(Sorry for the long ask below- I really wanted to present details since the idea I'm asking about is pretty wild compared to the character.)
What do you think of the idea of Tagiru's pride and exaggerated bragging coming from a place of insecurity?
I'm specifically talking about one line when he's fighting with Gumdramon. He says that his/Gumdramon's only redeeming quality is being straightforward. It stuck out because he said that they BOTH only had one good quality, even though Tagiru seems to be prideful. This felt one-off until I remembered that Tagiru DOES criticize others for qualities he himself has. In the FlaWizardmon episode, he says that the baseball/judo club's only point of charm was their energy. In the MetallifeKuwagamon episode, he tells Hideaki not to talk to (the bug kid) because he's obsessed with bug-hunting. You'd think that Tagiru wasn't the kind of person to exclude others after watching the Phelsemon episode. Perhaps it's on purpose, maybe he's being mean to these people because he's taking out his insecurity on them. He was probably taking out his insecurity on Gumdramon too, since Gumdramon's the character that's supposed to be the most similar to him. If Tagiru sees his good points in Gumdramon, he'll probably see the bad too.
When Tagiru and co. were insulted by SuperStarmon and called a third-rate, Tagiru calls himself a first rate instead. However, not only does he do that, he calls Yuu and Ryouma the third rates instead. He didn't NEED to bring Yuu/Ryouma into it, but he did anyway. He's saying "I'm better than those guys, don't compare me with them," which ties into my question of him projecting his insecurities and exaggerating his ego. He sees a trait of his that he doesn't like in someone else, and he criticizes it so he can feel above them although he feels worse than they do.
Hmm, I'd say it's a bit complicated. I think there is certainly compelling evidence that Tagiru's motives have some kind of connection to insecurity, because, after all, forming the entirety of your goals on "surpassing others" and not much else definitely has the scent of someone who hasn't developed enough of a self-identity to have any other goals for oneself. However, I'm also not sure if I would say it's entirely just that, because the fact he even openly admits that he wants to surpass characters like Taiki (and implicitly Yuu) indicates that he's well aware of and willing to admit his own need to improve in certain areas. So while I do think him often beelining to putting others down probably comes from him needing to rely on something like that to self-affirm, I also feel part of his own way of life (so to speak) comes from a premise of seeing everything as a competition, so in his mind everyone should be scrambling to better themselves this way, and therefore everyone is his rival.
In fact, I might even go as far as to say this is a recurring theme among the Hunters characters as a whole. Taiki is a "neutral" party because he actually knows the full depth of the otherworldly war from a year prior, but Hunters sticks out as one of the few Digimon settings where it's possible to not entirely be a villanous or antagonistic character yet also still be a "selfish" Tamer who acts out of one's own self-interest and goals first and foremost (any altruism is a side benefit). Even friendly Hunters like Kiichi, Hideaki, and Mizuki are prioritizing their own personal goals before anything about protecting or saving others. The Hunt is a competition (and is revealed to have been expliciltly made for that purpose in the end), so it attracts people who view things that way.
Even Yuu, who's trying to be a neutral party like Taiki, is not completely immune; although he consciously knows better from his experiences a year prior, his resentment still comes to the forefront specifically because he's upset Tagiru gets to have a partner and he can't (and, more implicitly, that he perceives Tagiru as having done less to earn it). His Hunters image song Shining Dreamers even has the line "A game that doesn’t have your heart in it won’t find what’s in store tomorrow", and you could even argue that his initial trouble in the first two series happened because he was venting out all of the competitive spirit he'd been holding back. And then by the end of the series, we find out that Ryouma's fixation with Taiki is arguably even worse than Tagiru's; Tagiru at least has a more casual background of being part of Taiki's team and realistically understanding what it takes to have him as a role model, whereas Ryouma is still fixated on one event of Taiki looking really awesome from a year prior to the point it's eating him up.
Tagiru has a very lighthearted approach to everything, and (probably because it was only two cours) Hunters never gets to a degree where he's pushed to a true emotional breaking point, so it's often hard to tell what his more deep-seated feelings on a situation are because a good amount of the time he's joking, or probably doesn't mean what he's saying seriously. Or in other words, it's often hard to tell how much he really means it when he makes fun of others or puts them down, because he's saying things in such a lighthearted manner that (at least to him) it may not really be meant as much deeper than saying something like "these losers over there". In regards to Gumdramon, where the relationship is much more personal, keep in mind that them partnering up in the first place was originally pragmatism -- they were intending to use each other to gain an edge in the Hunt, so in other words they started off on a note of "how useful can you be to me?" Obviously, as time went on they started forming a much more geniuine bond, but constantly evaluating how "useful" they were to each other in order to get a leg up on the competition was probably still a big thing on their minds in the early stages of their partnership, and still manifests in them being a lot more openly critical of each other than most Digimon partner pairs would be.
