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I dunno if this is OK since you tend to avoid stuff about ▽, but since we're almost hitting its 10 years since its release... And how it's pretty much chillier to talk about this now...

I do think Meiko and Meicoomon's portrayal was essential for the recent human-digimon partnerships and how they worked differently from Taichi-to-Daisuke. Yes, i'm aware that this whole thing of "non-healthy digimon partnerships" started with Ken and Wormmon back in 02, but i feel like Meiko and Meicoomon brought more opportunities to explore non-healthy (and even hella toxic) digi-partnerships. And I do believe Gammamon's role as both protagonist and antagonist in Ghost Game had roots in what was supposed to be Meicoomon's case in the OVA series (i mean, it was kinda... hinted in her character song, according to a friend who's a Meiko oshi? But i never had the guts to listen to all of the ▽ character songs after listening to Hikari's and feeling it was not that good compared to the old series' character songs orz And i'm relieved that i got to like Hikari-Tailmon Kizuna's chara song album haha 💧)

Do you have any thoughts on Meiko and Meicoomon?

(deep breath) You know what? I'm going to do it. I've got some free time for the first time in a long while, so I'm going to use it for this.

I wouldn't have answered this four years ago (holy crap, has it already been four years since I started blogging under this name? The pandemic really did destroy my sense of time...) because public opinion on tri. in Western fandom was all over the place; saying anything remotely negative about it in public would attract harassment accusing you of trying to slander it, Kizuna's announcement and early release made things even worse, and since the stereotypes of "02 fans vs. tri. fans" and "tri. fans vs. Kizuna fans" binaries were rife, I was afraid that talking about it more than the few times I did would get me pinned as making a brand out of being "pro-02 and anti-tri." or something. And on top of that, frankly, my own emotions were still on a runoff from a pandemic rewatch of Adventure/02 and old fandom community-related wounds; I had to write that one workbook to get all of that excess energy out of my system, and even then I wasn't truly capable of being level-headed. I still regret a lot of things I said back then.

But now we've had two more anime series and another movie as well as multiple official statements about the issue, and I think things have calmed down enough that mentioning the series isn't as loaded, plus I've mostly gotten over the fandom drama and am in a much better headspace to tackle this. Avoiding going into the topic of tri.'s content too deeply for the last few years has meant I haven't been able to talk a lot about Meiko, Nishijima, and Himekawa, which is kind of a shame because I actually really like them a lot. Hopefully I can talk about this following issue in a way that will also be amenable to tri. fans and won't come off as an attack on the series (and especially Meiko, because again, I really like Meiko a lot). If I end up failing in this regard...I'm very sorry, I won't try to make excuses for myself.

Anyway. To put it simply, the biggest difficulty that always comes with talking about tri. is that "what the series wanted you to think" and "what it actually came off as" are two completely different things, and when analyzing anything from tri., the biggest challenge is reconciling this difference.

Why production circumstances actually matter here

There is no getting around it: everything points to tri.'s production being a disaster, and this fact reflects too strongly on the final product for me to not take into account. And I want this to be clear: I am not talking about it being a production disaster because I want to dunk on the series nor imply that people should look down on it, because goodness knows I have my own favorite things that were production disasters. I'm saying this because it inevitably affects my ability to do analysis, and unpacking what happened is important to understand why the series is written the way it is and what has to be taken into consideration when handling it.

(I promise, I'll explain how this relates to Meiko and Meicoomon and my understanding of their characters in a bit; bear with me a little here.)

The idea of tri. being a production disaster is not a statement I would make lightly, considering that 02 had also been accused of being a production disaster with writer infighting (in actuality, everything we've heard suggests that everyone in the writer's room had a great time, even if it was a little disorganized), so I'd be a massive hypocrite for lodging this against tri. without good basis. I also do think that bringing up this issue comes with massive risks, since people too quickly equate "production problems" with "bad product", or they assume that the entire staff is a monolith and not that there were actually people who clearly cared and were working hard on staff (they just weren't in high enough positions).

The thing is, everything we've learned about production overwhelmingly towards there being a disaster of such huge extents that even people who know what happened are pretty obviously trying to hold back on the level of how bad it was. I get the impression that part of the reason they're being so touchy about tri. right now is not just because of the series' content itself having a bad reputation these days, but also because talking about it too much would reveal things that would be too embarrassing to say as PR or would even throw certain staff members under the bus. Because even the things we do know aren't pretty, especially when it comes to the director, who:

deliberately does not consult the source material for things he adapts and even publicly said it in an interview as if it were something to be proud of, and, combined with the fact he repeatedly made basic factual errors about Adventure that even a casual viewer wouldn't make, suggests that he never watched Adventure in the first place and was working off a SparkNotes-level understanding of it

actively rejected scripts that attempted to be character-accurate on the grounds of them not being "mature" enough but then neglected to give the writers clear answers on what "mature" was even supposed to mean, and even confused the music composer (who had worked with him regularly!) on what his requests for "mature" meant

generally had such an obvious "well it's a kids' show that we're going to make mature" attitude that he bragged about tri. using the word "kill" because it wasn't a Kids' Show (...but the tri. scene he mentioned in question did not actually use it, whereas the original series did!), and even his last interview about tri. a year later kept going on about the "mature" thing

He's since become a notorious name in the anime industry for causing the exact same problems with every adaptation and spinoff he works on every time, so although I don't usually like to pin most of a series' problems on one director, it seems like he was a significant bottleneck and that this isn't just something based on one fandom's drama. According to his own statements on the matter in the above-linked article (about his work on the adaptation of the second Utawarerumono game, which aired during tri.'s production period and also ended up infamously having the same problems), it seems like he started doing all of this because consulting the source material for something gave him "regrets" about it restraining his creative freedom...so ever since then, he believed that not consulting it at all would be the better move.

(And if you're wondering "if his reputation is bad, why did they think it was a good idea to put him on Digimon?!", back in 2014 when tri. started, he hadn't gotten this reputation yet, and his most notable work was the third Persona 3 movie. Since main writer Kakihara was also on the Persona 4 anime and even Kizuna/02TB director Taguchi did two of the other Persona 3 movies, I'm guessing they figured Persona was a good place to find staff good at dealing with teenagers with psychological problems, which honestly isn't a bad idea. But it seems that, as a series somewhere between "adaptation" and "original series", tri. happened to be the first thing where he had creative freedom and not tightly controlled production, which is why things went downhill starting from there; if you want to look at things the other way, getting Taguchi was a gamble too, because he only started getting huge acclaim after the Bleach Thousand-Year-Blood War adaptation, and back during Kizuna he was only known for the 2017 Kino's Journey anime, which was a bit polarizing. Hindsight is 20/20.)

In other words, the fundamental core belief behind this production was that making it Mature™ was more important than actually making sense with the original series. Questions about why certain plot points were done, like why the Mysterious Man pretended to be the Kaiser, get answers like "to make it more interesting" (read: getting a reaction out of the audience was more important than having an actual reason). Even the color scheme was made with "being mature" as a direction! And I think the situation with Part 4 is an especially good demonstration: you had two scriptwriters who were childhood fans of the series and really did care about the characters, and even sounded the alarm by saying "I'm a little worried that people are going to hate Sora with this plotline," but their scripts kept getting rejected, which is how Part 4 seems to be on the right track but then keeps crashing into a wall at the last second.

But even if you try to omit the original series, it doesn't even make sense with itself, which probably had to do with the fact a given movie could have up to four (two is understandable, but four for a single movie?!) scriptwriters, the budget ran out halfway through and they had to rewrite the entire plot, and something nasty clearly happened with production to the point the original producer mysteriously disappeared 2/3 of the way in and Kizuna's production didn't retain anyone significant from tri. besides voice actors, music, and a producer who publicly disclaimed involvement in tri.'s story. Considering how tight-lipped Japanese PR usually is about things like this, the fact they were even able to say this much really makes me wonder how much more there is we may not know about.

A lot of people may be surprised to hear this given how much I talk about creators and production stuff, but I do believe in "death of the author" in that you don't necessarily have to talk about creative intent in order to analyze the final product. But the thing about Adventure content is that it can be very confusing to navigate unless you consult interviews and take pointers on what to look out for. And this is doable with Adventure and 02, because even with those being a ball of knots at times, the creators did seem to be conscientious about consistency and especially consistency in themes, almost abnormally so at times.

But with tri., even though I really don't want to assume worse than better, if you show me something that doesn't make sense and say "well, I'm sure there was some reason for it that you just haven't come up with yet," it is very hard for me to believe this. We have way too many things that indicate that many of the things that did make sense were flukes and that things that don't make sense were because whoever was up there legitimately did not care about it not making sense. So if someone trying to analyze it can't figure anything out, that's not their fault for failing at critical reading; believe me, I have genuinely tried, but the series just isn't written to make sense in the first place, and there was no consistent philosophy about what the series was even supposed to be about or what points it was trying to make other than being Digimon Adventure, but Mature™.

(And I've heard that apparently some Western fans have been claiming that tri. just uses some Japanese method of storytelling that Westerners are too ignorant to understand, but the structure in question is functionally no more complicated than "a three-act structure, except it's four," and that certainly would not explain why the Japanese fandom is arguably even more critical of the series than English speakers are. They're the ones who were really pissed off at the series over "lore", because it was seen as so glaringly in contradiction with the original series that it came off as disrespect for thinking the fanbase would eat anything up without caring.)

Meiko and Meicoomon as the series was written

The reason I'm bringing this up in relation to Meiko and Meicoomon is that I personally consider them to be the worst victims of this problem. When Meiko's presence was first announced, I was absolutely stoked because she was an original character made entirely for tri., which meant that she should be one of the most fascinating elements that provides novelty and stimulates discussion over things the original series didn't cover. And I was even pleasantly surprised that they had the newcomer be a girl, since I was convinced that any deuteragonist "new character" would be another male character. (I also love her design; the black-haired hime cut has a certain sense of "normality" that provides a good sense of contrast with the rest of the Adventure kids.)

But now that everything is said and done, she's probably the biggest example of a character I want to just rip out of the hands of her own creators (and believe it or not, that's not something I tend to feel very often). Let's put it this way: her name was picked purely to be kanji slapped onto a placeholder name of "A-ko", testimony from people who attended Q&A at screenings is that she's from Tottori not for any meaningful reason about being from the countryside as much as it's just fanservice about Shimane in Our War Game!, the scriptwriters even forgot she was supposed to speak in Tottori dialect and had to be reminded by her voice actress, and the director made a joke (at least I hope it's a joke) about her existing to satisfy a glasses fetish, and it's like. Could you treat your own characters with a little more care, please?

So once you look at the writing itself, it doesn't seem like they had any clear goals for her character other than something vaguely about gaining confidence and being unilaterally loved by the Adventure kids:

The fact that the Adventure kids unilaterally shower praise on Meiko without bothering to hold her responsible for anything actually hurts her more than anything else, because -- well, ever notice that the Adventure kids never actually bother to ask about her life, personal problems, or anything that would actually solve her problems at the root? All they do is shut her down by going "don't say that!" whenever she says something negative or self-deprecating, or they gloss over the problem by saying things like "we've all got our faults!" to Meiko agonizing about her partner causing literal murder. All of this is insentitive toxic positivity in a nutshell and was something the original Adventure and 02 were very conscientious about avoiding; you can say they're friends forever all you want, but I want to see some genuine emotional connection for me to believe the Adventure kids actually did anything good for her.

Meiko and Meicoomon also never have any real heart-to-heart moments in the series nor do we know what kind of emotional impact Meicoomon had on Meiko's childhood, yet the audience is expected to believe that "dandan" alone carries the weight of an emotional relationship as one from Adventure and 02. Constantly repeating "because you're partners!" as a justification for everything does not mean anything by itself (again, something Adventure and 02 were very good at avoiding to the point I even wrote a piece on it).

On that note, since "monologues as partner conversations" are supposed to be the Adventure universe's way of letting us know more about what's going on in the human characters' heads, we end up never really learning anything about Meiko at all and have to guess based on her statements and actions throughout the series, which are often so vaguely worded that it's hard to get anything significant out of it. (This is a problem with the entirety of tri.'s cast in general, but Meiko gets hit the hardest because, as a new character, she has no pre-existing content to work with.)

Which also poses a problem in that we don't actually know how much Meiko knew about the infection or what ties Meicoomon had to it prior to the series. Without any additional information about her thoughts and internal feelings that could give it more nuance, the best interpretation you can make is that she got strung along by everything, and the worst is that she allowed bad things around her to happen without taking responsibility for anything, which is not something I want to believe but is nevertheless an interpretation I can't blame anyone for having because of how little information we have.

We learn nothing substantial about Meiko's past -- it really does seem like Meiko's background of being from Tottori was Shimane fanservice more than it actually meant anything, and even the few times we get a chance to learn more (the trip to the onsen in Part 2 and the ghost story in Part 5, for instance) end up with completely nothing. There are things that could potentially end up somewhere interesting, which I make use of in the analysis below, but they remain unaddressed to the very end.

Were they trying to bait Meiko and Taichi as a romantic prospect or not? Or at the very least, was her relationship with Taichi supposed to be deeper than the others or not? The official answer is no, but there are way too many writing decisions that are way too difficult for me to believe that at least one writer wasn't working under that idea; unlike Adventure and 02, where the only reason you might think something was romantic was just because of them being tropes, the Parts 5/6 stuff genuinely baffle me as to what narrative purpose they serve if not to do this.

On that note, Meiko and Meicoomon's writing is practically tailored to make the audience dislike them (and again, I consider this to be a way they were done dirty rather than me agreeing that people should dislike them). Showering praise unilaterally on a character about how much everyone loves them without really doing much to follow up on that just makes them feel shoved down your throat, and this problem gets especially bad with Meicoomon, whom they keep trying to convince you is the purest soul ever without doing anything to characterize her in any meaningful way. (Apparently, the staff adored Meicoomon to the point people were pushing to have her not die, so I'm guessing what happened was that they took "everyone loves her" for granted and didn't realize that they weren't doing enough to convince the audience that they should love her too.) She's called "kind" in Part 6, but I honestly can't feel anything that actually justifies this, because...

Meicoomon gaslights Meiko on screen, and that is also the only thing we ever see her coherently say after Part 2. She accuses Meiko of abandoning her and running away from her when, factually speaking from what we saw in the series before then, she did not. Meiko swallows this as if it were true, and the series even continues as if this actually were true, as if it doesn't even remember what happened before (which, given how sloppy the writing process seems to have been, may well have been the case). As you said, this should be a great opportunity to go into the potential implications behind a toxic partnership, except given that the entire series is written on toxic positivity, I'm not sure if they even recognized that this relationship is toxic instead of just pinning it on the infection. The character song you mentioned would provide something to work with (which I'll go into below), if not for the fact that the series itself contradicts it; the song suggests that Meicoomon is self-aware about everything going on with her and has her own concerns, but the series itself, especially Part 5, portrays her as 100% oblivious.

In the end, the series constantly flip-flopping back and forth on how sympathetic or unsympathetic Meicoomon is supposed to be means that it ends up shooting itself in the foot because all of the contradictory points about whether she was "born this way" or whether it was a problem that came later create a combination of "someone who was born with a problem so bad that she's impossible to save and is better off dead," which. Um. Is not really something you want to be implying! I sure hope that was not the intended implication!

So if you want to ask me about Meiko and Meicoomon as they were written, I end up running into the same problem that formed the reason why I generally don't include tri. in Adventure and 02 analysis: the details as given are so vague and contradictory that making sense out of it, and especially making sense with it combined with the original series, is just not possible for me to do without fudging and making up so many details that it turns into my own fanfic, and I don't feel comfortable styling that as an "analysis" without stamping disclaimers all over it from top to bottom. I would be willing to believe that "maybe I'm just not trying hard enough" if it weren't for the fact that, again, all evidence points to the idea that this series was not written to make sense to begin with, so it would mean grasping at a potential coherent interpretation that doesn't actually exist.

Now, fortunately, even if it's been years since I've actually written anything, I am still a fanfic writer! And now that we have two more movies under our belt where even official content seems to have run into the same problem and decided to go ahead and fudge things anyway, I have a lot more license to similarly fudge things and force them to work. So let's try things from that angle.

Meiko and Meicoomon with a more flexible approach

My philosophy with approaching what happened in tri. and trying to integrate it into the Adventure timeline is that I want to go with the broad spirit of what was probably going to be the main point before contradictory scriptwriting threw it all into confusion. Which is not to say that I can guess entirely what the staff as going for, but I at least feel like it's more important to take the heart and spirit of whatever we were supposed to feel about Meiko and Meicoomon and how they could tie into the overall Adventure narrative, rather than trying to work logistics out by focusing too much on specific dialogue wording.

In the process of doing this, I'm going to attempt to work under the principle "anything that is not contradicted by the original series nor tri. itself is fair game." So for instance, I don't really feel up to retaining the idea of Meiko's dad running an entire Digimon research facility that was publicly recognized as one, because that causes so many lore problems it makes my head spin (and is all but outright contradicted in 02 episode 39). But I am more than willing to keep the part about her dad being a scientist interested in researching Digimon, because there's nothing ruling out the idea of him being one of the few who had early access to all of this, so to speak. Contrary to popular belief, there is no rule dictating that every Chosen Child kept their partners under the table from their parents, hence why Menoa and Rui are also portrayed this way in Kizuna and 02TB.

The part about Meiko moving to Tokyo from Tottori is also unexplained; in Japan, it's extremely implausible for there to be a mid-year high school transfer without a serious reason (not even for work), to the point an exam is usually involved. Granted, Mimi's convenient transfer in from the US is also even more implausible, so I'm pretty sure the reason for both is just "plot convenience", but in the case of Meiko, she does say that Himekawa helped her move in, so it makes me wonder if some strings were pulled to get Meiko to Tokyo ASAP for some reason, especially with Himekawa's own machinations. (If you really stretch it, I suppose this could apply to Mimi as well.) But at that point we're going to have to go into even more speculation on Himekawa, whose sheer existence poses timeline problems, so I'll leave that there for now and focus on Meiko.

We know that Meiko met Meicoomon very early in her life as a child in Tottori. Adventure lore dictates that this encounter had to have happened after Meiko had a previous Digimon encounter; my guess is that the tri. staff forgot or didn't know this was supposed to be a thing, because you'd think it'd be brought up otherwise, but I think Meiko witnessing the Digital World in the sky in 1999 is reasonable.

The part about Meicoomon being an Apocalymon shard is...a bit ehhhh. Mainly because Meicoomon's actions don't match up with Apocalymon's motives and past of "being made up of the regrets of Digimon that couldn't evolve", something that Watanabe Kenji himself even observed (he'd tried to devise Ordinemon's design as "being made up of the regrets of Digimon that couldn't fly" only for it to be completely unused). The other lore explanation for Meicoomon's nature given is in Part 6 is regarding her being a memory backup for every Digimon in the Digital World, which was not really hinted at beforehand (most likely it was just a way to have the Digimon's memories come back without making a whole other plot device) but did eventually get used in Hudiemon's profile, so I think there could still be something related to that. (Hudiemon having this backstory has more to do with the themes in Hacker's Memory, but the similarity is interesting.)

Whatever it is, though, we at least know that something was going on with Meicoomon even since the day they first met. Part 5 says that she'd been dealing with this issue since birth, but Part 6 says that it was a result of her good memories with Meiko being sealed away; these don't really make sense together, but 5's is the one that's easier to work with and was probably the originally intended one. Either way, it does seem like there was something going on to the extent that Homeostasis and the Agents that giving her a partner would help alleviate the issue.

Homeostasis's actions in tri. really don't make a lot of sense, since this still leaves open the huge question of why they didn't tell Meiko about all of this nor offer her any help, functionally leaving her out to dry to deal with a problem way beyond her means. This wasn't how they were portrayed in Adventure and 02, since at the time anything that seemed unreasonable or lacking in information on its face was more out of full-on desperate necessity or out of something literally blocking communication, so I'm going to take a very generous re-interpretation of events and imagine something like this was the case again (perhaps they informed Meiko's dad about it, but he refused to give Meiko that information thinking it would be better for both her and Meicoomon).

It's also stated that Meicoomon had some emotional issues that developed out of separation anxiety from Meiko, and that this presumably made her outbursts worse. I imagine that when they first met, Meiko was a kid who didn't have too many obligations, so Meicoomon took for granted that they'd be together all the time, only for things to go south once Meiko got older and had to leave the house to visit places where "she's my cat" wouldn't pass as an excuse.

So with the increase in suspicious events, Meiko did notice how they kept surrounding Meicoomon and even witnessed the lab incident where her presence seemed to bring Meicoomon back from another episode. We also know that her father had told her that she was a "special Digimon", information that was on her mind all the way up to Part 3.

I would prefer to take a more charitable interpretation of Meiko's actions in tri. when possible, so when it comes to Part 3 I imagine she didn't know for sure Meicoomon was the source of the infection and only had strong suspicions about it based on what she'd seen beforehand. (In which case the narrative would have been unfairly harsh to her; she didn't have good evidence of it, so she really shouldn't be blamed for not bringing it up to kids who are still almost complete strangers to her.) Her father was only able to tell that she was a "special Digimon", but there wasn't anything else that would definitively identify Meicoomon as the source.

And in regards to things like Meicoomon gaslighting Meiko in Part 4, again, it doesn't really work if you take the words at face value, but if you go with the general spirit of "Meicoomon accusing Meiko of abandoning her", it makes more sense if you think of it as having a relationship with Meicoomon's separation anxiety: she believes that every time Meiko left the house or did things without her constituted abandoning her in some form, making her needy and clingy but with Meiko, being a young child and understandably overwhelmed, unable to deal with the fallout.

So I think it's possible to read it as a toxic relationship, but in a different vector from Rui and Ukkomon (and I do think it's an easier one to work with in a sense; Rui and Ukkomon had one of those toxic relationships that insidiously seems "perfect" at first but actually has a lot going wrong with it, but in this one it's clear something is wrong even at face value). And when you frame this in terms of Adventure's principle of Digimon reflecting their human partners' inner selves, I think it may be broadly applicable to Meiko possibly having potential abandonment issues or similar fears that she can't bring herself to vocalize.

One thing that particularly struck me (and honestly this is just a Me Thing, I suppose) the last time I watched Part 3 is how the portrayal of Meiko burying her head in her blankets in misery really does match up with depression, and in this case I mean clinical depression, not just depression the way it's used in slang lingo. I'm hesitant to do things like armchair diagnosis, but given the portrayal of Meiko as a rather chipper and upbeat kid in her childhood but shy and withdrawn as a teenager, I think this is a reasonable interpretation to make (and in fact I would be willing to believe this actually was originally intended and simply wasn't properly addressed in the series).

I don't think this would just be because of the Leomon incident, either. She spent her childhood dealing with a partner who kept having dangerous outbursts that she didn't know how to do anything about, she had to deal with her partner's own emotional immaturity on top of that, and now she's been uprooted from her home in Tottori and temporarily relocated to the city (she doesn't seem to be someone with a lot of experience in the city, and especially one like Tokyo, so it naturally must be overwhelming).

And although Meiko did seem like a pretty chipper kid back in Tottori, I think it's reasonable to imagine that even if she were chipper in demeanor, she might have always been hesitant to vocalize or even mentally acknowledge things that are too uncomfortable to touch on, leading to it all building up inside her. I think that would also track with her feeling guilt about not talking about Meicoomon potentially being the infection source in Part 3; the narrative is being unreasonably harsh to her if it's just about that alone, but if you interpret it as Meiko having dealt with this kind of "guilt for running away from the problem" since the beginning, it's a little more reasonable. It would also work well with Meicoomon's character song and the conflict of being torn between good and evil.

And if you apply this to Meiko's character arc as a whole, I think it would work to read it as a broad "Meiko learns to finally confront uncomfortable things and things she doesn't want to accept" character story (that didn't really happen in Parts 5 and 6 because she actually went along with the "we can't save her, except maybe we can" flip-flopping they kept doing, but it's about the spirit! The spirit!).

Kizuna including Meiko indicates that she is unambiguously canon even in the Kizuna/02TB setting where they're being a bit lenient about what they're pulling from tri. I think Meiko is probably one of the easiest factors to bring in (she and Meicoomon are probably the only original concepts in tri. that don't come with major lore or characterization contradictions just by being mentioned). It's also interesting to think about what that brief appearance entails:

that Meiko and Meicoomon exist and are partners (obviously);

(as per one of the Kizuna novels) that the Adventure group met her "in high school";

that Meiko's childhood was in Tottori or at least the countryside (the house depicted is a traditional Japanese-style home)

Meicoomon is not dead (implicitly suggested by the fact that she's able to appear in Neverland at all, but confirmed outright by Watanabe Kenji in the March 5, 2021 commentary, with wording suggesting that she did die once and came back)

Meiko has enough nostalgia to end up in Neverland, something that doesn't necessarily apply to everyone but would make sense for Meiko given the above circumstances

I think people who tend to put things on a "lore-compliant = good, non-compliant bad" binary or a "fully canon and not canon at all" binary might be mystified at how Toei seems to flip-flop on whether they're including tri. or not, especially with the incident where they didn't include tri. in the official timeline leading up to 02TB. But firstly, even putting aside the fact that "canon" doesn't really exist in Digimon Adventure to begin with, the way I see it is that it's not like they want to omit tri. entirely, no matter what the fanbase says about it; Kizuna's producer Kinoshita said directly that he slipped tri. references into the movie because he wanted some kind of connection to tri., and I don't think they would do any of these references if they really loathed the series' presence that much.

The problem is simply that everything that has to do with lore or consistency is now such a headache to deal with that there's no way to do that nicely, let alone in a 90-minute movie; after all, even 02TB's producer trying to say something to rationalize it ended up being completely nonsensical. And that's added to the fact that if they're going to do this, they're going to have to do this subtly in a situation where the fanbase is pissed off enough at tri. to flood social media posts with angry callouts (not as much the case anymore, but definitely common back then, especially when it reached its end in 2018). So in the end, they have to settle for meta nods like "characters who suspiciously have Meiko and Meicoomon's color scheme and voice actresses" to not be too conspicuous or interfere with timeline.

But if you reject all of tri. wholesale, it'd be such a waste! Almost everyone I've talked to about it agrees that there really were some good ideas in there, especially by the aforementioned staff members who obviously cared but weren't high up enough to get their ideas through properly. (Personally, I think setting researcher Suzuki had some inspired ideas that clearly came out of some very deep thought about Digimon lore and the 02 epilogue, and I mourn the fact they didn't make it into the final product.)

Point is! Meiko and Meicoomon exist. I have no idea what a more lore-compliant version of their story would look like if official were to tackle it somehow, but I like to imagine in my head that something spiritually similar to what I just described went down in 2005. Naturally, the version in my head also doesn't involve inhumanely treating the 02 kids like expendable fodder nor the Adventure group acting against their core characterizations and motives as much as they do, but there is some kind of spirit that was behind most of the new elements of tri., so I would prefer to not get rid of it as possible.

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