I really enjoyed reading all your meta discussion about the 02 cast especially the focus on Daisuke since I always thought he was a deeper character and the dub really seemed to put him in a bad light. Reading your blog reminds me why 02 is my favorite digimon season and I’m very thankful to you and your group for that!
I was actually wondering if you have any plans to write a Daisuke/Hikari fanfic? And if you would what it might be about? I’m really curious about how you would write them as characters in a romantic situation :)
Thank you so much! I'm completely at peace with 02 being a polarizing series, but I just can't stand for it continuing to get pinned in fandom history as the "objectively" worse sequel to Adventure with shallow characters and writing when that just could not be further from the truth, and I focus on Daisuke a lot because of how important he is to 02 -- I mean, he's the lead protagonist, but he really is the center of the story's main messages (and also the one I inevitably focus the most when discussing dub changes, partially because of that importance and partially because the changes are so blatantly drastic that anytime I see people pull out the "didn't change much" claim, Daisuke alone makes me think "okay, you're just lying to me at this point"). As you say, he's absolutely much deeper as a character than he's given credit for, and I think he's even more of an important character to many of us as we go further into adulthood and understand how important his specific brand of grounded forward-thinkingness is to getting through life. So I'm really happy if people can appreciate him and 02 more!
In regards to shipping fics, I'm afraid my inability to come up with ideas I find to be particularly compelling is exactly why I haven't written anything for Daisuke/Hikari yet...despite liking to analyze things, I'm really very limited in terms of actually writing things myself, and outside of certain narrowly specific things I often find a lot of my attempts to feel very unsatisfactory or half-formed, so it always goes back to the drawing board and that's why I've only ever written for two ships despite liking many more. I think my general favored theme with Daisuke and Hikari is that he tries so hard to please or impress her when in actuality he'd make her perfectly happy just by acting natural and being his usual considerate self, but I've yet to come up with things that would carry an entertaining story.