So... the exact thing I was worried about happening, Reina's character arc revolving around not being as strong as her (male) teammates. Her male teammates who have been at this for a year and a month respectively while she has been at this for about 6 years.
The only non prodigy of the team is a girl.
Hmmm.
I'm not sure they could be more stereotypically "strong-female character" if they tried.
Not necessarily a bad character arc... in theory... but not to the only girl on a team. But its not even being set up well.
Its contrived that Makoto got Perfect before her. Tomoro as special protag boy is one thing, but fellow average kid Makoto is another.
Like obviously if her teammates all had perfects and she didn't you'd expect her to feel some way about it. But even then, her feelings obviously weren't important enough to bring up the past few episodes. But I guess better now than later.
So despite the fact this is more Reina, like I want, I'm not exactly set up to trust what they do, which means that even if it is decent, I'm probably going to be too annoyed to enjoy it.
I've previously commented on how excited Reina is for others evolutions. And how it seemed to subvert typical jealousy tropes. Welp. Not quite I guess. I just wish they would have set this up earlier if they were going to do something with it.
Once Gekkomon reached Adult, Reina stopped being the 2nd strongest in the team. Even if Reina wasn't jealous yet, her role in the team would have shifted. Start showing Reina's feeling on this topic so we can understand how these feelings developed.
And, Wolvermon as the designated champion (heavy hitter) in the early season, took a lot of losses for the sake of letting Makoto and Tomoro have a place in the fight. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's just a natural consequence of taking the story that direction. Different approaches have their positives and negatives.
But that's why its all the more frustrating now that the table has been flipped, the same logic doesn't hold true in reverse. Wolvermon was constantly brought down to Rookie level before, and now she can't hold her own at Perfect. A double standard.
And she did in episode 30. But if they're really going to draw attention to Wolvermon's current lack of strength, all that does is also draw attention to her past lack of strength.
Reina kicking that guys ass was great though. More of that please.
Reina is still the most invested in profits. Honestly, as she should be.
Anyway, the rest of the episode.
Mostly this episode feels like set up for the rest of the arc, which seems to finally be actually getting somewhere. The pieces that have been laid the past few episode are finally coming together as Rose, GIFT and the Brilliant Thorn get involved in the same conflict.
But considering there's only about 14 episodes left in the show, I'm wondering how quickly they plan to wrap GIFT up? Because we still have to address the Kaito, Honoka, Raito situation. And whatever Kanada and Wong have going on.
Gekkomon explaining who Asuka was has big little kid energy. Bragging about what he knows! He's in the loop! Even though it's not his place to say that information.
Miharu had an older sister. That's the hand. Older sibling huh? She's clearly meant to parallel Tomoro. Presumably that sister was cold-hearted.
Does Miharu have parents? Or was her older sister raising her and now she's been left alone, and vulnerable. As a foil to Tomoro not having anywhere to go without Asuka, being saved by Glowing Dawns presence, it makes sense that she'd find herself in the hands of someone who wants to take advantage of her.
I did like Miharu walking around the pool of water as she talked to Tomoro. Cool visually. I feel like there's some sort of symbolism there. She's got a sort of round about way of speaking. Despite she and Tomoro being reflections of each other they can't just meet.
Something interesting about Miharu's philosophy is that it is the philosophy of a human Digimon bond in most iterations (more specifically post-02 Adventure especially). So in many ways, yes, Beatbreak's world is a twist on what things should be. This twist was also found in the Cyber Sleuth duology, but still.
We've seen time and time again that Tomoro is extremely sympathetic to children, so it doesn't surprise me that he goes to protect Miharu when things go down. Even if Miharu is responsible for that amount of terrorism, he's both deeply sympathetic to what she has to say, sees himself and his mistakes in her. And the Glowing Dawn in general has a philosophy about second chances. It extends to this 13 year old girl as much as it does Digimon.
This isn't the first time Reina's been pulled into Tomoro's nonsense without context. But now Tomoro is getting her into situations she can't handle but Tomoro can…. hmm.
Rose and Reina… have to see how things play out.
The fact this plot has unfolded over the course of like. A month or two in universe really does make a lot of the plot developments somewhat contrived.
Typically, a Digimon season takes place over the course of a year, more or less. Obviously the passage of time is less clear in seasons like Adventure where the kids are in the digital world the whole time. But even Adventure makes it clear that the show from the kids perspective took months. There's implied passage of time between episodes. Usually the problem with the timeline of these kind of shows is that events seem to be cover a much shorter amount of time than the amount of time they allegedly do (Ex. Tamers Digital World arc supposedly taking place from October to February, despite the fact that the episodes don't seem to cover 4 months worth of events).
In Beatbreak has the opposite issue, it still being summer, when it started end of May, means that there really isn't time for the kids to be getting into situations off screen. And this is coupled with the fact that beatbreak is arguably more episodic than a lot of older digimon. It's definitely more serialized than Ghost Game. But the plot events don't flow into each other as smoothly as they do adventure. Partially this is because Adventure had a simpler plot, and also because it was a journey, so Beatbreak has a status quo that Adventure never had.
But the end result is things literally jump right in between plot points, in a very disconcerting way.
Beatbreak has a lot of cool ideas. It just cannot string its ideas together in a cohesive way. Saying something has bad pacing is such a nothing statement most of the time but its very true of beatbreak. The plot points feel out of order, everything is improperly set up, its like there's just a bunch of episode ideas but the connective tissue is completely missing and it's obvious because of the otherwise tight timeline.
It was more important to develop and give Raito, a non-main character, a perfect than it was to let her have even a single true focus episode in the first three arcs.
Hell, Raito was the focus of last episode. A lackluster episode that said basically nothing but "i had offscreen character development and am strong and nice now". Meanwhile Reina spent the whole thing knocked out.
Reina should be more important than Raito. Raito isn't in every episode. Raito doesn't have main billing. Raito and Reina are very similar characters, when it comes down to it. They have more in common with each other than either does Tomoro. And yet.
Anyway, why did Makoto have the ad break? He's got the least to do with the episode out of our main cast.
I know Vulcanusmon is brilliant. A genius. I know he is.
yet the urge to write him as a himbo is strong. because well... genius and common sense aren't the same thing, and canonically he doesn't seem to have much of the latter.
I liked this episode, but... even if I had wrong expectations, there's an aspect of this episode that fell a bit flat for me.
So, Reina's visible discontent with her current limit in power. Great! This was always what I thought her arc was going to be. My main problem is that it's only showing now? Like. It feels like the way she was acting in this episode is a through line from previous episodes where she expresses some discontent, but... that never happened?
So it just sorta comes across like a through line that only started this episode. Kinda cxlumsy writing IMO.
That being said. Miharu and Tomoro's dynamic is great. I love those two little dinguses projewcting onto each other LMAO. Miharu really struck me as desperate for a peer connection IMO.
Also her being a streamer makes me imagine her in that costume playing a farming sim and reading out donation replies LMAO
Miharu, cult terrorist leader and maiden in love.
Appealing to Tomoro's troubles by also having a sibling who she wants to bring back a smile to. No wonder he felt the need to protect her, as she said, "They're the same."
Episode 35 (Rampaging Instinct) preview:
Bombermon (Another Gammamon evo) and a worried Reina.
With a title like that... I wonder...
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