The last thing 43-year-old Paul Manchester wanted was to get sucked into another world- and definitely not when he's got work in the morning. But instead, he's stuck tagging along with his 11 year old son while he and his new "Digimon" best friend go on a journey to save the "Digital World," or something. His son Asher and his new bad influence don't seem nearly as bothered by the ordeal, so Paul is left on his own to navigate a whole new world of problems and solutions- that as he goes on, become more and more painfully apparent he'd long since outgrown...
Figure out That mess, and having to put up with the little creature that won't leave Paul's side, that is. At least it actually listens to him when he says something.
"Let's trust the boy, alright? The kids seem to know more about it than we do."
Updates will come when they come, but I'm in this for the long haul.
(Just as a HEADS UP, this story features some intense themes that may be upsetting to some readers- such as bad parental figures, unhealthy family dynamics, child abuse, a lot of time spent in an abuser's pov and headspace, and similar elements that may sour the experience for some. Specific content warnings will be listed in the end notes, and feel free to comment and ask me to warn for anything else if I missed something. The ultimate goal of this story is Catharsis, but it'll be a long road to get there.
The father main character here is neurodivergent and not a good person and this fic does not shy away from that.)
Read on AO3 or RoyalRoad (content warnings listed)
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
The last thing 43-year-old Paul Manchester wanted was to get sucked into another world- and definitely not when he's got work in the morning
Tags used on this blog will be #digimon generations for general discussion, and #fic update announcement for new chapter notifs or any important news.
We probably wont ever see Tactics 1 again. Really felt like a waste of an episode when we've already done the Tomoro and Raito stuff over and over. I dont understand why they didnt just make it GIFT members instead of random Tactics leftovers that did not and will not matter.
EXACTLY EXACTLY EXACTLY! UGH!!!
FUCKING WASTE OF TIME IN THE WORST POSSIBLE WAY!!
long ass rant below the cut. you have been warned.
there are so many ways this episode could have been WAY more interesting but the writers chose none of them and instead gave us the most egregious kind of "filler" possible (i really hesitate to call a lot of stuff filler but this fits the bill)
we have:
fucked up weird animation
characters you haven't seen in forever or thought about in forever suddenly showing up only for 2/3 of them to get kidnapped and have no interesting character moments
TOMORO is the one that doesn't get drugged? HUH??? you go out of your way to show chiropmon going "weird" multiple times. chiropmon does nothing about it. makoto gets drugged. you could have had MAKOTO interacting with raito (something we hadn't seen yet)
hell! you could have had reina interacting with raito (let her call him a jackass! the narrative is too kind to that little shit as it stands!). why? pristimon has a refined sense of smell from "drinking" so much tea.
BUT NO EDGY BLUE FUCKER IS HERE AWWW YEAH WE GOTTA GET SOME CLIPS OF HIM INTERACTING WITH TOMORO! (i was telling one of the discords i'm in that i low key think the decision to do this was to get raitomo shippers to do free advertising for the show and i'm not convinced i'm wrong. no tremendous hate to raitomo shippers but i don't see the chemistry and i think this kind of shit is beatbreak's equivalent to teen wolf queerbaiting but that's another essay for another time when i don't have things to do)
the ONLY thing i think i liked about this ep was like. we see the digimon doing stuff on their own ig. raito confirmed caring about monodramon is nice.
now to be clear on my "filler" definition here: i don't think every episode has to have plot or shit to be worth the airspace. for me, "filler" is an episode that feels like it's just there to say you had an episode.
in appmon, there's an episode that's a series recap with silly things in between (a clip show) that they did in part because they got moved to a different time slot; this is the most rudimentary kind of filler. it adds nothing but reminding you of what has happened before.
in transformers: prime (bear with me here), there's a clip show episode that could similarly constitute "filler." but while being a recap, it also has a narrative frame that gives the clip show new context and texture. it tells us something about the world and makes us appreciate what the writers are doing better. nothing of plot relevance is done. this is "filler," but it is still filling.
then you have the episode of beatbreak that just came out. it isn't a clip show, but the thing about it is that we didn't really learn anything new about the world of the story. "raito bullied other tactics teams! :(" yeah what the fuck else is new he's an asshole. this was some first draft shit that really comes across as wanting to be subversive about the beach episode trope and instead fails to deliver on both beach episode needs and story needs.
"raito is working with a five star" is maybe the only important part of that whole episode, and it isn't given enough gravity in the moment for me to take it seriously. we're supposed to think the five stars are this corrupt organization thanks to klay being our intro to them! gasp! "you're working with the five stars?!" tomoro says. two camera shots later he smiles at raito because he says "i want to get stronger and beat you tomoro" GAG SHUT THE FUCK UP.
that writing doesn't tell us why raito is interested in working with the five stars. it doesn't establish anything new about raito and essentially wastes our time for about five minutes at the end of the episode with the writing team winking at raitomo shippers like "yes we see you blowing up the beatbreak tags." it's not in character for tomoro to brush off someone working with the five stars so easily. it's bad writing for him not to be more pissed than a quick ":( but five stars bad"
we don't learn anything new about granit or hotaruko either. they're there to just get kidnapped.
this is the kind of episode that the more i think about it the more angry it'll make me, and that's disappointing off the heels of what is maybe the best singular episode of digimon in the entire franchise (i am not exaggerating). "cold rain" was insane.
Head writer swapped his ability to write a good narrative about colonialism and the inability to write women. Now he can write women but trips over himself to be racist and lean into Orientalist tropes.
I was already worried about racism in Beatbreak since we were introduced to Granit, Klay, and Chairman Wong. Out of the three of these characters, I think Granit is the only one that's been handled acceptably (ie: not completely fumbled).
As of this episode, though, I can say my concerns with Klay and Wong are pretty founded. In this episode, Klay is revealed to be from a made-up nation somewhere implied to be "the Middle East." Albida is a caricature, and Klay seems to have only been given Proganomon so that he can have Pyramidimon as a partner Digimon.
What we are told about Albida is annoyingly vague in every way--- we can have Japan be named, but can't pick a country to research and talk about in this cyberpunk dystopia?? We can allude to "foreign meddling" in Albida's politics, but can't say with our whole chest any country that has participated in such a thing? Like is the Colonizer in the room with us right now? We can name Japan but can't have the balls to say "America did some war crimes in that region?"
We follow this with my concerns about Wong that I've had ever since the idea of a "World Government" was introduced, as well as the idea of a mysterious "cabal" that controls it (the Five Stars, essentially). For those of you unfamiliar with this framework, it's oftentimes used to portray a sinister "other" who is secretly controlling things for their own nefarious reasons. It's a common antisemitic trope, for context.
Now, before this ep I was thinking it might be possible to spin this in a way that didn't come across as violently sinophobic. That was before we found out that Chairman Wong is actually behind the catastrophe that destroyed an entire island, and covets that power still. A friend of mine pointed out that this being on a secret research facility parallels the sinophobic attitude that China is to blame for COVID. Which. Uh-oh.
Do I have a conclusion for this? No, not really. Beatbreak is about halfway through. I don't think I can conclude this completely until we see just how much racism was hiding underneath the icing of what could have been a palatable story with some unchecked -isms. Instead, with the sunset of the Tactics arc, we enjoy the sight beneath the icing, burnt and bitter with ideas that should have been challenged long before they made it to production.
I guess it's just lucky timing that I have a fairly competent video essay on Orientalism in Japanese media to point to. Go watch this video on the Gerudo from the Legend of Zelda by skittybitty. Or don't.
Beatbreak was looking to be my favorite season, despite my reservations, but it's looking instead to be the one I fight my feelings most on because of how sloppy it's handled non-Japanese characters. Us never learning where Granit grew up should have been the first warning, I suppose.
