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shihalyfie · 2 years

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Digimon Survive’s character cast, their roles in the group, and Adventure parallels

This franchise loves to self-reference, so it’s very easy to say that a lot of things are based on Adventure, but in Survive’s case, it has been abundantly clear (to the point of having been officially stated in many interviews) the narrative and setup itself is meant to be a reimagining of Digimon Adventure, as in the 54-episode series that aired from March 1999-2000. As much as the franchise likes to use Adventure symbolism, or rough glosses of its isekai premise, you might be surprised at how few things actually have bothered to take a look at the entire series and structure to the little things, trying to figure out what made it tick, instead of just pulling its names and faces and terminology and calling it a day. Moreover, one of Survive’s core premises of “a Digimon partner is effectively a part of your own soul” is a premise that originates directly from Adventure; it’s just that this time, it’s much more explicit.

Adventure is famous for being a character narrative, to the point you can put a picture with nothing but the characters and people will consider it representative of the entire series. So if you want to go deeply into Adventure, you have to look at its characters, what their relationships were, and what roles they had. And Survive does, but with its own distinct cast of characters who are very similar in some ways...and very different in others.

As you might expect, this post spoils all four routes, so please be aware of this before reading further. (I also will be spoiling Adventure and 02, in case you haven’t seen those yet. Hey, you never know.)

Because I wasn’t able to go back through all four routes to take screenshots, the screenshots used in this post are from Anthony (Wrathful), Owl-Quest (Harmony), and BattleBunny (Moral and Truthful)’s playthroughs. Please go check them out if you want to see the game yourself!

Something very important before we begin

I think making comparisons and drawing parallels is very useful, but I have a personal policy that comparisons should only be drawn “as much as they are useful” and no more than that. There’s a difference between “thoughtfully inspecting comparisons and contrasts to analyze how things work” versus “forcing parallels so hard that you end up trying to smash a square peg into a round hole, completely losing sight of the reason you’re trying to make those comparisons in the first place”. I know it’s tempting to try and make as many parallels as you can, but there’s a point where trying to force it becomes actively detrimental to your analysis.

It is true that Survive was built from the ground up as a reimagining of Adventure of sorts, and even promoted and officially stated to be such. However, Adventure is Adventure, and Survive is Survive. Survive is a game meant to stand on its own even if you've never touched Digimon Adventure in your life; to act as if the narrative and characters are nothing more than variations on Adventure’s is, in my opinion, disrespecting Survive’s efforts to be its own story in the end. It is a game that pays tribute to and reimagines Adventure's concepts, so it can't (and shouldn’t) be disentangled completely from Adventure if you want to bring the most out of an analysis, but it’s also unfair to treat the game as if it’s just some kind of twisted, barely-modified parody of Adventure, because it’s not. It’s a game that draws heavily from its predecessors in bringing up concepts to think about while also firmly doing what it needs to do in order to be its own story.

Therefore, in making character comparisons and analyzing the characters in relevance to Adventure characters, my priority will be on making connections between “their roles and positions in the group” rather than trying to force comparisons for the sake of forcing them, or trying to claim that this character is just the Survive version of this Adventure character. In fact, in some cases, my goal is to convey that a Survive character may start off in the same rough position as their Adventure counterpart but go in a very different direction.

I also would like to reiterate that I very much disapprove of the idea of using Survive to be condescending about Adventure. Survive’s characters and plot do address territory that Adventure isn’t able to, but framing Survive with reductive things like “Adventure but darker/edgier” or “a deconstruction of Adventure” as if the game only exists to dunk on Adventure’s idealism or treat it like it’s implausible is incredibly disrespectful, not only to Adventure but also to Survive, which in fact very obviously holds its predecessor in high esteem. (I mean, it is very fun to refer to Survive as “Adventure except people die” as a joke, but the game really is more than just that.) I’m going to bring back this very well-worded tweet “a deconstruction is when I like something in a genre I disrespect”; I don’t have any patience for this kind of thing, so don’t bring it in here. I reiterate: the comparisons are going to be drawn for the sake of better analyzing what Survive is pulling from and referencing while also doing its own thing for its own story. No more, no less.

Takuma and Agumon

At this point it’s pretty much common knowledge that anyone with a name that starts with “ta-” and a pair of goggles is going to be taking Taichi’s role as protagonist, and Takuma having an Agumon only drives it in further, but if we’re actually going to talk about Taichi himself, things get a little more complicated because Taichi was actually quite unusual in many ways (I honestly would say that Taichi is a character a lot of people “know” but don’t tend to easily “understand”). But right off the bat, Takuma turns out to have a very different temperament from Taichi’s, being significantly more introspective and less impulsive. In fact, he holds the distinction of being a rare Digimon protagonist who uses the polite first-person pronoun boku (most Digimon protagonists use the more assertive ore), and for frame of reference, the other major players who do this are Takato (Tamers), Haru (Appmon), and Keisuke (Hacker’s Memory), all three of whom are associated with some kind of meta element questioning whether they should be in the protagonist position...

(Personally, between Takato, Haru, and Keisuke, I’d say Takuma is probably closest to Haru in that he’s polite but also very thoughtful and introspective. He does happen to have self-doubts much more quickly than Haru would most of the time, but he’s not prone to Keisuke’s self-esteem issues or Takato’s tendency to shrink easily.)

Some of the nuances of Takuma’s personality and how selfish or selfless he is depend on the player’s choices and what route things are in, but for the most part the general core is consistent across all four routes. Takuma doesn’t start off thinking of himself as the group’s leader, and this part is consistent with Taichi as well; Taichi didn’t have particular awareness of himself as the group’s leader until Jou confronted him with the prospect in Adventure episode 28. However, in contrast to Taichi immediately taking initiative and pulling everyone forward even if he didn’t consciously see himself as the leader, Takuma started off still having strong awareness of seniors like Aoi and Shuuji, and it only slowly becomes apparent that he’s taking charge as more and more characters start pointing it out, culminating in multiple characters pretty much unanimously considering Takuma the group’s leader even before he’s considered it; Part 9 on the Truthful route has Shuuji outright admit to Ryo that he’s using Takuma as his model for how a leader should actually be.

So how does Takuma end up becoming unanimously considered the leader in a similar way to Taichi despite having such a different temperament? The characters spell it out in clear words multiple times over the course of the game: he brings the group together by being their emotional center. That part about being their “emotional center” is important because Taichi wasn’t necessarily as good at that part (which incites a lot of conflict between him and the others during the last arc of Adventure), but the reason this is more important for Takuma is that the Survive group is significantly more prone to infighting than the Adventure group was most of the time. When the game’s producer Habu called it the “Lord of the Flies” counterpart to Adventure’s “Two Years’ Vacation”, Adventure’s director Kakudou revealed that Lord of the Flies was an inspiration for the part of the story corresponding to Pinocchimon and Yamato...which resulted in Taichi failing to keep the group together and everyone falling apart. So in other words, Takuma is pulling off the achievement of keeping the group glued together when the equivalent of the Pinocchimon arc is happening all the time. There are no Crests in this narrative, meaning the automatic filtering for “naturally good kids” was absent and the kids were dragged into the Digimon world by sheer virtue of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, leading to a lot more negativity on all fronts and composures lost much more easily -- and thus, Takuma’s ability to keep a cool head and get everyone to calm down becomes his most important asset.

Also of note is Takuma’s own relationship with Agumon. While Agumon in this game is obviously based off Taichi’s Agumon in Adventure, Takuma and Agumon end up having quite a lot of conversations together where Takuma consults with him on how to sort out his emotions and what to do next, far more so than would happen in the original Adventure. Part of this is simply because of the medium shift (being a video game, Survive is able to have much longer conversations that aren’t restricted by timeslot airtime), and it’s also not like Agumon in Adventure wasn’t also emotionally insightful when Taichi needed advice, but Takuma and his Agumon partner end up having several conversations on the vein of Adventure!Agumon’s discussions with BlackWarGreymon in 02 episodes 32 and 46. In the end, the main reason is probably just that Takuma is just that kind of introspective person who actively seeks out Agumon and talks to him honestly, allowing them to get borderline philosophical without any strings attached.

Minoru and Falcomon

The mere suggestion that Minoru is supposed to be Koushirou’s counterpart would probably make someone roll their eyes and go “oh, come on, now you’re really forcing it,” and I wouldn’t blame anyone for thinking so. Temperament-wise, Minoru couldn’t be any more different from Koushirou. Rather than anyone in the Adventure group, he comes off as a kind of mix of Daisuke (in terms of being rough but friendly and having a forward-thinking attitude) and Miyako (in terms of being a “mood maker” who tries to keep everyone’s spirits up but needs to be reined in by a more stoic partner). But trust me, hear me out, I know this sounds weird, but I’ve got more reason for this stance than you might think!

Actually, Koushirou had a pretty complex role in Adventure, to the point he seems to have two counterparts in Survive. The more well-publicized parts of Koushirou’s profile involve his intellectual curiosity (bringing him closest to the secrets behind the Digital World) and his sense of deference and politeness, and those traits correspond more to the Professor (more on that when we get to his section). However, the less well-publicized but no less important part is that Koushirou was, for all intents and purposes, Taichi’s right-hand man, and thus one of the most important figures in helping Taichi pull off what he needed to as leader.

Koushirou was one of the few kids who knew Taichi prior to the events of the series and had already established a certain sense of respect for him (he only went to camp at all because of Taichi). As a result, while Koushirou tended to avoid confrontation with the others in the group, he was open to Taichi in a way he often wasn’t with others, and Taichi likewise was comfortable asking him for assistance (culminating in the famous moment in Adventure episode 28 when Taichi uses his authority as leader to appoint Koushirou as the best person to solve the card puzzle). Later, it’s Koushirou who sticks by Taichi when the group splits up during the Dark Masters arc, Koushirou who witnesses and hears out Taichi during one of his biggest emotional breakdowns in Adventure episode 48, and Koushirou who works directly alongside Taichi in Our War Game! Taichi’s relationships with Yamato or Sora tend to be more well-publicized, so casual fans of Adventure or mainstream media reports tend to completely gloss over this, but it’s conspicuous to anyone who knows Adventure on a particularly deep level. (While this analysis sticks purely to the original Adventure and 02 for the sake of consistent scope, it says something that even stage play writer Tani Kenichi clearly also caught onto this and had the lines "I've watched you at your side all these years! Isn't that right?!" and "But I thought you could at least speak honestly with me!" come out of Koushirou’s mouth.)

So as much as Minoru isn’t really much of a counterpart to Koushirou in terms of personality, he is in terms of Koushirou’s “position in the group”: the leader’s right-hand man who avoids inciting confrontation but is vital in helping keep them together. (In fact, the part about avoiding confrontation is pointed out quite directly in his official profile.) Considering how Takuma pulling off the feat of keeping everyone together required him to have a very different temperament from Taichi, it thus follows that Minoru’s temperament needs to be different from Koushirou’s in order to achieve the same effect with the Survive group. Koushirou’s more polite and level-headed demeanor was important to keeping the rather impulsive Taichi in check, but in this case, Takuma is already plenty level-headed by himself, and Minoru being more actively sociable and trying to keep everyone’s spirits up is a more effective complement. This is helped by the fact that, in the same way Koushirou knew Taichi from the soccer club even prior to Adventure, Minoru happens to have already been Takuma’s friend from school prior to Survive, and thus by the time we get to the final chapters of the game (especially in the Truthful route), it’s made quite clear that Minoru really is Takuma’s right-hand man whom he can rely on for many things. On top of that, Minoru being so agreeable makes him the only character of the group besides Takuma to survive all four routes -- he sticks by Takuma no matter what.

Background-wise, Minoru’s is quite different from Koushirou’s in that he’s mostly used to being rather lonely at home due to a divorced father and a workaholic mother, and he also happens to be a fan of hero manga and tokusatsu to the point a lot of his personal ideal throughout the game is to become a “hero”. (Perhaps fittingly, his temperament is probably the closest to the shounen protagonist archetype among this group.) This puts him in an interesting position in that he’s the most aware of what kind of heroic character would be from a series like Digimon Adventure and personally strives to be one, even though it takes him a while to gather up the courage for it. When you have affinity-affecting choices with him, he tends to prefer the “forward-thinking” kinds of responses that would make Daisuke proud, so he clearly took the kids’ media lessons to heart. In line with that, Minoru is the only character besides Takuma to survive all four routes; while his biggest emotional turmoil happens in all four routes (it takes up the majority of Part 6), he and Falcomon weather through it quite well. But when you think about it, back in the Adventure universe, the kids who admired the Adventure kids most were...well, the 02 kids, so perhaps it’s not actually that surprising Minoru’s temperament is closer to them.

Also, here’s another fun thing to consider: Minoru’s dynamic with Falcomon takes several pages from Miyako and Hawkmon’s book...so, remember who also happened to be Koushirou’s junior who admired him the most?

Aoi and Labramon

If you wrote a rough base outline of Sora and Aoi’s characters, they’d probably be pretty similar or even identical. You’d basically get something like “the Mom Friend who tries to take care of everyone and overwhelms herself in the process, crumbling under the pressure”. But there is one key distinction that makes all the difference: Sora’s desire to help others was something that came naturally to her despite her own lack of self-awareness, whereas Aoi’s woes come from the fact she’s all too aware of the fact everyone is relying on her and bears resentment about it.

One recurring thing with Sora was that her own self-evaluation was often much harsher than she actually deserved. Initially scoffing at the idea of being responsible for someone else (Adventure episode 4), despite being unable to abandon everyone and constantly going out of her way to help everyone behind the scenes (Adventure episodes 22-25), her own self-evaluation was still that she was apparently devoid of love and didn’t care about the others at all (Adventure episode 26). Her constant desire to help everyone was effectively compulsive, and she had poor awareness of whether she was getting in over her head, with others needing to remind her that she shouldn’t see things as an obligation (Adventure episode 51). Sora was barely even aware of how much she was putting out for others because she saw it as an impulsive obligation, and the others were the ones concerned about whether she was taking enough care of herself. Moreover, although Sora bottled up quite a bit of self-imposed pressure, she wasn’t exactly shy about expressing her feelings; it’s just that they often happened to be messy, and she wasn’t sure what to make of them.

(By the way, this is also why I really don’t like the idea that Adventure is somehow more “unrealistic” or even “idealized” than Survive’s just because they’re ostensibly more put-together and selfless people, because Adventure’s characters often toed on the other extreme of being selfless to self-destructive levels; the kids would be prone to severe self-confidence issues or even self-hatred, especially going into 02. While the Survive kids may seem overall self-centered at first and thus be more prone to infighting, any self-worth issues they have or attempts at reckless self-sacrifice don’t tend to be as frequent or extreme as they were with the Adventure and 02 kids.)

In contrast, Aoi is consciously aware of what’s on her plate, what she’s dealing with, and why she’s doing what she does. Sora was the same age as Taichi and Yamato, so she was able to be comfortable in a position as their peer, but Aoi is one year older than Takuma and therefore considered one of the seniors of the group, a fact that’s alluded to multiple times over the course of the game. This means the group ends up treating her with the expectation that she has responsibility for them (especially after Ryo and Shuuji die in the main routes, thus genuinely leaving her as the oldest one there), and on top of her class president duties, she’s surrounded by expectations and responsibilities that are actually imposed on her. On top of that, people actually take advantage of her kindness and exploit her, and she knows this fact very well and hates it. (While it’s possible this might have happened with Sora, it’s unlikely she would have even realized she was being taken advantage of, much less come to resent anyone who did, because the issue was more about her own difficulty with setting boundaries and doing something for herself.)

Aoi does what she does because “she wants to be helpful”, so she suppresses all of her angry feelings and resentment to not burden anyone; for the early parts of the game, Labramon openly voices all of the snark and harsh burns that Aoi clearly wants to say but won’t. This means that meeting Saki inspires a mix of admiration and envy for the fact Saki is able to express her feelings so openly. But in the Wrathful route, when everything goes to hell and Saki (somewhat) sacrifices herself for Aoi, Aoi implodes from the resentment of everyone burdening her with responsibilities, seeing their attempts to give her space as not caring enough about her, and upset that after all of her desire to be “helpful”, everything actually just got worse. The last straw is when Piemon exploits her kindness to attempt to murder her, and the end result is Aoi completely flipping into “the ultimate selfishness” (absorbing Labramon, as in her own ego) to decide that the best solution would be to impose her way -- the way she’d never been getting all of this time -- on others and force them to agree with her.

Thankfully, Aoi fares better in the other routes where she manages to trust and rely on others a little more, and her friends do much more to make sure she knows her efforts are appreciated. Notably, during her affinity choices, Aoi reacts very well to choices that validate her right to have “shallow” interests like cute things (instead of it being considered undignified and immature of her) and choices that have other characters outright call her a Mom Friend. I’m pointing this out because for all Sora is well-known among fans for being a Mom Friend, this wasn’t actually pointed out with this kind of wording in Adventure mainly because Sora wasn’t really seeing herself as one, but here Aoi does prefer to be seen this way, presumably because it affirms the fact her friends appreciate her as a person rather than someone to dump responsibilities on.

As an aside, the Wrathful route involves a subplot about Kaito being one of the first to catch onto what’s going on with Aoi and make the most prominent attempt at reaching out to her, and while I don’t know if this was intentionally meant as a parallel, it does call back to the scene in Adventure episode 26 when Taichi and Yamato are at a loss as to how to help Sora during her emotional meltdown, and Yamato’s response (to let her cry if she needs to) is indicated as the better option until Takeru finally manages to step in with the best response. In Aoi’s case, given that she ends up resenting everyone giving her space (interpreting it as “leaving her alone”), Kaito’s attempt to get through to her by confronting her directly about her feelings was probably the closest to a step in the right direction -- it’s just that unfortunately Kaito doesn’t exactly handle it delicately enough to prevent Aoi from having a complete breakdown.

Fortunately, as if responding directly to this predicament, the Moral route contains a scene of them getting along perfectly well when going out to get food together. This is significant if you played Wrathful and Harmony before then, because both routes had one or the other fall off the deep end; Moral has Shuuji and Ryo’s deaths force them to step up to the plate, but without the exacerbating factors that drove both to to the brink in Wrathful and Harmony, it turns out they’re more than capable of stepping up to the task.

Ryo and Kunemon

While it’s generally easy to figure out at least some obvious parallels for each character in this cast, sometimes even multiple, Ryo is the one character I’ve never seen anyone really be able to get a read on regarding this question. I’ve seen suggestions that it might be Akiyama Ryou (based on the name) or even Ken (based on having a bug-type partner that he initially had a bad relationship with). Personally, my stance is “nobody, and that’s the point” -- because you’ll notice that the one thing all of these theories have in common is that none of them correspond to anyone in the original group from Digimon Adventure.

I’m not sure if this really comes across as well to anyone who hasn’t actually played the game hands-on, but one very striking thing about Ryo over the course of the beginning of Survive is that the game oftentimes feels like it’s tempting you to give up on him. The characters label him as unlikely to be cooperative right off the bat, and while they extend the minimum amount of courtesy to him, it’s also tinted with a sentiment that nobody really expects him to come along because he’s so pessimistic he’ll never cooperate. Getting his affinity level up to a significant amount in the early game actually requires you to go out of your way to seek him out and talk to him at least once (during a period the game interface doesn’t inform you that he’s available to talk like it does the other characters). And Ryo really is an uncooperative stick in the mud who doesn't look like he has any interest in helping himself anyway. They spoiled the fact he was going to be the first death before the game even released!

In other words, Ryo has no clear Adventure counterpart because “he has no place here”. He’s not a character who fits in the framework of Adventure-defined archetypes. He wasn’t made to be on a heroic adventure to begin with, and so he’s the first to be removed from it. And yet, the difference his presence or absence makes results in him being arguably one of the most important characters in this game.

In fact, even in the very, very early stages on the game, there were hints that Ryo’s behavior of being completely uncooperative and pessimistic were largely exacerbated by the stress of being brought to another world with monsters; if you closely watch him at the beginning of the game, he’s the one who enables Miu into taking them to the shrine (which he reminds us about near the end of the Truthful route). His website short story reveals that he’d actively decided to go to the extracurricular camp despite his initial misgivings because he really did want at least a little hope of making friends. But being jaded from isolation does a number on your abrasiveness level (the Frontier kids can testify to that one), and then everything went to hell when all of his stress factors and feelings of isolation were aggravated to their worst.

Depression isn’t an elegant thing, unfortunately, and Ryo’s inner desire to do better being blocked off by his initial difficulty to connect with others is perfectly exemplified by Kunemon trying really hard to take care of Ryo and communicate with others but being held back by his inability to use human language or do much with his limited physique. Note that Ryo’s initial hostile behavior towards Kunemon isn’t necessarily condescension or anything near the level of Shuuji’s initial bad relationship with Lopmon; it’s just that Ryo is afraid of Kunemon and not sure what to make of him, in the same way he’s clearly not sure what to make of himself. (Naturally, the first thing Ryo does when he comes back from the brink is start forming a proper relationship wtih Kunemon, and Ryo himself opening up more in the Truthful route correlates with Kunemon’s higher forms becoming able to speak.)

Ryo’s death in the three main routes is from a mixture of factors that even the cast in-universe isn’t sure what to make of; he doesn’t actively commit suicide per se, but his death wouldn’t have happened if not for his extreme suicidal ideation, and while Takuma regrets not having reached out to him earlier, it’s also not like he can be blamed for not doing enough when it wasn’t for lack of trying (from Takuma’s perspective, it’s not like he had any way of knowing that Ryo would die if he didn’t bond with him intimately in 3 chapters, and Ryo himself wasn’t exactly giving much of an indication that such a feat would actually be possible). Looking at the difference between the routes where he dies and the route where he doesn’t, the difference is that when Ryo dies, his pessimism about anything working out for him and him having a “place” anywhere convinces him he really doesn’t have anything to live for anymore, whereas the route where he lives has Takuma and the others so obviously risking life and limb to drag him back that he’s actually able to see, very clearly, that he did have a “place” and the ability to make friends after all.

(By the way, I should point out that one thing Survive is very good at is that a lot of the “correct” affinity choices are ones where you don’t pry too deeply into their problems and instead respect the other person’s space. In Ryo’s case, getting his affinity up quickly enough to save him requires going out of your way to check on him often, but the actual choices that raise affinity mostly involve validating his feelings and not prodding things too much, basically showing that you care but also respecting that he’ll open up when he’s ready.)

Having realized this, Ryo opens up immediately; again, he was interested in proactively making friends from the get-go, so it’s only natural that as soon as he confirmed that was a possibility for him and his initial shell was broken through, he didn’t hesitate to brighten up and actively engage with the others. Turns out, he's actually one of the most emotionally insighful people in the cast (in no part because, as someone who's seen the bottom, he's well aware of its horrors), but he also has a certain sense of grounded, to-the-point pragmatism while also not being as extremely emotionally charged as Kaito. Completely contrary to the bad first impression he gave everyone (except Saki), it turns out he’s actually a pretty great friend to have. And once Ryo is saved, the route automatically locks onto Truthful, because it creates a chain reaction where he ends up being the best person to save Shuuji, who then paves the way for the truth to be reached and the best possible ending achieved.

Remember how I said that Ryo was the character who had no place in the Adventure framework? If Ryo dies in Part 3, the “best” possible ending you can theoretically get (Moral) is the one that correlates most closely to Digimon Adventure, with the kids being booted out of the Digimon world for the time being and an uncertain future of whether the worlds can truly come together. Reaching an even better one that more closely represents what came after Adventure and allows the story to be passed onto future generations (very unsubtly represented by the Chibimon meeting new kids at the end -- note the significance because none of the 02 quartet’s Digimon are recruitable in the game) requires Ryo, the added factor who helps the story proceed.

But really, the ultimate take-home the game is making here is that you shouldn’t give up on people that easily, because they just might surprise you.

Saki and Floramon

Saki’s creed being to “go with her feelings” makes it immediately obvious off the bat that she’s the Survive counterpart for Mimi, but interestingly, Saki is simultaneously more rude and more kind than Mimi was in Adventure. Mimi had a “princess-like” demeanor based on her somewhat spoiled upbringing, meaning that on one hand she would be quick to complain and gripe about anything that even moderately annoyed her, but she also was constantly deferential and respectful to her elders, had consistent use of honorifics, and was always polite and careful not to step on anyone’s toes as long as she wasn’t emotionally overwhelmed.

On the flip side, Saki handles everyone somewhat bluntly (not even using upward-facing honorifics for most characters despite being one of the youngest in the group) and has less regard for what other people think when she says what she feels -- but she’s quite the opposite of spoiled. In fact, Takuma realizes after a fashion that she comes off as someone who’s been through hardship in the past, and she’s actually one of the most resilient in the cast; eventually, we find out that any “sheltering” she’s been through comes from the fact she wasn’t allowed to do much in light of her illness, and her emphasis on feelings and living to the fullest comes from the fact she’s not sure whether she might die soon. Moreover, the illusory versions of Saki encountered over the course of the game reveal that she’s actually afraid of being hated by others, so there is a certain aspect of her that’s self-conscious about whether she’s going too far.

In the end, Saki respects others’ feelings, but also expects to have her own feelings respected in turn. Throughout her affinity events, Takuma learns that although she initially seems flighty and difficult to predict in terms of how she wants to be treated, she’s a lot more considerate than she seems at first, and at no point does she deny anyone else’s right to feel the way they do as long as they respect her own. In addition, while she doesn’t believe in hiding how she feels, she also does take measures to try not to step on others’ toes (that is to say, she understands that she can’t just selfishly do whatever she wants without regard for others). Out of all of the deaths presented in the three main routes, Saki’s is perhaps the most purely selfless one as she knowingly accepts death in the face of her fear of it, as long as it saves others -- especially since the weight of “failing” her friends hangs so over her head that she loses all sense of self-worth.

The beginning of Part 5 of the Wrathful route reveals that Saki had been delaying a surgery out of fear of its outcome, despite the fact that it would greatly increase her chance of living longer if she takes it. It’s left ambiguous whether she does actually decide to commit to it after the events of the game, but the three endings where she survives (Harmony, Moral, and Truthful) confirm she at least lives for a year after the game’s events. One can only hope that the events of the game and her friends convinced her to have the courage to take it!

Incidentally, Adventure and 02 generally had a pattern that the characters with Digimon partners that were closest to their own personalities were the ones that usually were more straightforward -- so naturally, Saki and Floramon have the closest to identical temperaments from the very beginning.

Shuuji and Lopmon

Considering that Jou tends to be one of the most well-liked Adventure characters by adult fans, depending on how you look at it, it’s either deeply ironic or incredibly fitting (or both) that his Survive counterpart is turning out to probably be the most controversial character in the cast.

In fact, on the surface level, Shuuji’s profile is almost identical to Jou’s from temperament to backstory. He’s the oldest of the group (in this case, the only one in high school) and is therefore considered the “leader” with responsibility for everyone by default, but doesn’t really have the mettle to keep himself together for it at first. His sense of duty has roots in his family life, including a father who has high expectations of him and a shadow of an older brother looming over him. However, one factor makes all the difference here: Shuuji’s doing all of this specifically because he wants to please others and get their approval.

Jou wasn’t really all that worried about what others thought of him (other than the minimum amount of respect necessary to have faith in his ability to keep them together). The concept of “status” didn’t really play any sort of factor, and in fact, he was portrayed as even somewhat dragging his feet when it came to studies or social status. On top of that, poking into a 02 drama CD reveals that Jou’s dad wasn’t actually that controlling, and was perfectly willing to give his blessing to Jou about not becoming a doctor; it’s just that Jou knew that, emotionally speaking, he wouldn’t be very happy about it, so Jou was doing this because he just really cared about his dad’s feelings. Jou only didn't want to "disappoint" others because he happened to have a Good Samaritan nature of wanting to help others, and in fact it almost seemed he thought of himself too little to the point of having a rather recklessly self-sacrificial streak (Adventure episodes 7, 23, 36). When Jou said “because I’m the oldest”, what it meant was “because as the oldest, I take my responsibility to take care of everyone very seriously”.

In contrast, Shuuji’s fixation with being respected as the “leader” is decidedly less altruistic than Jou’s, and in contrast to Jou not really worrying that much about what others think of him, Shuuji believes he’s entitled to everyone’s respect and acts out of fear of abandonment. Of course, the beginning of Part 5 makes it clear why there’s such a huge difference here: instead of a father who was still ultimately supportive despite everything and two older brothers who looked out for him, Shuujii’s father is emotionally abusive, and while his brother doesn’t seem actively condescending per se, he seems to have a sense of resigned apathy and is only driving Shuuji’s inferiority complex in further. (While it wasn’t said in Adventure or 02 that Jou was necessarily concerned about being compared to his older brothers, there was a nuance Jou had a very intimidating “example” set by his university-aged brothers -- but that's also exactly why Shin pulled Jou aside to give him advice in Adventure episode 38.) With the fear of being "abandoned" instilled in him, Shuuji desperately tries to prove to everyone around him that he's capable of being a "leader", but his obsession with trying to force everyone's respect rather than doing anything actually worthy of it only earns him less respect, which he knows...leading to a very bad loop.

Shuuji's behavior of being a well-meaning abuse victim who ends up exhibiting abusive behavior as a maladaptive response to his trauma is unfortunately a very well-known cycle, especially in the way it manifests via his behavior towards Lopmon. In a moment of clarity at the beginning of Part 5, Shuuji does notice that Lopmon's behavior towards him mirrors his own behavior towards his father, but this only results in a slight improvement in their relationship (from “treating him like a disgusting monster” to “overworking him to uncomfortable extents”), with Shuuji treating Lopmon in the exact same way his own father treated him. If you know anything about typical maladaptive trauma behavior, it comes out most prominently when the person in question feels the safest -- when they feel threatened, they shrink under the trauma, and when they feel safe, they try to make use of the control of the situation they’d so desperately been lacking, resulting in them resorting to the only thing they know how to do. So ironically, Shuuji began behaving this way because he actually felt emotionally safer with the kids and with Lopmon than he did at home; in front of his family, he shrank and groveled at his father’s feet, but once he was in a situation he did have an opportunity for respect, he became overly controlling.

In three of the four routes, Shuuji dies a vicious and unfortunate death when his own negativity dark evolves (for lack of a better way to put it) Lopmon and symbolically results in him being destroyed by his own malice, but in the Truthful route, Ryo gives him a good smack in the face to bring him back to his senses. While it's implied that Ryo was in the best position to understand how necessary that was due to having personally experienced trauma himself, at the same time, it's also remarkable just how quickly Shuuji bounces back and completely changes his tune thereafter. In fact, it’s quite unlikely Shuuji himself wanted to be this kind of person, it’s just that this kind of behavior was the only way he knew how to respond. (Note the symbolism of Wendimon himself clearly being in anguish and effectively crying for help even after devouring Shuuji -- he was afraid of his own destructive qualities.) Even if Shuuji wasn’t necessarily dealing with a supernaturally implanted ball of darkness in the back of his neck, it is not entirely off to be making a comparison with Ichijouji Ken.

Shuuji’s role in helping achieve the Truthful outcome happens because he decides to become the Professor’s assistant, meaning that Shuuji is actually incredibly capable and intelligent to the point where his observations help the Professor reach a level of understanding he wouldn’t have been able to otherwise. Shuuji himself says that he decided to start working under the Professor because he wanted an adult’s example to follow, which is important because this is basically Shuuji realizing that the other adults in his life had failed him. For all his father gave him grief for being a bad leader, he wasn’t exactly setting a fantastic example himself about what a good leader should be, and Takuma notes that Shuuji is starting to take on some actual leadership qualities just by being more confident and being more assured of what he wants. Shuuji says that he’ll talk to his father and brother once he gets back, and it’s not entirely clear whether this will go well (personally, I’m willing to put more bets on his brother, whom I imagine is likely to be a victim of their father as much as Shuuji is), but the important part is that this will mean Shuuji asserting himself and what he wants back at his family, pursuing what he wants to do and being a leader figure in his own way, rather than doing things just because his family expects him to.

It took a much longer and much more painful way to get there, but Shuuji was able to come to a forward-thinking conclusion for himself not entirely unlike the one Jou reached at the end of Adventure, which I think is pretty neat.

Kaito and Dracmon, Miu and Syakomon

Kaito and Miu’s character stories are so intertwined that I honestly feel it would be better to combine their sections here (I also know Miu would probably hate this, so I give my deepest apologies to her). Of course, it probably goes without saying that they’re Survive’s parallels to Yamato and Takeru, in the form of an overprotective older brother and a younger sibling who wants to be more independent. However, Yamato and Takeru’s situation was heavily influenced by their family situation, which is very different from Kaito and Miu’s, resulting in some pretty significant differences.

Back in Adventure, Yamato and Takeru’s parents having divorced meant that the brothers only got to see each other once a year (Yamato jokingly compares it to Tanabata in 02 episode 17), and Takeru had gotten his parents to agree to let him join Yamato’s camp despite not even going to his school. Thus, Takeru was openly affectionate with his brother because he was happy to even have the chance to be with him at all, and Yamato was overprotective because he didn’t have very many opportunities to do much for Takeru to begin with. Both of them were still heavily hurt by the divorce and coping with it in ways that were not entirely dissimilar to each other; Yamato started judging his own self-worth by his ability to be independent and via comparisons to other people, and Takeru suppressing everything and pretending he had it together and everything was fine, even when it wasn’t. Yamato derived his self-worth from his overprotectiveness of Takeru because he was afraid of the idea of anyone providing that role better than him (such as Taichi), whereas Takeru’s insistence on independence came from his desire to avoid difficult things and to not hold everyone back.

In Kaito and Miu’s case, the two still live together, but the inciting incident that defined their current relationship was the fallout from Miu being targeted by a stalker and Kaito dealing with him violently, resulting in the family relocating to the countryside and both of them blaming themselves for it; Kaito blames himself for not sufficiently protecting Miu during the incident, whereas Miu blames herself for causing a burden on her family and everyone around her.

While Miu’s desire to be independent and tendency to retreat into escapism reflects Takeru’s, her way of reacting to it is almost the opposite; Takeru responded by trying to present himself as a responsible, mature kid who had everything together, whereas Miu shirks responsibility altogether and sinks herself into occult hobbies and mischief. (It’s for this reason that while Part 4 contains a scenario that greatly calls back to the Princess Mimi subplot from Adventure episode 25, it’s Miu who is the central character instead of Mimi’s actual counterpart Saki, who’s significantly less selfish.) On Kaito’s end, he becomes so obsessed with his role as Miu’s protector that it becomes more about him than it ever becomes about Miu. His description of her as a frail girl at the beginning of the game is horrendously off, and his hot-headedness is to the point where Miu calls him out for defaulting to solving things with violence and using her as a proxy for it. (Yamato did lose his emotional composure enough to start punching Taichi out in Adventure episode 9, but this wasn’t treated as something that would have normally happened if not for the immediate stress of the situation he was in, and his punch on Taichi in 02 episode 10 came from him knowing Taichi would understand what he was intending to do with it, but Kaito going as far as to even slap Miu in Part 9 makes it clear that it’s not really about her as much as it’s Kaito wanting his way in being her “protector”.)

Of course, Kaito’s abrasive nature masks the fact Kaito genuinely does want to be friendly and simply has a hard time expressing it, but when Miu dies in the Harmony route, the despair brings the worst out of him, and his more self-centered stake in the equation ends up taken to its logical conclusion. Having basically centered his entire life around Miu’s existence and his own relation to her, Kaito decides that the entire world can burn for all he cares despite it being very obvious Miu wouldn’t approve of that (and when everyone informs him of this fact, Kaito merely retorts that they don’t have the right to say they know what she would think, as if he would know any better). In the end, Kaito is only barely brought to his senses before being destroyed by what he helped create.

Things end up better for Kaito and Miu on the Moral and Truthful routes, although, interestingly, the problem is not completely solved over the course of the game; Kaito keeps lapsing into overprotective tendencies, but he admits to Takuma that this isn’t good and that he needs to start doing better. Even if Kaito wants to do better, this kind of habit is not going to go away overnight, so it’s important that he keep this in mind going forward, especially since the end of the Moral route has him remind his shadow that he’s not going to be a very good brother to Miu if he ignores the fact she can take care of herself. Miu, on her part, stops shirking responsibility and becomes more aware of her need to not cause more trouble for others; on top of her compassion winning out in Part 4 when she realizes how much her immaturity had been causing others pain, she also starts taking more proactive roles as each route progresses, and the Moral and Truthful routes have her be more willing to admit that she doesn’t want to have a bad relationship with her brother despite everything.

Dracumon has a much more put-together personality than Kaito and is key in getting him to chill and hold back instead of losing his temper, similar to how Kaito is aware that he needs to do better (thus, him completely succumbing to his own despair and selfishness results in him willingly throwing Dracumon out for the sake of more power). Syakomon and Miu are like-minded enough that they have the best relationship among most of the partner pairs in the game, but Syakomon is significantly more down-to-earth and pragmatic, and she serves as a reminder of the responsibility to others Miu knows she’s shirking when she goes off to do things at her own convenience.

Miyuki and Renamon (”Haru”)

Fun fact: Due to Hikari’s natural sensitivity to Digital World-related phenomena and the fact she outright channels “the one who wishes for stability” (novel name: Homeostasis) in Adventure episode 45, quite a few Japanese fans have taken to calling her a “shrine maiden” (miko), basically comparing her to a Shinto priestess who helps communicate with the gods and convey their will...so, naturally, her Survive counterpart is an actual shrine maiden.

In fact, comparing Hikari and Miyuki is a little difficult, mainly due to the fact their contexts are so different -- the more detailed nuances of Hikari’s characterization didn’t start popping up until 02, and her comparatively short time in Adventure had her with a cold, so she wasn’t exactly in her most optimal condition. Thankfully, if we do retroactively reflect Hikari’s further characterization in 02 back on Adventure (especially since Miyuki seems to be closer to 02!Hikari’s age anyway), Miyuki is actually pretty similar to Hikari’s nature of being bright, assertive, insightful, very put-together, and incredibly selfless. (Also, the scene of her immediately going right to the blackboard and drawing out the relationship between the worlds brings to mind Hikari’s Jogress mockups in 02 episode 28 and her parallel worlds diagram in 02 episode 34.)

As for Miyuki herself, she is at least significantly more willing to be vocal and outspoken about her feelings instead of clamming up to dangerous levels and risking falling into despair about her own welfare like Hikari would (Adventure episode 48, 02 episodes 13 and 31). In addition, the fact she grew up as a “responsible older sister” instead of being in the shadow of an older brother like Taichi means she grew up with the expectation of having responsibility for Akiharu, and her independent streak seems to be in line with that (it’s commented that even despite Akiharu now being much older than her in age, she still seems to have it more together than him). However, being born to the Minase family meant she was trained as a shrine maiden from the very beginning, which ends up causing much more misfortune for her than it does Hikari; Hikari’s sensitivity abilities were more of a “factor” than anything, and her ordeal with Miyako in 02 episode 31 allowed her to assert herself in spite of her special position, but Miyuki understands her role as a shrine maiden to be a duty, which includes considering it her responsibility to sacrifice herself for others and the world if need be. And while Homeostasis ultimately borrowed Hikari’s body after negotiating with her and left after courteously explaining themself, the entity that ends up taking possession of Miyuki for the last few chapters of the game is...decidedly not as benevolent.

Takuma’s initial contact with the “real” Miyuki in Part 8 is very brief (fittingly, it’s during the chapter he has contact with the real world, like with Taichi’s brief visit and meeting with Hikari in Adventure episode 21), but it’s enough to convince him that she should be considered a trusted friend worth saving, which puts him a bit at odds with the others for a short time after his return. Unfortunately, Miyuki remains somewhat of a damsel-in-distress for most of the rest of the game, and in two of the four routes (Wrathful and Harmony) she unceremoniously dies when the route’s main antagonist absorbs her. On the flip side, however, she becomes extremely instrumental in saving everyone in the Moral and Truthful routes, and is also granted a way home and a much happier future with her brother.

Interestingly, the parallel continues with Miyuki’s partner Renamon having a very “complicated” relationship with her partner and with loyalties or morality in a similar way to Hikari’s partner Tailmon-- but in an inverted sense. Other than the obvious partnership reasons, Tailmon’s absolute loyalty to Hikari came from a past lifetime of bitterness gained from blackmail and abuse on Vamdemon’s part, so it’s only natural that she jumped ship at the opportunity and took the chance to be with someone who would treat her with love. (She did initially start off on a bit more of an abrasive note with the other Digimon, most notably setting Gomamon off with her attitude in Adventure episode 45, but she eventually settled in.) Renamon is the opposite; her absolute loyalty to Miyuki and desire to be the one to make her happy (even to the point of taking the form of someone she hates) results in her stooping as low as trickery, betrayal, and submitting herself to an abusive master just for the chance to get Miyuki back (and, more selfishly, to prove that her bond with Miyuki means something, in the sense that she can’t stand the idea of anyone being more important to Miyuki than herself). It's an interesting contrast where, in both cases, the arguably most morally upright person in the group has a partner who ends up most closely associated with questionable morality, but it also goes to show you that even the best of intentions can end up with very bad results when sufficiently pointed in the wrong direction.

Professor (Akiharu)

Every Digimon series needs a designated infodump character to unpack what’s going on with the worldbuilding and all, and back in Adventure Koushirou was the main bearer of this role -- in fact, he was so important that he ended up constantly showing up in 02 despite not technically being a part of the advertised main cast. At first, it seems as if the Professor really is mostly just this, and it’s initially even questionable how helpful of one he’ll be when it seems like he’s died at the end of Part 3. But not only does the Professor return to provide more info behind what’s going on, he also ends up becoming instrumental to determining the difference between the endings, because whether he’s present or not and how much he’s learned become the biggest influencing factors on the outcome. (The Harmony route involves the gate being opened much less aggressively than in the Wrathful route, but it’s implied things still had a worse outcome than they did in the Truthful route because the Professor wasn’t able to be there anymore to give any guidance, and the Moral route has everyone seal off the gate because him never uncovering the truth behind the Master meant they destroyed it and thus the system that gave the boundary between worlds any stability.)

The Truthful route happens thanks to the chain reaction of Ryo saving Shuuji and Shuuji becoming the Professor’s assistant, allowing him to more effectively dig up the truth regarding the Four Holy Beasts, the Master, and Haruchika -- hence why it’s called the “truthful” route, not simply in terms of being a “true ending”, but also in terms of it being the ending where the truth behind it all was revealed. Through flashbacks and eventually some outright statements, we learn that as even as a kid, Akiharu actually had quite a bit in common with Koushirou, in terms of being timid and deferential yet bursting with intellectual curiosity and a desire to know more. Back in Adventure, Koushirou managed to uncover some very important things about the Digital World thanks to the fact he actively pursued anything he was interested in, and while Akiharu spending his life studying the Kemonogami might initially seem to be his way of coping with the traumatic loss of his sister and memories, he tells Garurumon in the Truthful route that it was simply his encounter with him that inspired him to learn more and teach others.

The ending of the Truthful route draws parallels between the siblings Haruchika and Yukiha with their descendants Haru and Miyuki, but their situations are reversed; Haruchika was the one “abandoned” by his sister, whereas Miyuki was “abandoned” back in the Digital World when she sent her brother back, and thus the Master attempts to claim Miyuki as someone who should sympathize with him only to find that she bears absolutely none of the malice he does. And like Yukiha, Akiharu doesn’t give up on finding his sibling again and eventually manages to do so, despite going through trauma and memory loss (and some scorn from the scientific community) to get there. On the flip side, Garurumon ends up bearing the emotional pain of being left behind, but in the Moral and Truthful routes he can’t bring himself to hold the grudge for too long once it becomes clear Akiharu really didn’t mean for that to happen. In the end, despite all the trouble that happened between Akiharu, Miyuki, Garurumon, and Renamon, none of them were able to hold onto their grudges, and that’s what eventually allows them to save Haruchika from his own.

Haruchika

You might be wondering, wait, what, this guy? Well, you see, in the Truthful route we find out that he was a sacrifice for others to have power, and he decided to take out his feelings of betrayal out on the world and bring it down with him. Now how does that correlate to anything in Adventure --

-- oh, okay.

I’m sure a lot of Adventure fans who finished the Truthful route were probably at least able to figure out the parallel overall, but inspecting it closely reveals there’s even more than you might think -- Haruchika is deliberately drawn as a parallel to Akiharu in a sort of Survive equivalent to a “fallen Chosen Child”, and his laments rather parallel Apocalymon’s “we wanted to live and speak of friendship, justice, and love!” And in the Moral route version of things, the Master forces the kids to go through trials of overcoming their darkest feelings and reaffirming how far they’ve come, quite similar to the reaffirmations in Adventure episode 53.

Fortunately for Haruchika, his much deeper contextual relation to Survive’s story and themes (and therefore sympathetic qualities) allow him to be saved and to pass on properly with Yukiha, which certainly beats going out in a failed suicide bombing. Adventure, as a sort of pioneer for Digimon works thereafter, had Apocalymon serve as the “inhibitor of evolution” compared to Adventure’s “story of evolution”, but Survive, which spends more time examining what a Digimon partner even is in the first place, thus has Haruchika represent more of a challenge to what the Survive kids learn to find and what ultimately saves Haruchika himself in the end: as the theme song says, turning hatred into love. Haruchika himself is said to be the first to have realized that bonds between humans and Digimon made each other stronger -- basically being the inventor of Digimon partnerships in this universe -- only for him to end up succmbing to his own hatred and the malice of the world.

Also, when you really think about it, the Master is the closest thing you can say to entities that “chose” the kids as the Survive equivalent of Chosen Children -- at least, in the sense that their distortions dragged the kids into the Digimon world in order to prey on them. Homeostasis and the Agents were still guilty of dragging Adventure’s Chosen Children into the Digital World and not really giving them good explanations, but Homeostasis rather courteously explains in Adventure episode 45 that they were doing it out of desperation for lack of many other options. However, Homeostasis also made it clear that they didn’t have many abilities on their own besides housekeeping, and that the kids would have to be the one to figure the rest out on their own (the novels clarify that it’s really nothing more than a security system), whereas the Master does pose himself in a deity-like position and even has the entire stability of the Digital World depend on him -- it’s just that they’re also quite the opposite of cooperative. So in both cases, regardless of the initial circumstances, the groups involved had to solve the problem on their own will.

#digimon #digimon survive #shihameta #shiha's ask box #survive spoilers

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shihalyfie · 2 years

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So if you’ve known Digimon Adventure for long enough, you’ll know that it has some very strict color-coding for its characters thanks to the Crests: Taichi with orange, Yamato with blue, Sora with red, Koushirou with purple, Mimi with green, Jou with grey, Takeru with yellow, and Hikari with pink. There’s also a very strict “order” of characters, which is exactly the order above (it’s the order in which we saw their Digimon’s first evolution, and in the second ED). The franchise has followed this with strict consistency for almost the entire time since Adventure’s airing (it took until a little after 02 for the order to completely solidify, but after that it basically hasn’t budged). For Tamers fans, the order for the main three characters has also been consistent -- although there are rare exceptions, it’s pretty much always Takato, Jian, and Ruki in that order, associated with their D-Ark colors red, green, and blue respectively.

On the flip side, 02 and Frontier have been...decidedly less straightforward. Things like color coding and character ordering probably don’t matter much to the average viewer, but for fanartists (like @digitalgate02 and @demonoflight, who graciously assisted in helping me write the rest of this post), this can easily drive a person absolutely nuts. However, thanks to DigiFes 2022 and other surrounding events, these questions have finally been cleared up!...Maybe.

Let’s take a look at the history of 02 and Frontier’s color handling and ordering (with some bonus series thrown in)!

So as I said earlier, generally speaking, the Adventure order and coloring has been very straightforward, and when you involve Adventure and 02 in a group of twelve, the order for that has been consistent for the most part after 02′s airing: Taichi, Yamato, Sora, Koushirou, Mimi, Jou, Takeru, Hikari, Daisuke, Ken, Miyako, Iori. (This ordering has basically all been all but completely solidified on the Kizuna website and in most Kizuna promotional materials thereof.) That said, things get a little more complicated once we talk about the 02 group specifically, especially because of Ken’s unusual position -- usually “latecomer party members” are added on at the end, but Ken ends up in a right-hand man position to Daisuke in terms of the story, so it feels a little awkward to tack him on in the end like that. If you go by rough order of “evolution introduction” for the series, that implies a Daisuke-Miyako-Iori-Takeru-Hikari-Ken order, but other materials have offered a “Jogress order” (Daisuke-Ken-Miyako-Hikari-Iori-Takeru) or “original order but with Ken moved up” (Daisuke-Ken-Miyako-Iori-Takeru-Hikari).

Things get even trickier when you get to figuring out their image colors. You could try doing the Crest colors (orange and blue for Daisuke, pink...? for Ken, red and green for Miyako, purple and grey for Iori, yellow for Takeru, and pink for Hikari). But not only does this cause overlap with Ken and Hikari both having pink of some kind, it’s also just not very good for design and merch, due to the lopsided nature of three of its members having two colors while the others have three (the Kizuna website attempts it, but only on the character square borders).

The seemlingly easiest and most straightforward one to use is the D-3 colors (blue for Daisuke, black/grey for Ken, red for Miyako, yellow for Iori, green for Takeru, pink for Hikari), and we do have quite a bit of precedent on this one, most notably in 02′s second ED. Unfortunately, this color scheme comes with one major issue: grey isn’t exactly a very easy color to use in design, especially for merch. (Jou merchandise struggles with this issue a lot, and it’s really only offset by the fact he’s surrounded by a whole seven others to make the impact less noticeable, plus the fact it’s explicitly a light grey, unlike Ken’s dark grey and black D-3.) Ken’s D-3 remaining black was a very important symbol of his penance in-series, but it makes merchandise making a bit tricky. It also is not very easy to use for shiny glowy things, and even this same ED struggles with that:

...yeah. (White is never used for Ken anywhere else.)

And then there’s the fact Ken’s Wormmon is associated with being the “green” side of Paildramon, and Daisuke and Ken’s Jogress D-3 combo is blue and green...but because the other combo colors (red/white and yellow/white) aren’t really ones that are easy to make hard matchups with, it’s still hard to say that there was any hard association with green and Ken back in 02, especially since that makes it more complicated with Takeru.

Even Kizuna struggled with this for a bit. The movie shows Takeru with a yellow phone case, in a context where the other five members of the 02 group have cases matching their original D-3s, but in all other contexts -- promotional art, merchandise, the card game, the character song album -- it’s back to green, matching with his D-3. But there is merch that associates Takeru with yellow, his Crest color, overlapping him with Iori...and giving Ken green. Generally speaking, it’s understandable that any context with all twelve Tokyo Chosen Children will have to have a color overlap somewhere, but Takeru particularly sticks out as one they don’t really know what to do with.

(Note that the card game’s backing colors don’t apply; the card game’s mechanics are tied to its own set colors, which means that characters are placed in there for reasons closer to their Digimon’s archetype than their own original series image colors.)

However, starting with the Kizuna character song albums (technically also the concurrently-released Digimon Stitches, but that one also had a contradictory palette in the same set), it seems like recent merch (especially in relation to the upcoming movie) is finally consistent about color -- but what’s interesting is that Takeru is now orange. That was never used in 02. That wasn’t even used up until 2021!

The theme behind the new colors seems to be, quite simply, their partners’ colors (V-mon’s blue, Wormmon’s green, Hawkmon’s red, Armadimon’s yellow, Patamon’s orange, and either the pink from Tailmon’s ears or Angewomon). This does seem to be in line with the angle taken in both Kizuna and the new movie that this group is rather unusually close with their partners, possibly even more so than their seniors. The benefit of this color scheme is that, with there being a consistent baseline for all six of them, there’s now proper justification for Ken being associated with green, while also not putting Takeru in an awkward position.

These colors were used for the official DigiFes 2022 penlight, which explicitly lists the following colors as the kids’ “image colors”: "light blue" for Daisuke, "red" for Miyako, "yellow" for Iori, "orange" for Takeru, "light pink" for Hikari, and "green" for Ken.

Perhaps acknowledging the truly chaotic nature of this issue (probably fitting when this group is concerned), the Karatez collab firmly, undeniably associates these colors with the original 02 kids instead of just the Kizuna-era ones, but also strings a bunch of other colors here and there to reference their other associations: Daisuke’s orange glasses and shoes (Courage and Friendship), Ken’s black shirt (D-3), Wormmon’s green maracas and blue band (Jogress with Daisuke and V-mon), Miyako’s red shoes and green guitar (Love and Purity), Iori’s purple guitar and grey shoes (Knowledge and Faith), Armadimon’s orange tambourine and green band (Jogress with Takeru and Patamon), Takeru’s yellow shoes (Hope), Hikari’s pink keytar and shoes (D-3 and shoes), and Tailmon’s red keytar (Jogress with Miyako and Hawkmon). That’s basically about all you can cram in there at once. Whew!

(As an aside, some of Miyako’s merch tends to toe dangerously close to purple at times, including in this very collab, but it’s probably intended to be pushing the boundary of what can be considered “red” as far as possible; her smartphone case has some noticeably purple tones, probably to prevent it from overlapping too much with Sora’s red.)

It is still probably a bit weird that this color scheme is obviously retroactive, since it wasn’t ever in 02 itself or anywhere near its airing, but it’s nice to finally have something consistent to work with for once after all these years. Will future things continue to maintain this? Hopefully. Probably.

As for ordering, unfortunately, this is still fluctuating, because even the same sets of merch can’t seem to decide whether Ken is second or last. It does seem like most merch so far has been favoring the Daisuke-Ken-Miyako-Iori-Takeru-Hikari ordering, putting Ken next to Daisuke for obvious reasons, which the movie website also supports -- and the added benefit of this ordering is that if you put them in two rows or columns of three (which is done quite often), the Jogress pairs will still be next to each other. So for the most part, I’d say it’s safe to say things have mostly settled on that one.

Frontier

Frontier is explicitly based off Super Sentai, so that means a lot of its visual compositions with the cast are focused on Takuya in the center. However, unlike Sentai, Frontier doesn’t really have ordered roll calls. And while the OP gives you a Takuya-Izumi-Junpei-Tomoki-Kouji order, putting Kouji last feels a bit off considering we pretty much all know he ends up being Takuya’s lancer character for the series (and unlike Ken, we know this very early in the series). Besides, if you watch Sentai, that’s pretty much just how it goes. The first ED offers multiple different orders, so it’s confusing. (And on one hand, it’s possible to make an argument that it’s refreshing that the orders seem malleable, but on the other hand, this is jarring since ordering is a staple of Sentai.)

Also unlike Sentai, there hasn’t been a lot of consistency with the colors, which is especially strange considering that producer Seki explicitly mentioned that Izumi should be associated with pink due to Sentai’s precedent. In fact, a lot of older materials do seem to want to associate Izumi with pink specifically:

But as you can see, there's already some contradictions in regards to color associations, because we can't tell if Takuya's supposed to be orange or red (Sentai associations would suggest red), whether Junpei should be blue or yellow, or whether Tomoki should be light blue or green...and to make things even more complicated, the D-Scanners all have two colors each (and that’s in base colors, because Takuya and Kouji get new ones later).

And, unfortunately, you shouldn’t expect the elemental symbols to help you either, because not only does Kouji being associated with pure white pose similar problems to Ken having black or dark grey, the combo of red/white/light blue/pink/dark blue/purple also isn't really very balanced in terms of design (no yellows...).

While Frontier didn’t get a consistent stream of merch to be contradictory per se, it turns out that by the time we get to the 20th anniversary stuff, we still don’t have a consistent answer!

(ノ°Д°）ノ︵ ┻━┻

Well, okay, it’s not that bad. The same penlights that doubled down on the new coloring for the 02 kids also offered some official image colors for the Frontier kids as well: “orange-red" for Takuya, "blue" for Kouji, "light green" for Tomoki, "purple" for Izumi, "orange-yellow" for Junpei, and "light grey" for Kouichi. Keeping in mind that the colors have such specific names mainly to not give them too much overlap with the 02 kids’, it’s probably better to consider it as red for Takuya, blue for Kouji, lavender for Izumi, yellow for Junpei, green for Tomoki, and purple-tinted grey for Kouichi. In addition, there’s a consistent aspect about this: they correspond to the grip colors on the D-Scanners (the original ones in the case of Takuya and Kouji), so we have a baseline too!

Kouichi does seem to consistently show an angle of wanting to use proper grey but not really wanting to ruin design composition, so some obvious purple tints are put on it to make it blend nicer with the other colors. This is probably something that’s only possible because unlike with Ken, Kouichi ends up actively embracing his association with darkness, which has a purple elemental symbol and has been associated with “darkness” to some degree in the past (the current card game uses it for darkness-aligned cards even besides Kouichi). On the flip side, the bonus about acknowledging Izumi as having at least some kind of purple tinting to it means much better consistency with Izumi/Fairymon/Shutumon’s coloring.

As for the ordering...well, still, good luck. However, I personally feel that merch lines have been more likely to depict the Takuya-Kouji-Izumi-Junpei-Tomoki-Kouichi order, and if you have to ask me, I personally prefer this ordering as well because it makes a nice alternation between the Hyper Spirit Evolutions (fire/wind/ice and light/thunder/darkness).

Bonus

It seems like it’s always the group ensemble things that want to drive us nuts, because other than having this problem again, that’s what Appmon also has in common with 02 and Frontier. The good thing is that there does seem to be some kind of baseline -- usually Haru-Eri-Astra-Rei-Yuujin seems to be somewhat of a followed order, and Yuujin isn’t really put aggressively in the second position like Ken is because his looming presence in the series isn’t nearly as conspicuous. In addition, the Appli Drive covers also seem to be consistent between the original model and the Duo -- red for Haru, blue for Eri, yellow for Astra, and black/grey for Rei, and this seems to be consistent with their Buddy coloring as well. So one could probably extrapolate and decide that purple for Yuujin would work based on his Duo color and Offmon...but then the second OP decides to mess with you at the last minute.

Of course, the reason why is obvious, and it’s possible it really is just for that OP -- again, grey/black tends to be a hard color to work with, and Yuujin really doesn’t seem to fit the image of purple himself (that’s more Offmon). Sadly, Appmon never lasted long enough to get merch runs to really lock down on any of this, so it’s more “vague” than “contradictory”. But it is at least interesting that Haru is consistently associated with red, despite his temperament completely lacking the tropes associated with the color and the consistent underlying question of whether he’s suitable to be a “protagonist” or not.

But hopefully, this won’t continue to be an issue in the fu--

OH, COME ON

#digimon #digimon adventure 02 #digimon frontier #appmon #digimon ghost game #shihameta

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shihalyfie · 2 years

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Seems like someone translated the now unavailable stage reading from DigiFes2022 and i'm shocked about some things like, the twins not being all lovely around each other (a very common fanbase's interpretation/guess) and how Kouichi does not seem to be a shy (??) person like Ken (another fanbase guess regarding him)

Any thoughts? 😗

There is so much to unpack here. So much. So, so, so much. I thought I was going to answer this quickly, but then this post got too long because I had so much to say, so I'm going to tuck the rest under the cut, but my goodness. I'm actually offended this is from a "vanishable" stage reading (and that the official stance is even that the contents are meant to be disposable and not taken as canon -- to hell with that, material like this, let alone for Frontier, is too valuable to let go of). I don't know about other people, but this checked off all the boxes for things I wanted to see addressed or confirmed, moreso than even The Train Called Hope from 2019 (which I did still like, but to be honest, this one felt more like it was "at home" in a sense).

Well, let's start with stuff about production background (skip to the bullet points below if you don't care about this). This script was penned by Yamatoya Akatsuki, who was an episode writer for Frontier, and was presumably brought on because he's also working on The Beginning right now. But despite working on Kizuna and sometimes being advertised as a member of original staff, Yamatoya was actually very minimally involved on Adventure or 02...and on the flip side, he was a regular writer for Frontier and wrote quite a few of its landmark episodes. In fact, he may be right behind Frontier's head writer Tomita Sukehiro in terms of how significant he is to Takuya's characterization. Him writing for this is arguably more at home for him than Kizuna/The Beginning are -- not to say that he isn't doing amazingly with the Adventure and 02 characters, but I imagine Seki has probably been doing a lot of intervention with them, and while it may just be mental bias, there's a certain sense of comfort that just especially works here with this stage reading's dialogue for the Frontier kids, since Yamatoya was personally responsible for building up these characters to begin with.

(If you're wondering why Tomita wasn't the writer, he retired from anime writing in 2011, so any Frontier content "with original staff" has to be done by one of its episode writers. This sounds like a bad situation at first, but this is where I have to remind people not to get too hung up on auteur theory; Adventure, 02, and Frontier already had drama CDs partially or wholly written by episode writers, and said episode writers deserve way more credit for their influence than people give them. Please reference my posts on Adventure/02 and Tamers staff for more info...actually, I really ought to make a Frontier one too if I have free time, huh... (edit: okay, now I did)

However, our last bit of post-canon Frontier material, The Train Called Hope, was written by a different writer, Masaki Hiro (who also was an episode writer for Frontier). Because of that, and especially because these two "dramas" were written in reverse chronological order (The Train Called Hope takes place in their high school years, whereas this one takes place two years after Frontier's finale), I do have to admit I feel a little dissonance, especially in regards to the portrayal of the twins -- a lot can happen in several years, but it does feel weird to think about the fact that two years later they'll be close enough to bicker with and troll each other, but in high school they'll go back to being a bit more awkward...? Of course, it's very easy to reconcile both portrayals at once -- humans are very multifaceted creatures after all -- but from a writing perspective it's a bit weird. But between the two portrayals, the new drama's interpretation makes a lot more sense to me, and is also just a lot more satisfying in general, so I'm honestly very relieved to have this solidified, and judging from reactions on Twitter I can tell a lot of twins fans were also very satisfied.

(Disclaimer before we go forward: I'm afraid of giving the wrong idea, so to be clear, I do like The Train Called Hope quite a bit, it's just that this current drama was a lot closer to my personal preferences in terms of what kinds of details I wanted to know about the kids' futures. Given that Tamers 2018, which came out in the same batch as The Train Called Hope, was said to have been explicitly inspired by tri., I feel like they were kind of on a kick of trying to give the Tamers and Frontier kids the tri. treatment of big timeskips and future stuff, and I certainly don't mind it but I also felt a little sad at the fact that the character dynamics were a little thinner and we didn't get to see much of the group as a whole because they were busy trying to cram in so much info about everyone's career prospects.)

I already wrote about Ken and Kouichi last year, and this is especially prominent given that Yamatoya wrote both this and the Kizuna drama CD, even using similar story formats, and yet it's very clear that they (and their respective groups) are very different. This stage reading may be one of our most valuable resources for Kouichi lovers, because unfortunately during the series itself he was a little shy with the others due to the circumstances of how they met, and Izumi even admitted that she felt she didn't know him very well at the time (although to be fair, she also admitted she understood Kouji even less). But there were multiple hints within the series that Kouichi was normally very open and sociable, arguably even more so than a good chunk of the rest of the group, and more similar to Kouji in temperament than you might think at first -- so this is the one time we basically got hard confirmation of that. And it was exactly as I said: now that we're seeing Kouichi outside a very stressful situation where he had a lot of things to be worried about with this group, it turns out he really isn't very different from his brother after all (at most, he's a little more down-to-earth...just a little).

Anyway, bullet-pointing the other things I found to be of interest (I am frankly amazed at how much information Yamatoya is capable of conveying in only short lines of dialogue):

We finally get an answer to the question of whether the Shibuya train station elevator is still connected to the Digital World, and the answer is that, at least as of two years later, it’s not there anymore. My impression is that the implication is that it only supernaturally manifested in Shibuya Station at all due to the events of Frontier, and now that it was no longer “needed” it vanished. But the restaurant that replaced it apparently has a connection despite that...

The Frontier kids are confirmed to basically be on “penpal” status. The Train Called Hope made it clear they were still in contact, but to what degree was unclear. So as of this one, it’s confirmed that they don’t see each other super-often and still have to catch each other up, but they also do seem to contact each other regularly to the point it’s a given they have each other’s contact addresses and have rough awareness of certain things ongoing in each other’s lives. (I imagine once smartphones are invented, they might make a LINE group like the Adventure kids have in Kizuna...if they can bring themselves to swap out their phones.)

Izumi has a junior who likes her! (Well, likes her in some way.) I think that’s a pretty good sign that the whole making friends deal has been working out for her.

The group certainly has an interesting perspective on Kouichi, in that apparently they’re aware he’s not the type to throw random uncalled for surprise parties, but also Takuya seems perfectly capable of imagining him as some kind of action hero.

Speaking of which, while the entire group seems to be devoid of any brain cell whatsoever (if anything they might be in the negatives at this point), Takuya seems to be the most “pure-hearted” because he easily believes whatever theory he’s hearing at the moment. Since all of the kids are showing equal degrees of chaos, I like those little things that stand out.

On the other hand, Tomoki has now become genuinely terrifying with his ability to become deadpan at the most unnerving times.

Kouji stopped calling Kouichi “nii-san” as far as we can tell, which is in line with Things I Want to Tell You and The Train Called Hope, as with the portrayal of the twins here as significantly more rough with each other than they were back in the original series. As Izumi points out, the fact they’re so rough with each other is conversely a good sign about how comfortable they are with each other as actual brothers now.

The twins go to the same middle school. I cannot emphasize enough how much of an incredible bombshell this is. This cannot have been an easy feat to pull off, since the twins didn’t live in the same area at the time of Frontier. While it’s not stated in the drama itself, I have to imagine that at this point all three parents are aware and on board with this (possibly even directly assisting with it), because there’s no way the twins could have pulled this off by themselves, but hey, maybe their parents decided to help them to make up for lying to them for eleven years. (Okay, we’re getting into real headcanon at this point.)

The twins look alike enough that they can be confused for each other by appearance alone (basically, it’s confirmed that they have the same hairstyle at this point). I think headcanons were split as to whether both would want to look like each other or stick with their own individual styles, but I do know it’s a popular Japanese headcanon that Kouji only had long hair in imitation of his supposedly deceased biological mother (therefore favoring the idea he’d cut it after the series as a sign of moving on and as a way of looking more like his brother), so I think a lot of people were feeling very validated on that end. I am kind of amused at the fact that their voices are canonically considered to be different in-universe (I’m not sure if that’s actually possible in real life, but it’s definitely a meta joke).

Kouichi apparently has a girl who likes him (whose feelings he doesn’t reciprocate). Well, I mean, the twins are very popular among real-life audience members, so this isn’t really surprising...

Not only have the twins gotten a lot closer, Kouji is not above just completely messing with his brother for the hell of it. I’m not sure if this is a voice actor joke (Kamiya and Suzumura are close friends in real life, and Kamiya is infamous for being a troll who pranks Suzumura quite often), but at the same time Takuya also specifically singles out Kouji as being more on the antagonistic side. Right now this may be the one key difference between the twins in terms of temperament, since it’s otherwise clear that they are incredibly similar now, and it’s probably a byproduct of how Kouji started off with thicker social boundaries than his brother’s and is thus is a little behind in in having a more active social life.

That said, I am sorry to anyone who hoped the twins would be among the more sensible members of the group, because at this point they might actually be the most unhinged. The two of them happened to get in a bickering match this time, but them both ganging up on Takuya at the end makes me really scared of what they’re capable of if they do start conspiring together the way Junpei theorized they were doing.

Katsuharu is still close with Tomoki (this is consistent with The Train Called Hope), but he’s since fallen out of contact with the others.

The twins seem to perceive Izumi as the most sensible of all of them (operative word: perceive)...

The Frontier kids are utter idiots. I say this with all the love I can muster, and I mean this in a way that the Frontier kids truly are uniquely chaotic and borderline unhinged in a way other Digimon groups just can’t match. I already pointed out earlier that there was a difference between how the 02 and Frontier groups handled their chaos, but this is now pretty much as clear as you can get between Yamatoya’s takes on the 02 kids in the Kizuna drama CD and the Frontier kids here -- both follow similar formats of zany comedy followed by a sentimental conclusion, but while the 02 kids were mostly just getting out of control because they were too excited, the Frontier kids actually accusing each other in a game of whodunnit with increasingly absurd justifications is just on another level. This is truly the fun of Frontier in a nutshell -- the shamelessness, the misfit nature of the cast, the chaos, and just the lovable sentiment of it all.

By the way, I really, really love this fanart. If you haven’t seen it, you should. I think combined with the script, it really feels like I finally got to see these kids again after so long.

I basically only have two real complaints, and both are shared between this and The Train Called Hope. The first one is that I feel like they really haven’t figured out what to do with the Spirits, and they feel a little like an afterthought at this point; I know they’re kind of in a tough position because they’re simultaneously the kids and also not, but I would have liked to see a bit more thought put into what kind of relationship they have to the kids besides just vaguely connected guardian spirits. The second is that there is a terrible lack of Bokomon and Neemon, who should be at least hanging out with the Spirits back in the Digital World (I wonder if Sugiyama Kazuko wasn’t available...). They were important too! Don’t forget them! In fact, if anything, this new drama may have indirectly confirmed that Bokomon was possibly the main reason the kids didn’t completely go off track and actually managed to get anywhere in the Digital World, because without him they risk being extremely unhinged. Please give your thanks to Bokomon for saving the Digital World.

#digimon #digimon frontier #tomorrows2top #shihameta #shiha's ask box

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shihalyfie · 1 year

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I've been watching data squad, and I noticed all the bio hybrids are very deliberately made to mirror the main DATS trio in some way. Kouki's a battle hungry street brawler, the goth girl (forgot her name) is a genius who only cares about herself, and Ivan...well, i'm not sure about ivan, something to do with family. I'd assume you're better equipped to do an analysis on this contrast, so I'd love to hear your thoughts on it, if possible.

I noticed this as well! I think their appearances were too short for me to make a full-blown meta out of it, but to basically summarize it:

Masaru is a rough brawler, but he only ever picks fights with people who are also causing trouble or challenge him on equal terms (and in the latter case, he follows specific principles and respects the opponent). For Masaru, "fighting" is something you do as a means of self-improvement and to be strong so you can protect those who need to be protected, not to dominate over others. In contrast, Kouki loves fighting and violence, but he does it for the sake of his own superiority and to crush weak people, or in other words, he's a bully who's the picture-perfect depiction of what you imagine when you hear about someone who loves violence. It's notable that he's the only one of the three who's not portrayed as particularly redeemable.

While Tohma came from a privileged background and is quite intelligent, he also was emotionally abused by his family, so he has a strong motive to do something meaningful with his life out of something he accomplished rather than it being for the sake of his family name (while he does make use of his privilege, it's as a means to an end in terms of wanting to do things for others, including his sister, and in fact he's portrayed as somewhat disliking unwarranted attention). Nanami is a "genius" like Tohma, but she only cares about herself and has a snobbish attitude towards "normal" people who can't understand her. She indulges in her "elite" status and doesn't care about morality as long as she gets to satisfy herself.

Yoshino started off the series without much meaning in her life, punching the clock at DATS without any real investment in what she was doing because she was dealing with an inferiority complex. It's only as the series progresses when you can really get the sense she's doing things out of her own beliefs of what's right and wrong (especially when DATS gets cut off from government support but she still chooses to fight anyway). Meanwhile, Ivan is a victim of the system; in order to support his siblings (who are implied to be in very severe financial straits), he "threw away his morals and sold his body" to Kurata out of desperation, because he and his family were so pushed into a corner that he didn't have the room to think about that anymore. (Note the fact that Ivan is the only one of the three to not be Japanese, so there's a nuance of his position as a foreigner being exploited by someone powerful.) So as much as that doesn't make his actions justifiable, Yoshino is capable of empathizing with that to some extent and recognizes that Kurata had been the one to exploit Ivan's situation and vulnerabilities to pseudo-blackmail him.

#offbeatcat #shiha's ask box #digimon savers #shihameta

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shihalyfie · 2 years

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Maybe you can explain to me - what's the deal with Ryo Akiyama? He has his WonderSwan games, he cameos in Our War Game, then in 02, then pops up in Tamers as a semi-major character, and supposedly it's the same Ryo in *everything*? Even though his personality isn't even consistent between depictions? I can understand if it's different versions of the same person, but... Could there be a weird production reason for this or something?

You know what? I've got some free time (something I don't have a lot of lately) between work and playing Survive, so what the hell, why not: it's time for a completely Akiyama Ryou-centric meta!

Who is Akiyama Ryou? Why is he so popular among Japanese Digimon fans? Why does he pop up in Adventure, 02, Tamers, and V-Tamer with almost mutually exclusive and contradictory portrayals? What happened here? Obviously, he’s canon to both 02 and Tamers, but how does that even make sense? Well, a lot of this has to do with the complicated history of Ryou in real life, in terms of the history of his games and what development notes for the anime have indicated about planning regarding Ryou. And unfortunately, a lot of Ryou’s meta-history is often misleadingly reported or even outright smothered in misinformation in English-speaking circles, making the issue even more confusing.

The tl;dr is that almost everything messy about this is extremely likely to be Bandai’s fault.

So what are the “WonderSwan games”?

As you are probably likely to know already, Ryou originates from a series of Digimon games for the WonderSwan, Bandai’s handheld console that never left Asia but did have a pretty decent following in Japan (at least until it got wrecked by the Game Boy Advance).

Now, here’s the part I’m going to deliver in a way that probably sounds really cold, but please understand that understanding this context is really important to understanding what went on with Ryou here: while many Digimon games have fans who are Digimon fans (and they are no less valid for it), most of them are actually awful games by general video game standards. The writing is usually low-effort at best, and if anime canon characters from Adventure or whatnot appear in it, they’ll be horribly out of character with flanderized or just really off characterizations (even Re:Digitize, generally agreed to be one of the better games, is not immune to this). And this was especially the case back then, when the games Bandai was churning out were basically the equivalent of the kind of bargain bin game churned out to cash in on marketing value more than they were actually any good as video games. There are exceptions, but they’re few and far between, and that was especially the case back in the day when Bandai was obviously much better of a toy company than a game company. It’s only very recently, like “last decade” recently, that Digimon games have actually started putting any real effort into nuanced writing, and that’s probably mostly because of a certain former Tekken producer named Habu Kazumasa becoming a hardcore diehard Digimon fan who started actually pushing for better writing.

The WonderSwan games, which also are equally as guilty of completely destroying the anime characters’ canon characterization and generally being very bare bones, might have been completely tossed into the ether and remembered in history as more low-effort licensing cash-ins if not for Akiyama Ryou and Millenniummon and his whole entire surrounding saga. Not because the games were the pinnacle of the world’s greatest writing, and not because they really integrated all that well with anime canon (in fact, play the games or watch a Let’s Play and you’ll see timeline and characterization contradictions all over the place to degrees that make the anime’s awkward handling of the issue look masterful in comparison). But I think the best way to describe this is similar to how many people feel about the original Pokémon games for the Game Boy. The games themselves are riddled with bugs and sloppy programming to embarrassing degrees, and the writing is stilted, barely present, and at times borderline surreal...but at the same time the concept of it all was so strong that it captivated an entire generation with so little and kickstarted one of the world’s most profitable franchises. Those games actually didn’t have a lot of substance in themselves, but the concept was strong, and the gaps were just big enough for imaginative kids to fill in the blanks with their own creative ideas.

That’s basically also what went on here with Akiyama Ryou. Advertised as “the ninth Chosen Child” and featuring a post-Adventure side story where Ryou is called to save Taichi and his friends and teams up with and fights against familiar faces, eventually fighting the embodiment of a Y2K bug who eventually becomes his eternal rival, even if they didn’t really have much to it when actually put into practice on the WonderSwan (and to be fair, it was handheld hardware from the late nineties, it’s not like it probably could have particularly detailed writing), it’s just a lot of interesting concepts that make a kid inspired to fill in the details of what’s going on with Ryou’s adventures, especially since it’s (apparently) canon to the anime as well. You can’t deny there’s appeal in the idea of a Tamer who’s sent around to do odd, unusual jobs with “borrowed” partners and fighting against the embodiment of Y2K.

Thus, Ryou became a popular character, and in very much the same way Pokémon fans latch on to the idea of Red as the world’s most badass Trainer despite the fact we don’t know a single thing about him except the fact he apparently doesn’t talk much, many a Japanese Digimon fan became very attached to Ryou and the tale of how he became a “legendary Tamer”.

The many attempts to get Ryou into the anime

Digimon is what’s known as a “media mix”, meaning it’s a franchise that’s fundamentally planned as a multimedia outlet from the get-go. Ultimately, it’s more Bandai’s IP than Toei’s, which means that if they veto any idea the anime staff has, the anime staff can’t go with it, and if they demand something get put in the anime, the anime staff has to go along with it.

As I said earlier, Ryou’s games are far from the only games to have glaring contradictions with the anime, and since Ryou’s games are more about him than they are the Adventure or Tamers characters, that probably puts them in a better position than games that are ostensibly supposed to be anime tie-ins but aren’t great about it (trying to think too hard about how Digital Card Arena makes sense with the rest of 02 will make your head hurt). However, since Ryou was a popular character, Bandai and Toei started entering in talks to make Ryou relevant to the anime, too. The thing is, though, with the games already off the rails in regards to consistency with the anime in the first place, that basically left the anime staff at a complete loss as to how. Interviews with the anime staff on the matter have all graciously stated that this kind of thing is probably just inevitable when you have a media mix, and, putting Bandai’s known history of being completely unhelpful about this issue in every way imaginable aside, this is probably true to at least some extent (as long as two branches of a media mix are being planned simultaneously, it’s very unlikely they’ll be perfectly consistent with each other).

As a result, the anime staff started making repeated attempts to find a way to fit Ryou in the plot somehow, but the problem is that the games themselves didn’t really give them a lot to work with, and Ryou didn’t even have much of what you could call a characterization in said games (again, it’s all in the realm of where you’re supposed to be filling in the blanks imagining what he’s like). The first known appearance is Ryou (in Turkey, for some reason) sending an email to Taichi and Koushirou in the Diablomon fight in Our War Game! (This was probably just intended as a “cute reference” at the time, but starts posing problems for Tag Tamers later; see below.)

After that, the staff started discussing making Ryou the central character of the summer 02 movie, presumably because the “self-contained” nature of a movie would allow for them to explore Ryou without interfering with the main series too much, and it would have also given them the opportunity to expand on his relation to Ken’s backstory -- but the plotline of the movie ended up rejected for being too depressing for a summer movie, we ended up getting Hurricane Touchdown instead, and Ryou ended up only getting his short 02 cameos in episodes 23 and 43. (Amusingly, if the original plan for the movie with Ryou had gone through, Ryou would have likely been Terriermon’s partner instead of Wallace.)

It does seem that, as part of planning, the anime staff and Bandai had firmly agreed that Ken’s backstory would be related to a game tie-in, so that part was non-negotiable even if the movie with Ryou was scrapped. In fact, in real life, the game in question, Tag Tamers, was released right before 02 episode 21 aired -- meaning audiences would get a taste of the knowledge that Ken was, indeed, originally a good-natured and kind young child who fell victim to dark forces before it was formally revealed in the anime. So when the relevant scene in 02 episode 23 aired, the kids could point at the screen and go “I remember that!!”, and they’d have extra information about Millenniummon’s role in Ken’s downfall to work with as the plot went on. As you can imagine, very fun for the kids.

However, if you look into it closely, despite it apparently being important for Ken’s backstory, Tag Tamers...doesn’t make sense with the anime, and despite what a lot of people like to claim about it being “necessary” to understand what was going on with Ken, it actually makes it even more confusing:

According to the game, Ken and Ryou were sucked into the Digital World after witnessing the Diablomon incident together, but this contradicts Ryou’s depiction in Our War Game!, Ken getting depicted as going in and out of the Digital World alone in the 02 episode 23 flashback, and Ken’s statement that his encounter with Digimon was in August 2000 (long after the Diablomon incident in March 2000!) in 02 episode 33.

Ken is characterized in ways that would make the emotional backdrop of his backstory in 02 completely fall apart. The game has him recognized as as “boy genius” even at that point in time (the fact that Osamu was and Ken wasn’t is vital to backstory), his room is full of toys and sports equipment when Ken and Osamu’s room conspicuously lacking anything that allowed them to be “normal kids” informs their characters, Wormmon doesn’t even call Ken “Ken-chan” despite that being vital to their relationship...

Ken is a year older in the game than he was during his initial Digital World trip in the 02 episode 23 flashback, and considering Ken coming back to the real world alone and clearly not gravely ill is a major plot point, him making only one trip to the Digital World doesn’t quite make sense.

The epilogue of the game depicts Ken clearly remembering Millenniummon when declaring himself the Digimon Kaiser, but that would open up a huge can of worms regarding the Kaiser’s depiction in 02.

One game later, in D-1 Tamers, the young Ken has an almost naively chipper attitude towards Ryou apparently vanishing off the face of the planet, and he tells Gennai to “cheer up” because Ryou will definitely come back, in such an insensitive manner that a Japanese Let’s Player called the game’s Ken “irresponsible”.

To be blunt about it, it seems the only information Bandai and Toei had in common was that Ken was a good kid in the past who met Wormmon in the Digital World and fell into darkness after a piece of Millenniummon lodged into him, and everything else is contradictory!

Ryou in Tamers

Nevertheless, Ryou didn’t really show up in 02, so there was still a stake on Bandai’s part (and by extension, on the part of anime producer Seki Hiromi, whose job description also involved representing Bandai’s wishes for the anime staff) to actually get him in the anime this time, so when things rolled around to Tamers the attempt was made again. The problem was, Tamers was not in the same universe in Adventure, and so far, Ryou had only appeared in games that were (ostensibly) in the Adventure universe.

The full details of the story behind how Ryou ended up the way he was portrayed in Tamers came from a blog post by Konaka from 2021 (which I will not be linking here for various reasons, but savvy people can probably find the post themselves). The events went as follows:

Seki decided to have Ryou appear in the Digital World arc, feeling it would be best to have him in the Digital World due to Tamers being, in her words, "a meta-Adventure" (basically, she felt the Digital World arc would be a better place to put a meta element like Ryou rather than one of the real world parts of the story)

Konaka agreed to it at first, knowing he was working with a media mix franchise and this came with the territory (and Ryou’s presence in Tamers was determined before he even joined the staff), but later learned about what the games entailed and realized this risked having to connect with the Adventure universe when the whole point was that they weren’t the same universe

Konaka decided to avoid the topic of bringing in his history with Ken since that would (rather understandably) make things overcomplicated

...so basically, the decision on how to address Ryou’s presence in the Tamers universe on the part of the anime staff was just to not deal with it at all.

According to Konaka, while Ryou’s Tamers characterization isn’t necessarily meant to contradict the WonderSwan games, he still focused on making Ryou a character more for Tamers than anything else. Ryou’s status as a “legendary Tamer” is obviously a wink and a nod to the games (and, of course, a way to appease all the fans who would murder if Ryou were portrayed as anything less, kind of like how Pokémon fans would also murder if you insinuate that Red is anything less than the world’s coolest badass), but it also comes from Konaka himself -- he was apparently inspired by the character of Tuttle from the movie Brazil, in that he showed up in the Digital World before them and was a super awesome senior who showed everyone up by being badass. As for Ryou’s characterization, Konaka let Yoshimura Genki (the writer for his first episode) basically handle his entire characterization, which was also heavily inspired by his voice actor Kanemaru Junichi having a similar “refreshing” personality. The part about his antagonistic relationship with Ruki apparently came from simple logical inference that if he were an accomplished Tamer, he must have met Ruki at some point, and they probably wouldn’t get along, and so on and so forth.

So as you can see, the Tamers writing staff really wrote Ryou as a Tamers character more than they did a character from the WonderSwan games, but they also deliberately left enough doors open so they wouldn’t incur a direct contradiction. And, again, you can tell that Bandai never really gave them a Ryou characterization to work with in the first place -- it’s apparent Ryou would have had different characterization if he’d been in the 02 summer movie as originally planned, or not voiced by Kanemaru.

True to form, Bandai’s next two games sort of seemed to explain how Ryou jumped universes; D-1 Tamers depicts Ryou getting recruited into a fake tournament by the (uncharacteristically jerkass-like) Adventure kids and set to fight against Millenniummon again, which blows them through the multiverse. One game later, in Brave Tamer, an amnesiac Ryou engages in a battle with Millenniummon across the multiverse (including the Tamers universe) and even partners up with a Monodramon, who forces a Jogress between himself and Millenniummon to end the battle once and for all, the idea being that he’ll counter Millenniummon’s endless hate for his rival Ryou with his own love for Ryou, resulting in an egg that we’re probably supposed to assume will eventually hatch into Tamers!Cyberdramon. (Contrary to popular English-speaking fandom rumor, there is no indication Millenniummon was ever Ryou’s partner besides in this way.) So that explains everything, right?

...Not really.

Brave Tamer ends in a cliffhanger of sorts. It doesn’t explain whether Ryou ever gets his memories back. It doesn’t explain where Ryou goes after that. It definitely does not explain how this is supposed to lead up to Ryou having a dad in Fukuoka or a multiple-year career in the Digimon card game, nor the fact that the backstory for Ryou and Cyberdramon in Message in the Packet doesn’t match the above at all...I mean, it’s probably theoretically possible to come with an explanation, but it will definitely make your head hurt. And then to make things worse, in 2002 V-Tamer had a crossover chapter with Ryou, and his personality is in stark contradiction with the Tamers version (in that he’s portrayed as an argumentative hot-blooded protagonist type), probably because, again, the games never actually gave Ryou a characterization, and Yabuno and Izawa were probably just using their own interpretation of what he must have been like in the games.

So are all of these versions of Ryou the same character?

The official stance is technically yes, but...

In an (extremely infamous) interview from 2002, Seki confirmed that 02 and Tamers Ryou are indeed intended to be taken as the same character. The thing is, almost everyone on the Japanese end, and by that I mean including Adventure/02 and Tamers staff, has called bullshit on this, or has at least been really shocked that this is apparently supposed to be the case (for example, Kakudou himself saying in 2003 that he was still shocked about that). The Japanese wiki article for Ryou on Pixiv immediately follows Seki’s statement up with the observation that this doesn’t make sense. However, vague wording from staff since then has also hinted at the real reason Seki said this: because she has to represent Bandai’s wishes for the anime staff (and vice versa), she probably had no other choice, because Bandai made D-1 Tamers and Brave Tamer under the obvious premise they’re supposed to be the same character, so she has to deliver their viewpoint regardless of how much sense that makes or not. (Otherwise, she’d be basically telling the public that the games are wrong, and Bandai would obviously not be happy with that.) In the aforementioned 2021 blog post, Konaka admitted that his choice to dodge the topic of Ken in the course of Ryou’s Tamers portrayal probably contributed to forcing Seki to give that very forced explanation.

Although the Japanese fanbase still likes Ryou and the games, most people on that end generally don’t really treat them as the same character, and the aforementioned Pixiv wiki’s suggestion is that you treat them like different timeline possibilities of the same character akin to Ultraman’s “parallel isotopes”. Ryou is still clearly canon to 02, and canon to Tamers, and nobody disputes that, but the part that's more uncertain is whether the events of the WonderSwan games themselves are canon to Adventure/02/Tamers or whether it's more of a "broad strokes" thing (or in other words, something mostly resembling what happened in the games is canon to Adventure, 02, and Tamers, but it can’t be precisely the same way with the exact same presentation because there would be massive logical contradictions).

Pixiv’s stance is that Ryou’s background in the games is “somewhat parallel” to 02 (a shorthand way of saying “treat it as if it’s canon AU, but something close to its events did happen in the original timeline”), and for the most part I generally feel like I’ve seen people approach Tamers!Ryou somewhat differently than they do the original WonderSwan Ryou. Personally, I’ve already written about the arbitrariness of “canon” in Digimon, how official stance has always been “everything is canon regardless of how much sense that makes”, and how individual fans will have to decide their own stances on each issue for themselves. The WonderSwan games are only the first in a long line of things that make Digimon fold on itself in terms of canon, so the best thing to do is just accept that Bandai and Toei probably aren’t interested in making any more clear statements on the matter, and figure it out for yourself.

#digimon #akiyama ryou #ryo akiyama #digimon adventure 02 #digimon tamers #demonoflight #shiha's ask box #shihameta #digimon multi series talk

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shihalyfie · 2 years

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Digimon Survive’s production background, story themes, and relationship with Adventure

Here's a little story. Fresh of the heels of the relative success of Re:Digitize and working on the 2013 PSP adaptation of Digimon Adventure for the franchise’s 15th anniversary project, Digimon game producer Habu Kazumasa (known for being rather communicative with the fanbase at a time the franchise had a tendency to be a bit out of touch with them) had the opportunity to work with Kakudou Hiroyuki, Adventure’s original director, who was working on voice direction for the game. Around then, Kakudou told him about a certain background concept he’d had for Adventure: that Digimon may have originally been like youkai that had made human contact before, but become more recognizable to the human world via technology (a concept that was alluded to in 02 and related media but not explicitly stated).

Habu was enthralled with this idea, and two years later, he directly used it as inspiration for the “ghost story”-like quests in Cyber Sleuth, released in 2015. This carried over into the game’s later-released interquel, Hacker’s Memory, released two years later in 2017 -- but, interestingly, in interviews for it, Habu alluded to working on another Digimon game with “set partners”, or a game that would allow for “what-if” scenarios that allowed you to pursue different evolution branches...

And so, one year later, in July 2018, Digimon Survive was announced. (And then it got delayed for a few years due to development circumstances, but that’s not the point.) So what is this game? How does it relate to Adventure, and the ideas behind its production that captivated Habu all the way back in 2013?

This post spoils all four routes, so please be aware of this before reading further. (I also will be spoiling Adventure and 02, in case you haven’t seen those yet. Hey, you never know.)

Two Years’ Vacation and Lord of the Flies

Back when Survive was first announced in 2018, frankly speaking, it was a lot to take in for a Digimon fan -- “survival horror visual novel” was not exactly something you would easily expect from the Digimon franchise (the SRPG part was probably the least weird part of it). The “survival horror” part especially ended up turning off some game publications off the bat, declaring that this kind of content was unfit for Digimon, but veteran fans coming from the days of World and Adventure were quick to point out that it’s not like Digimon hasn’t been a mild survival horror before. The over-the-top silliness made it harder to really feel the weight of it, but “getting trapped in another world where a lot of things are interested in killing you” could even be said to be a return to origin in a sense.

Shortly after the initial announcement, Habu explained that it would be a reimagining of Adventure’s concept with a more direct expression of Adventure’s “Digimon partners as a literal part of their human partners’ souls” and “Digimon as youkai” concepts -- but also more vividly depicting the “survival story” part of Adventure’s isekai, describing it as the Lord of the Flies equivalent to Adventure’s Two Years’ Vacation. What does that mean?

Let’s dip a bit into a brief history of survival stories, as well as Survive and Adventure’s relationship with them. “Two Years’ Vacation” is an 1888 novel by French author Jules Verne (you probably know him from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Around the World in 80 Days, and other similar adventure stories). Two Years’ Vacation is virtually unknown to English speakers, but is very popular in Japan due to a famous translation from 1896 with the new title “The Castaway Story of 15 Boys”, followed by more Japanese retranslations and media adaptations, including a Toei anime. (Although the "15 Boys" version of the title is more well-known in Japan, there have since been other Japanese translations that use the original "Two Years' Vacation" title, and interestingly, Kakudou's own references to the book have used the original title, perhaps unsurprisingly for someone who tends to be rather infamously in-touch with Western media.)

Two Years’ Vacation itself is one of a whole bandwagon of “Robinsonades”, a trend of books all taking after the 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe, a story about a man who learns to survive after getting shipwrecked on a deserted island. Verne wrote Two Years’ Vacation under the idea of making Robinson Crusoe for kids as a way to show that kids could be brave and admirable under harsh circumstances, too. Thus, after getting stranded on an island during what was supposed to be a British school summer vacation, fifteen boys set up a home there, brave harsh seasons and wild animals, fight and make up, and eventually hijack a passing slave trafficker’s boat and escape. In line with Verne’s usual work, it’s a feel-good story about kids being cool and brave.

The 1954 novel Lord of the Flies by British author William Golding (which you’re probably more likely to have heard of) is a much more cynical take on the concept. Golding wrote the novel as a scathing response to another survival Robinsonade called The Coral Island, an incredibly, incredibly imperialistic narrative involving British boys fighting against “savage, uncivilized native” archetypes and converting them with the goodness of Christianity. (While Two Years’ Vacation was not immune to racist or imperialistic notions, especially regarding the part where the boys treat Moko’s lower status for being black as a given fact of life, it was generally more focused on the boys figuring out how to survive in the first place, and the differing social backgrounds between the boys is depicted as a source of conflict they have to overcome.) Thus, Golding wrote Lord of the Flies with thinly-veiled parodies of Coral Island’s protagonists, with the point being made that instead of being righteous Christians who purge the area of evil, the evil instead comes from the boys themselves as they turn on and try to kill each other.

With Two Years’ Vacation being so famous in Japan, it’s no wonder that it was directly specified as a reference for Adventure all the way down to its original planning documents. (Naturally, most Japanese fans of Adventure are easily able to spot this as the inspiration.) And thus, Adventure is a story of kids from different backgrounds being put in a survival situation together, bonding, and proving their resilience and wit. But when Kakudou released his non-exclusive list of works that were used as reference for Adventure, among Two Years’ Vacation and a number of other charming adventure and coming-of-age stories, Lord of the Flies is also there. (In case anyone’s wondering, Kakudou later revealed that it was mostly to do with the part with Pinocchimon and Yamato and such.)

So, all things considered, I think the metaphor of Survive being the Lord of the Flies to Adventure’s Two Years’ Vacation is actually pretty apt -- but not just in the sense of Survive being Adventure except with more fighting and kids dying. Two Years’ Vacation had its share of friction between the boys, and Adventure itself had a bit of Lord of the Flies in it too; it’s just that Survive takes the parts about putting internal loyalties and individual characters’ selfishness more to the test.

I also do feel the need to point out that despite what it looks like at first glance, Survive is still, to the very end, a love letter to Adventure (no matter how morbid that may sound to some people at first glance). A frustrating byproduct of having works that are supposedly something “but darker” or “a deconstruction” of something (to which I will simply respond with this well-worded tweet “a deconstruction is when I like something in a genre I disrespect”) is that they often tend to be malicious works that are condescending towards the original by insinuating that it’s “unrealistic” or “too idealistic”, and even if the work itself isn’t actually like that, the fans are certainly likely to read it that way, both in well-meaning and insidious senses. But even if you didn’t know the fact that Habu is infamously known for being a hardcore Digimon lover to the point he convinced staff members to join him out of sheer passion (basically, if you know anything about him, it’s laughable to even imagine he would willingly treat Adventure with that kind of condescension), playing Survive itself and seeing how its endings are framed makes it evident that at no point does it ever ask the player to give up on the idealistic values Adventure is built on. The setup is harsher, and the kids are put through the kinds of trials that the Sunday morning kids’ timeslot would be very unlikely to approve of, but the journey to reach the best possible ending still falls under the same lines, and the outcome that everyone strives to reach is the same.

The four routes and endings

Although the game presents the three main routes as much as they’re “equivalent”, that’s not really true, and in fact the routes and their outcomes are pretty obviously presented on a scale of morbid to ideal:

Wrathful: Aoi/Plutomon attempts to assimilate the Master and everyone and forcibly yanks the gate open herself, resulting in the two worlds rapidly fusing even after the party defeats her. Without Miyuki around to manage the gate, and with humanity given no time to prepare, the end result is in chaos, destruction, and social strife, forcing Takuma and his friends to form a resistance group and shelter Kemonogami and their partners. Although Takuma and his friends take as positive of a stance as they can, this ending is so bleak for everyone involved that Takuma himself even outright wonders if this really was supposed to be how their adventure ended (or in other words, the game directly hint-hints that this really isn’t it).

Harmony: The party defeats VoltoBautamon, but the gate remains open and the worlds slowly merge. With not everyone finding their partners and with humanity not given enough time to learn about Digimon, social strife breaks out between those with partners and those without, and Miyuki isn’t there to manage the gate nor is the Professor there to be able to conduct studies, leaving the kids to have to set up research facilities and try to bridge the gap hoping for a better future. Aoi considers themselves to be “chosen kids” for the job of pioneering relations between humans and Kemonogami.

Moral: The party defeats the Master, although as he dies he ominously mentions that he was responsible for maintaining the stability of the Kemonogami world; with the worlds threatening to fuse and the kids’ partners sensing that this isn’t the right time to start trying to unite the worlds, the kids leave their partners behind and return to the human world with Miyuki closing the gate behind them. The human world returns back to normal, leaving the kids, the Professor, and Miyuki unsure if they’ll meet their partners again, but they decide to come back to the campsite a year later for a trip, and the Professor speculates that the Kemonogami world being sustained by everyone’s feelings and modern digital communication will make it resemble the human world more so the gate can open again someday.

Truthful: The party discovers the truth behind Haruchika’s situation and, with the help of the Four Holy Beasts’ partners, Yukiha’s spirit, and the feelings of the world, manage to put his soul to rest. The worlds begin to slowly merge (Miyuki explicitly states that it’ll be happening at a slow pace) to return to the state they once were as one world, while humans begin to slowly seek out and accept their partners. While the Wrathful and Moral endings emphasized that not everyone was able to find their partners due to the chaotic nature of the worlds merging, this ending implies that everyone will eventually be reunited with their other halves in due time (presumably because of the more graceful way the worlds began to merge again, instead of everything falling apart due to the one upholding it being violently killed).

As you might have noticed, the Moral ending is the one most analogous to Digimon Adventure’s, whereas the Truthful ending is the one based more on the 02 epilogue (which is driven in further when members of the “new generation” of kids chance upon a Chibimon -- note that the V-mon line, along with the other lines from the 02 quartet, is not recruitable in the base game). In fact, the 02 epilogue was actually intended as the ending for Adventure before it was greenlighted for a second series, and was always the planned endpoint for Adventure’s “story of humanity’s evolution”, so it follows that this would be treated as the outcome Survive’s characters end up reaching as their ideal as well.

The correlation between the accumulation of Takuma’s karma choices over the game and how this leads to the routes is a bit vague, since the lineup of whether Miu (Harmony), Saki (Wrathful), or nobody (Moral) dies doesn’t take direct influence from Takuma’s choice in Part 8, but the outcomes do roughly correlate with the general ongoing theme behind the alignments:

Wrathfulness choices correlate with Takuma prioritizing himself and forcing his way through regardless of how others feel; Takuma’s choice in Part 8 is that he decides to save the world only for Agumon’s sake. As a result, Saki feels even more determined to not die with regrets and sacrifices herself during the amusement park incident, Aoi falls apart from the extra stress of having had to take extra charge as de facto leader, and the ending involves Takuma’s closest allies (besides Minoru) being Kaito and Miu, with Kaito addressing things with physical fighting while Miu is freely doing her own thing.

Harmony choices correlate with Takuma picking choices along the lines of “doing enough to not rock the boat” (this route is deceptive because although it’s ostensibly about “teamwork”, it has somewhat of a passive “as long as everyone gets along” nuance to it); Takuma’s choice in Part 8 is that he’ll save the world because he doesn’t just want to sit around and do nothing while the world ends; thus, he manages to maintain good relations with Aoi and Saki, but it’s not enough to prevent Miu and Kaito from fighting, and Kaito from completely snapping in response to Miu’s death to the point of refusing to see reason. The end result is that Takuma and his friends end up in a situation where they can at least do something to try and establish peaceful human-Digimon relations, but the uncertainty is thick and the sentiment lukewarm.

Moral choices correlate with Takuma picking choices that are about “the right thing to do”, whether it’s about not abandoning friends or saving people who need help, or basically the kind of values that shows like Digimon Adventure would like us to take to heart. Takuma’s choice in Part 8 is that he can’t abandon his friends (the choice initially seems to be a Harmony one in that it prioritizes friends, but the nuance is that Takuma’s doing it because he knows he has a duty to not abandon them, rather than simply doing something only because he doesn’t want the world to end around him); thus, he takes charge during the amusement park visit in Part 9 in trying to save Miyuki and prevent victims, the group doesn’t split up, and nobody else dies. The end result is that Takuma and his friends momentarily give up on their desire to stay with their partners for the time being so that the world can be in peace for the time being. This is blatantly the game’s favored route out of the three main ones, since it has a significantly more “complete” story and resolved plotline compared to Wrathful and Harmony.

The Truthful route involves Takuma going out of his way to connect with Ryo in spite of Ryo not initially looking cooperative, and in helping Ryo have the will to survive the events of Part 3, Ryo helps keep the group together even further and gets to the root of Shuuji’s issues in turn, which results in Shuuji assisting the Professor in learning the truth behind the Kemonogami world and Haruchika, allowing to get to the complete source of the problem and resolve it at the root. Thus, the ending involves reaching a solution that allows everyone to achieve the goal of the worlds coming together again in a way that’s more appropriate.

(All this being said, the fact this game so blatantly favors Moral does make this one of the franchise’s most glaring examples of its tendency to be biased towards Vaccine types. Strangely, Wrathful/Harmony/Moral do not correlate to Virus/Data/Vaccine’s expected parallel with Chaos/Neutral/Law. It’s understandable that, as a part of a franchise with its deepest roots in a kids’ series that’s traditionally favored the power of friendship and doing the right thing, the game would have a bias towards Moral, but many of the Moral choices in the game are closer to what you’d expect from Neutral alignments on the Law/Neutral/Chaos scale, so seeing this correlate to Vaccine is a bit unusual.)

So although there isn’t technically a strict cause-and-effect correlation, you can see how Takuma’s attitude in approach has an influence on the course of the story, and the take-homes are: try not to be too selfish or self-centered, be proactive in doing the right thing, and try to make sure you know what’s really going on in making decisions. It’s a surprisingly didactic game for something that’s not advertised as kids’ media, but, again, this is probably what happens when it’s something that owes so much of its lineage to it.

Incidentally, while it wasn’t outright stated in 02, the time period between 1995 and 2028 involved the number of Digimon partners doubling every year. In particular, early contact with the Digital World was minimal, and the early years had the pioneer Chosen Children (like those depicted in Adventure and 02) helping keep things on the downlow, and access to and from the Digital World was still dependent on gates that could be opened or closed -- that is to say, it certainly didn’t involve the worlds messily fusing into each other. Given that, the world actually had a pretty reasonable “slow burn” period to adjust to the presence of the Digimon and adjust society to accommodate for them, so when you think about it, the 02 epilogue had it comparatively easier than the chaotic scenarios in the Wrathful and Harmony endings.

While we’re here, let’s also discuss why this game is a visual novel with branching paths. The first reason is to do with Digimon evolutions; Habu stated (in a part of an interview that’s totally about Survive, even though it wasn’t formally revealed yet) that he wanted to find a way to express branching possibilities of evolution with what-if scenarios, citing the SkullGreymon incident in Adventure as an example. But beyond just that, it also allows us to see sides of certain characters that would happen in different, mutually exclusive scenarios, and see how characters would reach rock bottom under what circumstances and situations, with their weaknesses cracking under the worst of stress tests. This means that even when you go into the “better” endings like Moral and Truthful, you understand what those characters had to overcome by not going in that direction, even if it wasn’t directly expressed in those routes. Thus, I don’t think any one of the routes alone constitutes the “complete” game, because certain routes are obviously written in ways to show off those contrasts (in particular, Wrathful shows Kaito and Miu doing spectacularly well in contrast to Saki and Aoi’s unfortunate fates, and vice versa for Harmony). And while the Survive characters can’t really compete with the Adventure kids having 54 episodes plus major recurring appearances in another 50 plus an unholy amount of drama CDs, material books, theatrical movies, and even a novel adaptation to flesh out their characters in excruciating detail (and that’s before we get into the post-2014 additions), the visual novel format allows the characters to explore them in a certain kind of intimate depth not always possible in other formats.

A Digimon game that can barely be called a Digimon game

Most of us know that Adventure is so influential on the Digimon franchise that pretty much everything that’s come after it has taken massive cues from it in some way. And given that Survive is pretty shameless about referencing Adventure in particular, this should only go without saying. But to put things in perspective, let’s imagine you went back in time before Digimon Adventure began airing and struck up a conversation with someone who knew “classic” pre-Adventure Digimon (with V-Tamer, Digimon World, and the like). And then you tell them there’ll be a game like this:

There is no Digital World; there is an “other world”, but it’s a youkai world that’s implied to have existed since feudal Japan

There is no Digivice

The Digimon aren’t depicted as being made of data per se

The Digimon aren’t even called Digimon, but are instead “Kemonogami” and are connected to human souls

...they’d probably look at you funny and think something has gone fundamentally wrong with the Digimon franchise. Of course, the fun of Digimon “null canon” is that it’s not something every work has to be particularly married to, but this game has almost none of the standbys that should normally define something as a Digimon work, with the only ties to the “digital” premise being that a smartphone seems vaguely able to interface wtih the world, and eventually the Professor’s prediction that the prevalence of digital technology and social media will become the sustaining force for the Kemonogami and their world. So when you think of it this way, Survive is getting away with what it’s doing because it’s taking so many things directly from Digimon Adventure...but moreso the “Adventure” parts than the “Digimon” parts.

That being said, while those parts aren’t necessarily solidified as part of the Digimon franchise as null canon rules, they’re definitely a part of the franchise identity to the point people now assume they come part and parcel with Digimon partnerships. Think about how immersed it is in public memory now that Digimon evolution is tied to human mental epiphanies; had it not been for Adventure, we could have easily had many more series where evolution was tied to item fetch quests or martial arts training (the latter would certainly be more V-Pet-accurate). Even entries like Tamers or Ghost Game, which are stronger on emphasizing Digimon individuality distinct from that of their partner, tend to imply some kind of emotional connection being directly linked to evolution. Of course, there are exceptions that do handle emotional growth and Digimon evolution on a separate basis, but the Adventure-based concept of “partners” is generally considered to be the default at this point.

It’s interesting that this game’s development timeline ended up coinciding with Last Evolution Kizuna’s production cycle as well (from what we’ve heard about official statements on the matter, the game and anime timelines are generally almost entirely separate with the exception of minor things like collab DLC, so any major similarities are likely to be coincidental). In short, we basically got two things playing around with and more directly addressing the implications and potential extremes of this kind of Adventure-established partnership, especially since Adventure’s take on it is probably the most intensely psychological out of all of them. The part about Digimon partners being literally a part of the human’s own being was not actually something stated outright in the original Adventure nor 02; it was really something you had to glean by context, the word “partner” didn’t even come up as much as you’d think, and while “Digimon partners die when their human partners do” was part of the original lore, it never came up in the series and we only found this out through behind-the-scenes stuff and post-series interviews, probably because Adventure and 02 had more than enough morbidity before adding that on top of it. But here, Survive spells all of this out clearly for its own Adventure-inspired setting; the phrase “destined partner” (localized as “fated partner” in Survive, but the term is “unmei”, the same one that had plot relevance in Kizuna) is prominent, the characters have strong awareness of partnership as a concept from the very beginning, and the link between their life and death is clearly depicted from right off the bat.

However, there is one significant difference between Adventure and Survive’s takes on the issue. In Adventure’s portrayal, it was implied (although still considered an unknown by the character in-universe) that there had been limited contact with the Digital World over the years, and it was only very recently that digital technology became able to connect with it on a more reliable basis. (The narration describing the history of the Digital World in the Adventure novels implies the connection with the human world to be just as new to the Digimon as it was for the humans.) On the other hand, Survive’s lore states that the Kemonogami world and the human world were actually supposed to be one to begin with and were split apart by the fallout from the Minase family’s actions and their impact on Haruchika and his friends. You can especially see the difference in the way the Four Holy Beasts are treated between Adventure and Survive’s takes; Adventure(’s novels) had the Four Holy Beasts be partnered to some of the earliest Chosen Children, implied to be from around 1997-1999, and the “first Chosen Child” retroactively implied to be from 1995, but Haruchika’s discovery of the concept of human partnership (thus making him Survive’s equivalent of the first Chosen) and the establishment of the Four Holy Beasts goes back to around the Kamakura feudal era of Japan from around 1000 years ago.

(Incidentally, a brief digression in terms of production and meta: Huanglongmon didn’t exist at the time Adventure and 02 were produced, but the 15th anniversary drama CD has a skit where the kids are given advice by the Four Holy Beasts in the Digital World to try and recreate the original Chinese/Japanese setup with their own partners in Kyoto. The end result is that they end up using some comedically forced reaches in trying to force their Digimon into the roles of Gabumon as the "blue dragon", Gomamon as the "white tiger", Piyomon as the "vermillion bird", Tentomon as the "black turtle", and Agumon as the “yellow dragon”. The natural conclusion of Agumon ending up representing Huanglong is fitting, but the rather irreverent, comedic tone of the CD drives home the idea that while the Four Holy Beasts are still important to Adventure’s world and connected to Japanese folklore around Kyoto, they’re not necessarily formative presences in both worlds, considering that the issue was ultimately addressed not by the Four Holy Beasts’ power, but by bribing a rock.)

So why the difference? Adventure and 02 only used the concept of historical connections with the spiritual world as a minor note in a story that was mostly about the present and future, so it still had a strong sense of being about digital technology as it was starting to become more involved with the world. That was something facilitated by its setting and the year it was produced; 1999-2002 made up of the years where digital technology was just starting to become something normal in households and kids were starting to get a feel for how it even worked. On the flip side, despite eventually becoming a story to do with an era long before digital technology even existed, Survive premises its existence as a “Digimon” narrative by saying that the transmission of thoughts and feelings is synonymous with digital technology, illustrated by people liveblogging Agumon and Piemon’s fight on social media and the resulting inflow of support from the crowds coming in almost immediately -- something that wasn’t easily as imaginable in this sense back in 1999-2002 when the Internet was still on dial-up (something like Our War Game! or Diablomon Strikes Back would be the closest you could get).

This was pointed out even back when Appmon finished airing in 2017, but “and then the kids were separated from the Digital World for an indefinite amount of time” feels a lot more incongruous these days than it did in Adventure, now that wifi and smartphones and so many other things are prevalent in our lives to the point it’s a better argument that you can’t escape technology these days. Conversely, with Survive’s context both in-universe and in real life, suddenly the idea of “digital technology is so fundamentally intertwined with human communciation and thought that a world made of thoughts will become more attuned to said technology” seems much less far-fetched.

Adventure frames the “Digimon evolution as human growth” metaphor with the idea that the road to the 02 epilogue and everyone having a partner is “humanity’s evolution” -- that is to say, the idea that the ability to have self-awareness in the way a Digimon partner gives you would be the next step in how humanity “evolves” overall. Therefore, the focus mainly sticks to portraying the kids as pioneers into completely unknown territory. On the other hand, Survive, being somewhat more conscious of its position as a reimagining of an anime from 1999, has a stronger theme of taking things from the past and passing it onto the future in a new form. Part of the reason Haruchika is initially unable to move on from his rage is that he and Huanglongmon still expect the world to be as war-torn as his original era (Yukiha says that Huanglongmon being purified means he’ll finally be able to “gaze upon the world” as it is), and Yukiha is only able to reach out to them by having faith that one of her descendants can convey the will she was never able to in life. The kids are still referred to as the “new generation” that’ll be able to make something out of the world in the current age, but even then, another “generation” of kids is depicted a year later as being about to go on their own Digimon adventure inspired by Takuma’s.

The flowers yearn for the leaves, and the leaves for the flowers

Thanks to this changed setting, Survive’s premise regarding the concept of separating human and Digimon partner is that they were originally supposed to be parts of the same whole, so separating them is actually going against what was supposed to be the case originally. (While Adventure had Digimon partners meeting them before they were formally partnered, with cases such as Oikawa Yukio, it also had partners like Taichi’s Agumon not being born until after 1995, or Daisuke’s V-mon having been born in 1999.) Thus, both humans and Digimon partners are portrayed as having somewhat of a sense of loss if they’re torn apart, and recreating something resembling the Adventure ending in the Moral route is given a more dissatisfying aura than it had in the original series due to this. In particular, looking back at the Moral route after knowing about the revelations from the Truthful route, insisting on keeping the worlds separate is basically reinforcing Haruchika’s cynicism about the world in a way (and to be fair, it’s not like even the Truthful outcome is a guarantee everything will go well, and as far as the circumstances in the Wrathful and Harmony routes go, he wasn’t entirely wrong about that one).

The themes of the game are reflected in its theme song, “Kizuna” -- first in the sense that it talks about the yearning of those meant to be together but torn apart, and in the sense that it advocates to “turn hatred into love”. It’s a fairly simple concept, and perhaps not even a particularly deep one, but it is nevertheless a theme that’s part of the core of both Survive and the franchise as a whole. Back in Adventure, Apocalymon served as something that tried to inhibit or hold back evolution out of grief and jealousy that the entire world got to evolve instead of him, and the kids defeat him by resolving to move forward with the help of the world’s feelings; in Survive, Haruchika succumbs to his own resentment from his isolation and feelings that are trapped in the past, and is ultimately saved by his sister and the world’s feelings reaching out to him.

That concept of “bonds saving people from their negative feelings” is basically a fancy way to say “power of friendship”, but nevertheless, the ending makes it clear that it wasn’t just human and Digimon partnership that constitutes a bond, but also the bonds between Akiharu and Miyuki allowing them to retain faith in each other despite being separated, the bonds between Takuma and his friends as he chose to go back to save them after having a chance to return to the real world, the bonds that Ryo and Shuuji are able to successfully form after being saved, the bonds between people as they’re bridged by digital networks, and so on and so forth. It’s a recurring, important theme through the Digimon franchise (again, it’s pretty funny we coincidentally had a movie also named “Kizuna” just now, but it’s a word constantly used over iterations of the franchise for good reason).

The game itself leans on symbolism regarding the spider lily flower, and most people familiar with Japanese anime instantly picked up its associations with death and therefore the fact this game was advertised as potentially having characters die. The theme song, however, brings up another meaning of the flower: that it represents bonds between those who are separated, represented by its leaves and flower petals never being visible at the same time, yet still part of the same plant. Haruchika initially lost faith in his bond with his sister after he believed she betrayed him, but Akiharu and Miyuki never did even after being separated for fifty years. Even if they’re torn apart, whether it’s through digital networks or emotional connections, it’s important to never give up on those bonds.

#digimon #digimon survive #shihameta #survive spoilers

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shihalyfie · 2 years

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When you really think about it, it’s a bit obvious 02 episode 13 was written by a guest writer, and not just in terms of plot

This is one of my more opinionated posts, but in going through 02 episode 13 again, I notice that every time I rewatch the episode, the characterization and depiction of surrounding events make the episode feel even more conspicuous that it was written by a guest writer with almost no involvement with the rest of the series, and not a member of the usual writing team. I won’t say the characters are completely out of character here, but they’re a bit...off.

Now, this is not meant to imply that the episode’s events or the characterization provided in it should be completely disregarded. Variations in characterization are normal for TV shows that switch writers per episode, and you can even see the other scriptwriters incurring them, especially in the early episodes of 02 (for instance, Miyako’s reaction to Ken in 02 episode 3 doesn’t quite match how she views him for the rest of the series). Adventure and 02 producer Seki even said herself that this kind of thing is to be expected, and should be taken as part of the character’s possible range. However, this episode does still somewhat stick out because it’s the only of Adventure and 02′s 104 episodes to be written by a scriptwriter who never worked on any other episode -- a scriptwriter who was so busy he couldn’t be brought on for any of Adventure, and therefore had very minimal involvement in the rest of the series -- when 02 is otherwise pretty abnormally consistent in its characters’ nuances. Again, nobody’s completely out of character here, but when analyzing the characters’ personalities, it may be advisable to keep in mind how much of an outlier some of these portrayals are.

One of the biggest tells regarding how “out of place” this episode is relative to the rest of the series is that whenever they bring up a reference to what’s going on in the rest of the series around it, it’s either really vaguely worded, or it ends up pretty much irrelevant to the rest of the series. Actually, “irrelevant” may be an understatement -- references to the ongoing Digital World conflict in this episode contradict what we know from the rest of the series (or at least really stretch consistency with what’s going on). When you look at the entire conversation between Miyako, Iori, and Daisuke in the middle of the episode, it doesn’t really make sense.

Miyako talks about expanding the D-Terminal to allow them to talk in real-time and not just email -- and this clearly never came to fruition, because Miyako seems to have not succeeded in this, or if she did, the kids decide to not use it for some bizarre reason (it sure would have been helpful in later episodes if they really did have this!). In a bit of a jarring leap of unusually indirect logic, Chibimon chimes in that this will help them to “stop” their friends from being forced to dark evolve. That’s some really strange phrasing there; it implies we’re getting ongoing cases of friends like Agumon being forced to dark evolve, but there’s no evidence of the sort.

Actually, when you look at episodes 12 and 13 together, you’ll notice that both of them have minimal contributions to the plot, and are meant to complement each other -- 12 has Daisuke, Miyako, and Iori working together with Takeru and Hikari left out, and 13 has Takeru and Hikari working together with the other three left out. The heavy content makes it distracting, but it seems like 02 episode 13 wasn’t really intended to have been very plot impactful, much like 12. In fact, the only reason the Dark Ocean ended up relevant later was that Yoshimura was resourceful and brought it back for 02 episode 23 at the last minute, so if not for her quick thinking this episode might have ended up not advancing the overall plot at all. The episode 11-16 block was apparently made with an emphasis on “having as much variety as possible” (probably because things were going to start getting much heavier and more plot-focused starting at 17), so it makes sense that this episode may not have been intended to be all that plot-impactful. Konaka was brought on this episode literally because of the vibes in his writing.

(Incidentally, 12 was written by Urasawa -- a writer very much known for strange, absurdist out-of-context humor, but also a regular on both Adventure and 02.)

Obviously, Konaka had been brought up to speed on what had been going on in 02 so far, but remember, he was originally intended to write for Adventure and postponed to 02 due to his busy schedule. That means it’s extremely unlikely he was privy to the vast majority of the meetings and production behind 02, and when you look at the conversation above and the very vague references to what’s going on in 02 otherwise, it does kind of come off as working off some fairly limited information about the rest of the series.

One big aspect of the episode involves conflict between Hikari and Takeru regarding Hikari being overdependent on her brother, and while it is true that Adventure previously established her as overdependent on Taichi, the specifics of the portrayal also don’t quite match up with what we know of Hikari in both Adventure and 02.

When we learned Hikari had a dependency problem on Taichi back in Adventure episode 48, we learned that from Taichi’s own mouth, because Hikari never said this about herself. Hikari’s “dependency” wasn’t her actively relying on him, but rather things turning out that way because Taichi had to keep intervening on her behalf. According to Taichi, the problem was that Hikari was too selfless -- she never told anyone about her problems because she didn’t want to burden them, until the pain got too much for her and it was too late. So that should actually suggest the opposite of what’s being implied here, which is that Hikari is actively waiting for her brother to bail her out. You’d think it’d be the other way around -- that Hikari wouldn’t want to burden her brother at all!

It’s not impossible to reconcile this, of course; Hikari’s mental state is a lot worse than usual during this episode, and her vision of apologizing to her brother does allow for the interpretation that what she’s actually worried about is burdening him (which is what this blog goes with). At the same time, it’s also fairly apparent that this wasn’t the intended reading of this episode, because Takeru calls her out for “always” relying on her brother like this. Yeah, so, funny thing about that: how many times has Hikari expressed unusual dependency or clinginess to her brother in all 103 other episodes of Adventure and 02?

Zero.

Hikari is a terrifyingly assertive girl. All of her interactions with Taichi in Adventure and 02 were well within reasonable bounds for a younger sister seeking guidance from and showing endearment for an older brother she obviously cares about very much, but there was never a single depiction of unusual clinginess or dependency on her part. About the closest you can argue is Hikari’s TV debut appearance in Adventure episode 21, but that’s still a far cry from what Takeru is claiming here. Taichi’s statement about her habits in Adventure episode 48 in fact implied that Hikari would rather let herself get seriously hurt than ever ask her brother to help her. Sure, maybe something is happening offscreen we’re not seeing, but it’s kind of strange Takeru is saying this is always a problem when we’ve literally never seen this from her outside this episode...? And, most tellingly, when the episode that contributes the most to resolving her character arc (02 episode 31) comes by, Taichi isn’t even an object. The episode is entirely about her, her own personal problems of passiveness, and her relationship with Miyako. Taichi’s name doesn’t even come from her mouth once.

In other words, this episode seems to focus an awful lot on a problem that we never saw happen in any episode prior to this, nor any episode after.

Takeru is also unusually aggressive and standoffish this episode. The disparity with him isn’t as much as with Hikari, especially because it is consistent with his character that he tends to suddenly lose his emotional composure without warning, but even so, his overall state during the episode is a bit unusual for someone who’s usually depicted as having himself together most of the time and having problems specifically because he keeps it bottled up until very specific moments. At one point in the episode, he even mildly swears; normally, Takeru doesn’t use rough language (him starting to slip a little into it in 02 episode 19 is treated as genuinely abnormal), and Daisuke and Ken are the ones to usually have rougher speech patterns than him.

And in general, even the fight between Takeru, Daisuke, Miyako, and Iori in the middle of the episode is unusually uncoordinated, especially since they all part ways instead of trying to work something out together. In fact, as early as this point in the series, the 02 group had already gotten very close with each other, and the vast majority of the initial water between Daisuke and Takeru had long gone under the bridge (the main conflict two episodes prior had come up because Daisuke was worrying too much about Takeru and Patamon). We even had a situation where Hikari was endangered back in 02 episode 7, and Daisuke and Takeru and the others handled it much better -- the actions everyone takes here are remarkably unproductive. Takeru never goes into detail about Hikari’s experience with the “ocean” despite how important this would be for everyone else to help (Takeru had never been portrayed as cryptic whenever it came to volunteering information to help others in need, especially Hikari), and Daisuke locking down stubbornly on Hikari being in the Digital World despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary is a bit much to imagine for even him. Daisuke is rarely stubborn about these kinds of things; he’s more consistently portrayed as pliable and caving to anyone who’s assertive enough before and after this episode, and back in 02 episode 7, it didn’t take him very long to admit that he was wrong and apologize to Takeru.

Again, it’s not that all of this is impossible to make rationalizations for -- this was a very bad day for every character in this episode, so you could probably chalk it up to everyone really just not being in a good frame of mind for its duration. However, realistically speaking, it does seem to be the effect of what happens when you have a writer who wasn’t able to be there for the majority of discussions regarding these characters, so even if their actions in this episode roughly match up with their character outlines for the most part, the nuances and little things that were so consistently portrayed in most other episodes don’t seem to be in play here.

In the end -- as I said earlier, it’s not that all of these should be completely disregarded, but I do think it’s important to consider that the kids’ behavior in this episode is somewhat of an outlier compared to the rest of the series. This episode is a famous one, so it’s easy to put too much stock in what we see here when it comes to things that the rest of the series consistently contradicts in much more plot-relevant ways. In particular, this has especially been an issue with Hikari -- this is considered to be a character-defining episode, and rightfully so, but considering that the rest of the series contradicts what the episode seemingly says at face value, it might be better to remember that this is still only one episode out of 104. In other words, simply taking the characters as seen in this episode and relying on these portrayals alone doesn’t give you an accurate picture of their depiction for the rest of the series.

#digimon #digimon adventure 02 #shihameta

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shihalyfie · 2 years

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Hmmm... We've talked a lot about the differences and changes between the original version (Japanese) and dubs for 02 and Adv'99. In the light of the announcement of the reboot/Adv 2020's US dub, can you talk a little more about the American dubs in general?

My only exposure to them were material dubbed from the US dub (Digimon the Movie, and Digimon Fusion), so i'm curious about more details 👀

I haven't seen the American English dub as recently as I've seen the Japanese versions, but I did originally get into Digimon with it and therefore I do know it pretty well. As I've said before, the fandom myth that "the dub was a very loyal one for its time" is a complete lie or at least willful ignorance (only the "for its time" part might be true, and even then not as much as people think). Also, as I've said before, I don't think enough people realize that there's actually a difference between different series' dubs. There are some things in common between each, like changed names and added jokes, but the degree of how much they did it and how much it impacted the story varies a lot, both because the approach to dubbing changed per series and because each series' own writing style interacts differently with seemingly minor changes.

The short answer is: Adventure got fairly significant changes but the plot mostly held up, 02 got the highest number of significant changes to the point it actually took serious damage in terms of story and characterization, Tamers changes mostly are tonal, Frontier and Savers (Data Squad) are where they chilled a bit, Xros Wars (Fusion) was overkill, and tri./Kizuna were about what you'd expect from modern adults' anime dubs. The long answer (with a brief history of said dubs) is below the cut. (Also, hopefully this is interesting info for those who’ve never had contact with the American English dub at all!)

Adventure

One thing that’s important to keep in mind is that Digimon dubbing and rights have actually changed hands a few times. The first few Digimon American English dubs were by a company named Saban Entertainment, headed by a guy named Haim Saban who unfortunately has openly said a lot of very questionable things about the Japanese media he’s handled to the point of bordering on racism, but that was also unfortunately very common at the time. Saban was also responsible for Power Rangers, among other things. Digimon was one of their last dubbed productions before they started falling under and got bought out by Disney. We’ll talk about that a bit later once we get to Tamers.

Adventure was dubbed while the Japanese series was still ongoing, in what seems to have been an episode-by-episode workflow. Now, the good thing is that Adventure's plot wasn't really impacted that much by the changes, and this is probably the origin of the "the Digimon dubs were very loyal" myth, because people are probably thinking of things like the infamous 4Kids outright changing plot points or cutting whole episodes. At the time, it was also unusual for an anime to outright admit they took place in Japan -- Adventure’s tried to hide it for half a series (that’s why “Highton View Terrace” is a thing), but they decided to give up once the Tokyo arc really was too obviously in Japan to do anything about.

The thing is, who on earth is watching Digimon Adventure for the plot? We’re all watching it for the characters, and this is the part people tend to ignore when discussing how much the dub did or didn’t change. All of these characters are defined by their temperaments and personalities, and these are the lines that got changed the most frequently. On top of that, the approach to dubbing seems to have been, for lack of a better way to put it, “a bit too reckless” -- they were very casual about making changes to the script without any foresight that things would become important later. This manifests most clearly in things like Mimi making a throwaway joke about a little brother only for us to learn she’s an only child later, but this does start causing more severe long-term issues in 02 (more on this later).

The most drastic change is Mimi’s personality and temperament, and there’s a reason my meta for her actually has an explicitly set aside disclaimer warning that readers coming only from the American English dub might find parts of the description to be jarring. I’m guessing that the dub production staff didn’t anticipate (or didn’t care about) the fact that the Adventure characters are meant to subvert their usual character archetypes, so a lot of the characters are rewritten to be pigeonholed back into the stereotypical tropes. Mimi definitely gets the biggest brunt of it because the dub writers basically piled on every single “empty-headed materialistic girly girl” trope they could think of on her -- obsessed with materialistic spending and shopping, lacking in common sense, haughty and condescending, et cetera. (Note that there are definitely positive examples of this kind of character in fiction -- Miyako’s character arc in 02 involves some degree of the shallowness issue -- but the problem in this particular case is that there is definitely a bit of maliciously misogynistic “girly girls must always be shallow and stupid” intent behind this here.) Unfortunately, this starts posing problems around the last quarter of the series when Mimi’s mental breakdown and character arc starts depending heavily on her Japanese version characterization, and it starts feeling jarring that someone who was so condescending towards others for three-quarters of a series is now getting a character arc about how inherently kind and non-judgmental she is towards others.

In the end, I don’t think Adventure took as much damage from the changes because it’s ultimately a very straightforward plot, and a lot of their character arcs are tied so heavily to the events depicted visually on screen that bar making severe footage changes, you can’t really change it that much. Any character arc that spiraled out of control eventually had to snap back into alignment with the Japanese version to some degree (hence why a good number of people were able to see past Mimi’s initial dub-induced rudeness), and some parts that were changed probably still needed to be changed in some way for cultural reasons (Sora, Koushirou, and Jou all have characterization elements that depend very heavily on understanding Japanese social propriety). Also, Adventure is probably somewhere around the middle when it comes to how tonally lighthearted or heavy it is compared to others Digimon series, so the added jokes do have some impact on its overall silliness, but not as much. Probably the worst part of it is that unfortunately they keep cracking jokes even when characters are having mental breakdowns or during formidable enemy climactic portions, but these are mostly offset by the character arcs being so clear that it’s still hard to dispute their contents in the end.

The real problems start once we get to 02.

For better or for worse, 02′s Japanese version has this incredibly subtle writing style where the character nuances rely a lot on individual lines of dialogue, and the plot often runs separately from how they do their character development. It’s a double-edged sword; on one hand its high level of depth and complexity means I can dedicate a whole blog to picking apart its nuances twenty years later, and it’s infamous for having a lot of people saying they saw it differently years later as adults, but on the flip side it means a lot of its best substance goes over the heads of kids or first-time casual watchers, and I’m not even sure I can blame the audience for missing it. It’s honestly too subtle for its own good at times.

Unfortunately, combined with being dubbed as it still aired in Japan, this created a very nasty combination with some of the most recklessly aggressive dub changes in the entire Digimon franchise. (This isn’t just personal bias; if you actually do a count of number of changes per episode, 02 changes average at about 1.5 times an average Adventure episode and 2-3 times an average Tamers or Frontier episode.) A lot of the substance of what makes 02 work in the first place either completely dies in the dub or at least becomes significantly harder to see the value in, and there's a reason it seems to have the highest rate of people saying they liked it much better when watching it in Japanese for the first time. Those from non-English speaking countries who got Digimon the Movie (the only product consistently translated from the English script instead of the Japanese internationally) have sometimes complained that the tone and characterization seemed off compared to the Digimon they knew, with jokes being cracked every half minute and everyone being really rude to each other. So basically, imagine that for fifty episodes.

The changes are basically more aggressive and more exaggerated versions of the Adventure changes, but they end up getting much more damaging to 02′s integrity as a series overall for the following reasons:

Daisuke. Very little of his original characterization survived the dubbing process, and there’s a reason I consistently dedicate entire posts to what happened to his characterization and how this created a chain effect with 02′s entire writing. After all, Daisuke’s the lead protagonist! 02 is when the series started getting very theme-heavy (Adventure’s was broadly about individualism and self-awareness, but not as pinpoint about overarching story themes), and unfortunately the first half-writing basically added almost every toxic masculinity trope you can imagine to him, almost as if they wanted to make him unlikable. They started toning it down in the second half as Daisuke’s forward-thinking nature and friendliness actually became plot important, but this still didn’t fix the issue because now the character arc just became flat-out unbelievable (someone who was so arrogant and self-centered in the first half is supposedly one of the most open-minded and friendly guys around?).

“Adding jokes” is consistently done in every series dub, but the 02 dub stands out because it seemed to be utterly incapable of ever cutting the jokes out even during plot-important moments when it really needed to, causing a lot of the series to become basically devoid of emotional depth. Of course, this only ended up causing problems for characterization too, because the Japanese version could have a scene where they’re exposing their vulnerabilities and emotional weaknesses, but we have to make this into a joke, again, which implies nobody in the series is actually taking this seriously. (Kiuchi Reiko’s Daisuke has multiple moments where you can tell in delivery Daisuke’s about to cry, even if he doesn’t actually break into tears, but I can’t remember a moment I ever felt that way with Davis.) 02 starts off tonally lighter than Adventure at the beginning but ends with a much heavier emotional toll on all the kids by the end of it, but you’d probably never believe this with the American English dub alone. This is also why 02 fans who favor the Japanese version tend to get very upset when people justify why the American English dub is better because “it’s funnier”, because a lot of what made it “funny” also ended up doing serious damage to some core parts of the series.

A lot of the 02 kids’ characterization is built up through one-off lines or the nuances of how they approach things, and the dialogue changes being done so uniformly and recklessly across the series means that basically all of this goes out the window. Instead, it’s replaced with everyone constantly mocking and dunking on each other, which probably sounds fun and “savage” at first, but it leads to two major problems: firstly, it does damage to a series where a lot of the appeal is about the group’s dynamic and way of playing off each other (you’re supposed to get the impression these kids really, really love each other, because this is a series heavily themed around relationships and all that), and secondly, every single character now has an identical sort-of-snarky temperament with no clear distinction between them, so it’s no wonder the 02 kids have such a strong reputation in English-speaking countries for being “flat with no character development”. A good number of the emotional payoffs in the second half become nonfunctional because everything meant to build up to it is no longer recognizable.

Even in the original version, 02 definitely has a very crowded plot where lots of things happen and subplots get juggled around at the drop of a hat, but the very reckless dubbing approach to these points leads to unaddressed/unanswered/contradictory plot points and portrayals basically permeating the entire series. Hey, did you know the ending to episode 13 wasn’t a cliffhanger in Japanese?

I’m not saying it’s impossible to see some of the substance behind 02 when you’re dub-only; I liked the series well enough when I was younger (although I very much disliked Davis due to being upset with the creepy -- and dub-exclusive -- way he invaded Kari’s boundaries), and I think perceptive fans have been able to see bits of the original Japanese series’ substance poking through the cracks (although it generally manifests in things like “I see what it was going for even if it didn’t succeed in execution” far more often than it would in Japanese). But I definitely think 02′s Western reputation has definitely taken a severe tangible negative hit thanks to this dub, and there’s a reason this blog devotes about 10% of its posts just trying to weather out and inform people of the differences at all because the confusion has gotten so bad.

Incidentally, Ken’s character arc and backstory is closest to that of an Adventure character in that it’s heavily tied to the actual plot events depicted on screen (i.e. it’s the least subtle and hardest to miss), and that’s probably why he’s the character who’s closest to unscathed out of all the 02 kids. I think the strength of that character arc contributed heavily to salvaging 02′s Anglosphere reputation and allowing 02 to still get good reviews by a decent number of people out there; it’s hard to argue with what happened in it, and it’s also hard to argue with the appeal of the rough-around-the-edges Davis mellowing out through his relationship with him (even if it has way more hurdles to get around than it was originally intended to).

That said, I do have a major credit to give this dub and it’s that it had a lot of pretty good dub-exclusive insert songs (mainly made for The Movie, but I digress). Adventure’s dub only had one, “Hey Digimon”, and it was this lighthearted song that they somehow felt they had to use even for some really climactic battle scenes, resulting in some of the worst anticlimax ever. 02′s are much better and much more well-timed.

Hurricane Touchdown gets its own post because while people generally know it was the most edited-down part of The Movie, the fact a lot of people don’t actually know much about the original movie (it didn’t even have very good fansubs until around two years ago) means what got lost is often not very well-known -- mainly that the original was heavily about moving on from denial and nostalgia for the past, and that Wallace was characterized as a relentless flirt and general disaster child. (Willis in The Movie comes off as significantly more responsible while Davis antagonizes him, but in the original Japanese version Wallace was the unhelpful gremlin while Daisuke was more understandably upset at his antics.)

One extra thing I have to point out before I move onto Tamers is that Diablomon Strikes Back (Revenge of Diaboromon) was the first Adventure-branded thing to be dubbed by anyone besides Saban. (Diablomon Strikes Back, both Tamers movies, and the Frontier movie were dubbed by Disney in 2005, between Frontier and Savers/Data Squad.) As a result, for a while, it was probably the most accurate-to-the-source dub of any Adventure product. There are still some changes, but they’re within line of necessary cultural nuance considerations and the overall tone of the movie. I’ve seen some dub-only people say that Davis came out feeling unusually nice and friendly compared to the TV series. Yeah, funny thing about that...that’s actually because that’s Daisuke’s original characterization. My biggest fear right now is that the upcoming 02-based movie may have fights breaking out over how the characters are portrayed there, because it’s entirely possible they’ll be accurate to Japanese characterization but get accused by dub-only fans for being out of character.

Tamers

I’m not actually sure at what point the deal between Saban and Disney was finalized in practice, but on paper the handover happened around the point of the D-Reaper arc. This is where things kind of get interesting, and I think whether you prefer the original version of Tamers or the American English dub will really be a matter of taste.

Firstly, not only did they start really toning down how aggressive they were with the changes, they also started getting more tasteful about how they wrote in added humor (instead of just intrusively adding in jokes in periods of silence, the way people would deliver lines would be more smoothly integrated into the series). It feels much like a transition period into what would eventually become the style used for Frontier and Data Squad, and it’s why I wonder if the shift to Disney wasn’t already happening earlier than when they say it did.

Tamers is a much more straightforward series than either Adventure or 02 when it comes to characterization -- it’s not very subtle, and characters will often state their motivation or epiphanies directly in dialogue -- so although there are of course enough changes that you could unpack them in more detailed Tamers meta or run into discrepancies in deeper fandom discussions, for the most part the characters come off as almost the same among most casual watchers. This means that the biggest difference is tonal, and that’s where the preference issue really comes in.

Japanese Tamers is a very unrelenting series, and its reputation for being “dark” probably has a lot to do with the fact it has very minimal situational comedy compared to Adventure, 02, or Frontier. (Note that Ghost Game is heavily relying on situational comedy for tonal regulation; Kiyoshirou is a huge factor in balancing out all the knives and stuff.) I don’t believe the core contents are necessarily unusual for Digimon standards, but I do agree that tonally speaking, by the time you get to the third quarter, it becomes a barrage of heavy thing after heavy thing happening to the characters without as much in the way of balancing it out (or at least not much compared to other series). It’s a lot for even an adult to handle, and based on testimony from Japanese fans watching it at the time as kids, it was often just too emotionally draining for them. It’s considered one of the leading theories over there as to why Tamers was the first series to experience a major financial hit (ratings started dropping enough to make the TV networks panic early in the series, and it ultimately made only barely over half 02′s toy revenue that year), in that people may have dropped it because it was just too much. (In actuality, there were several other things that probably contributed to the downfall, but the point I’m making is that this is notable enough for people to take it seriously as a theory.)

In contrast, American English dub Tamers was...I’m not going to say “making jokes” per se (it thankfully does not have people crack inappropriate jokes at people’s suffering or anything like that), but the tone of everyone’s dialogue carries an ever so slightly lighter and more casual tone from the beginning even all the way to the end. If the above theory of the original series turning people off for being too overwhelming is true, it’s very possible that -- ironically, given Tamers’ reputation -- the dub contributed to actually retaining a proportionally larger audience in English-speaking territories as a result of being less unrelenting. (Of course, again, things went south in the West too due to changed universes going over less well with Western audiences and other things related to franchise mismanagement, but, again, that’s a digression.)

My impression is that the Tamers dub never got quite to the level of utterly assassinating emotional resonance the way 02′s was often guilty of, but of course there are things you can still dispute for good reason (based on characterization nuances -- Kazu is a bit more openly misogynistic than Hirokazu is, Ryou and Ruki’s dynamic is a bit changed in ways that probably turned a lot more people off, and I’m personally uncomfortable with how the Chinese elements are the most aggressively stripped out in a series that partially involved discussing racism against Chinese families in Japan), and tonal preference is always going to be a thing. Also, Tamers is a bit unusual in Japanese in that it's one of the more willing to be indulgent in gender-neutral Digimon personalities (Renamon, Culumon, etc.) and this unfortunately doesn’t come into play in English -- although I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume this was more due to the fact the writers simply didn’t get the memo in time and weren’t given references on how Japanese pronouns work. That kind of thing is more commonly provided to localizers today, but the actual translation process was very shaky back then.

I will say one really major thing the Tamers dub bungled (possibly due to lack of foresight) is that they changed Leomon’s last words to Juri to ones of reassurance -- they even named an episode after the new version! -- only for things to pose problems when it turned out his last words having a trigger word for her (”destiny”) was plot important. They awkwardly tried to retcon it by having flashbacks to the scene use more accurately translated dialogue, but it’s really conspicuous.

In any case, like I said, the last quarter was when things transferred fully to Disney, and that’s when the changes started toning down.

Frontier

Legally, Frontier’s dub is by “Sensation Animation”, but in practice by Disney commissioning former Saban staff to finish dubbing Digimon material. Nevertheless, the company shift shows in multiple ways -- for one, they stopped having the rights to the original Digimon dub theme song anymore, and that’s why you’ve never heard it used in anything since Tamers (and why the Frontier theme song is used in Revenge of Diaboromon, because that’s the only theme song they had the rights to at the time).

Again, I think there are definitely nitpicks you can make here if you happen to be a Frontier meta writer, and I definitely think there are reasons to be annoyed at the fact everyone is a bit more cruel to each other than they were in the original. (It’s not as bad as 02 because in Frontier everyone is very rough around the edges and not always in sync, especially at the beginning of the series, but it is supposed to be one of the tighter groups in the end, and them softening around each other is a way the series often employs to show the potential these kids have to be much nicer people.) However, on top of this being where dubbing started to really chill due to the company change, Frontier is also a very straightforward, easy-to-understand plot, and therefore I don’t think I’ve ever heard any major disputes in understanding between Anglosphere fans of Frontier and others in terms of getting the characters and how they work.

Probably the one biggest difference I can think of is Kouichi, and this is mostly due to his very limited screen time in terms of speaking for himself -- in Japanese it’s much clearer through his speech pattern he’s actually normally a very casual, sociable kid (he uses ore!) and just happened to be shy with the others due to circumstances. His major focus episodes in the American English dub (with Crispin Freeman’s delivery) sound a little more sad and a bit angstier, so you might get the impression he’s a lot softer and more introverted of a kid.

Savers/Data Squad

For all I’m not normally the biggest fan of Disney, I have to say it is kind of impressive they were pretty dedicated to Digimon during the time they had it. They went ahead and dubbed all of the remaining movies (at the time) to promote Data Squad, and when they brought on Studiopolis for it, Jeff Nimoy made it a thing to get high-demand voice actors among Digimon fans for it (if I remember correctly, Colleen O'Shaughnessey is Yoshi specifically because of this). But anyway...

Data Squad is about the level of Frontier in terms of dialogue and tone changes, with the one major sticking-out point being that Disney got really antsy when it came to depictions of bombs and led to one of the franchise’s most infamous censors (hi Citramon). Personally, though, I think Citramon is hardly much of an issue compared to the fact that Tohma’s fake betrayal centered heavily around the fact he was being blackmailed with a bomb around his sister’s neck...but other than that one unfortunate part, Savers was always a series that was big on situational and slapstick humor even to the very end, so it takes well to dub humor, and on the flip side the dub was careful to still preserve the themes about xenophobia and the cycle of hate.

Xros Wars/Fusion

I haven’t seen all of this one’s dub yet (I stopped after five episodes), so I’m going off what I remember of it and what others watching it reported. This was the first dub done after the franchise was transferred back to Saban Brands, Haim Saban’s successor company to Saban Entertainment. They seemed to be on a roll of procuring Toei franchises, since they took Power Rangers back and also tried to start a dub of PreCu-- um, Glitter Force. Unfortunately, they were also convinced that the best way to go about things would be to pretend it was the nineties again.

The end result is Adventure/02-style dubbing applied to a 2010 series in an era where nostalgia wouldn’t even save it. (I do think it’s a bit hypocritical the Digimon fandom treats this like the most radical dub in the franchise when in actuality Adventure and 02 were even worse at times, but it is true that in this case Saban didn’t even have “this is normal for the time” as an excuse.) The problem is exacerbated even further by the fact that someone (not sure if it was Saban or Nickelodeon, which aired the series) decided that most of everything that could be remotely taken as objectionable had to be censored to ludicrous degrees -- even if they were things that were fine back in Adventure -- and while I’m personally whatever when it comes to issues of design, I feel like even the idea of a kid in Taiki’s backstory getting gravely ill from pneumonia for months being considered objectionable is a bit much.

Overall Xros Wars is a bombastic series that never lets up on situational humor, and even during its most tense moments it’s over-the-top, so Fusion probably didn’t suffer too much to that extent, but I also unfortunately heard stories of them still overdoing it to the point that even if it didn’t cut into the series themes and characterization, it was just plain cringeworthy writing. That said, I don’t know very many people who survived watching it to the end in the first place...

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I don’t personally know very many people who watched this beginning to end, and I didn’t watch it myself (and the reason is actually just because Vic Mignogna as Matt is just a bit too much for me to personally bear at this time). I do know that the dub was allegedly commissioned by Toei themselves now that they’ve been getting more actively involved in their series localization. Otherwise, I didn’t hear much about it, and the few people I know who did watch it didn’t have much to analyze very deeply about it. I assume there was definitely some added humor, but from the sound of it it was somewhere around Tamers level.

The biggest complaint I heard was mainly that they tried to have Meiko have a sort of “fake Southern” accent to approximate her Tottori dialect, but in actuality it was just too intrusively distracting.

Kizuna

I assume this was also commissioned by Toei. This one I did actually watch myself. Not many added jokes (and the few they added were well-timed), Daisuke and the others are in-character, and honestly this is probably because the movie just goes so fast and is so packed that there isn’t much room to add in the first place. In fact, my biggest issue with the dub is something that wasn’t the dub staff’s fault at all; the original Japanese script’s official translation is awful, and the dub staff was very obviously given that to work with. The other issue is that the voice acting is a bit stale compared to previous dubs -- one thing I had never faulted Digimon American English dubs for prior to then was voice acting quality, and it was one of the best among dubs of the time -- but this is probably because it was during early COVID pandemic conditions, so I don’t think much could have been done about it.

Adventure: reboot

So funnily enough I’m writing this despite not knowing much about it at all -- I don’t even know who commissioned this or who has the rights. (My best guess is Hasbro since they’re the ones who took in Power Rangers after Saban Brands also imploded, but I really have no idea.) I also don’t know where it’ll be airing; it doesn’t sound like Nickelodeon, and it could very well be a streaming service like Netflix.

I will say, though, as someone who watched the reboot from beginning to end, even if they do decide to go nuts with joke adding in the dub for it, I don’t think the series risks getting heavily damaged by it. As I pointed out earlier, impact of heavy dub changes also varies depending on how straightforward the series itself is, and not only is Adventure: extremely straightforward, it also is a series centered more around action and zany hijinks than it is character psychology, so a bit of extra humor doesn’t seem out of place there. But we’ll have to see!

#digimon #digimon adventure #digimon adventure 02 #digimon tamers #digimon frontier #digimon savers #digimon multi series talk #shihameta #dubbing discourse #tomorrows2top #shiha's ask box

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shihalyfie · 2 years

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Frontier’s relationship with Super Sentai

Frontier is well-known -- and by well-known, I mean the staff has literally admitted it -- to be based off of Toei’s tokusatsu series Super Sentai. But what is Super Sentai, anyway? If anything, most people in the West probably know it as the original basis for Power Rangers (and Power Rangers will probably be their only real understanding of non-kaiju tokusatsu). But that doesn’t really have a lot in common with Frontier, does it? Well, you might be surprised.

Let’s take a look at Super Sentai as it’s known in Japan, and its relationship to Frontier and Digimon as a whole!

Much thanks to @digitalgate02, @demonoflight, and my other tokusatsu consultants who assisted in the making of this post.

So what is Super Sentai anyway, and how is it different from Power Rangers?

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I don’t want to assume what people reading this post know and don’t know beforehand, but I at least imagine readers of this blog are more likely to be familiar with Power Rangers. Power Rangers’ relationship to Super Sentai is that it’s the American adaptation of Sentai, but the word “adaptation” is a bit loose here. More specifically, it uses the suits, character designs, and battle footage from a given Sentai series, but exactly how closely it follows the premise of the original Sentai it’s “based” on will vary, and in many cases (including with the original Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers), it won’t even remotely resemble the original premise at all.

Generally speaking, the main differences between Super Sentai and Power Rangers are:

While it’s not to say Power Rangers doesn’t have some degree of camp, Super Sentai takes the camp and marinates itself in it. Dramatic poses, over-the-top surrealist humor, explosions for no good reason, personal catchphrases, excessively noisy talking toys, and basically trying to be as outrageously silly as possible. In fact, Sentai series that don’t go hard enough on these factors often get criticized as “too bland”/“not fun enough”. A lot of these factors end up getting toned down in the transition to Power Rangers to give it more of a “cool” image (case in point, Power Rangers exists in the first place because Haim Saban thought Sentai was “weird”), and it’s to the point where certain Sentai series with “absurd” enough premises like ToQger and Kiramager are suspected to be impossible to market as Power Rangers because the Western market will consider them too cheesy.

Most Sentai characters are adults (canonically adults, not just adults acting as teenagers). This means they often have the degree of societal freedom adults have, and, on the flip side, it means the series can often be more active about putting its characters through harsher plot events, up to and including permanently killing them off. This doesn’t happen as much in modern Sentai series, but it did happen with enough frequency in the past that Power Rangers (which is significantly more shy about killing characters off) would run into problems because they would run out of footage for a character whose counterpart had died in the original Sentai.

While there are still plenty of Sentai series with normal humans on its teams, Sentai will generally be more willing to have more outlandish premises for its background characters, such as ancient warriors emerging from suspended animation, angels, alien pirates, furries people from a race of humanoid animals, actual robots, and more. It also means it can have a lot more variation in premise; for instance, Kyuranger takes place entirely in interplanetary travel, and doesn’t touch on Earth very much.

Individual Sentai rangers will have names specific to their series; for example, Zyuranger’s Red is named “TyrannoRanger”, while Gokaiger’s Red is “Gokai Red”. Modern series will also often give them longer one-sentence titles to use during their roll call; for example, “The Sparkling Inspiration, Kiramai Red”. (Frontier’s “this Digivice will purify you” lines are probably somewhat meant as a callback to these.) In line with Sentai being very deliberately campy, the roll call is almost always dramatic and drawn-out, with a group pose, sometimes even a group title, and occasionally an explosion.

While Power Rangers did eventually concede to following Sentai’s take on it to some degree, barring minor things like crossover movies and special series, every Sentai series has had its own distinct premise and a change of cast since the very beginning, in contrast to Power Rangers which tried to have multiple separate Sentai series be adapted into one single continuity for several years. (This caused infamous trouble when the ninja-themed series Kakuranger and the absurdist comedy Carranger had premises and tones that were extremely incompatible with the other series Power Rangers was working with at the time, leading to the Power Rangers works based on Kakuranger and Carranger being extremely controversial.)

While this happens more with Sentai’s sister series, Kamen Rider, Sentai is considered enough of a cultural touchstone in Japan that actors will often be booked for it as a stepping stone to get more exposure and eventually break into the industry. While it does have a bit of kids’ show stigma, it’s still a staple of Japanese pop culture (as is tokusatsu as a whole), and so it doesn’t have nearly as heavy of a “weird corny kids’ show stigma” that Power Rangers unfortunately still has.

More broadly, tokusatsu is a genre that’s just very well known and accepted in Japan in general. The definition of tokusatsu is any series that relies mostly on practical effects in live-action, including rubber and spandex suits, and beyond just Super Sentai and Kamen Rider, there’s competitor company Tsuburaya’s Ultraman, and kaiju (giant monster) franchises like Godzilla, and even tons of other Sentai- and Rider-like transforming hero shows that most people in the West have probably never heard of (GARO and Kikaider, anyone?). The advent of CGI has made tokusatsu come off as “cheesy” in the modern era, meaning most of it has been relegated to the kids’ show arena, but nevertheless, it’s a genre with a rich and long history. And, of course, because it’s focused more on being bright, absurdist, and fun, it often has a lot of the same absurd “cartoonishness” you’d get from animated series -- which means it actually has a lot of influence on animated kids’ shows, especially Toei shows, despite not actually being anime itself.

Sentai’s influence on Japanese kids’ shows, on Toei works, and on Digimon as a whole

Super Sentai has been running continuously, with virtually no significant breaks, since 1975. In that sense, it’s probably one of Toei’s most historically successful franchises ever (its sister series, Kamen Rider, is probably a bit more culturally prominent in the long run, but it also suffered a long break between its Showa and Heisei periods). Every single year comes with a new premise and a new Sentai team, meaning that a vague set of tropes common to most Sentai series is embedded harder in the public memory than any one specific Sentai series.

And, of course, Sentai is a Toei series. It’s by their live-action department instead of their animation department, but nevertheless, Sentai has shaped a lot of Toei’s kids show formats and style. Even Sailor Moon exists in the form it does now because of Sentai; it would have been an anime adaptation of Sailor V if it hadn’t been for discussions about making a Sentai-like team of magical girls (which means that, by proxy, it influenced every other “magical girl team” series that followed it). Moreover, Digimon shares a lot of staff with Sentai; most prominently, 02 head writer Maekawa Atsushi went on to be the head writer for the very well-acclaimed Mahou Sentai Magiranger, regular Adventure/02/Tamers episode writer Urasawa Yoshio was the head writer for Gekisou Sentai Carranger, and Xros Wars head writer Sanjou Riku was the head writer for Zyuden Sentai Kyoryuger (and this is even before we start getting into the shared individual episode screenwriters). In fact, 02 even referenced it for fun in episode 42 (note that “Sentai” is the Japanese word for “squadron”):

The reason these shows have so much in common is that Sentai’s precedent actually had a massive influence on Toei’s original children’s shows, including Digimon. In fact, a lot of what Western Digimon fans considered to be unique to Digimon, or difficult to get used to from a Western perspective, had been done by Sentai for years already:

Most significantly, the sheer concept of changing up the cast, premise, and tone every year had basically been standard form for Sentai (and of course, not just Sentai, but also other Japanese children’s shows from other companies, like Ultraman) for decades. The idea that the story you're watching will be wrapped up in a year was already a well-understood concept by that point, as well as the fact it allows a franchise to have more variety instead of beating a dead horse of a concept over and over. In fact, even the nomenclature of referring to different Sentai/Digimon/etc. series as “seasons” is a very American-tinted concept, because they’re not treated as seasons of the same show in Japan, but legally registered and acknowledged as distinct series that happen to be part of the same franchise (and considering the premise changes every year, it’s probably a more accurate way of describing it anyway).

The idea that the core group of protagonists will fundamentally be a team with each member on an equal level, and the idea that there would be specific “focus episodes” focusing on a given character or given relationship, is often thought by Western Digimon fans to be something that was codified by Adventure, but in actuality it’s been a staple of Sentai since long before then (and has also shown up in Toei’s other shows like PreCure). Debates about whether the Red’s been getting too much focus this year have characterized the Sentai fandom for ages.

Even certain tropes like “the red hot-blooded leader and the blue cool-headed rival” are heavily immersed in public memory thanks to Sentai.

The “sixth (not always sixth) ranger” -- the idea of having a solidifed near-equal group for most of the series, and then throwing a wrench in it halfway through with a new character who joins the group, often having turned from the antagonist side -- was of course made very popular by Sentai (and, of course, it being carried over into Power Rangers made it popular in the West as well).

Digimon’s way of using insert songs takes several cues from the way Sentai does it (and thanks to Sentai’s very luxurious budget, it has a ton of insert songs per series -- basically imagine 02 or Xros Wars level, except every year). In fact, most of the Xros Wars insert songs are sung by vocalists who usually sing for Sentai.

While Digimon and Sentai are, of course, still very different series in the end, you can see that a lot of the rough writing style consistent to many Toei series is based on the fact Sentai has had success with that kind of thing for decades.

Sentai and Frontier

Frontier is definitely the Digimon series with the most fundamentally derivative premise, being the only one to have human kids transform directly into Digimon (somewhat contrary to the base Digimon concept of having a human “raise” Digimon). It’s also infamously made Frontier a very hard sell for people who aren’t familiar with it, mainly because of concerns about the lack of partners, but one thing I notice is that the complaint “the idea of humans turning into Digimon is weird” comes up far more in the West than it does in Japan. This is just my personal speculation, but I think it’s because Japanese kids’ media is simply just no stranger to having human characters transform into inhuman heroes on the regular. Ultraman’s been running since 1966 and revolves around humans turning into giant silver aliens. The original Kamen Rider involved a modified cyborg, and in fact, many Sentai and Rider and other similar tokusatsu series treat the transformed form as not just humans in powerful suits, but a manifestation of them actually physically transforming into something. Of course, the West does still have things like that like the Hulk or Ben 10, but usually they come with a heaping of angst about the potential loss of humanity, whereas the idea of “yeah, that’s just part of the premise, roll with it and don’t worry about it” is a lot more common in Japanese works.

(Incidentally, there are actually some Sentai series where the team members will have their own “partners” similar to Digimon, usually in the form of cute robot mascots. Ironically, Power Rangers seems to dislike these, and they usually phase them out to be inanimate or feral in their adaptations, with Beast Morphers being a notable exception most likely due to how unavoidably prominent the Buddyroids were in Go-Busters’ plot. Power Rangers RPM infamously mocked the “big googly anime eyes” on the cars that originally came from Go-Onger’s versions being actual distinct characters.)

Frontier is a series from 2002, so it’s interesting in that the “Sentai” it took huge inspiration from is already very different from the “Sentai” we know now (more on this later). A lot of what Frontier takes cues from are tropes that were more common to the Showa era of Sentai, or the early 90′s works, and some of them were even on their way out by the time Frontier aired (but still well-known in the memory of the adult staff making the series).

There are at least two things that were more associated with Sentai back in 2002 than they are now:

While there are still Sentai teams with five or more members in total with only one being female, having two female members is generally considered more of the modern standard, but back when Frontier was being produced, there was outright pressure to not exceed one girl in a five-person group (for a series made for boys). This is actually the reason Adventure starts off with seven characters; they wanted more than one girl on the team, so in order to maintain a high ratio of boys to girls, they had to make a group as big as seven (no word on why this didn’t apply to 02). At the time, Sentai series with more than one girl on a five-person team were very rare -- this is something Power Rangers was a lot more diligent about from the very beginning -- but, ironically, right after Frontier finished airing, having two girls on a five-person team started becoming a Sentai staple. If Frontier had aired only a few years later, it’s possible there might have been another girl besides Izumi.

In one really unfortunate factor that hasn’t aged well at all, the idea of Junpei being the “fat character” is something that comes straight from early Sentai, where it would be a stereotypical trope where the yellow ranger would be a comedic fat character who loves eating (the archetype example being curry, coming from the very first series, Goranger). This was already on its way out by the time Frontier aired -- in fact, no Sentai series that aired after Frontier actually does this -- but for anyone who was an adult at the time Frontier aired, it was a well-known trope, and it’s why the Persona series also describes it in its Jetman parody. Despite some unfortunate things having been considered about Junpei’s weight back during development and during an interview in 2003, in a possible reflection of the times, Junpei’s finalized character arc in Frontier is already far more tasteful than the usual invocations of the trope (in that it treats him mostly like any other character and focuses more on his friendmaking abilities and practical intelligence), and the 2019 drama CD offhandedly mentions his weight without making a huge deal about it, so while your mileage may vary on how tastefully the final product came off as, it’s definitely far, far better than it really could have been given context.

The Sentai series that Frontier most obviously takes after is Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger, which aired in 1992 (ten years before Frontier aired). Rather fortuitously, it also happens to be the series that was adapted into the original Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers -- but in Japan, Zyuranger has some cultural significance besides just happening to be the first series that got localized off in the West.

For some context, Sentai was actually on the verge of dying the year before, resulting in Zyuranger’s predecessor, Jetman, adding a ton of soap opera tropes and saving the franchise by getting the support of a lot of soap opera lovers into it. (Jetman is the one Persona references for its “Featherman” Sentai parody.) Nevertheless, the fact remained that Sentai had been doing poorly because people were a bit tired of how repetitive it was getting. Prior to Zyuranger, every Sentai series had a bit of a “sci-fi enhanced secret agent” plot, and so Zyuranger decided to change things up by being the first Sentai series with a more fantasy-oriented plot, allowing for Sentai to more drastically reinvent itself thereafter. Thus, the Zyurangers are warriors from ancient tribes who went into suspended animation to be ready when threats resurfaced in the modern day. Hmm, that sounds a bit familiar, doesn’t it?

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The biggest dead giveaway that Frontier mostly takes from Zyuranger, however, is the fact that series producer Seki outright stated that Kouichi’s position as an enemy-turned-ally sibling of a major character was a Sentai-inspired element. When you look for which Sentai had this, it turns out Kouichi’s character story is a blatant callback to Zyuranger’s Burai. DragonRanger, Burai, was the long-separated older brother of TyrannoRanger Geki, with Geki having been taken away by the Yamato Tribe's royal family right after he was born. Burai fostered jealousy for his younger brother and followed him in suspended animation to take revenge. After Geki learned that Burai was his brother, the two reconciled, but Burai learned that he was already dead and on limited time, and spends his last moments giving his powers to his brother before he dies...wait, wow, this is really familiar, isn't it?

(Fortunately, Kouichi survives, but Burai wasn’t nearly as lucky.)

Burai was Sentai’s first example of a “sixth ranger” in the form we currently know the trope as, and just like his counterpart Tommy Oliver over in Power Rangers, the character inspired immense popularity and led to tons of other media, Sentai or otherwise, making use of the trope. Of course, Adventure and 02 had already used it in the form of Hikari and Ken, but Kouichi is such a blatant callback to the original Burai himself that it isn’t even subtle.

Modern Sentai

At this point we’re at a bit of a digression, but as I said before, as of this writing, Super Sentai has been running continuously since 1975, and that includes after Frontier’s time and well into the modern era. This means Sentai itself has already changed a lot in both style and in public perception. As I mentioned earlier, a lot of what people know Sentai for now wasn’t as much of a thing back when Frontier aired twenty years ago, so Frontier was based on a version of Sentai that doesn’t quite exist in the same way it does now. So what is Sentai now? What’s changed, and what hasn’t?

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Well, it’s still running. Several things have been modernized, and while there’s a lot more CGI than it used to be (which has been a serious concern for veteran fans as time has gone on), it’s fundamentally still a practical effects franchise. While the process has been slow, the gendered color stereotyping has been slowly chipped away at; on top of making two girls on a five-person team a more regular occurrence, female characters have been associated with non-pink colors like yellow, blue, silver, and most recently green, and the most recent series (as of this writing) currently has the coveted male pink ranger (finally!). In general, the association of “this character’s color must have this kind of personality” is slowly starting to erode, and while red is still almost always the leader, different variations of team dynamics that aren’t just things like “hot-blooded red, cool-headed blue, comical yellow” are starting to appear, or at least it’s possible to see a bigger variety of different takes on them.

In 2000 (when 02 was airing), Toei rebooted its old Kamen Rider series into what’s now known as “Heisei Kamen Rider”, and Rider and Sentai became sibling shows on TV Asahi known as the “Super Hero Time” block. In 2004, a year after Frontier ended, Toei started its PreCure magical girl series, which gained a reputation for having the girls physically beat up their opponents, and since the three shows aired (and still air) back-to-back on Sunday mornings, they started gaining a collective fanbase in which it was commonly understood that being a fan of one made you very likely to be a fan of the others. Among the three, Sentai is the one most likely to be closest to the monster-of-the-week format and is probably the most formulaic of all of them (probably due to its long history being based on such a formula), but since all three series change every year, the dynamic between them will change depending on the year. The three series will also often cross-promote each other (especially Sentai and Rider, since they’re both tokusatsu), and, in what might be a bit of a depressing thing to think about, the three of them probably collectively represent the kind of thing Digimon could have been if it didn’t have such a troubled history.

In 2011 (when Xros Wars was airing), Sentai’s 35th series, Gokaiger, was produced as an anniversary celebration that involved crossing over every single Sentai series to date, with at least one actor from every series making some kind of cameo. Despite the fact this sounds like an absolute disaster in theory, the result was very well-acclaimed thanks to the strong central premise of space pirates who can turn into any ranger form in the franchise and use their abilities to learn what heroism is (in fact, the space pirates are arguably more popular than the actual crossover elements). In 2021, probably wisely figuring that it wouldn’t be a good idea to imitate Gokaiger too closely because everyone would keep comparing it, 45th Sentai anniversary series Zenkaiger took a completely different comedic approach to its crossover elements, which also ended up being very popular.

Of course, since the series has run for so long, there’s already been multiple generational changes with kids who grew up with the series becoming actors in the series themselves, and the franchise has its own branch of direct-to-video special movies (think similar to OVAs) targeted at adults who watched the series as kids, such as “10 Years After” specials that bring the original actors back for a short sequel movie. Amusingly enough, Kouji and Kouichi’s voice actors Kamiya Hiroshi and Suzumura Kenichi are huge fans of tokusatsu (even besides occasionally being in it themselves) and jointly run an official radio show called Kamen Radiranger, where they talk about the currently airing Sentai and Rider and interview some of the actors and staff in it. Part of this involved sneaking into the Kyoryuger dance ending theme, which of course led to a fanartist making a Frontier parody.

Unfortunately, however, things haven’t been looking very good for Sentai lately. While the most recent few series (as of this writing) have been critically acclaimed in terms of actual storywriting, in kids’ shows, toy sales are everything, and they’ve been on a very noticeable slump since 2015, made even worse by the pandemic. As a result, Sentai has been getting a bit desperately experimental with most recent series Zenkaiger and Donbrothers, and there are some genuine concerns that the series may finally die soon after all of these years (although, in a bit of bitter irony, it’s still doing a lot better than Digimon despite that). Of course, it being such an iconic cultural property gives it a bit of insurance from having the plug pulled on it abruptly, but there are definitely concerns. Time will only tell how things work out, but there’s no doubt that even the modern incarnation of Sentai, despite it having changed greatly from what it used to be known as before, still has a lot of core elements regarding its approach to ensemble casts, team balance, character color coding, and hero writing that are very important to the kids’ shows surrounding it.

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Besides, the opening for the currently running series totally slaps.

#digimon #digimon frontier #super sentai #shihameta #please consider this my repentance for not finishing frontier fest

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shihalyfie · 2 years

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do you have any thoughts on the relationships between the characters in appmon? (bit vague i know but, i'm curious about your thoughts esp regarding eri n astra's relationship)

One thing that I think is most notable about the Appmon group is that they're one of the very few Digimon groups to be explicitly delineated "social-life friends", or, that is to say, they spend their days hanging out and doing mundane activities even if they don't have any world-saving duties in play, and they seem to be the closest friends available in their immediate lives. This isn't always the case for most Digimon lead casts! It's one of the biggest differences between the Adventure and 02 groups. Tamers was somewhat of an edge case about this; in Tamers, the Yodobashi Elementary kids did play together in places like the Shinjuku park, and Ruki would sometimes stop by, but she still had a bit of extra detachment and her own character arc was closer to her family than anything. Frontier's another edge case because post-canon material has definitely established that they at least keep in contact, but Izumi, Junpei, and Tomoki's character arcs in particular depend heavily on their ability to make friends outside the group.

The Appmon group has an interesting variation on it in that while not all of them are a cohesive group at the same time -- Rei unfortunately doesn't start becoming more attached to the group until around the time he's started harboring doubts about Yuujin -- they do all gravitate around the "base" in Kashinoki Books, and specifically around Haru. And Haru doesn't even realize this -- he doesn't assert himself as the leader or anything, but everyone starts naturally gravitating towards him because of his natural kindness and friendliness! They don't say it out loud, but they're all there because Haru brought them there, and you'll notice that when Eri and Astra learn about YJ-14's betrayal, they're less offended by the betrayal than they are by the fact he specifically betrayed Haru.

But they are a friend group that loves to hang out with each other, simply because they enjoy each other's company. (And while it does look like Yuujin's world revolves around Haru exclusively, keep in mind that the reason he idolizes Haru so much is that Haru helps him make other friends. Note that in episode 18 he doesn't show any particular jealousy or misgivings about Haru starting to hang out with other friends besides him, and in fact him getting along easily with Eri and Astra was already setting the tone for him getting along with the rest of the group once he formally joined them.) Also, while the series focusing on the ongoing battle with Leviathan, it may be easy to miss, but Ai is actually as much of a member of the group as anyone else as long as the incident in question doesn't require having a Buddy Appmon or being able to see non-Apprealized Appmon. Socially speaking, the others clearly see her as one of them by the end of the series, and since Rei starts hanging out with them in the basement by the end of the series, Hajime probably applies too. Of course, a lot of this is fitting because Appmon specifically makes a point about apps and technology being inevitably integrated in one's daily life, so the line between doing work as an Appli Driver and normal social activities is heavily blurred.

So it's a group that really just likes each other's company, and, more importantly, is constantly out to support each other. Haru is not a talented soccer player nor a famous influencer, but he supports everyone in any of their endeavors and aspirations, which is how he reaches out to Rei in episode 12 (after which the desire to help Rei is constantly on his mind thereafter). The group constantly checks on each other's endeavors and successes, like supporting Eri on TV or checking Astra's video performance. Ai holds down the fort and brings food and information when they need it. Compared to a group like the 02 kids, the Appmon kids are generally more well-behaved and put-together (this is by design, under the reasoning that this is more accurate to real-life modern kids), but they share something in common in that both are groups that are unabashedly ride or die for each other in every way, especially in terms of emotional support. Which is, naturally, in line with Appmon's core theme of kindness and understanding being the most necessary thing in an accelerating world that encourages cold efficiency.

In regards to Eri and Astra specifically, Eri stands out as the only member of the group to call Astra "Tora", and I get the impression that her awareness of him as a younger child is slightly higher than, say, Miyako towards Iori, which involves Miyako seeming to completely forget the concept of age at times. Whenever Eri and Astra bicker, it's usually along the lines of Eri being irritated this elementary school kid is talking back at her. But other than that, Astra is clearly bearing so much and working so hard that it'd be condescending or demeaning if she tried to lord her status over him, and Astra''s way of being in-your-face is out of friendliness as much as it is cheekiness. So the two afford each other as much respect as if they were peers, which is especially prominent during their episode 35 collab when they work together on a completely equal level, and Astra's remarks about her in episodes 36 (The Best Tenth Place Ever) and 40 (figuring out Fakemon because he knows Eri too well) are done out of that sentiment of mutual respect. In general, the group doesn't seem to normally be too conscious of age hierarchy; this is around the line of 02 and Frontier's groups, but while 02 and Frontier mainly came from the characters often being too much of a disaster to enforce the hierarchy well, in Appmon the nuance is more that they all respect each other and each other's accomplishments and abilities too much for the hierarchy to be meaningful.

#badmistmountain #appmon #shiha's ask box #shihameta

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shihalyfie · 2 years

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Adventure/02 (and Kizuna) timeline and lore contradictions (and things are not actually contradictions)

Pretty much every kids’ anime like Digimon is written and often rewritten as the series goes along, but Adventure and 02 do happen to be particularly obvious cases where a good chunk of the plot doesn’t seem to have been planned from the very beginning, and a lot of things are rather blatantly retroactively rewritten to account for it. They actually admitted this, too -- they weren’t entirely certain the series would go for one year at first, so they basically winged it with a “loose mindset”, and then by the time they got to 02 they didn’t confirm there wouldn’t be a third series until very late, resulting in a bid to get everything out of their system before 02 ended so they could leave with no regrets.

That said, considering how incredibly complicated the Adventure/02 timeline is and how sprawling its lore is, there is a remarkable amount of consistency between everything to the point where it’s pretty clear some very diligent notes were being kept back there (which is also supported by the fact that background materials released over the last decade have generally tracked with each other to some pretty terrifyingly impressive degrees). Moreover, a lot of things commonly considered to be contradictions have actually been addressed, even if only briefly -- whether the explanation seems a bit belated or forced is up to subjective opinion, but nevertheless it respected the audience enough to offer an explanation. Still, some things did unfortunately happen to slip through the cracks, so which ones are those (and which ones aren’t)?

Note that I’ve already covered most of these topics in other longer meta, so this is just a post made to organize everything in one place and link to the relevant ones. Also note that this post is mainly for informational and reference purposes -- I absolutely do not subscribe to the theory that plot contradictions are necessarily what make something bad, so I’m writing this from the perspective of useful things to keep in mind for fanfic or other similar things.

(Kizuna-related things are deliberately clustered at the bottom of the post in case you want to skip that.)

Other than one famous point from Tag Tamers (see the Media Mix section below), the WonderSwan games and tri./the stage play are not included in here mainly because both series have so many unaddressed contradictions all the way down to premise that they’d basically eat up the entire post. Both of them are still treated as part of official canon, but unfortunately official doesn’t seem to have any indication of wanting to resolve the contradictions anytime soon, so it seems like the job of how to handle this may have to be best left to the individual fanfic writer...?

Also, a reminder that no matter how many contradictions something has, the official stance is that everything is canon no matter what, so none of this should be taken to discredit any of the below involved works. Official does not expect you to cut anything out wholesale, it just simply won’t help you figure out how to make sense of it.

Media mix-induced contradictions

Digimon is what’s known as a “media mix”, which is basically a subset of a multimedia franchise in that there’s an emphasis on releasing tie-in materials for a series simultaneously (which means things like anime, manga, and games will all be produced and released together). Unfortunately, this creates a problem where it’s often hard for the simultaneously-working teams to swap notes or keep things consistent with each other. Anime director Kakudou Hiroyuki has been very clear about the fact that anything he wasn’t involved on has a very high chance of going against the background lore he’s created in some way (mainly the video games, Our War Game!, Hurricane Touchdown, and Kizuna), and this is a recurring problem with pretty much any series made like this, not just Adventure (as an example, it’s why Tamers has similar problems fitting Ryou within timeline, why the second Tamers movie contradicts other post-finale Tamers materials, and why the Frontier and Savers movies don’t seem to quite fit in their respective series timelines).

This is the most consistent source of contradictions or overly convenient/forced explanations, and the fact maintaining this was an increasingly difficult task for the anime staff is a major reason the 02 staff decided not to make a third Adventure series. Note that the fact the staff even tried to do this is remarkably rare for Toei series -- usually all of the contradictions are just dumped on the audience, and they’re forced to figure it out themselves.

When did Ken adventure with Ryou in the Digital World and get hit with the Dark Seed?: The WonderSwan games and Tag Tamers basically disregard the anime in almost every aspect (as said earlier, I don’t intend to cover all of it because we’d be here too long, it’s just this one is too plot-relevant to 02). I’ve tried very desperately to make sense of it from the anime prioritization perspective, but the truth is that it’s impossible, and it’s likely the anime staff themselves weren’t sure what to make of it either. The anime itself seems to imply there were two Digital World visits, the first in August 2000, but Tag Tamers wants to suggest Ken actually was taken to the Digital World right after the Diablomon incident in March 2000. Pick your favorite.

Sora’s birthday: This is a relatively obscure one, but interestingly, Kakudou seems to have doubled down pretty hard on the fact this wouldn’t have happened if he could have prevented it, due to an internal policy of not giving any character besides Miyako a clear horoscope sign (which setting Sora’s birthday in late February or early March would go against). This is probably the reason why official 02 profiles cite her as 14 during 02, which shouldn’t be possible if her birthday were indeed in February or March (02 takes place between April and December).

Wallace being a Chosen Child before 1995: The revelation that the concept of “Chosen Children” was created in 1995 (from Adventure episode 45) and the hidden lore revelation that the number of total Chosen Children doubled every year since then seems to be pretty serious business for people who keep track of lore documentation on the Japanese fanbase side of things, so this is actually the main reason Hurricane Touchdown’s canonicity has been disputed among Japanese fans. Wallace says in the movie that Chocomon disappeared in 1995, which would imply he met him before then, when in fact the concept of a Chosen Child shouldn’t even exist before then. There are a few patches you can make (for instance, “being a Chosen with a Digivice” is what was invented in 1995, not the sheer idea of meeting a Digimon, so maybe Wallace didn’t get an actual Digivice until later, or maybe Wallace both met and lost Chocomon in 1995, although this is unlikely) -- but official has never helped you with this one.

How Seraphimon and Holydramon were able to appear when Patamon and Tailmon shouldn’t have been able to evolve to Perfect, let alone Ultimate, at the time: This is the Western fandom’s biggest point of dispute about Hurricane Touchdown being in canonicity (for some reason, the Japanese fanbase doesn’t seem to worry about this part as much, maybe because the rest of the scene itself has a lot of other things to ask questions about). Yeah, this one I’ve really got nothing on.

How Jogress and Perfect/Ultimate evolutions were possible in Diablomon Strikes Back (and afterwards): By the time of the end of 02, Agumon and Palmon should have been the only ones able to still access Perfect/Ultimate due to the loss of Qinglongmon’s DigiCore power in 02 episode 39, and in 02 episode 50 Tailmon’s Holy Ring was returned to her on the grounds it was powering Jogress and “Jogress isn’t needed anymore” (implying giving it back to her would remove anyone’s ability to Jogress). But MetalGarurumon appears in Diablomon Strikes Back, as does Imperialdramon. This apparent contradiction is a fairly easy one to resolve -- it’s not like “power sources” like Qinglongmon’s DigiCore are particularly lacking in the Adventure universe, so just imagine something cool happened to restore their evolutionary abilities sometime between December 2002 and March 2003. There, easily done.

Contradictions within the series itself

A lot of things often perceived to be contradictions in Adventure and 02 are not actually contradictions (see below), but there are still a few remaining loose ends:

Why Agumon couldn’t evolve in Adventure episode 3 despite having plenty of food and rest: Still no explanation. (Of course, the meta reason is that it was Gabumon’s episode to get an evolution, so it was obviously to prevent Agumon from stealing his thunder.)

The treatment of clothes changing: Obviously, the clothes changing in the Digital World is actually a mechanic to ease animator load so they can default to the same character designs (and on a lighter note, to explain Ken’s Kaiser outfit), but it is funny how it only seems to apply to a few kids and not everyone. A dominant Japanese theory as to why it only seems to apply to the 02 kids in the specific way it did is that it only applies to D-3 holders (further theories have even gone as far as to suggest it “locks” in the outfits they’re in when they receive their D-3 unless something drastic happens), but nothing’s been officially confirmed.

How much energy it takes for Digimon to be in the real world: In short, it is consistently shown that being in the real world is somewhat draining on Digimon, but the actual extent tends to vary. The rule naturally seems to be enforced more strictly on V-mon, Hawkmon, and Armadimon, and not strictly enforced on the Adventure Digimon, but for some reason Wormmon seems to also not have it very tightly enforced (although he does claim to still feel the exhaustion in 02 episode 33). Of course, the practical production reason is that the 02 kids bring their Digimon into the real world far more often, so having them in smaller forms that are easy to hide is easier to devise scenarios around, especially since Patamon and Tailmon are small enough to not need to worry about it as much as, say, Agumon.

The missing bunk bed: Ken and Osamu were supposed to be sleeping on a bunk bed, which is directly stated in words in Spring 2003 and setting documents, and you can somewhat infer it from the fact Ken himself sleeps on a modified one. But when we see flashbacks with Osamu in 02 episode 23, in what seems to be possible animator error, the mythical bunk bed in question never appears...

Whether the international Chosen’s Digimon were in the real world or in the Digital World: It’s implied the international Chosen were in the same boat as the original Adventure kids in that they couldn’t open gates -- hence why the 02 kids had to go around the world to open it for them -- but, strangely, their partners are with them in the real world during 02 episodes 40-42, despite this being known to be a very bad idea if you don’t have consistent Digital World access. By the time of the finale in 02 episodes 49-50, they’re all back in the Digital World...?

Adventure mini dramas and Armor Evolution to the Unknown: ...Look, I don’t know either. There is so much to unpack with that one that I don’t know where to even start. On the other hand, the drama CD is blatantly tongue-in-cheek and basically canon crack material, so it’s probably best to not think about it too hard.

Things that aren’t actually contradictions

A lot of the below are commonly brought up in fan discussions as being contradictions, but in fact aren’t -- albeit they’re usually addressed in obvious retroactive lore patches or single one-off explanations, so it’s understandable people wouldn’t easily remember they were actually explained already, but nevertheless, they were!

How Gennai doesn’t seem to know about Homeostasis or Digital World history even though he really should: You might notice that in 02, Gennai is actually incredibly efficient about information-giving and perfectly helpful. The novel basically confirms what this implies: Gennai was not in good physical or mental condition at all during the time of Adventure, and that incredibly aged appearance was not just for show. It is far more than likely the black ball inserted into him may have outright damaged his memory and internal processes.

How everyone just conveniently forgot the events of the first movie: Of course, the in-series explanation is that they all repressed the childhood memories because it was passed off as a terrorist bombing incident, but even so, it’s an awfully clean amount of memory erasure for a whole seven kids to have, isn’t it? Actually, they did explain it a bit more than that -- it’s quite literally divine intervention (apparently beyond even Homeostasis’s control). Yes, it is the literal deus ex machina. This is also apparently the reason why everyone conveniently moved to the same tiny island of Odaiba years after that. (In more practical real-life terms, the answer is more that the movie wasn’t coordinated with the TV series staff, so a forced explanation had to be conjured up to find a way to keep the first movie canon in a TV series that was a bit too obviously not made with that movie in mind.)

How Yamato’s dad Hiroaki knew about Gabumon without being told: A single line of Gabumon gasping at how Hiroaki somehow knew about him beforehand has led to years of speculation about Hiroaki somehow being a past Chosen or something, and...it’s a dub mistranslation. Specifically, Hiroaki said “Gabumon, right?” in the sense that it’s implied Yamato just explained it to him offscreen, and Gabumon answers a bit flustered because he’s not used to Hiroaki addressing him, but the American English dubbing staff seemed to have misinterpreted it as a sign Hiroaki knew something he shouldn’t have. But no, in the original Japanese version, it was just an ordinary, friendly conversation (and Koushirou clearly had to explain Digimon to him in Adventure episode 36, so no, he has no prior knowledge).

If Homeostasis could do all that, why did they go out of their way to summon a bunch of otherworldly kids and make them do all the work?: This question is behind the general sentiment of “Homeostasis is a selfish jerk” interpretations, but the thing is that they’re being completely honest when they say this is literally all they can do (if you doubt their words, the novel confirms that it actually has barely any jurisdiction over anything at all besides being a “mere” security system). They directly tell the kids in said episode that 1) they’re not a god or anything of the sort, and 2) their abilities basically extend to asking the Agents to do things on their behalf, and creating a repair system to help reverse damage. That’s it -- expecting any more out of them would be like asking the security alarm system repair technician to do something about a fire about to burn down the entire building. Getting the Chosen Children into this was an act of desperation. That’s presumably why they’re named “Homeostasis” -- homeostasis maintains regular functional balance within a system, but it can’t do much when something really drastic happens.

How would a team of Chosen existing before Taichi’s group even be possible? And if they did exist, why didn’t they come help during Adventure?: The facts of “a team of Chosen existed before Taichi and his friends” and “there are no Chosen before 1995″ initially seem like a contradiction, because we’re told that the first sealing of Apocalymon seems to have been some many years ago from the Digital World’s perspective. The thing is that even the small space between 1995 and 1999, or even 1998 and 1999, is enough to be millennia in the Digital World, going by the calculations provided in the series -- and Two-and-a-Half Break locks down on the number of Chosen doubling every year since 1995 (although Koushirou seems to have accidentally halved his calculation), so it seems you were supposed to come to this conclusion. This also explains why they didn’t just recruit the older Chosen Children to help with the Apocalymon incident the second time -- they’re not much older than the Adventure kids themselves, and going by the novels explaining that the older Chosen team’s partners became the Holy Beasts, they were probably a bit busy being sealed and all that to really help in Adventure’s events.

How well-recognized are the Digimon by 02?: The treatment of Digimon by the public in 02 does seem awfully well-understood for something that’s supposed to be kept a secret from the public...and that’s because it wasn’t a secret, actually. Everyone saw the Digital World in the sky during Adventure -- there was no way they’d ever be able to cover up anything after that! 02 episode 39 has Gennai say that they deleted scientific and military research on the Digimon, presumably because unethical experimentation and military weaponry development would absolutely be a dangerous thing to let the public have so quickly, but it seems like journalistic (Natsuko, 02 episode 38, novels) and humanities (Haruhiko, 02 episode 33) research were fair game -- especially since people like Natsuko, Hiroaki, and Haruhiko started becoming effective emissaries to explain Digimon to the public by 2003. Well, considering that it was obvious the public would learn about the Digimon whether anyone wanted them to or not -- especially given the events of Adventure, Our War Game!, 02 episodes 38-50, and Diablomon Strikes Back -- the kids’ efforts to keep things on the downlow were more on the lines of preventing mass panic and allowing the public to learn about Digimon in a safer way, but nobody seemed to have the illusion the public had no idea about Digimon at all.

Hurricane Touchdown’s timeline placement: Often submitted as proof of Hurricane Touchdown’s supposed lack of canonicity is that it’s difficult to fit in timeline, particularly due to Ken’s conspicuous absence and irrelevance, but just because it’s hard doesn’t mean it’s impossible. The advertising for the movie suggests that it should take place during summer 2002 (with very few exceptions, most 02 works take place around the time of year they released in), which basically could mean pretty much anywhere between episodes 14 and 18 (when summer starts but before the Kaiser base expedition) or between episodes 21 and 22 (when the Kaiser has been defeated but the autumn season hasn’t started yet). Personally I prefer the latter, because it does a lot to explain why Ken isn’t remotely on anyone’s mind at the time, and makes sense regarding Daisuke’s experience with the Digimental of Miracles.

Oikawa and Hiroki meeting a Digimon in the 80′s: Likewise, the fact there can’t be Chosen before 1995 might suggest Oikawa and Hiroki meeting Pipimon and other Digimon all the way back in the 80's shouldn’t be possible, but note that the only thing we learned about the 1995 thing is that “humans specifically partnered to Digimon to help them evolve spontaneously” (Homeostasis said in Adventure episode 45 that “spontaneously evolving” with the help of a human was what they learned from the Hikarigaoka incident). Simply “making contact” with Digimon is not out of the range of possibility, and 02 episode 33 and Two-and-a-Half Year Break implies this had already been happening throughout all of human history.

How Taichi got into the Digital World in the first episode of 02: Taichi and friends were cut off from their partners at the end of Adventure, but more in the sense they no longer had a reliable way to get in touch with them whenever they felt like it. In terms of just “sheer making contact”, that happened three times during the mini dramas (yes, they’re canon), plus the incident mentioned in 02 episode 26, and also the 15th anniversary drama CD...and, basically, they actually had quite a few opportunities to meet during those times, so that’s presumably why Taichi doesn’t even act like he’d been seeing Agumon for the first time in three years or something. The gate was opening, just not often, and 02 episode 22 even implies that the Digital World has a sort of will that opens the gates up proportionally to however much it needs help at the moment. So, presumably, Taichi just went in because the gate was open.

Daisuke and Iori’s ages: In official profiles, Daisuke and Iori are 11 and 9 respectively at the start of 02, but setting materials reveal they were 7 and 5 at the time of Adventure. This is possible if both of their birthdays are after August 3 (note that 33/50 episodes of 02 take place after then). Keep in mind that official profiles also say Miyako is 12 in 02, but her birthday is in May-June after the series starts, so this isn’t an unreasonable interpretation at all.

Osamu’s age: This one’s more “borderline” than anything, but depending on the material you consult, Osamu is either three years or two years older than Ken. This is actually possible to resolve if you take a very broad look at the fact they’d be two years apart at a given time of the year and three years apart at others (which honestly kind of drives home the fact that maybe they’re a little too realistically accurate about citing things like these).

How international Chosen can exist without D-3s, or at all: None of the international Chosen seen in 02 have D-3s, so it seems they were at the mercy of gate openings and closings, and you’d think, why do they even have Digivices? You can’t be implying they had some of their own adventures in the Digital World a la Taichi’s in Adventure, right? Well...yes, actually. They do actually imply this. The Digital World is revealed in Adventure episode 15 to be, in a sense, something you could superimpose on the real Earth, which means it’s just about as big as Earth itself, and the Tokyo Chosen Children we know have probably only seen a very tiny fraction of it (the fact 02′s D-3s allow for some degree of teleportation makes it harder to notice this fact, but Qinglongmon only governs the “Eastern” part of the Digital World, after all...). So yes, the equivalent of Digimon Adventure isekai may well have happened to a bunch of kids all over the world. Also worth noting is that Gennai and the Holy Beasts aren’t as all-powerful as their character archetypes would suggest -- Gennai himself apparently isn’t able to keep track of what every Chosen Child is doing on his own. The existence of Chosen Children is something Homeostasis and the Agents helped facilitate, but the phenomenon does seem to be somewhat beyond them as well.

Kizuna (both contradictions and non-contradictions)

Despite the premise initially looking like a massive contradiction against 02 and its epilogue, if you investigate further, Kizuna actually is fairly compliant with Adventure and 02 even down to the details, as long as you’re willing to think about it hard:

Jou’s age: Jou is 11 in Adventure as of August 3, 1999 (Adventure episode 35). 02 profiles list him as 14, which is somewhat plausible if his birthday is between August and December (again, 33/50 of 02′s episodes take place after August 3, so this isn’t unreasonable). The problem is that Kizuna profiles list his age as 23, which is mathematically impossible because it takes place in July 2010. The only way to really resolve this contradiction is if you interpret that “23″ very loosely, as in “Jou is 23 at some point in the year Kizuna takes place, after the actual movie events”.

The 02 epilogue taking place in 2028: This figure was given in a lot of Kizuna advertising material, and initially sounds strange because the 02 epilogue is allegedly “25 years” after 02′s finale, but as it turns out, evidence points to 2028 having always been the correct year from the very beginning.

The doubling-every-year principle: If a handful of Digimon partners start disappearing based on their human partners having an existential crisis, you’d think that’d start really messing with the math leading to everyone having a partner in the epilogue, but Kizuna is otherwise fully compliant with the original doubling-every-year principle in background Adventure and 02 lore. The movie is deliberately ambiguous about whether partners that have disappeared really have disappeared, or whether they just simply aren’t visible or manifested, so it’s easy to rationalize this by concluding that even partners who have ostensibly “disappeared” count towards the total.

Morphomon identified as Menoa’s partner in 2002: The blurb in the newspaper article identifies Morphomon as Menoa’s partner, but the article is from 2002, which is awfully early for them to know what a Digimon partner is. However, while it’s a stretch, it’s not impossible -- again, the Digimon weren’t actually a public secret by the time of 02, and judging by Menoa’s photos, she seemed to have been quite open about Morphomon’s existence to her parents. Menoa seemed to live in a very sleepy village in Colorado, so it’s completely possible she trusted the locals around her with knowledge of Morphomon’s existence, and they might have been quicker on the uptake for the concept of Digimon than others.

Menoa as a Digimon researcher: Organized Digimon scientific research wasn’t possible until 2002 because Gennai and his colleagues deleted any data relevant to it (02 episode 39), but Menoa is admitted to Liberica in 2002 under the presumable premise of wanting to do Digimon research. But not only did we get no information on how tightly the data deletion held after 2002, Menoa would also be someone the Agents would want to be able to do Digimon research, since as a Chosen herself, she could advocate for the Digimon ethically. It’s also possible this was why she became a Chosen in the first place (since she makes no reference to going on any combat adventures).

Digimon appearing in camera photos: Digimon in the real world normally shouldn’t be able to show up in camera photos or videos (Adventure episode 39, 02 episode 33, others), but we see multiple photos of Morphomon as part of Kizuna’s plot. Thing is...they’re all film photos, and it makes sense Digimon wouldn’t interfere with that. Digimon show up regularly on cameras in Kizuna’s present timeline in 2010, but given Kizuna’s world is one that’s had eight years since 02 to account for the fact Digimon exist, it’s likely they figured out how to make their cameras capture images of Digimon well.

Whether the movie connects to the 02 epilogue: Given the way the movie ends, it’s easy to come to the conclusion that it just veered off the track of the 02 epilogue...? But no, every single press release and interview that has touched on the subject has doubled down and redoubled on the fact the 02 epilogue is still canon and follows from this movie. There was no room for ambiguity left there. If you want a personal interpretation on how the movie and the 02 epilogue connect together, you can read a longer post here, but even regardless of personal theorization, given the movie’s themes of overturning things that seem impossible to do and having belief that they’ll meet again, the answer really is obvious: “they figured it out.”

How Tailmon and Hawkmon can Jogress outside Hikari and Miyako range in the penultimate memorial short: I’ve just been personally rationalizing this with the idea that Hikari and Miyako were there, just not focused on with the camera. But that one (and the next one, especially the next one) is fairly tongue-in-cheek, so maybe just don’t worry about it too much.

#digimon #digimon adventure #digimon adventure 02 #digimon adventure last evolution kizuna #shihameta

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shihalyfie · 2 years

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The D-Reaper possibly having feelings is a question I've mused about a few times over the years. You lean toward "yes?"

Absolutely. The D-Reaper's complete motivations aren't delineated particularly clearly, but while most portrayals of "AIs just following its programming" usually tend to lean on the idea they're mindless and don't know better, the D-Reaper definitely seems to have a sadist streak. Its (or more specifically the Juri imitator's) language also phrases things in ways you really can't interpret as fully detached; it's clearly interested in humanity and Digimon, it's just that the "interest" is in how disgusting and worthless it considers them to be.

Notice that the D-Reaper's stated motivations aren't about anything like how humans being "destructive" will endanger the world if left unchecked, like Yggdrasil in Savers or Leviathan in Appmon. It also doesn't even bring up the idea that it’s following its original directive of being a cleanup program; it's the other humans who discuss it themselves. It consistently justifies its reason for destroying everything as simply being that humans and Digimon are not "worthy" of existence because it decided that they're weak, pathetic, and self-destructive. That's not something that comes from following a directive; that's something that comes from developing a concept of condescension and pure, undistilled malice. It's true that its motivations originated from that directive of being a cleanup program, but that directive was twisted into the most malicious form possible.

My impression of the D-Reaper is a bit like No-Face from Ghibli's Spirited Away; No-Face started off (mostly) benign, but once it started consuming the bathhouse patrons, the act of becoming addicted to its own gluttony, compounded with the patrons' own greed and malice, turned it into a walking embodiment of said malice. So it is true that the D-Reaper doesn't seem to have a full range of emotions, hence why it's so ruthless, but after eating and consuming so many Digimon (ones that, in the Tamers universe, explicitly live off a dog-eat-dog philosophy of life) and feeding off Juri's negativity, the malice and disgust towards others it embodies has way more than simply being just a dispassionate program.

#ask-anguirus #shiha's ask box #digimon tamers #d reaper #shihameta

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shihalyfie · 2 years

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Key Frontier writing staff roles and what parts they were in charge of

Following up from Adventure/02 and Tamers, and in honor of its 20th anniversary, here’s the Frontier version of the post!

Unfortunately, of the original Seki-produced “Digimon quartet”, Frontier is the one we know the least about production for, due to the fact its staff members don’t tend to be quite as talkative as Adventure/02/Tamers’. Because of that, we don’t have a lot to work with, and have to extrapolate from the little we have and the little we know of the writers’ other portfolios. That said, due to the general prominence of the “Digimon quartet” as a group, we do have a bit of information about it bundled in, and the fact said information is on print media has thankfully made it easier to preserve than websites that vanished off the Internet before being archived (Savers and Xros Wars...).

Note before we continue: As with before, this is only a small chunk of the staff involved in the series’ creation and story; this is also with a major focus on writing and therefore isn’t taking into account what must have also been major contributions from the animator and episode direction staff.

Seki Hiromi

Returning after Adventure, 02, and Tamers, for one final time as anime series producer (although most certainly not her final major involvement in the franchise), and known as the “mother” of Digimon anime as we know it. Because Kaizawa and Tomita aren’t particularly known for coming out in public much, Seki is pretty much our most consistent source of the majority of what we know about Frontier production. While it’s unknown to what exact degree she was involved in the story writing compared to Adventure/02 (where she was extremely involved to the point of making 02′s entire premise) or Tamers (where she seems to have been very hands-off other than providing some input here and there), since her focus is in character backstories and narratives, Frontier being a more character-focused narrative and Seki commenting often on said characters seems to imply that she was at least involved somewhat more than she was on Tamers, and interviews carry a nuance of her, Kaizawa, and Tomita often discussing the series collaboratively (all of their interviews pretty much consistently track with each other regardless of who’s talking).

In fact, it seems the story of how Frontier came to be left an impression on her to the point she repeats it almost as much as the number of times she’s mentioned how she came up with 02′s premise: Bandai came up with the idea of having the kids turn into Digimon, Seki went around asking people “I’m not a boy, so I wouldn’t know, but would boys really be interested in turning into monsters?” and everyone went “yes!” very enthusiastically, so she rolled with it.

Seki is known for being rather incredibly blunt and honest about things, so she’s been very straightforward about the fact things were already not looking good financially by the time Frontier had started planning, and that she had a feeling from the very beginning that Frontier was going to be the last series. As a result, her attitude towards the series is that she seems to mainly just be happy that the staff was satisfied with what they’d made and finished without any major regrets.

Kaizawa Yukio

In an incident that’s been cited multiple times over the years, after finishing up production on Tamers, Kaizawa gave a sentimental speech about how he felt like he’d “finally become a Digimon Tamer”, which touched her enough that she felt he was a good fit to be appointed again as well (in her words, she liked his “sensitivity”). Because Tamers was his first Digimon series, it seemed that he’d mostly left things to the other staff in trying to get a feel for it, so Frontier is said to be more in his comfort zone, especially in regards to worldbuilding (he’s consistently credited for this aspect and personally drew diagrams for it). On top of that, he was personally very attached to Flamon (who was originally intended to be Takuya’s base Spirit Evolution form) and was relieved they could at least reuse him in episode 22.

Kaizawa is the second most vocal about Frontier production after Seki, and although he hasn’t been quite as public as Kakudou was about Adventure and 02, he has spoken openly about the process of making Frontier's worldbuilding and the themes it involved, particularly about the Frontier kids having agency to “choose” compared to their predecessors. In line with Seki saying he seems to be quite the sentimental person, he does seem to talk about wanting both Tamers and Frontier to be “close to the children” and to inspire them in some way.

Although the fact he isn’t as public on the Internet means he hasn’t spoken about Digimon as much as Kakudou, Kaizawa is still pretty clearly fond of Digimon, and eventually went on to direct Hunters as well as participate on Xros Wars and Adventure: production. Much like Kakudou in Adventure and 02, Kaizawa likes to be involved in individual episodes even as a series director, but unlike Kakudou, he’s gone on to be series director for quite a few other things as well (most notably the 2007 series of GeGeGe no Kitaro and a PreCure series).

Tomita Sukehiro

Part of the reason we don’t know much about Frontier production is really that we don’t know much about its head writer, and he doesn’t tend to come out and talk much about it. We basically have only the one interview from the DVD box, and some hearsay from the other staff members.

What we do know is that he was brought on because Seki had apparently wanted to have him on for Adventure, but he was too busy at the time. Unfortunately, we can’t really tell how different that may or may not have made Adventure because its own head writer, Nishizono, also has only one interview that didn’t tell us a lot, and most of what we know about Adventure comes from Kakudou or the other writers who went on to work on 02 -- but it does seem that, like Nishizono, Tomita seemed to be big on giving the individual episode writers some degree of freedom.

It also seems that, on top of Frontier being “conventional” and “easy to understand” due to concerns that Tamers might have turned the kids off for being too difficult, another reason was that Tomita was new to Digimon and therefore it was advisable to make it easier for him to write.

Tomita’s one interview indicates that he’d put quite a lot of thought into the question of what "evolution" and "change" should mean in Frontier's context. Unlike Konaka one series prior, he definitely was very big on character backgrounds and backstories and worked on them with Kaizawa and Seki to the point of fleshing them out far more than what was in the series itself (although he encourages fans to come up with their own things even if they’re completely in contradiction with what he came up with). In particular, he pushed for Takuya to be a little softer and more compassionate than an average hot-blooded protagonist and for Tomoki to not get back at his bullies with violence; he also singled out Takuya as easier to get a feel for in writing and Junpei as one he particularly likes.

Tomita’s episodes for Frontier are the following: 1-3 (introductory episodes for Takuya, Kouji, and Tomoki), 9 (Tomoki and the forest), 10 (Kouji getting his Beast Spirit), 14 (Junpei getting his Beast Spirit), 22 (the one where Takuya briefly goes home), 24 (Volcamon vs. Junpei), 32 (Kouji defeating Duskmon/Velgrmon), 38 (Lucemon introduced as a threat), 43 (the return to Flame Terminal), and 49-50 (finale). Naturally, as the head writer, he was responsible for the biggest plot lynchpin episodes, but the characters he seemed to be most involved with were Takuya, Kouji, Tomoki, and Junpei.

Tomita also penned the movie (Island of the Ancient Digimon), which makes it stand out as a movie that was actually written by the original series head writer. This might be why the movie is so tied closely in theme to the original series, with only one extremely minor timeline contradiction.

Tomita retired from the anime industry in 2011 in order to start training junior writers, so as a result it’s unlikely we’ll hear anything more from him regarding Frontier, and future material was thus helmed by episode writers like Masaki and Yamatoya instead.

Narita Yoshimi

Another reason we don’t quite know a lot about Frontier production compared to previous series is that there doesn’t seem to have been a clear division of roles between writers -- testimony imples that there was quite a bit of organized collaborative effort between everyone. Even back in Adventure and 02, which involved throwing ideas in the collective pot to some rather absurd degrees, there at least was some rough attempt to assign certain characters to certain writers, and Tamers had Konaka basically leave entire character arcs to other writers without providing much input at all (most infamously, Maekawa basically doing the entirety of Impmon’s character arc). In Frontier’s case, even looking at the episode lists often doesn’t really show a clear role division, and we have no choice but to look at the writers’ other works for a look at their portfolio...but other than Tomita, Narita is the only episode writer to have never had any involvement in Digimon beforehand. That said, we do know that she would eventually go on to become an extremely prolific writer for Toei’s magical girl series PreCure, which does have several things in common with Digimon in regards to its character writing. (Well, Frontier may be the closest thing Digimon has to a magical girl series...)

Narita's episodes are 4 (Izumi's first evolution), 16 (Shutumon's first appearance), 20 (arrival on the Continent of Darkness), 25 (Asuramon vs. Tomoki with a dash of Karatenmon vs. Kouji), 30 (Velgrmon's first appearance), 36 (arrival at Cherubimon's castle), 41 (the beanstalk village), and 48 (Kouichi's sacrifice). It’s not really easy to pick out a pattern here, although it is notable that she seems to have been somewhat involved with some of the twins’ more dramatic moments, which may be why she wrote the twins’s tracks for the drama CD.

Yamatoya Akatsuki

Yamatoya is technically a writer for Adventure and 02 (a fact Kizuna and The Beginning advertising has liked to lean on), but he actually was only very minimally involved -- only a few episodes and a drama CD -- because he was busy working on Ojamajo Doremi. Frontier was the first series he was a regular episode writer for, and he would eventually go on to work on Savers; the fact he was eventually still regularly involved with Digimon as a whole was presumably the reason people didn’t really begrudge the sort-of-misleading advertising in regards to him and Kizuna, because it’s clear he still understood what the Digimon writing style was to some extent. Yamatoya is mostly known for his comedic writing, and he’s mainly made a name for himself as a writer for the very comedic series Gintama, but he’s also often praised for mixing his comedy with sentiment, and he still works on kids’ shows (especially Super Sentai) to this day.

Yamatoya's episodes are 5 (Junpei's first evolution), 11 (the introduction of Vritramon's spirit), 15 (Calmaramon's first appearance), 21 (Duskmon wrecks the kids), 28 (Ardhamon's first evolution and initial defeat of Mercuremon), 31 (the Trailmon graveyard), 37 (the final battle with Cherubimon), 40 (meeting Tomoki's bullies), and 44 (Gotsumon and Kouji's reunion). While there’s definitely some wacky humor in there (that Trailmon graveyard episode sure is a thing), there are some pretty dramatic episodes in there too, and some of Takuya’s best moments come from him.

Masaki Hiro

Notable for being the only person to be a regular writer for all of Adventure through Frontier. He’s also the only writer here with a Twitter account, so a brief Twitter thread in promotion of the Blu-ray revealed that, because he’d already gotten any remaining desires out of his system with Tamers, he focused more on making his writing from Frontier be more fun and exciting for the kids who were watching.

Masaki’s writing for Frontier is definitely quite the departure from his writing for the prior three series, where he was responsible for slipping in literary and cinema references he liked, building on lore a little, and supplying most of Tamers’ family drama and relationships. In Frontier, well, I’ll let the list of episodes speak for itself: 6 (Grottomon's first appearance), 12 (Takuya controls his Beast Spirit), 17 (Blizzarmon's first evolution), 18 (wacky Trailmon races), 23 (Takuya becomes one with nature), 33 (Kouichi accepts his darkness and gains his purified forms), 35 (debut of Hyper Spirit Evolution), 39 (the kids yeet themselves off the moon), 45 (return to Akiba Market), and 47 (beating the hell out of the Royal Knights).

Basically, although they don’t get quite as absurd as Urasawa’s in the last three series, Masaki is responsible for some of the series’ more absurd moments (perhaps fittingly, given that this was the first series Urasawa wasn’t on), and this is probably a big reason The Train Called Hope goes completely off the edge of absurdity at the end. But it’s not like he didn’t provide a healthy amount of drama either, and 33 in particular invokes the flavor of family drama akin to the kind he brought out in Tamers.

Yoshida Reiko

Yoshida penned all four Adventure/02 movies and was also a regular writer for those series whenever she wasn’t busy with said movies, but for Tamers, she only wrote one episode, and that was strictly because of her movie writing, but she made a full return as a regular writer for Frontier. (She eventually went on to become a very famous writer with an incredibly prominent portfolio for Kyoto Animation, and on the Digimon end she was also a regular writer for Xros Wars.)

Yoshida’s Frontier episodes are 7 (ToyAgumon), 8 (the Digimon kindergarten), 13 (meeting Seraphimon), 14 (the hamburger episode), 15 (Ranamon vs. Izumi), 29 (defeating Sephirotmon with combo attacks), 42 (the Village of Beginnings), and 46 (Nefertimon's library). You’ll notice that all of these episodes have a decidedly sentimental touch to them, which is something she’s very famous for (and yes, this means that she’s the one responsible for everyone’s favorite hamburger episode).

As a side note, you may notice that Izumi’s most important character episodes were handled by either her or Narita. This is most likely intentional, as it was a deliberate practice to at least try to have the female characters be predominantly written by female writers. This was actually attempted back in Adventure with Yoshimura Genki, but didn’t ultimately pan out, especially after Yoshimura settled into her role as the go-to for antagonist and villain writing; however, 02 still had some key Miyako episodes written by Yoshimura and Yoshida (most notably the Silphymon Jogress with Hikari), and it’s also the main reason Ruki’s character arc was given to Yoshimura to handle in Tamers.

Imamura Takahiro

Imamura was a regular episode director for both Adventure and 02 as well as the director for Diablomon Strikes Back; while he wasn’t involved on Tamers, he returned to direct the Frontier movie (and three episodes of Frontier itself), giving him a rather unique position in that he’s the only one to have directed two of the TV series-linked movies. Apparently he was somewhat of a last-minute grab at that too, but in any case, perhaps it explains why the movie is much like Diablomon Strikes Back in being so good at balancing out the ensemble cast.

#digimon #digimon frontier #shihameta

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shihalyfie · 2 years

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Have you ever thought about making a timeline for the Adventure Saga? Like, say in what order the events of the Animes, Movies, Games, CD Dramas, Live Plays occur in the Adventure universe.

Sure, I can try! I don't think I could go as far as listing a timeline of the individual events because of how much of a mess that tends to become (and, honestly, how much personal interpretation is required), but I can try and give a rough outline listing the works involved.

Note that with the exception of the Adventure novels and the stage readings like the ones at DigiFes, Toei and Bandai have never, ever, ever, ever, ever made a statement that you’re supposed to remove anything from canon. If anyone tells you “this thing can’t be canon because (insert some minor plot or lore contradiction here),” that’s something they arbitrarily came up with, that’s never been the official stance. This is especially because Tag Tamers, which is important for 02′s background, has very glaring contradictions with 02 itself, and of course tri., a six-part movie series that has a major timeline or lore contradiction nearly once every five minutes, still fall under the official stance that they’re supposed to be canon. Even with the Adventure novels, which by nature depict mutually exclusive events with the original series for formatting reasons, you’re intended to take most of its background lore and transplant it back into the original series, and the main reason the stage readings aren't considered strict canon is specifically because they're one-off shows that weren't preserved on accessible media, so it's unfair to expect anyone to have to take it into account (and the reason we know this is the official stance isn’t even from an Adventure thing, but from a certain writer getting upset about this from a Tamers thing). So in other words, I’ll be taking pretty much everything I can think of into account. If you have trouble making it make sense, I’ll leave that to you to figure out on your own.

Anyway, let’s go under the cut!

(1995) First Digimon Adventure movie

(Unspecified time) Event depicted in flashback in Adventure episode 45 (creating the Crests)

(Unspecified time) First track of Adventure 15th anniversary drama CD

(August 1999) Digimon Adventure (TV series), alternatively novel or PSP versions, all with some mutually exclusive aspects

(Between August 1999 and January 2000) Adventure mini dramas parts 1 and 2

(November 1999) Two-and-a-Half Year Break, Taichi’s track

(December 1999) Anode/Cathode Tamer

(January 2000) Adventure mini drama part 3

(March 2000) Our War Game!

(May 2000) Two-and-a-Half Year Break, Jou’s track

(August 2000? Might be March 2000?) Tag Tamers and D-1 Tamers

(October 2000) Two-and-a-Half Year Break, Sora’s track

(Unspecified time, likely 2000-2001, must be before April 2001) Event depicted in flashback in 02 episode 27 (unsealing the Holy Beasts)

(April 2001) Two-and-a-Half Year Break, Koushirou’s track

(Summer 2001) Second track of Adventure 15th anniversary drama CD

(September 2001) Two-and-a-Half Year Break, Mimi’s track

(March 2002) Two-and-a-Half Year Break, Yamato’s track

(April 2002-summer 2002) First half of Digimon Adventure 02 (TV series)

(Summer 2002) Hurricane Touchdown

(Summer 2002-December 2002) Second half of Digimon Adventure 02 (TV series)

(Winter of an unspecified year, possibly winter 2002-2003) Letter

(February 2003) Armor Evolution to the Unknown

(March 2003) Diablomon Strikes Back

(Spring 2003, Miyako’s track has to be April or later) Spring 2003

(Summer 2003) The Door to Summer

(June 2005-summer 2005) Digimon Adventure tri., parts 1-3

(Summer 2005) Digimon Adventure tri. “Super Evolution Stage” stage play

(Summer 2005-December 2005) Digimon Adventure tri., parts 4-6

(Unspecified time, likely around 2010) Memorial shorts #3-5

(Summer 2010) Where Should We Go?

(July 2010) Memorial short #1 (“To Sora”)

(July 2010) Digimon Adventure Last Evolution Kizuna (movie or novels in Dash X and Shueisha Mirai flavors, the latter has some mutually exclusive elements); memorial short #2 (”Hole in the Heart”)

(2012) Digimon Adventure 02 The Beginning

(2028) 02 epilogue

#zeto1304 #digimon #digimon adventure #digimon adventure 02 #shiha's ask box #shihameta

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shihalyfie · 2 years

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Let’s talk about Digimon Savers and its themes

Savers is kind of an “awkward middle child” in terms of the Digimon franchise, being Digimon’s first attempt at shattering a ton of precedents set by Adventure through Frontier but also not being quite as unconventional as later entries would be, and being in the unfortunate position where most childhood Digimon fans had outgrown the target age range but weren’t adults yet. It’s also got a lot of factors that make it difficult to market, since it’s relatively restrained and not particularly in-your-face with a lot of its elements compared to following entries like Xros Wars or Appmon, meaning that it tends to slip under the radar and not be discussed in that much extensive detail even among the hardcore Digimon fanbase. Because of that, I personally feel like any intimate discussion of its themes and characters tends to be woefully oversimplified -- it’s generally understood by most to be somewhat about xenophobia, but beyond that most of it involves memes about Masaru punching things because he’s apparently superhuman (which is absolutely not how the series actually portrays him in context), so I’d like to do something about that!

Savers is probably the most overtly political of all the Digimon series released to date -- while it’s hardly unusual for a Digimon series to have social commentary elements, they’re usually more aimed at more personal social issues and especially those that impact children, whereas Savers just goes ahead and rips into the problems with political systems and power structures, how they enable conflict at the expense of ordinary people, how “preconceived notions” come from those power structures instead of being based off actual truth, and how -- most importantly -- people willing to understand each other through their differences leads to greater things.

Given that, what are the main points brought up in Savers from a theme perspective?

“Hate”

The definition of “hate” here isn’t the “let’s all try to love and not hate each other” general meaning, but rather “hate” in the context of “hate crime” and “hate campaign”. It’s when you make condescending hatred of other things into your entire brand. It’s when you build your entire motive off of hatred of others. And it’s why major antagonists like Kurata and Yggdrasil are hypocritical and contradictory -- it’s not that they’re lying about their hatred and disgust towards Digimon and humans (respectively), it’s that everything boils down to hating and looking down on everything that’s not themselves.

Why doesn’t Kurata have a sympathetic backstory? Because this is how people in these kinds of campaigns often work in real life. It’s not always about some tragic sympathetic backstory that turns people to evil. And it’s not even like Kurata is the only one to feel this way; look at all the people he recruited under his thumb who seemed to be totally fine with Digimon slaughter. Even on the Digimon end, you see ones like Gotsumon (who may have reason to hate humans, but it’s too obvious his real priorities are kissing up to authority and picking whatever’s the winning side, which is apparent even after his memories are wiped) and Yggdrasil (who mostly works on the pretense of saving the Digital World, but is actually a control freak who’s most intent on exercising absolute power over the Digital World by any means necessary). It could have been anyone. Kurata was just the first. And Kurata didn’t need any special kind of charisma to get people to follow him -- he just needed the right connections in the government, to appeal to other conceited and condescending people (Kouki and Nanami), to appeal to people’s personal loyalty outweighing their morality (Ivan), or even outright blackmail (Tohma).

Go look at politicians and ardent right-wingers who paint themselves as supporting violence for a just cause, and you’ll see that Kurata is yet another one of those plucked right out of reality (right down to the “both sides” rhetoric often employed to force false devil’s advocate views). Everyone points out the hypocrisy that he chooses to merge with a Digimon despite claiming to despise them himself, but, again, that’s all true for these kinds of self-centered people in real life, who conveniently tweak their agendas for what’s all just self-serving greed. Even Kurata himself genuinely doesn’t seem to understand how anyone can have a mentality of not being the most ambitious kind of person possible -- chasing “ambition” is what strong people do.

In his dying moments in episode 25, Mercurimon warns Ikuto not to become like this. Note that he doesn’t tell Ikuto to not hate anyone -- but rather, to not make “hatred of something” his entire creed and reason for fighting, and to focus that hatred only on the ones who merit it. If Ikuto’s going to have an emotion like hatred, it needs to still all be in the name of the right thing to do, not just blowing it up at everyone else for the sake of being entitled to getting to hate others. That’s why Mercurimon points out Masaru and the others who helped and supported Ikuto specifically; is it right or healthy to spend your life or energy on broadly picking things to hate instead of focusing on why you hate those specific people who wronged you?

In many ways, Ikuto embodies the hell of the immigrant child experience -- being born a human but near entirely raised in the Digital World, he faces both sides actively trying to consider him “not one of us”, but as Sayuri (episode 23) and Mercurimon (episode 25) point out, Ikuto is someone who can understand both perspectives in many ways due to his unique position. Ikuto is encouraged to return to the human world not because that’s necessarily the “right” place to be, but because with Yukidarumon and Mercurimon both dead, the Noguchi family is the one place where they actively want to provide him with a new familial support system and to make up for the time lost with him. And, after all, what’s most important to all of us is our connections with those who are around us and supporting us. (More on this below!)

Even with the Ruin Mode incident in episodes 34-35, Masaru isn’t given grief for understandably being mad at Tohma’s apparent betrayal, but rather the fact he went so far into bloodlust that he made “beating the hell out of Tohma” the priority far over what his intent for beating up Tohma was for, therefore causing Agumon (ShineGreymon) to get indirectly hurt in the process.

The hell of government bureaucracy, systematic evils, and preconceived notions

Savers is unique in that it’s the only Digimon series (so far) to cover such a wide age range of major characters, from young children to old man Yushima, and that’s because it’s the series that covers topics that have to do with “the adult’s world” (that is to say, wide-spanning societal things that are often out of reach for a child) rather than being issues more personally relevant to children at school. DATS is a government agency, and while its developments and infrastructure are important for providing assistance and support for the protagonists throughout the story, they are by no means saintlike and said characters are forced to contend with a lot of other things enforced by a system that doesn’t care about anyone’s feelings -- it enlists elementary school aged children for bonding with Digimon (which almost happens to Chika in episode 12 and is implied to have already happened for Yoshino in episodes 12 and 17), and it has the classic problem of the higher-ups’ orders being enforced no matter how much it actually makes sense. Even Satsuma being a bit obtuse at the beginning (forcing Masaru and Tohma to work together for no good reason despite how much they hated each other at the time) ends up paling in comparison to how “not my problem” Hashiba gets in episodes 13-14, and suddenly Satsuma seems like a godsend for being able to game the bureaucracy system of the higher-ups on DATS’ behalf -- especially when Kurata exploits said system and Hashiba in episode 26 to gain support for his Digimon genocide plan.

DATS (and the government behind it) isn’t an ominous cartoonish council of evil, and it’s easy to understand why their presence is necessary -- Yggdrasil even gives humanity credit for forming DATS in episode 39 -- but it’s also responsible for enabling much of the conflict by ultimately prioritizing bureaucratic standards and the chain of hierarchy, complete with being willing to enable downright inhumane things in the process.

(Those having doubts about whether being critical of the government is really part of the series should take a quick peek at head writer Yamaguchi Ryouta’s Twitter and see just how much of it is dedicated to ripping the Japanese government and the LDP apart for their handling of practically every political issue imaginable.)

The final arc often brings up the topic of “unlimited potential” and defying the concept of “calculations” with the power of emotions. What this actually means is, more implicitly, that “rules” and “restrictions” and preconceived notions about what you can and can’t do are often enforced by people who are too narrow-minded, or have an interest in limiting others. In particular, Craniummon keeps defaulting to hiding behind his supposedly impenetrable shield in episode 44 because he has such absolute faith in it to protect him that he uses it as a default fallback -- so it's no surprise that taking enough of a repeated battering from the group's Digimon attacks (and one final punch from Masaru to finish it off) throws him off.

Even DATS feeds a bit of propaganda about Digimon to Masaru at the beginning (that Digimon can only eat special Digimon food, which Masaru believes for a while only to find that it’s very false). There’s nobody in this narrative who knows the right answer to anything, especially because the influence of humans and Digimon being together is such a wild card. What ultimately defeats Yggdrasil is not one of the Ultimates or Ultimate Burst Modes, but a powered-up Child-level Agumon, breaking preconceived notions about the system -- because, again, preconceived notions about how the level system works or what constitutes more powerful than what were all decided by these self-interested systems and narrow-minded ways of thinking to begin with. Nobody ever tried any of this before.

Those in power who exploit the people

Because much of the final arc of the series revolves around Yggdrasil’s status as an apparent “god” and the phrase “God is not absolute”, it’s easy to think that Savers is mainly just attacking the concept of organized religion (and to be fair, that probably is one of the things under the umbrella of what it’s discussing), but in actuality Yggdrasil’s way of acting “in the interests of” the Digital World is effectively comparable to any kind of authoritarian government or organized body that claims to work on behalf of the people but is actually working in their own self-interest. The group points out in episode 46 that Yggdrasil’s decisions of what “deserves to live” is basically just it making things up by its own rules and deciding things selfishly (especially because it decides to “test” Suguru and BanchouLeomon on a whim by holding Suguru’s body hostage and knowingly tormenting Masaru about it).

Yggdrasil continues to claim in episode 47 that it’s totally doing everything in the Digimon’s best interest, that it’s respecting their feelings of resentment by destroying the human world as revenge, but when the actual Digimon and humans get a say in the matter, it turns out...most of them are not genocidal like Kurata nor bloodthirsty like Yggdrasil, and would prefer to live in peace. (Now think back on any politician who’s justified war on the grounds of “well, they attacked us first!” and frame this as being in the best interests of people who never actually asked for it.) Even an “edge case” like the memory-wiped Gotsumon, who still blatantly has a kiss-up “fighting for the strongest side” mentality, still says in episode 47 that he wants a world where humans and Digimon can coexist. And, really, almost every Digimon Masaru and his friends met in the Digital World came around eventually to acknowledging that at least some humans are cool. Perhaps unsurprisingly, not a lot of people tend to be on board with genocide, no matter how many leaders claim to be acting in their best interest.

In the end, for a brief moment in episode 48, we see that Yggdrasil, the Digital World’s “god”, is really nothing but a fragile figurehead, something that surrounded itself in layers of defense and pulled all the powerful strings at its disposal to exert its force on what it considered right and wrong -- but in the end, it’s nothing. It’s a pathetic little thing that just happened to be in the right position of power to force everyone to do what it wanted, a control freak that throws a petty hissy fit and a tantrum when things don’t go the way it likes and looks down on people trying to do things it deems “close to impossible”. It’s arguably even questionable whether Yggdrasil really was a “god” in the first place, as much as it was a computer that convinced everyone that it should be treated as a god because of its authority -- Masaru calls it out in episode 47 saying that any “deity” who toys with its subjects’ lives like that has no right to call itself a god, and in episode 48, Gotsumon doesn’t refer to the loss of Yggdrasil in terms of actually losing a god, but in terms of the societal upheaval the loss of such a high figurehead would cause.

The most important thing we have is each other

Episode 37 has Ikuto call Kurata out for not having any friends, and while this can easily be taken as a simple “power of friendship” statement, it’s also a statement about what it’s like to be a person who refuses to make friends and only wallows in selfish greed. This concept is also what lies at the core of every provided answer to how to combat hate campaigns: mutual support and love, choosing to work with others instead of playing a game of who’s the most superior, is what wins out over people sustaining themselves on hatred and distrust ultimately coming out with no allies, no support, and nobody to help them when they’re at rock bottom. It sounds cheesy to say it, but it really is true! Tohma went and betrayed Kurata (episode 36) the moment he was free of Kurata’s blackmail; Kurata never really managed to cultivate any concept of true loyalty among his followers, because everyone there was selfish.

Yggdrasil tries to make its final case in episode 48: if humans and Digimon continue to interact, conflict is inevitable -- but Agumon responds that it’s all worth it. “We can’t learn to appreciate each other if we’re scared of getting hurt.” It’s true that conflict may seem inevitable when you put two very different things in contact, and it’s easy to think that this means you should keep everything separate for its own safety. But exposure to other things broadens your horizons and teaches you about new things you hadn’t considered before, allowing you to break out of your narrow-minded view of the world, and accomplish unprecedented things together. As is said over and over and over again throughout the entirety of the last arc: humans and Digimon can accomplish together what they wouldn’t be able to individually.

In fact, episode 48 makes the strongest assertion of Savers’ theses as a whole:

Masaru: It's true that we fight a lot over stupid things, and sometimes we even hate each other. From your point of view, we might have evolved in the wrong direction. But...! Agumon: Human emotions...make us Digimon stronger! Masaru: And the Digimon...give us both dreams and courage!

Those new horizons are expanded by presences like Ikuto (born a human but raised in the Digital World) or DATS’ Digimon (born as Digimon but raised in the human world), and eventually the DATS members themselves, especially Masaru, plus everyone adjacent to them like Chika and Sayuri. So even if it hurts, and even if you’re risking conflict, even if conflict seems inevitable, it’s important to appreciate the value in each other’s differences and to work together to create something new. Not just between things as different as humans and Digimon, but between all of each other -- as evidenced by the fact that what eventually stops the dimensional collision is not any calculated scientific discovery nor a brutal act like wiping out one world, nor the single act of any powerful figurehead, but the power of everyone’s emotions and feelings of wanting to live together in peace and understand each other.

The most important thing we have is each other.

Extra: Let’s talk about Masaru for a second and why he’s not some kind of superhuman

Look, making memes is fun. Masaru is an amazing character, and I completely get why it’s fun to make memes about him being some kind of incredible superhuman who can break impenetrable shields and punch gods, and I’ve even seen people claim that Savers is “very Shonen Jump” on the grounds that Masaru will whip out amazing superhuman powers above the others’ pay grade out of nowhere. (Is this even true for most Shonen Jump series?) I get that it’s funny and I really don’t want to ruin anyone’s fun, but there’s a certain point it really bothers me, because reducing Masaru’s achievements to strange superhuman abilities does a disservice to Savers’ themes, ignores the point of Masaru’s character, and moreover disregards the original context these scenes were placed in.

Other than punching Digimon on the regular obviously requiring a lot of physical stamina, Masaru’s not actually that special in terms of physical abilities. In fact, Yoshino demonstrates in episode 48 that she can reap the benefits of extra physical strength from manifesting DigiSoul if she really wants to. And Masaru shattering Craniummon’s supposedly impenetrable shield (episode 44) and punching Yggdrasil (episode 48) are not statements about him as it is about the actual frailty of what he was dealing with. In the case of Craniummon’s shield, the episode itself made it very clear that the shield was already giving way from the stress of repeated attack after attack from the other Digimon, and in the case of Yggdrasil, the whole point was that it was ultimately nothing but a shallow, fragile figurehead relying on giant shows of power to have any influence, one that Masaru could punch out easily (and as I stated earlier, calling Yggdrasil a “god” might be questionable in the first place, despite its self-styling). If you really wanted to portray Masaru as that amazingly superhuman, you could have had him destroy the 7D6 terminal or something, but having that little frail crystalline figure coming out had a very good reason behind it.

Masaru is Savers’ protagonist because of his mentality. He’s the one that does the honors with all the above punches because facing things in combat head-on is his style. He has no respect for the arbitrary enforcements of authority structures described above, adhering to his own moral code -- a strange one that has very specific definitions of “manliness” that comes from overapplying what his dad taught him as a kid -- but nevertheless one that’s probably closer to the right track than the power structures he’s often up against (or even technically part of, in the case of DATS). So much that Yushima comments as early as episode 2 that “the human world is too small for him” (or in other words, that the “Digimon world”, both in the figurative sense of getting involved in tackling Digimon incidents and in the literal sense when Masaru decides to join the Digimon in the Digital World in episode 48, was arguably a better fit for him to begin with). It’s also the reason Suguru got as far as he did, since Masaru got those open-minded traits from him to begin with, but Masaru is tasked by Suguru with surpassing him (episodes 35, 46).

The other extreme that I warn against pigeonholing Masaru into is that just because he punches things doesn’t mean he’s a violent kid with no respect for anything. As we see very often throughout the series, he respects his mother (he even snaps at Agumon multiple times for calling Sayuri by her given name only instead of anything respectful), understands his role as a surrogate parent for Chika (especially in episode 7), and doesn’t start fights against people unless they’re either causing trouble for others (i.e. endangering others) or when the other party is also interested in a fight and wants to do equal combat. (It’s also pointed out in episode 3 that there are fights he’s not good at; he does poorly in the more rule-bound, structured kind of combat that boxing entails, and is easily defeated by Tohma.) He also treats his friend Kouichirou (from episode 10) with kindness and seems to get along well with him, and becomes personally invested in the family's troubles for reasons that are blatantly not to do with the manjuu at this point, evidenced by the fact he briefly touches his dog tag, clearly empathizing with Kouichirou's admiration for his dad by thinking of his own. Masaru may be rough around the edges, disrespectful of authority, and a go-getter who prefers to do things hands-on, but he’s still someone with a strong sense of doing the right thing and caring for the people around him. In fact, every time Masaru begs for more power, it’s so that he can have the power to protect others he cares about (episodes 13, 37-38).

Most tellingly, given that the Bio-Hybrid trio is meant as foils to our main one (Nanami as a “genius” who’s conceited about her status instead of humble as Tohma is, Ivan as someone who prioritizes personal loyalty and “just wants to get by” but is willing to engage in literal genocide for it), Kouki is a foil to Masaru in that he’s bloodthirsty and violent but doesn’t have Masaru’s capacity for wanting to protect others, simply happening to be a bully who looks down on others and enjoys sadistically crushing them. Naturally, Masaru has no patience for that at all, and he and ShineGreymon spend the duration of episode 33 conversely trying to minimize as much damage as possible as they fight -- they’re doing this because they care.

#digimon #digimon savers #shihameta

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