinglongmon in 02 episode 37, he introduces himself as being in charge of the Eastern side -- and we never meet the others. In effect, there’s probably a huge area of the Digital World that needs protecting that even twelve kids from Tokyo can’t cover by themselves. And that answers the question of what the international Chosen Children are there for -- what do you think they’re doing with those Digivices, twiddling their thumbs? The Tokyo Chosen’s adventures were the ones we were blessed with being able to bear witness to, but that absolutely does not exclude the idea that there were other kids going through their own tales of growth and adventure -- especially since, as I said, Homeostasis and the others protecting the Digital World are not omniscient, and there are a lot of known factors beyond their control.

On that note, you might notice that, by the doubling-every-year principle and by running a math calculation, in 1999, there were eight other Chosen Children besides Taichi’s group. This also tracks with the fact that Adventure episode 53 revealed that there were other Chosen Children prior to Taichi et al. who performed an incomplete seal on Apocalymon, ones that even Gennai wasn’t aware of (remember how I said that the Agents aren’t actually omniscient?). While the fact that such an ostensibly huge fact was dropped so casually is jarring for the viewer, in retrospect, the fact that this was dropped so casually was indicative of the idea of how...not very much of a big deal this was supposed to be. Taichi and his friends may have been instrumental in the selection process for Chosen Children back in 1995, but they weren’t the only ones who witnessed the Hikarigaoka incident nor to have contact with Digimon, and they weren’t even the first to save the Digital World, nor will they be the last. But the journey of personal growth they took was still important to themselves -- just because they weren’t the only ones who took it didn’t change the fact that such an important thing happened, nor that we got the benefit of being able to meet and resonate with these kids.

In fact, the Hikarigaoka incident wasn’t even the first point of contact with the Digital World. 02 episode 33 hinted very heavily that what humans have perceived as youkai and other spirits were actually Digital World contact, just not something actually noticeable until digital technology started connecting the worlds. Episode 47 revealed that Oikawa Yukio and Hida Hiroki had made contact sometime in the 80s via video games -- even though they weren’t Chosen Children themselves at the time. In short, the concept of the Digital World and its contact with the human one is something that spans throughout history, of which the Tokyo Chosen Children are only part of in very recent years.

And finally, one of the most important parts: the idea that the Digimon would stay a secret to the world for very long is inherently infeasible. The 1999 “Digimon in the sky” incident was international. It made international news. Everyone in Tokyo has clear memories of the “Odaiba fog” incident, and, as revealed in 02 episode 14, even a boy from America, Michael, has clear memory of seeing a Gorimon. Reporters like Ishida Hiroaki didn’t hesitate to get in on the scene and try to cover what was going on, and 02 episode 38 revealed that Takaishi Natsuko was doing intensive enough press coverage on the Digimon incidents that Oikawa actually sought her out for information on it. They’re probably not the only reporters around the world doing the same. One episode later, Gennai revealed that the government/military and scientific worlds had actually caught onto the existence of Digimon and did make active attempts to research it -- but, fearing that the world wasn’t quite ready to do that without exploiting Digimon for evil purposes, Gennai and the other Agents wiped out any data records so that they couldn’t do organized research or swap notes. But just wiping out data doesn’t wipe out the public memory, and, especially when the number of Chosen Children is proliferating, and with all of the Digimon-related disasters that happened around the world in 02 episodes 40-42, at some point the world is going to start becoming very aware of what’s going on with this whole thing.

And finally, about that thing where a lot of people claim that a world where everyone has a Digimon partner must be some kind of dystopia: I think this camp severely underestimates how adaptable the world is.

This is something that might not be as resonant to those who were very young at the time they aired, but Adventure and 02 were written in what was a very shocking and scary world for adults that were living at the time. The rate at which the world changed and adapted to digital technology in the late 80s and all of the 90s was ridiculous, and in some ways even terrifying. Many tech people have pointed out how much it feels like the entire structure of the world has changed in light of technological developments, AI, and the Internet in only the last few decades compared to centuries before. International policy has changed, daily life has changed, business structures have changed, in time much less than 25 years. Hell, I’m writing this post smack in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic; I think anyone reading this right now at this time can attest to how terrifyingly quickly the world changed itself in only a few months in response to such a thing.

Compared to that, a whole 25 years of slow burn where the Digimon partner rate at least had the decency to double every year and give people a chance to acclimate and make public policy seems practically luxurious. On top of that, while there will certainly be more people like the Kaiser out there abusing their power, Digimon evolution at least happens to be tied to human emotions (unlike many other weapons out there), and there is some stifling factor in less-than-pleasant people being a bit less likely to have the same access to overwhelming power as those who are more selfless and virtuous. That kind of limiter is something I wish modern technology could have sometimes.

So what is the Tokyo Chosen Children’s place in this narrative? At the forefront of such incredibly massive incoming changes were children who were living in a completely different world than that familiar to even people who were born five to ten years earlier -- much like the real children born in the world of technology in the late 90s. The Tokyo Chosen Children were some of the earliest pioneers in this regard, being the ones who had to figure out logistics and Digimon and the Digital World and what it meant to be a partner in a world that hadn’t figured any of this out yet, and arguably wasn’t ready yet.

Yet they did, and they saved both worlds with no precedent nor support on what to do. This, I think, is a massively more meaningful accomplishment than the idea that they were exclusively selected by some higher power.

On romance and marriage

I feel like this topic is one I’m setting myself up to end up with my head on a pike by daring to breach it -- there is pretty much no way I can cover this without setting myself up for some risk of this -- but I do want to talk about it. I really don’t want to make this post into a pro- or anti-shipping discourse post, so you’ll have to forgive me as I try to be about as diplomatic about this as I possibly can. For all it’s worth, I’m a firm believer in shipping and shipping headcanons being an integral part of the fan’s experience (heck, anyone who knows me knows that I often talk about my own ships more than I really should), and so, as I said before, I’m writing this largely from the perspective of elucidating “the most likely reason it was written this way”, and not “should it have been written this way” nor “how I think people should feel in spite of this”.

In any case, I’m going to start off this section by a statement from a friend that left a particular impression on me. I’d introduced them to Digimon recently, with both of us as adults, and one thing they commented was that the idea of shipping any of the characters felt a little too odd, because they were all elementary school kids. They, of course, understood quite naturally that I had been shipping some of these kids since I was their age (and that my current round of shipping usually was more about whether they’d get together later than whether they would during the time of the series), so it wasn’t an accusation of me being creepy or anything -- it’s just that, as an adult coming into this for the first time without a lot of preconceived attachments, it felt too weird for them to ship children at that young of an age, and it was something that made me think a lot about it.

As I said, shipping is often an integral part of the fan’s experience, even for those who don’t do “fandom” -- romance is such a huge priority that it permeates all of our media, and how it’s handled is often one of the first things deeply scrutinized. Part of the reason the 02 epilogue is so controversial is that it went pretty much against the face of the most popular ships in the fanbase, and the two that did go forward (Yamato/Sora and Ken/Miyako) weren’t ones that people would conventionally expect given what you’d generally look for when it comes to fictional relationship development.

But that’s kind of the issue here: remember when I pointed out earlier that Adventure and 02 were trying to stay away from anime tropes unless they found it to be particularly relevant to the characters’ arcs? In actuality, the way that people generally expect romance and romance tropes to happen in a series -- especially a not-particularly-romance-centric series like this one -- isn’t how romance generally works, and especially not for kids at the age we saw them in Adventure and 02. It doesn’t seem like coincidence that the first hard show of romance we get (Sora asking Yamato out during Christmas) is when the relevant characters were 14, which is around the earliest age you can imagine two kids actually taking a relationship seriously and having some depth of what they’re getting into. As if to drive this in further, Daisuke’s crush on Hikari is portrayed as a sign of him acting shallow and not having a good sense of priorities at the moment; the whole 02 main cast, as of 02, is probably still too young to entertain anything serious for at least a few more years.

If you look at actual couples, as romantic as “childhood friends to lovers” is as a trope, it’s actually not very common in real life, especially for “childhood” being defined as 8-12. There might be a slightly higher chance when it comes to the Tokyo Chosen Children, considering they’d gone through some shared experiences others might not understand, but even that gets slightly mitigated by the fact that more and more people around the world are becoming Chosen themselves. So while it can happen, and while it’s probably somewhat more likely for this group in particular, it’s not as likely as the average shipper would probably want it to be. Even those who support the canon ships don’t really favor the idea of them being in a continuous relationship all the way up to adulthood -- my personal experience as someone closely following Ken/Miyako fanfiction and comics in both the West and in Japan indicates a common thread of it being treated as a mutual pining ship until several years later, and the Yamato/Sora fans I’ve personally talked to have a very high rate of feeling that the two of them have experienced at least one breakup before getting back together. Or, in short, even people who like those ships have a hard time imagining a unbroken, continuous relationship all the way from elementary/middle school to adulthood, because of how much that generally doesn’t happen.

I promise I am not writing this as a treatise against the ship itself, I swear I’m just using this because it’s the best example I can pull out at the moment, but I’ll put it this way: I think the clearest example of this is Takeru and Hikari, the only pairing that has the unfortunate distinction of being explicitly confirmed as not being married (by Seki Hiromi in V-Jump), whereas everyone outside the scope of Yamato/Sora and Ken/Miyako is still technically in “believe whatever you want” territory. Takeru/Hikari is, depending on which scale of ranking you use, a ship that consistently ranks as one of the three most popular Digimon ships globally, and them not getting together is cited as one of the most common things disliked about the epilogue. But despite its overwhelming popularity to the point you’d think it’d be easy to cater to such a humongous fanbase by pairing them together -- and so few people would dispute it, really! -- not only were they not made an item, but they were explicitly confirmed as not being one.

Why?

Takeru and Hikari probably feel “baited” to anyone who’s looking at this from a romantic trope perspective. They’re constantly in each other’s company to the point where it almost feels like they like hanging out with each other more than they do others. Takeru is shown as having a particular investment in Hikari’s welfare in 02 episodes like 7, 13, and 31. They’re constantly associated with each other in promotional materials, too. But when you look at them in terms of their actual relationship as children...well, I’ll put it this way with another personal anecdote: I actually had multiple platonic friends like that back when I was their age in elementary and later middle school, and, uh...well, people did actually ask if we were in love with each other, and it genuinely, no-strings-attached, annoyed the hell out of me, because we weren’t, and I hated being pigeonholed into that.

In real life, platonic relationships happen a lot with kids in that age group, and it’s not actually all that surprising that 02 would have wanted to portray a healthy one without any strings attached -- the same way the series also portrayed other unconventional situations with kids, such as Iori being a nine-year-old who hangs out with kids much older than him (there are most certainly kids who can attest to being in that position!). I mentioned in my earlier 02 characterization meta that both Takeru and Hikari are actually rather inscrutable (especially in the first half of the series), and in fact, episode 13, usually quoted as a Takeru/Hikari episode, is actually centered around Takeru having difficulty reaching out to Hikari because, despite the fact he was closest to her at that point in time, she still was too closed-in to open up about anything. They almost never talk about what they actually think about each other, other than obviously having an investment in each other’s welfare and enjoying each other’s company, but, again -- this isn’t unusual for platonic friends at this age. And the fact that this is the one ship where there was actual official word putting a foot down and saying, no, this did not end up in marriage...everyone interprets this like it’s some kind of callous move made to make people miserable for no good reason, but I would say that, given the writing philosophy applied to the kids in nearly every other respect, the intent was likely to make a statement that this kind of relationship can exist without it ending up in inevitable marriage somewhere down the line.

We’re inclined to see “two people being emotionally close means a higher chance of being a couple” because this is how romance has been portrayed in media for as long as any of us have been consuming media, but in actuality, relationships are very multifaceted and complicated, and there are many ways to be “emotionally close” to someone in ways that don’t overlap with being “romantically attracted” to someone. This is especially once you start becoming an adult and end up needing to navigate the web of who’s a friend and whom you might have a crush on, and in actuality the person you start flirting with because you think they’re attractive might have been someone you just met last week, or at least someone you don’t know very emotionally intimately (which is why crushes can be intimidating, even in adulthood). This is also what I think fuels the disparity between why Taichi/Sora gained such a huge following and what actually happened with them, because many, many fans will testify that they felt baited by the ship, but if you look in the actual series in terms of what counts as “romantic attraction” and not just emotional closeness, there’s...not a lot; they happened to know each other before the events of the series (but so did Koushirou!), Taichi had a bit of a mental breakdown about saving her (because he’s not someone who abandons important friends), and in Our War Game! they had a bit of a spat with traces of tsundere (which, ultimately, are circumstantial and don’t necessarily indicate they actually have serious mutual feelings for each other). Official word implies that Yamato and Sora were planned since rather early in the series, and it doesn’t seem like coincidence that “pairing up the main hero and heroine” (Taichi and Sora) was given as an example of an avoided trope in an official booklet, so it lends further support to the idea that “not following typical romance tropes and expectations” was a significant priority.

Again, this isn’t me saying anything about those who ship it or those who have been able to figure out ways in which the relationship could work in some very wonderful headcanons I’ve had the benefit of reading over the past decades, nor those who are having a marvelous time with fanfic and headcanon and comics and being a bit more willing to indulge outside the scope of the series’s canon. (Nor the multitude of very good headcanons and meta I’ve seen about the possibility of Takeru/Hikari at least trying out dating somewhere along the line, even if it doesn’t end up anywhere permanent.) Nor does that mean I think that this was the best way for the writers to go about it -- as I’ve said in this meta already, there is an inherent fallacy of not paying enough attention to how writing will be taken and interpreted by people with certain reasonable expectations cultivated from years of media consumption, and especially by kids who aren’t going to pick up that nuance or don’t have the appropriate relationship life experience. Regardless of intent, there’s still a lot that can be criticized about its handling; in many ways, it could be considered a bit cruel that the series had things known to be considered romantic subtext in most other series that may not have been actually intended this way. But, nevertheless, I do feel very strongly that there’s a high likelihood that this is what they were at least going for, even if it didn’t come off that way to most of the audience.

Extrapolating this concept further, it’s also interesting to see how Adventure and 02 treat romance as a relatively insubstantial thing in the grand scope of things. I said earlier that it’s quite understandable that romance and shipping have become the main obsession for media -- and it’s probably been that way for as long as human civilization has even existed -- but when you really think about it, Adventure/02 treat romance as “a thing that is a big part of your life, but not the sole controlling factor”. Again, note how Daisuke’s precocious crush on Hikari manifests when he’s at his most shallow, and even after Yamato and Sora start dating in episode 38, we really don’t hear a lot about it -- granted, neither were in the lead protagonist cast by that point in the series, but whenever they do appear thereafter, it’s almost always about their work helping out as Chosen than it is about their relationship, which is presumably a private thing going on in the background. It’s a part of their lives, but it’s not the only thing going on with them. Of course, shounen anime with casts of these ages don’t tend to breach the topic of romance much at all, but it’s interesting how it touches on the topic and then leaves it in the background -- again, something probably frustrating and a bit too cavalier for those inclined to see shipping and romance as life or death, but from a real-life perspective, makes sense in the realm of friends’ relationships largely not being your business, even if it is significant.

(Ken and Miyako are a trickier matter because their pairing was allegedly based on their voice actors’ friendship, but considering that it has been cited multiple times across multiple Digimon series production notes that character outlines were often subject to change even mid-series based on impressions of the voice actors’ performance -- it happened in Tamers too, and it’s not even unusual for original anime in general -- it’s still ambiguous as to when in production this decision was made, and, considering the flip between Miyako having jealous pettiness over him in episode 3 to fantasizing over him and considering him exactly her type in 8, I would not be surprised if the decision were made somewhere in between there, especially since the fact the epilogue would eventually happen was already established in production over a year prior. Unlike with Yamato and Sora, we don’t get to see the two of them at a reasonable age to start doing anything serious within the scope of 02, which led to the unfortunate result of the reveal of them getting married in the epilogue being a very startling and sudden jump for many.)

In any case, I’m going to close this with yet another disclaimer -- I know I’m repeating myself too many times at this point, but I really, really want to make it clear that I am not, in any way, trying to imply that I don’t understand why people would be blindsided by the epilogue in any of the above ways (careers, the status of Digimon partnerships, shipping) because, as I said, I do think there is some merit to the philosophy that maybe they should have paid a bit more attention to how people -- especially kids -- would actually see the events rather than the writing philosophy behind why it should be written this way. (And, to be honest, I think I might have this complaint behind not just the epilogue, but both Adventure and 02 as a whole, for a multitude of different reasons.) Moreover, there are a million other cans of worms that could be feasibly discussed regarding the epilogue that I’ve only barely scratched the surface of here, because there are so many different topics to unpack when it comes to it, and I could go on forever (and further increase my risk of ending up with my head on a pike...). And of course there’s the wider issue of how to handle timeskip epilogues in general (they don’t really tend to be very popular, do they), so, really, there’s only so much I can cover in one post before dragging this on for too long. But in the end, even after writing all this, I understand that there are a lot of people who still won’t like it or don’t want to accept it, and that’s fine; it’s not my place to try and convince people to.

But, nevertheless, the reason why I made this post -- and what I hope the take-home can be -- is that, no, I don’t think this was made as a random off-their-rocker decision with the intent to make everyone miserable, nor some kind of fever dream that the writing staff must have pulled out while drunk, nor whatever accusations I’ve seen levied about it as a weird spontaneous idea (and the fact it really did come out very suddenly at people), but that -- regardless of how it landed -- there was some idea behind why it played out, and why, even 20 real-life years later, principles like “not everyone’s going to stick with the same career even in adulthood” continue to hold.

#digimon #digimon adventure 02 #shihameta

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