#demonoflight

[elecmon]

Hello good good Lizfriend, I hope I'm not late for doodle requests

I would please like Iori holding his practice kendo sword out and balancing Upamon on it

thank you I hope you have a good day I blow you a kiss mwah <3

MWAH!!!💖💖

theyre trying to set a record in secret before telling everyone!!! Theyre up to 40 seconds now!!!!! (Upmamon keeps wiggling around)

Shitty doodle requests closed, Happy Odaiba day!

[shihalyfie]

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.

[pengychan]

In my defense those letters are way too close and also I suffer from a terminal case of sausage fingers.

[minimuii]

Commission for @demonoflight of their adorable OC Sekai!

Commission Info!

[grubsnuggle]

The stardust this boy is made of is reflected on his skin But the lights billions of years old Now glows in his heart And glowed warm and soft and stayed giving No matter how much the cold world took 

@sp0chi HAPPY BIRTHDAY VALE!!!!!!!!!!!! You’re one of the realest guys I know and I gotta do ya solid for your birthday. Making ocs with you and then making stories with them is the best, and your sweet octo boy Jerm is especially lovable. Had to get commission of him!  I hope your birthday is amazing and the rest of the year for you as well!!!!!!

Commissioned @demonoflight (thank you bunches beebo) who y’all should definitely check out

[imploder]

@demonoflight started following you

Hello, I see a certain someone sent you my hs salt tag

[elecmon]

Hey bud can you draw me a (absolutely not shitty your doodles are the best) doodle of Arukenimon and Mummymon happily chilling at a playground, like swings or the slide or something

Thanks you're the best I like you

he switched popsicles so she would have the rare perfect one!!!!!

Shitty doodle requests closed, Happy Odaiba day!

[shihalyfie]

In what ways does the Japanese fandom differ from the "western" one (for lack of a better word)? I'm assuming there are a lot of similarities too, but something must be a little different for all sorts of reasons.

I'm hardly an expert on the Japanese Digimon fanbase, but I would say they're pretty similar for the most part. Humans are the same everywhere, really. Of course, once you start narrowing things down to individual series and individual questions about characterization and all that, yeah, you start having more discernible differences, but if I had to just broadly answer the question of if the Japanese and Western fandoms for Digimon come off as that different in the long run, my answer would probably be that they’re more alike than different. The reputation for Digimon fans never agreeing on anything happens on that end, too.

Of course, as you say, there’s got to be some differences, so here are the ones I can think of off the top of my head. (Mind you: this is not based on any kind of empirical research whatsoever, this is purely my observation as one person who hangs out on social media and reads lots of fansites, so take the biggest grain of salt you can with this.)

Japanese fandom seems to treat the issue of whether you’re lore-compliant as life and death (part of it might have to do with the fact it seems to be fandom tradition to be extremely good with recordkeeping). Might also partially be due to the fact that media mixes are taken a lot more seriously over there. If you bring up obscure material like drama CDs or novels over here, you’re likely to be considered pedantic, but the expectation you know or should care about all the Deepest Lore is a lot tighter on that end. Amusingly, both Japanese and Western fandoms tend to fight about Hurricane Touchdown’s canonicity, but the reasoning is completely different (the former cares more about issues with Wallace’s placement in Chosen Child timeline, the latter cares more about evolutionary mechanics). Also, a lot of false production rumors never circulated there because of how good documentation is (although there are still a few here and there).

Obviously, there are differences when they’re major ones related to American English dub changes. Biggest ones usually have to do with Adventure and 02, of course, and with certain characters more than others (Mimi, Daisuke, Wallace) or dub-induced plot holes/unanswered questions becoming a Big Deal to Anglosphere fandom when they were nonexistent (the theory about Yamato’s dad being a former Chosen, everything to do with 02 episode 13′s supposed cliffhanger ending), et cetera. Naturally, big ones like Hurricane Touchdown. That said, I don’t think the difference in fandom impressions due to dub-related changes is as huge as you might think at first -- remember that even if the American English dub has a tendency to eat up discourse in Anglosphere fandom, more accurate-to-the-source dubs do exist and have some influence, as well as the increasing number of people watching it in Japanese. That, and also -- on both sides of the Pacific -- a lot of people don’t really remember the series well, or only remember the series based on face value they remembered as a kid and never bothered to correct their opinions later, so that kind of roughly evens out everything between both sides of the fandom. This happens a lot with Adventure and 02, and for instance you’ll still see people having the same really reductive takes about the characters because the characters really are too nuanced for their own good.

02 is still controversial on both ends, but it’s significantly more well-liked or at least more respected over there. A retcon movement like there was on this end would be treated as ludicrous. (Well, I mean, it was here too, but it got way more momentum here than it would there.) Yes, that includes the epilogue. Japanese 02 fanwork also tends to be more consistent, probably because American English dub 02 contradicts itself a lot, so discourse around the series is very confusing in every direction. But also I think the main reason is just that 02 was a very profitable series with tons of merch, so people have good memories of it either way.

On that note, there’s obviously memories and nostalgia concerning merchandise and product lines that were never consistently localized (ranging from WonderSwan games to how well people can remember V-mon eating chocolate). The usage of Hyper Colosseum cards has a very different nuance to a Japanese fan who actually remembers that card game (probably fondly) than to an American one who probably only remembers that really awful one we got.

Tamers still is well-liked, but “being too depressing” is taken seriously as a reason it didn’t financially do well or a reason someone might not like it. In general, “too depressing” is more likely to have a negative connotation there, whereas “being dark” is more likely to be propped up on a pedestal here. (This is in both productive and unproductive ways; you’re just as likely to see a Japanese fan declare something depressing to be “bad” even if it’s meaningful as you are a Western edgelord saying that something “dark” is “good” even if it’s meaningless.) Part of this may have to do with the fact that the American English dub is much tonally lighter than the Japanese version, so the whiplash isn’t as strong, but personally I don’t think that’s the only main factor. Also, I’ve seen at least one person commenting that Tamers doesn’t come off as female audience-friendly as Adventure and 02, and I’m still thinking about that.

That said, not a lot of Japanese fans realize what happened with DigiFes 2021 or why it was such a problem, since it’s so relevant to Western politics specifically. There was one person who realized what it was and freaked out, but most people were just disappointed because it wasn’t really written all that well in regards to characterization.

Ryou/Ruki is a really popular ship. Takeru/Daisuke is...still not overwhelmingly popular per se, but it’s proportionally more popular among book-publishing doujin artists than it is here. There are various reasons for both. Meanwhile, Jou/Mimi and Yamato/Mimi are treated as rarepair, while Koushirou/Mimi is the single most popular ship with either character by knockout.

Japanese fans really, really, really like X-Evolution. Due to a botched history of translation and other surrounding factors, it’s not liked nearly as well in the Western fanbase. Hurricane Touchdown is considered a really weird movie on both ends, but the reception is definitely worse on this end because not only was it the most altered part of Digimon the Movie, even its fansubs were very poor quality until as recently as two years ago.

Due to a combination of disastrous PR and other things relevant to how the series was handled, plus the high pedestal put on lore compliance, tri. is disliked with much more of a violent passion, to the point there is actually a retcon movement, or at least a significant camp calling it a franchise disgrace. (This has been improving ever so slightly since the time I wrote that analysis.) At the very least, it’s understood that it’s a series with a severe negative reputation attached to it that goes beyond the level of the other series. Because lore documentation is so good, it’s a common theory that the staff didn’t even watch the original Adventure and 02 and basically just SparkNotes-ed it, because all of the apparently obscure/niche references made in the series are easy to find on Japanese Wikipedia.

Appmon reception seems to be a bit more lukewarm. In the West it’s either treated condescendingly (mostly by people who haven’t even watched it) for being too kiddy or adored on a critical level as the best anime ever, but over there, because Digimon lore and creature design is so well-liked, the fact Appmon tossed that all away means a lot more people have mixed feelings or even disgust about its sheer existence, regardless of how well the actual anime is written. (That said, it’s still a critical darling among doujin artists, much like how fanfic writers and other creatives usually like it here too.)

This is a cultural thing overall more than just Digimon, but keeping the same voice actor is a lot more likely to be Serious Business, and I've seen people boycott tri. and Kizuna just because the voice actors weren't retained when possible.

Again, huge grain of salt! But this is just what I’ve personally observed.