#reply: savers

[commentaryvorg]

Hi, I've been binging Digimon Savers on and off around the time when you started your blog, and reading your analysis after each episode I watch has given me a new found respect for the writing and how strong it can be.

A little something interesting in the second opening that I don't think you've brought up yet is when the part where we see the Royal Knights in shadows is the figure on the left. We see Omegamon, Dynasmon, Rhodoknightmon, Magnamon, and Dukemon in full and the other shadows can easily be seen as UlforceVeedramon, Craniummon, and Sleipmon, however the figure on the left is too large and bulky to be Duftmon in any capacity. The only one who fits the silhouette is Alphamon, the only Royal Knight who was made at the time who doesn't show up. This makes me wonder if a plot involving him was scrapped because of time constraints, or maybe he was originally supposed to fill out the role Duftmon did (at least the bit where Duftmon only helps when he feels like it which corresponds to Alphamon more in that one of his titles is that of the Aloof Hermit) and he was replaced solely to promote Duftmon more. But that's all speculation I guess. Maybe someday we can get our hands on some drafts but who knows.

Yeah, you're right, that's definitely Alphamon's silhouette there in the opening, and not Duftmon's. I never really thought too much about why he wasn't in Savers; I guess I passively assumed it might be because the previous piece of Digimon animated media heavily centred on Alphamon, so they didn't feel the need to give him any more spotlight here? But that doesn't explain why he's there in the opening, so your theory that there was a last-minute change from Alphamon to Duftmon would make sense. Duftmon's appearance being so last-minute would also explain why he's by far the least developed of the three Royal Knights debuting in Savers.

(I didn't bring this up in the commentary despite having noticed that about the opening, because I'm not interested enough in the Royal Knights to have considered it worthy of mention. It is interesting trivia for Royal Knights enthusiasts, though, I guess!)

Thanks for reading the commentary; I'm thrilled it's been letting you appreciate even more of how good the series' writing is!

[commentaryvorg]

I'm finally sitting down to catch up with your Savers posts and it reminded me of my first time ever watching the series through. It aired on TV around 2010-2013 in the UK, and my mum half-watched it while doing chores, so she had a slight grasp on the fact that Marcus's dad was missing in the digital world based on what she caught. And that's how she came to the conclusion that Merukimon HAD to be the missing dad, and he was just disguising himself as a Digimon.

Haha, high-five to your mum for having had that same theory about Mercurimon secretly being Masaru's dad! It was a theory that certainly made, uh, An Amount of sense.

(Also, wow, Data Squad aired in the UK that late? That'd probably have been just a bit too late for me to have been likely to have watched it on TV even if I had been into Digimon as a kid. (Which I was not; a friend of mine got me into Digimon as an adult, hence me being primarily familiar with the original Japanese.))

[commentaryvorg]

Jsut wanted to say that I've really loved going on this Savers/Data Squad journey with your blog. Even though I still love Data Squad, you've given me a lot of great perspective and insight on Dubs and how they should theoretically function.

Thank you for this amazing project and I look forward to reading what remains!,

Thanks for reading! I'm relieved that even people who have fond memories of the dub don't seem to be minding all my grumbling about it too much. It's still very valid to enjoy Data Squad - it is broadly the same story as Savers, after all, and it does have some dub-specific charm to it - but I'm happy if this commentary can give people unfamiliar with the original some insight into just how much better Data Squad could have been if it'd been localised by a team who cared more.

And it's also cool to see you appreciate my thoughts on localised adaptations in general! That's like half the reason for the dub part of the commentary, and it's kind of a niche topic that I wasn't expecting that many others to necessarily care about.

[commentaryvorg]

Another episode 45-related ask, putting it under a cut just in case, even though I'm past that by now in the commentary.

Anonymous asked:

(warning: not really spoilers, just a very silly ask using the commentary on episode 45)

Ok but now that it's confirmed(ish) that Yggdrasil has at least some remnant feelings from Suguru, I can only imagine Mr. Computer God confusing Suguru's feelings of "this guy is ACTUALLY TERRIBLE, wtf?" while watching what Kurata was doing with "surely this must mean all of humanity has to be eliminated". Which would sort of (not really) explain why he was that fixated on the idea of humanity being irredeemable over Literally Just One Guy.

Okay, so I know you seemed to mean this largely as a joke, but I do want to talk about why this doesn't track as an explanation to me, because I think it's interesting. There's a reason I waited to answer this ask until after episode 47's commentary had gone up.

Suguru may have been horrified at learning just how terrible Kurata was, but he did also spend all of his imprisonment staking his life on the belief that the rest of humanity could be better than that. So if Yggdrasil was actually learning anything from Suguru's residual thoughts, it surely would have noticed that part too, more so than the Kurata part.

But mostly, Yggdrasil blaming everything on Kurata doesn't need to be explained by it having “learned” mistakenly from Suguru, because it already makes sense for it to do that! Yggdrasil's nature as a computer seems to make it really bad at seeing humanity as more than just a homogeneous mass of viruses in its code, so it's already predisposed to judging an entire species based on Just One Guy. And, even more to the point, Yggdrasil wanted humanity gone anyway for interfering with its Digimon experiments, long before Kurata was a thing. Blaming it all on Kurata was really only ever an excuse to get its Royal Knights on board with helping the genocide along.

While I'm here and under a spoiler-cut, another ask I got from @amethyst-geek about a related topic:

I think Yggdrasil seeing Suguru's memories can be chalked up to him having access to Suguru's physical brain, including the hippocampus

I guesssss that might make sense? I suppose that didn't even occur to me because, when you've got a fictional narrative where it's possible to separate a person's entire consciousness from their physical brain, thinking about which parts of the physical brain produce which bits of consciousness suddenly doesn't seem like it's nearly as relevant, because apparently that's not entirely how it works in this world.

[commentaryvorg]

Maybe Suguru had some photos of his kids on his person and during his 5 years of imprisonment, Suguru passed the time by going all Maes Hughes on the royal knights (including Craniumon) and when Craniumon saw Chika, he thought to himself "hey this human child looks a bigger version of 1 of the tiny humans in those photos Suguru showed me."

Haha! Unfortunately, if I wanted to be canon-pedantic, I'd have to say that couldn't be possible, because if Suguru had photos of his kids on him then we'd certainly have already seen him show them to Mercurimon. But nonetheless I am very tickled at the idea of Suguru being all Maes Hughes about his family, that is a cute image.

(Context for others: Maes Hughes is a Fullmetal Alchemist character whose most memorable trait is enthusiastically showing off photos of his wife and daughter and being all "LOOK HOW BEAUTIFUL/CUTE THEY ARE :D" to literally everyone ever, all the time.)

[commentaryvorg]

Your mention of Yoshino forgetting her job in episode 26 raises a similar but somehow even more horrifying point: Yoshino had Lalamon since she was about 5, and she would have been a pretty constant presence in her life. After the memory wipe, Yoshino would have massive patches of her childhood to young adulthood completely missing from her memory.

Ouch, you're right! I don't know why I never thought about that before myself. Man, she's lucky she didn't stay memory-wiped for that long, because realising she has such huge unexplained gaps in her entire life would have really messed her up, probably.

[commentaryvorg]

Got a Savers ask that alludes to episode 45 spoilers, so just for absolute safety’s sake, putting it under a cut!

Anonymous asked:

(Same anon that talked about realising how badly the dub did things, and hearing just how badly they did Falcomon.)  

You said in your commentary of the Banchouleomon episode that, at that point, you had figured out what had happened to Suguru; I'm curious, then, now that we're there, how did you react to Suguru in Episode 40? Was Masaru's reaction and Suguru's general aura enough for you to realise that what was going on? Or did Masaru's conviction that it was his father enough to convince you that you were wrong?  

(Apologies if I've gotten any names wrong, I'm mostly familiar with the dub names. I also tried to keep it vague in case you wanted to limit spoilers, although if you wanted to hold onto this ask until we're done with your commentary to answer it in full that's perfectly understandable!)

Haha, nope, I didn't buy that Yggdrasil was Suguru at all! I was convinced enough that Suguru was BanchouLeomon by that point that my immediate reaction was "okay yeah this is definitely fake, but also I love that Masaru is buying it, this is delightful". Which you may be able to tell from the fact that I'm openly talking about Yggdrasil not really being Suguru in those episodes' commentaries without marking it as a spoiler. ...Maybe I should have? Oh well. The true nature of Yggdrasil-as-Suguru is not something it remotely occured to me that first-time viewers might be in suspense about, because it was so obvious to me that I had absolutely none of that experience whatsoever.

[commentaryvorg]

so i didn't notice this until the photo of them side-by-side, but franz and tohma's outfits kind of parallel each other? white, formal-looking shirt, vest overtop with a blue accessory (tie and hankerchief). and outside of color and tohma's being more casual, the other big difference i noticed is tohma's vest being open while franz's is closed- which i can't help but feel was intentional? so i just wanted to share that lmao

Huh, neat! I never noticed that myself either, but they do look kind of similar now that you mention it. I agree that probably was intentional on the character designers' part. Thanks for sharing!