#shihameta

[shihalyfie]

Tagiru is a more well-behaved kid than he's given credit for (and other misconceptions about him and Hunters)

With Xros Wars finally getting some officially endorsed anniversary love (you don't see that happen every day, you know!), I also happen to have rewatched Xros Wars quite recently! I had previously written a meta talking about the differences between Daisuke and Tagiru, but while I wouldn't disagree with anything I wrote back then per se, there are some things I wish I'd phrased better or emphasized more. I owe it to Tagiru to make it up to him, so I wrote this up quickly.

To put it simply and bluntly, partially as a byproduct of people misunderstanding his home series and people misunderstanding him directly, Tagiru tends to be taken the wrong way by a lot of people in the fandom, so let's set the record straight!

First, let's talk about Hunters

Like I said, a big reason Tagiru ends up misunderstood quite often is that...well, I won't mince words, but Xros Wars came out at a time when the Western fandom had some very specific ideas about "what a Digimon series should be", and to compound things even further, the target demographic for the older Digimon series was in pretty much peak edgelord phase (late teens/twenties) of wanting everything to be Dark and Edgy.

In fact, this treatment of Xros Wars and Hunters is very specific to the Western fandom and only to that particular time period; Hunters is reasonably well-liked and Xros Wars as a whole very well-liked among Japanese fans, and nowadays, I hear a lot of cases of even Western fans watching Xros Wars and Hunters in recent years for the first time and being utterly baffled as to why anyone would view the series as poorly as much of the Western fandom does. There was a serious echo chamber and toxic aura problem going on that seems to have altered people's perception of reality to the point of historical revisionism regarding what was and wasn't in the series.

Hunters got especially maligned on the grounds that it was supposedly a bunch of meaningless trash that didn't go anywhere, but having rewatched it recently, I find that a lot of it is little more than unrealistic expectations where people were expecting something completely different from what it actually was. I suspect this to be one major reason Japanese reception to the series wasn't nearly as negative, because the Japanese fanbase had much stronger consciousness of two major factors:

The Tohoku earthquake and tsunami had a massive impact on Japanese media and especially kids' media at the time, and there was a collective bid among them to make things that would lift kids' spirits after the disaster (Smile PreCure, Kamen Rider Fourze, and Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger were also made under this philosophy). Combined with the fact that Japanese audiences tend to be more insistent that kids' shows should brighten kids' days, if you were to insinuate that a show was too lighthearted during this period, you'd easily be seen as a cruel and insensitive sadist to suggest that a kids' series isn't "dark" enough.

It is well-known among Japanese fans that Hunters was greenlighted at the last minute (the Death Generals staff was already into production of the finale when they found out Hunters was going to exist), and it's widely understood that it was also a series made to hold down its timeslot until Saint Seiya Omega was ready. In other words, Hunters was a series made after the staff was told to make something that would literally waste time. Once you stop having unrealistically high expectations of the series to do something revolutionary with its content, it's actually doing much more for its audience than it needed to, and frankly, I have seen series that spent 50+ episodes doing far less interesting things than Hunters did within its two cours.

You are supposed to watch Hunters under the understanding that you're meant to have fun, and from what it sounds like, the staff was also trying to have as much fun as they could within that time. (Honestly, I'm currently convinced that the crossover episode was made for the returning Digimon staff to indulge and satisfy themselves more than it was to pander to the fans.) That's all it is, and the story becomes much more enjoyable and insightful when you watch it this way.

I'm not kidding when I say that a lot of people who currently dislike Hunters would probably become a lot more attached to it just by rewatching it now. It's only two cours, so it's not even that long! One thing I noted during my last rewatch is that the kids are all of the archetype that the modern Internet would affectionately call "gremlins" and enjoy for being all over the place and often of questionable morals. Perhaps one could even say that the series was too ahead of its time.

Tagiru is actually pretty well-behaved

So let's talk about Tagiru. Common perception is that he's rude to the point of disregarding what others say and often puts down others, but is that really true? Certainly, it's true that he's at least a little poorly behaved in terms of often stepping out of line and disregarding what Taiki and others tell him to do, but:

Even when he disregards others, it's not nearly as much as people often think. Having rewatched the series lately, I find that the majority of his cases of directly violating someone's suggestion without at least taking it into account is simply just because he was too impulsive and went ahead before even he had thought it through. Otherwise, he'll still defer to others most of the time (even if he has to complain loudly about it). And you don't see people giving Taichi grief for doing the same thing, do you?

He's diligent about his honorifics and still largely treats strangers and elders with respect as per Japanese propriety rules. He's not as deferential as Daisuke, but he also doesn't massively step out of line either.

If you take his words at direct verbal face value, he's being rude to people, but if you actually look closer, he's just kind of brash and loudmouthed and doesn't actually mean it that seriously. You don't see people giving Takuya nearly as much grief for this one either, do you? Rather, once you get into Tagiru's head, you'll see that him treating Taiki and Yuu as "rivals" of a sort is his way of acknowledging them as people worth having a rivalry with; he sees the entire world as a competition, but he respects his competition too. And Tagiru does have a concept of kindness and decency; he loves to mess with Yuu because Yuu is someone he knows well (and, frankly, even if he's not as direct with what he says, Yuu is actually the one responsible for provoking him most of the time), but with strangers and other people he doesn't want to step on the toes of, he takes care to not be insensitive, takes responsibility easily, and apologizes well.

He's competitive and hates the idea of losing, but when he actually does lose, he doesn't let it deter him and just takes it as a reason to try harder so he can win next time. A lot of people could do well to be this forward-thinking!

Multiple episodes allude to the idea that the real reason Tagiru can often be a problem for others is that he has too much energy that he hadn't been given a good enough outlet for, something alluded to by the fact that Shoutmon also immediately let up on Gumdramon when he found that the latter had gotten himself a partner (episode 2). Just like how the Digital World's "wild child' stopped causing chaos for everyone around him now that he had something to dedicate himself to, Tagiru becomes much easier for Taiki and Yuu to work with once he starts putting all of that excess energy into the Hunt. And that ties into...

Being "selfish" can be a good thing

I mentioned earlier that I wrote a meta about Daisuke and Tagiru but currently wish that I'd phrased some things differently, and the biggest reason is that I emphasized a lot that Tagiru was self-interested compared to more altruistic characters like Daisuke. But when I said that, I also meant this in the sense that having personal goals and "selfish" interests is not a fundamentally bad thing, and Hunters is actually quite a lot about the juggling of personal interests and doing good for others.

Tagiru is impulsive, brash, and often disregards what Taiki and others would prefer that he do in order to pursue his own goals, but he's also not self-centered to the extent he doesn't care about other people. Yes, he's participating in the Hunt because he personally enjoys the thrill of it. But it's not like he's paying zero consideration to the fact that it helps people, and in fact, if you actually pay attention to Tagiru's behavior throughout the series, Tagiru enjoys the Hunt partially because it's a way of helping people in meaningful ways. It's because of this that he's able to meaningfully distinguish between Hideaki's personal goals and Ganemon's greed (episode 8), because Tagiru himself would also hate it if he got lumped in with people who took from others purely for self-gain!

It's easy to get distracted by the fact that the Hunt technically involves combat, but Tagiru also just thinks Digimon are pretty cool in general (see episode 21, when he immediately drops the idea of Hunting the amusement park Digimon when they seemingly aren't doing anything wrong). It's actually quite common for people to have things they enjoy doing that also happen to help others! It's just that we usually call those "hobbies" or "career aspirations".

The Hunt is a competition that's structured in a battle royale, dog-eat-dog sort of format, and in a case like that, having personal ambition is very important. It's tempting to expect every shounen hero to fit a model of constantly saying one-sidedly selfless things like "I just love seeing everyone smile!", but the realistic truth is that there are also cases where you're not going to survive very long if you don't think about yourself, too. This is where Tagiru excels: he's brimming with motivation (to the point that episode 11 demonstrates how dangerous that motivation would be if it were anyone different), and he's up against Digimon who are manipulating kids based on their own personal desires without any selflessness at all.

He may not be like Daisuke in terms of cooperating with others as a given team player, but not everything in this world is about team cooperation, and there's a reason Daisuke and Tagiru are the respective protagonists of their own respective series tailored to those strengths.

And that's also why saving the world from Quartzmon required someone who enjoyed the Hunt itself rather than just wanting to save everyone for altruistic reasons. If you're on the verge of getting obliterated from existence and need to find something to cling onto, having something you personally enjoy and find fulfillment in helps a lot.

Up until Hunters' finale, participation in the Hunt was optional. There was no need to save the world, and a lot of Tagiru's cases could have easily been solved by any other Hunter. But Tagiru didn't need to have "the world is going to end right this second if you don't do something!" to motivate him, and that's why he's able to focus on Hunting Quartzmon even while dealing with a situation where everyone he knows might be gone forever if he fails: sure, he wasn't one of the "chosen heroes" for this job, and it's stressful as hell, but he can have the mindset of "wow, saving the world requires doing something that I happen to be really good at? Too bad for you!"

So what is a "superstar"?

Since it's one of the first things presented about his character, "Tagiru wants to be a superstar and surpass Taiki" is the part that most people easily remember about him, and that means that Tagiru's primary fandom reputation comes from his arrogance. And it is true that he has a certain degree of arrogance and pride, moreso than a lot of other Digimon protagonists. But once you actually look at the series as a whole...

...it turns out that Tagiru being a bit arrogant is also the main reason he's able to be normal about his personal aspirations compared to almost everyone else in the series.

Episode 9 introduces the concept of "excessive idolization and putting others on a pedestal to the point they just become nothing but tools to you" and puts in a warning that idolizing Taiki is very likely to go in the same direction. Even Yuu, who's not necessarily doing it to an entirely unhealthy level, is still overly conscious of Taiki's role in the Digital World war a year prior and initially resents Tagiru for lightly using the Xros Heart name and imitating Taiki without understanding the war. It's understandable that Yuu would feel insulted by this, but you also have to look at things from Tagiru's perspective: Tagiru only ever knew Taiki as "the cool middle school senior whom I should use as a goal to surpass", and it's not really his fault for not knowing there was an entire war going on there.

But that's also the key word there: surpass. It's a word that's often taken as a sign of arrogance, but the point here is that Tagiru only treats Taiki like an admirable reference point rather than judging his entire self-worth based on whether he's like Taiki or not. He seems to be as close to treating Taiki as an equal as he can get within the limits of Japanese seniority. And after a whole series of people getting caught up in Digimon incidents because a Digimon started feeding off their feelings of "not being good enough"...

...we get to the eventual reveal in the final episode that Ryouma was, essentially, the same as another monster-of-the-week victim: someone who made his entire life about "wanting to be like someone else" and easily fell prey to a Digimon's manipulation because he was so obsessed with that goal that he lost sight of anything else.

The truth is, even with humility being a virtue, being confident in yourself is important too, because it means you won't project your insecurities on others. Even back in the first two parts of Xros Wars, Taiki's disregard for himself was also the cause of a lot of problems. And ultimately, that's the take-home: Tagiru is self-aware about what he is and isn't, and that's why he's able to pursue his own dreams in a healthy manner rather than railing on himself.

Tagiru's vaguely-defined goal of "being a superstar" is essentially "doing something that I feel is fulfilling and worthy", and he repeatedly demonstrates that he knows full well that he's only going to become a superstar when he decides he's done enough. For Tagiru, it seems that as long as he himself acknowledges that he did something cool (and his friends also acknowledge that it was cool), he'll see that as sufficient to have achieved his goal. So when it comes to saving the world, Tagiru decides that this is satisfying enough for him to pat himself on the back and go "that was really cool, wasn't it?"

In conclusion

I'm aware there are a lot of people who were expecting a more traditional shounen hero progression of "a protagonist who's not cut out for heroism grows and becomes a noble hero by the end of the series". Certainly, if Hunters had been a longer series and was given more resources in planning to be anything beyond a stall series, it's true that we probably would have gotten to see this aspect of Tagiru gone into thoroughly with the attention that it should have been given. But with what we were given already, there's already a lot you can get out of it, and in fact, I personally find that Hunters still covers a niche of the boundary between personal aspirations and finding fulfillment in it, even when it's about mundane problems that anyone else could have solved.

Tagiru wants to pursue his own personal goals, but he balances it well with doing good things for others and finding fulfillment in it. He's prideful enough to aspire to do bigger and better things, but he's also self-aware enough to not be constantly insecure about whether he's doing enough already. He's rough around the edges, but he gets it in a way that even adults often don't (again: it's arguably a series that was ahead of its time), and while it's not necessarily a perfect way to live nor the only way for one to live, I'd say it's pretty admirable.

[shihalyfie]

So after I made the post on Yamato's motorcycle in Kizuna, I was informed by multiple sources that his motorcycle is without any doubt a Ducati 848, and looking at it myself, even I'm like "okay there's no way it's anything else," so I'm removing the last post to prevent misinformation spread (I don't mind having a record of myself being very blatantly wrong, but misinformation is misinformation).

I'll fully admit that I really don't know much about motorcycles in terms of their technical specs at all, so I was primarily relying on the friend who was talking to me about it, and amusingly, when I brought this update up to them, they immediately went like "are you kidding" because Ducati hadn't even been on their radar. "Like hell is that an accessible bike for a college student!!"

But while their concern was the price (it'd have been something like 2 million yen in 2010), personally, as someone who was more familiar with the series and Yamato, I didn't think that was that big of a deal considering I can easily imagine him saving up for one over a long period of time, especially taking into account the idea he'd apparently been into this hobby for at least five years. From my perspective, the part I'm more concerned about is the accessibility: something with a combustion as high as 849 cc classifies as a large two-wheel vehicle with license and maintenance requirements that are so difficult that most Japanese resources discourage you from going for that unless you really, really are committed to this. (But Yamato was seen taking the bike all the way to Yokohama at the end of the movie, so maybe this isn't that unreasonable.)

But nevertheless, it is also true that there's nothing outright forbidding Yamato from having one (the license minimum age is 18), so in conclusion:

Given the requirements for said license, Yamato is canonically capable of lifting a 168-kilogram motorcycle and pushing it around unassisted.

(That, and he's really committed to the bit...but it's Yamato, so that shouldn't be surprising.)

[shihalyfie]

I've already added this in a later update to my Sora meta, but I figured I should go into this in a little more detail. Between Adventure and 02, Sora switches her sport from soccer to tennis, and the reason that's actually given in explicit text is that it's part of her bonding with her mother (since her mother played back in the day and is now her personal coach). But there's actually another implied reason that's a bit lost in cultural translation, and in fact, from what I understand, most Japanese fans already assume that this was the case despite it never being stated in dialogue:

Sora probably didn't have a choice even if she wanted to, because Odaiba Middle School probably didn't have a girls' soccer club.

There are enough Japanese middle schools that don't have girls' soccer clubs that this is actually a fairly frequent story you hear among girls who played soccer in elementary school (and especially so in 2001, when Sora first entered middle school). In such a situation, if Sora wanted to continue soccer, she would have two choices:

Brute-force herself onto the boys' club: In fact, this is implied to be exactly what she did in elementary school after she self-exiled herself from the girls' club (based on her testimony from Adventure episode 26). But while elementary schools are fairly lenient about this, middle schools are not, and Sora would be up against school staff advising her against it as well as potential scorn from the team itself. Indeed, if you look at the results of a survey held by the Japan Football Association, 68% of girls who played soccer in elementary school were affiliated with the boys' team, but only 20% did so in middle school (and this is from 2009, a whole decade later, so the numbers were probably even lower in 2001!).

Find a neighborhood girls' soccer team: Even outside school clubs, there are still independent soccer teams, so it would theoretically be possible to continue with the sport as an extracurricular activity. But that would mean potentially making a long commute (depending on where the nearest team is) and dedicating extra time on top of required school club activities, something that a lot of girls in real life don't have the luxury of doing.

So while she could have gone for it if she really, really wanted to, at this point, she would have to be willing to push for it to "considering going for the Nadeshiko League" levels (and according to former Nadeshiko League player Yoshino Yuka, who had to commute an hour's distance by train to continue playing soccer in middle school, it's not something that's easy to pull off for a lot of girls and their families even if you do have that level of dedication). Of course, there's no doubt that this is an unfair, unfortunate situation no matter how you look at it, but it's one that Sora would have realistically been likely to face in 2001, and given that she was never particularly depicted as being attached to soccer beyond hobby level in the series, it's easy to imagine that she would have decided to take an alternative route in order to continue playing sports instead.

[shihalyfie]

While we're on the topic of Yamato and motorbikes, let's take a look at Yamato's scooter in Part 2 of tri.!

From the few shots we get of it, visually speaking, Yamato's scooter is a dead ringer for the Vespa P150X. Using this model would be very advantageous from a pop culture perspective: it became famous in Japan because of its appearance in the TV series Tantei Monogatari, so it would immediately associate Yamato with something cool, classic, and stylish to anyone who recognized it.

But unfortunately, once we start applying real-life logic, we start hitting a major snag: the P150X would have been way outside accessibility range for a high school student, since its combustion of 150cc would classify it as a standard two-wheel motor vehicle under Japanese law, and while Yamato technically was old enough to get a license for that, it would be inadvisable for him (or anyone who's just starting to get into bike riding) to jump straight into one rather than easing his way up from the lower-requirement licenses.

If we stick purely to real-life models, Yamato would have most likely had a PX80E or one of the PX125 models, both of which have the same frame (visual appearance) as the P150X but would fall under the much lower-hurdle classification of a small two-wheel motor vehicle under Japanese law. But if you personally ask me, I have a hard time imagining that Yamato would have any more than a standard moped license at this age; on top of the testing and schooling requirements being much higher for a motorcycle than it is for a moped, the license fees are also significantly higher, and the majority of Japanese high schools won't even let you drive a motorcycle to school. Meanwhile, a moped license is very convenient to get (it doesn't even have a practical exam!) and is also generally the recommended way to go for people who are just getting into bike riding, let alone the fact that most high schools do allow mopeds, so from a pragmatic perspective, it would be by far the best choice for someone in Yamato's position to go with.

So personally, my headcanon is that tri.'s Yamato has a theoretical 50cc variant of the PX frame that didn't exist in real life but does in tri.'s universe, kind of like how Koushirou had a PiBook before the iBook actually existed in real life (Kakudou was using it as a statement that he wanted Apple to make a MacBook for kids). Of course, there's room for creative leeway, but it's personally the most feasible option I can imagine for him based on the P150X's popularity and his own practical needs.

[shihalyfie]

Digimon Survive’s character cast, their roles in the group, and Adventure parallels

This franchise loves to self-reference, so it’s very easy to say that a lot of things are based on Adventure, but in Survive’s case, it has been abundantly clear (to the point of having been officially stated in many interviews) the narrative and setup itself is meant to be a reimagining of Digimon Adventure, as in the 54-episode series that aired from March 1999-2000. As much as the franchise likes to use Adventure symbolism, or rough glosses of its isekai premise, you might be surprised at how few things actually have bothered to take a look at the entire series and structure to the little things, trying to figure out what made it tick, instead of just pulling its names and faces and terminology and calling it a day. Moreover, one of Survive’s core premises of “a Digimon partner is effectively a part of your own soul” is a premise that originates directly from Adventure; it’s just that this time, it’s much more explicit.

Adventure is famous for being a character narrative, to the point you can put a picture with nothing but the characters and people will consider it representative of the entire series. So if you want to go deeply into Adventure, you have to look at its characters, what their relationships were, and what roles they had. And Survive does, but with its own distinct cast of characters who are very similar in some ways...and very different in others.

As you might expect, this post spoils all four routes, so please be aware of this before reading further. (I also will be spoiling Adventure and 02, in case you haven’t seen those yet. Hey, you never know.)

Because I wasn’t able to go back through all four routes to take screenshots, the screenshots used in this post are from Anthony (Wrathful), Owl-Quest (Harmony), and BattleBunny (Moral and Truthful)’s playthroughs. Please go check them out if you want to see the game yourself!

Something very important before we begin

I think making comparisons and drawing parallels is very useful, but I have a personal policy that comparisons should only be drawn “as much as they are useful” and no more than that. There’s a difference between “thoughtfully inspecting comparisons and contrasts to analyze how things work” versus “forcing parallels so hard that you end up trying to smash a square peg into a round hole, completely losing sight of the reason you’re trying to make those comparisons in the first place”. I know it’s tempting to try and make as many parallels as you can, but there’s a point where trying to force it becomes actively detrimental to your analysis.

It is true that Survive was built from the ground up as a reimagining of Adventure of sorts, and even promoted and officially stated to be such. However, Adventure is Adventure, and Survive is Survive. Survive is a game meant to stand on its own even if you've never touched Digimon Adventure in your life; to act as if the narrative and characters are nothing more than variations on Adventure’s is, in my opinion, disrespecting Survive’s efforts to be its own story in the end. It is a game that pays tribute to and reimagines Adventure's concepts, so it can't (and shouldn’t) be disentangled completely from Adventure if you want to bring the most out of an analysis, but it’s also unfair to treat the game as if it’s just some kind of twisted, barely-modified parody of Adventure, because it’s not. It’s a game that draws heavily from its predecessors in bringing up concepts to think about while also firmly doing what it needs to do in order to be its own story.

Therefore, in making character comparisons and analyzing the characters in relevance to Adventure characters, my priority will be on making connections between “their roles and positions in the group” rather than trying to force comparisons for the sake of forcing them, or trying to claim that this character is just the Survive version of this Adventure character. In fact, in some cases, my goal is to convey that a Survive character may start off in the same rough position as their Adventure counterpart but go in a very different direction.

I also would like to reiterate that I very much disapprove of the idea of using Survive to be condescending about Adventure. Survive’s characters and plot do address territory that Adventure isn’t able to, but framing Survive with reductive things like “Adventure but darker/edgier” or “a deconstruction of Adventure” as if the game only exists to dunk on Adventure’s idealism or treat it like it’s implausible is incredibly disrespectful, not only to Adventure but also to Survive, which in fact very obviously holds its predecessor in high esteem. (I mean, it is very fun to refer to Survive as “Adventure except people die” as a joke, but the game really is more than just that.) I’m going to bring back this very well-worded tweet “a deconstruction is when I like something in a genre I disrespect”; I don’t have any patience for this kind of thing, so don’t bring it in here. I reiterate: the comparisons are going to be drawn for the sake of better analyzing what Survive is pulling from and referencing while also doing its own thing for its own story. No more, no less.

Takuma and Agumon

At this point it’s pretty much common knowledge that anyone with a name that starts with “ta-” and a pair of goggles is going to be taking Taichi’s role as protagonist, and Takuma having an Agumon only drives it in further, but if we’re actually going to talk about Taichi himself, things get a little more complicated because Taichi was actually quite unusual in many ways (I honestly would say that Taichi is a character a lot of people “know” but don’t tend to easily “understand”). But right off the bat, Takuma turns out to have a very different temperament from Taichi’s, being significantly more introspective and less impulsive. In fact, he holds the distinction of being a rare Digimon protagonist who uses the polite first-person pronoun boku (most Digimon protagonists use the more assertive ore), and for frame of reference, the other major players who do this are Takato (Tamers), Haru (Appmon), and Keisuke (Hacker’s Memory), all three of whom are associated with some kind of meta element questioning whether they should be in the protagonist position...

(Personally, between Takato, Haru, and Keisuke, I’d say Takuma is probably closest to Haru in that he’s polite but also very thoughtful and introspective. He does happen to have self-doubts much more quickly than Haru would most of the time, but he’s not prone to Keisuke’s self-esteem issues or Takato’s tendency to shrink easily.)

Some of the nuances of Takuma’s personality and how selfish or selfless he is depend on the player’s choices and what route things are in, but for the most part the general core is consistent across all four routes. Takuma doesn’t start off thinking of himself as the group’s leader, and this part is consistent with Taichi as well; Taichi didn’t have particular awareness of himself as the group’s leader until Jou confronted him with the prospect in Adventure episode 28. However, in contrast to Taichi immediately taking initiative and pulling everyone forward even if he didn’t consciously see himself as the leader, Takuma started off still having strong awareness of seniors like Aoi and Shuuji, and it only slowly becomes apparent that he’s taking charge as more and more characters start pointing it out, culminating in multiple characters pretty much unanimously considering Takuma the group’s leader even before he’s considered it; Part 9 on the Truthful route has Shuuji outright admit to Ryo that he’s using Takuma as his model for how a leader should actually be.

So how does Takuma end up becoming unanimously considered the leader in a similar way to Taichi despite having such a different temperament? The characters spell it out in clear words multiple times over the course of the game: he brings the group together by being their emotional center. That part about being their “emotional center” is important because Taichi wasn’t necessarily as good at that part (which incites a lot of conflict between him and the others during the last arc of Adventure), but the reason this is more important for Takuma is that the Survive group is significantly more prone to infighting than the Adventure group was most of the time. When the game’s producer Habu called it the “Lord of the Flies” counterpart to Adventure’s “Two Years’ Vacation”, Adventure’s director Kakudou revealed that Lord of the Flies was an inspiration for the part of the story corresponding to Pinocchimon and Yamato...which resulted in Taichi failing to keep the group together and everyone falling apart. So in other words, Takuma is pulling off the achievement of keeping the group glued together when the equivalent of the Pinocchimon arc is happening all the time. There are no Crests in this narrative, meaning the automatic filtering for “naturally good kids” was absent and the kids were dragged into the Digimon world by sheer virtue of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, leading to a lot more negativity on all fronts and composures lost much more easily -- and thus, Takuma’s ability to keep a cool head and get everyone to calm down becomes his most important asset.

Also of note is Takuma’s own relationship with Agumon. While Agumon in this game is obviously based off Taichi’s Agumon in Adventure, Takuma and Agumon end up having quite a lot of conversations together where Takuma consults with him on how to sort out his emotions and what to do next, far more so than would happen in the original Adventure. Part of this is simply because of the medium shift (being a video game, Survive is able to have much longer conversations that aren’t restricted by timeslot airtime), and it’s also not like Agumon in Adventure wasn’t also emotionally insightful when Taichi needed advice, but Takuma and his Agumon partner end up having several conversations on the vein of Adventure!Agumon’s discussions with BlackWarGreymon in 02 episodes 32 and 46. In the end, the main reason is probably just that Takuma is just that kind of introspective person who actively seeks out Agumon and talks to him honestly, allowing them to get borderline philosophical without any strings attached.

Minoru and Falcomon

The mere suggestion that Minoru is supposed to be Koushirou’s counterpart would probably make someone roll their eyes and go “oh, come on, now you’re really forcing it,” and I wouldn’t blame anyone for thinking so. Temperament-wise, Minoru couldn’t be any more different from Koushirou. Rather than anyone in the Adventure group, he comes off as a kind of mix of Daisuke (in terms of being rough but friendly and having a forward-thinking attitude) and Miyako (in terms of being a “mood maker” who tries to keep everyone’s spirits up but needs to be reined in by a more stoic partner). But trust me, hear me out, I know this sounds weird, but I’ve got more reason for this stance than you might think!

Actually, Koushirou had a pretty complex role in Adventure, to the point he seems to have two counterparts in Survive. The more well-publicized parts of Koushirou’s profile involve his intellectual curiosity (bringing him closest to the secrets behind the Digital World) and his sense of deference and politeness, and those traits correspond more to the Professor (more on that when we get to his section). However, the less well-publicized but no less important part is that Koushirou was, for all intents and purposes, Taichi’s right-hand man, and thus one of the most important figures in helping Taichi pull off what he needed to as leader.

Koushirou was one of the few kids who knew Taichi prior to the events of the series and had already established a certain sense of respect for him (he only went to camp at all because of Taichi). As a result, while Koushirou tended to avoid confrontation with the others in the group, he was open to Taichi in a way he often wasn’t with others, and Taichi likewise was comfortable asking him for assistance (culminating in the famous moment in Adventure episode 28 when Taichi uses his authority as leader to appoint Koushirou as the best person to solve the card puzzle). Later, it’s Koushirou who sticks by Taichi when the group splits up during the Dark Masters arc, Koushirou who witnesses and hears out Taichi during one of his biggest emotional breakdowns in Adventure episode 48, and Koushirou who works directly alongside Taichi in Our War Game! Taichi’s relationships with Yamato or Sora tend to be more well-publicized, so casual fans of Adventure or mainstream media reports tend to completely gloss over this, but it’s conspicuous to anyone who knows Adventure on a particularly deep level. (While this analysis sticks purely to the original Adventure and 02 for the sake of consistent scope, it says something that even stage play writer Tani Kenichi clearly also caught onto this and had the lines "I've watched you at your side all these years! Isn't that right?!" and "But I thought you could at least speak honestly with me!" come out of Koushirou’s mouth.)

So as much as Minoru isn’t really much of a counterpart to Koushirou in terms of personality, he is in terms of Koushirou’s “position in the group”: the leader’s right-hand man who avoids inciting confrontation but is vital in helping keep them together. (In fact, the part about avoiding confrontation is pointed out quite directly in his official profile.) Considering how Takuma pulling off the feat of keeping everyone together required him to have a very different temperament from Taichi, it thus follows that Minoru’s temperament needs to be different from Koushirou’s in order to achieve the same effect with the Survive group. Koushirou’s more polite and level-headed demeanor was important to keeping the rather impulsive Taichi in check, but in this case, Takuma is already plenty level-headed by himself, and Minoru being more actively sociable and trying to keep everyone’s spirits up is a more effective complement. This is helped by the fact that, in the same way Koushirou knew Taichi from the soccer club even prior to Adventure, Minoru happens to have already been Takuma’s friend from school prior to Survive, and thus by the time we get to the final chapters of the game (especially in the Truthful route), it’s made quite clear that Minoru really is Takuma’s right-hand man whom he can rely on for many things. On top of that, Minoru being so agreeable makes him the only character of the group besides Takuma to survive all four routes -- he sticks by Takuma no matter what.

Background-wise, Minoru’s is quite different from Koushirou’s in that he’s mostly used to being rather lonely at home due to a divorced father and a workaholic mother, and he also happens to be a fan of hero manga and tokusatsu to the point a lot of his personal ideal throughout the game is to become a “hero”. (Perhaps fittingly, his temperament is probably the closest to the shounen protagonist archetype among this group.) This puts him in an interesting position in that he’s the most aware of what kind of heroic character would be from a series like Digimon Adventure and personally strives to be one, even though it takes him a while to gather up the courage for it. When you have affinity-affecting choices with him, he tends to prefer the “forward-thinking” kinds of responses that would make Daisuke proud, so he clearly took the kids’ media lessons to heart. In line with that, Minoru is the only character besides Takuma to survive all four routes; while his biggest emotional turmoil happens in all four routes (it takes up the majority of Part 6), he and Falcomon weather through it quite well. But when you think about it, back in the Adventure universe, the kids who admired the Adventure kids most were...well, the 02 kids, so perhaps it’s not actually that surprising Minoru’s temperament is closer to them.

Also, here’s another fun thing to consider: Minoru’s dynamic with Falcomon takes several pages from Miyako and Hawkmon’s book...so, remember who also happened to be Koushirou’s junior who admired him the most?

Aoi and Labramon

If you wrote a rough base outline of Sora and Aoi’s characters, they’d probably be pretty similar or even identical. You’d basically get something like “the Mom Friend who tries to take care of everyone and overwhelms herself in the process, crumbling under the pressure”. But there is one key distinction that makes all the difference: Sora’s desire to help others was something that came naturally to her despite her own lack of self-awareness, whereas Aoi’s woes come from the fact she’s all too aware of the fact everyone is relying on her and bears resentment about it.

One recurring thing with Sora was that her own self-evaluation was often much harsher than she actually deserved. Initially scoffing at the idea of being responsible for someone else (Adventure episode 4), despite being unable to abandon everyone and constantly going out of her way to help everyone behind the scenes (Adventure episodes 22-25), her own self-evaluation was still that she was apparently devoid of love and didn’t care about the others at all (Adventure episode 26). Her constant desire to help everyone was effectively compulsive, and she had poor awareness of whether she was getting in over her head, with others needing to remind her that she shouldn’t see things as an obligation (Adventure episode 51). Sora was barely even aware of how much she was putting out for others because she saw it as an impulsive obligation, and the others were the ones concerned about whether she was taking enough care of herself. Moreover, although Sora bottled up quite a bit of self-imposed pressure, she wasn’t exactly shy about expressing her feelings; it’s just that they often happened to be messy, and she wasn’t sure what to make of them.

(By the way, this is also why I really don’t like the idea that Adventure is somehow more “unrealistic” or even “idealized” than Survive’s just because they’re ostensibly more put-together and selfless people, because Adventure’s characters often toed on the other extreme of being selfless to self-destructive levels; the kids would be prone to severe self-confidence issues or even self-hatred, especially going into 02. While the Survive kids may seem overall self-centered at first and thus be more prone to infighting, any self-worth issues they have or attempts at reckless self-sacrifice don’t tend to be as frequent or extreme as they were with the Adventure and 02 kids.)

In contrast, Aoi is consciously aware of what’s on her plate, what she’s dealing with, and why she’s doing what she does. Sora was the same age as Taichi and Yamato, so she was able to be comfortable in a position as their peer, but Aoi is one year older than Takuma and therefore considered one of the seniors of the group, a fact that’s alluded to multiple times over the course of the game. This means the group ends up treating her with the expectation that she has responsibility for them (especially after Ryo and Shuuji die in the main routes, thus genuinely leaving her as the oldest one there), and on top of her class president duties, she’s surrounded by expectations and responsibilities that are actually imposed on her. On top of that, people actually take advantage of her kindness and exploit her, and she knows this fact very well and hates it. (While it’s possible this might have happened with Sora, it’s unlikely she would have even realized she was being taken advantage of, much less come to resent anyone who did, because the issue was more about her own difficulty with setting boundaries and doing something for herself.)

Aoi does what she does because “she wants to be helpful”, so she suppresses all of her angry feelings and resentment to not burden anyone; for the early parts of the game, Labramon openly voices all of the snark and harsh burns that Aoi clearly wants to say but won’t. This means that meeting Saki inspires a mix of admiration and envy for the fact Saki is able to express her feelings so openly. But in the Wrathful route, when everything goes to hell and Saki (somewhat) sacrifices herself for Aoi, Aoi implodes from the resentment of everyone burdening her with responsibilities, seeing their attempts to give her space as not caring enough about her, and upset that after all of her desire to be “helpful”, everything actually just got worse. The last straw is when Piemon exploits her kindness to attempt to murder her, and the end result is Aoi completely flipping into “the ultimate selfishness” (absorbing Labramon, as in her own ego) to decide that the best solution would be to impose her way -- the way she’d never been getting all of this time -- on others and force them to agree with her.

Thankfully, Aoi fares better in the other routes where she manages to trust and rely on others a little more, and her friends do much more to make sure she knows her efforts are appreciated. Notably, during her affinity choices, Aoi reacts very well to choices that validate her right to have “shallow” interests like cute things (instead of it being considered undignified and immature of her) and choices that have other characters outright call her a Mom Friend. I’m pointing this out because for all Sora is well-known among fans for being a Mom Friend, this wasn’t actually pointed out with this kind of wording in Adventure mainly because Sora wasn’t really seeing herself as one, but here Aoi does prefer to be seen this way, presumably because it affirms the fact her friends appreciate her as a person rather than someone to dump responsibilities on.

As an aside, the Wrathful route involves a subplot about Kaito being one of the first to catch onto what’s going on with Aoi and make the most prominent attempt at reaching out to her, and while I don’t know if this was intentionally meant as a parallel, it does call back to the scene in Adventure episode 26 when Taichi and Yamato are at a loss as to how to help Sora during her emotional meltdown, and Yamato’s response (to let her cry if she needs to) is indicated as the better option until Takeru finally manages to step in with the best response. In Aoi’s case, given that she ends up resenting everyone giving her space (interpreting it as “leaving her alone”), Kaito’s attempt to get through to her by confronting her directly about her feelings was probably the closest to a step in the right direction -- it’s just that unfortunately Kaito doesn’t exactly handle it delicately enough to prevent Aoi from having a complete breakdown.

Fortunately, as if responding directly to this predicament, the Moral route contains a scene of them getting along perfectly well when going out to get food together. This is significant if you played Wrathful and Harmony before then, because both routes had one or the other fall off the deep end; Moral has Shuuji and Ryo’s deaths force them to step up to the plate, but without the exacerbating factors that drove both to to the brink in Wrathful and Harmony, it turns out they’re more than capable of stepping up to the task.

Ryo and Kunemon

While it’s generally easy to figure out at least some obvious parallels for each character in this cast, sometimes even multiple, Ryo is the one character I’ve never seen anyone really be able to get a read on regarding this question. I’ve seen suggestions that it might be Akiyama Ryou (based on the name) or even Ken (based on having a bug-type partner that he initially had a bad relationship with). Personally, my stance is “nobody, and that’s the point” -- because you’ll notice that the one thing all of these theories have in common is that none of them correspond to anyone in the original group from Digimon Adventure.

I’m not sure if this really comes across as well to anyone who hasn’t actually played the game hands-on, but one very striking thing about Ryo over the course of the beginning of Survive is that the game oftentimes feels like it’s tempting you to give up on him. The characters label him as unlikely to be cooperative right off the bat, and while they extend the minimum amount of courtesy to him, it’s also tinted with a sentiment that nobody really expects him to come along because he’s so pessimistic he’ll never cooperate. Getting his affinity level up to a significant amount in the early game actually requires you to go out of your way to seek him out and talk to him at least once (during a period the game interface doesn’t inform you that he’s available to talk like it does the other characters). And Ryo really is an uncooperative stick in the mud who doesn't look like he has any interest in helping himself anyway. They spoiled the fact he was going to be the first death before the game even released!

In other words, Ryo has no clear Adventure counterpart because “he has no place here”. He’s not a character who fits in the framework of Adventure-defined archetypes. He wasn’t made to be on a heroic adventure to begin with, and so he’s the first to be removed from it. And yet, the difference his presence or absence makes results in him being arguably one of the most important characters in this game.

In fact, even in the very, very early stages on the game, there were hints that Ryo’s behavior of being completely uncooperative and pessimistic were largely exacerbated by the stress of being brought to another world with monsters; if you closely watch him at the beginning of the game, he’s the one who enables Miu into taking them to the shrine (which he reminds us about near the end of the Truthful route). His website short story reveals that he’d actively decided to go to the extracurricular camp despite his initial misgivings because he really did want at least a little hope of making friends. But being jaded from isolation does a number on your abrasiveness level (the Frontier kids can testify to that one), and then everything went to hell when all of his stress factors and feelings of isolation were aggravated to their worst.

Depression isn’t an elegant thing, unfortunately, and Ryo’s inner desire to do better being blocked off by his initial difficulty to connect with others is perfectly exemplified by Kunemon trying really hard to take care of Ryo and communicate with others but being held back by his inability to use human language or do much with his limited physique. Note that Ryo’s initial hostile behavior towards Kunemon isn’t necessarily condescension or anything near the level of Shuuji’s initial bad relationship with Lopmon; it’s just that Ryo is afraid of Kunemon and not sure what to make of him, in the same way he’s clearly not sure what to make of himself. (Naturally, the first thing Ryo does when he comes back from the brink is start forming a proper relationship wtih Kunemon, and Ryo himself opening up more in the Truthful route correlates with Kunemon’s higher forms becoming able to speak.)

Ryo’s death in the three main routes is from a mixture of factors that even the cast in-universe isn’t sure what to make of; he doesn’t actively commit suicide per se, but his death wouldn’t have happened if not for his extreme suicidal ideation, and while Takuma regrets not having reached out to him earlier, it’s also not like he can be blamed for not doing enough when it wasn’t for lack of trying (from Takuma’s perspective, it’s not like he had any way of knowing that Ryo would die if he didn’t bond with him intimately in 3 chapters, and Ryo himself wasn’t exactly giving much of an indication that such a feat would actually be possible). Looking at the difference between the routes where he dies and the route where he doesn’t, the difference is that when Ryo dies, his pessimism about anything working out for him and him having a “place” anywhere convinces him he really doesn’t have anything to live for anymore, whereas the route where he lives has Takuma and the others so obviously risking life and limb to drag him back that he’s actually able to see, very clearly, that he did have a “place” and the ability to make friends after all.

(By the way, I should point out that one thing Survive is very good at is that a lot of the “correct” affinity choices are ones where you don’t pry too deeply into their problems and instead respect the other person’s space. In Ryo’s case, getting his affinity up quickly enough to save him requires going out of your way to check on him often, but the actual choices that raise affinity mostly involve validating his feelings and not prodding things too much, basically showing that you care but also respecting that he’ll open up when he’s ready.)

Having realized this, Ryo opens up immediately; again, he was interested in proactively making friends from the get-go, so it’s only natural that as soon as he confirmed that was a possibility for him and his initial shell was broken through, he didn’t hesitate to brighten up and actively engage with the others. Turns out, he's actually one of the most emotionally insighful people in the cast (in no part because, as someone who's seen the bottom, he's well aware of its horrors), but he also has a certain sense of grounded, to-the-point pragmatism while also not being as extremely emotionally charged as Kaito. Completely contrary to the bad first impression he gave everyone (except Saki), it turns out he’s actually a pretty great friend to have. And once Ryo is saved, the route automatically locks onto Truthful, because it creates a chain reaction where he ends up being the best person to save Shuuji, who then paves the way for the truth to be reached and the best possible ending achieved.

Remember how I said that Ryo was the character who had no place in the Adventure framework? If Ryo dies in Part 3, the “best” possible ending you can theoretically get (Moral) is the one that correlates most closely to Digimon Adventure, with the kids being booted out of the Digimon world for the time being and an uncertain future of whether the worlds can truly come together. Reaching an even better one that more closely represents what came after Adventure and allows the story to be passed onto future generations (very unsubtly represented by the Chibimon meeting new kids at the end -- note the significance because none of the 02 quartet’s Digimon are recruitable in the game) requires Ryo, the added factor who helps the story proceed.

But really, the ultimate take-home the game is making here is that you shouldn’t give up on people that easily, because they just might surprise you.

Saki and Floramon

Saki’s creed being to “go with her feelings” makes it immediately obvious off the bat that she’s the Survive counterpart for Mimi, but interestingly, Saki is simultaneously more rude and more kind than Mimi was in Adventure. Mimi had a “princess-like” demeanor based on her somewhat spoiled upbringing, meaning that on one hand she would be quick to complain and gripe about anything that even moderately annoyed her, but she also was constantly deferential and respectful to her elders, had consistent use of honorifics, and was always polite and careful not to step on anyone’s toes as long as she wasn’t emotionally overwhelmed.

On the flip side, Saki handles everyone somewhat bluntly (not even using upward-facing honorifics for most characters despite being one of the youngest in the group) and has less regard for what other people think when she says what she feels -- but she’s quite the opposite of spoiled. In fact, Takuma realizes after a fashion that she comes off as someone who’s been through hardship in the past, and she’s actually one of the most resilient in the cast; eventually, we find out that any “sheltering” she’s been through comes from the fact she wasn’t allowed to do much in light of her illness, and her emphasis on feelings and living to the fullest comes from the fact she’s not sure whether she might die soon. Moreover, the illusory versions of Saki encountered over the course of the game reveal that she’s actually afraid of being hated by others, so there is a certain aspect of her that’s self-conscious about whether she’s going too far.

In the end, Saki respects others’ feelings, but also expects to have her own feelings respected in turn. Throughout her affinity events, Takuma learns that although she initially seems flighty and difficult to predict in terms of how she wants to be treated, she’s a lot more considerate than she seems at first, and at no point does she deny anyone else’s right to feel the way they do as long as they respect her own. In addition, while she doesn’t believe in hiding how she feels, she also does take measures to try not to step on others’ toes (that is to say, she understands that she can’t just selfishly do whatever she wants without regard for others). Out of all of the deaths presented in the three main routes, Saki’s is perhaps the most purely selfless one as she knowingly accepts death in the face of her fear of it, as long as it saves others -- especially since the weight of “failing” her friends hangs so over her head that she loses all sense of self-worth.

The beginning of Part 5 of the Wrathful route reveals that Saki had been delaying a surgery out of fear of its outcome, despite the fact that it would greatly increase her chance of living longer if she takes it. It’s left ambiguous whether she does actually decide to commit to it after the events of the game, but the three endings where she survives (Harmony, Moral, and Truthful) confirm she at least lives for a year after the game’s events. One can only hope that the events of the game and her friends convinced her to have the courage to take it!

Incidentally, Adventure and 02 generally had a pattern that the characters with Digimon partners that were closest to their own personalities were the ones that usually were more straightforward -- so naturally, Saki and Floramon have the closest to identical temperaments from the very beginning.

Shuuji and Lopmon

Considering that Jou tends to be one of the most well-liked Adventure characters by adult fans, depending on how you look at it, it’s either deeply ironic or incredibly fitting (or both) that his Survive counterpart is turning out to probably be the most controversial character in the cast.

In fact, on the surface level, Shuuji’s profile is almost identical to Jou’s from temperament to backstory. He’s the oldest of the group (in this case, the only one in high school) and is therefore considered the “leader” with responsibility for everyone by default, but doesn’t really have the mettle to keep himself together for it at first. His sense of duty has roots in his family life, including a father who has high expectations of him and a shadow of an older brother looming over him. However, one factor makes all the difference here: Shuuji’s doing all of this specifically because he wants to please others and get their approval.

Jou wasn’t really all that worried about what others thought of him (other than the minimum amount of respect necessary to have faith in his ability to keep them together). The concept of “status” didn’t really play any sort of factor, and in fact, he was portrayed as even somewhat dragging his feet when it came to studies or social status. On top of that, poking into a 02 drama CD reveals that Jou’s dad wasn’t actually that controlling, and was perfectly willing to give his blessing to Jou about not becoming a doctor; it’s just that Jou knew that, emotionally speaking, he wouldn’t be very happy about it, so Jou was doing this because he just really cared about his dad’s feelings. Jou only didn't want to "disappoint" others because he happened to have a Good Samaritan nature of wanting to help others, and in fact it almost seemed he thought of himself too little to the point of having a rather recklessly self-sacrificial streak (Adventure episodes 7, 23, 36). When Jou said “because I’m the oldest”, what it meant was “because as the oldest, I take my responsibility to take care of everyone very seriously”.

In contrast, Shuuji’s fixation with being respected as the “leader” is decidedly less altruistic than Jou’s, and in contrast to Jou not really worrying that much about what others think of him, Shuuji believes he’s entitled to everyone’s respect and acts out of fear of abandonment. Of course, the beginning of Part 5 makes it clear why there’s such a huge difference here: instead of a father who was still ultimately supportive despite everything and two older brothers who looked out for him, Shuujii’s father is emotionally abusive, and while his brother doesn’t seem actively condescending per se, he seems to have a sense of resigned apathy and is only driving Shuuji’s inferiority complex in further. (While it wasn’t said in Adventure or 02 that Jou was necessarily concerned about being compared to his older brothers, there was a nuance Jou had a very intimidating “example” set by his university-aged brothers -- but that's also exactly why Shin pulled Jou aside to give him advice in Adventure episode 38.) With the fear of being "abandoned" instilled in him, Shuuji desperately tries to prove to everyone around him that he's capable of being a "leader", but his obsession with trying to force everyone's respect rather than doing anything actually worthy of it only earns him less respect, which he knows...leading to a very bad loop.

Shuuji's behavior of being a well-meaning abuse victim who ends up exhibiting abusive behavior as a maladaptive response to his trauma is unfortunately a very well-known cycle, especially in the way it manifests via his behavior towards Lopmon. In a moment of clarity at the beginning of Part 5, Shuuji does notice that Lopmon's behavior towards him mirrors his own behavior towards his father, but this only results in a slight improvement in their relationship (from “treating him like a disgusting monster” to “overworking him to uncomfortable extents”), with Shuuji treating Lopmon in the exact same way his own father treated him. If you know anything about typical maladaptive trauma behavior, it comes out most prominently when the person in question feels the safest -- when they feel threatened, they shrink under the trauma, and when they feel safe, they try to make use of the control of the situation they’d so desperately been lacking, resulting in them resorting to the only thing they know how to do. So ironically, Shuuji began behaving this way because he actually felt emotionally safer with the kids and with Lopmon than he did at home; in front of his family, he shrank and groveled at his father’s feet, but once he was in a situation he did have an opportunity for respect, he became overly controlling.

In three of the four routes, Shuuji dies a vicious and unfortunate death when his own negativity dark evolves (for lack of a better way to put it) Lopmon and symbolically results in him being destroyed by his own malice, but in the Truthful route, Ryo gives him a good smack in the face to bring him back to his senses. While it's implied that Ryo was in the best position to understand how necessary that was due to having personally experienced trauma himself, at the same time, it's also remarkable just how quickly Shuuji bounces back and completely changes his tune thereafter. In fact, it’s quite unlikely Shuuji himself wanted to be this kind of person, it’s just that this kind of behavior was the only way he knew how to respond. (Note the symbolism of Wendimon himself clearly being in anguish and effectively crying for help even after devouring Shuuji -- he was afraid of his own destructive qualities.) Even if Shuuji wasn’t necessarily dealing with a supernaturally implanted ball of darkness in the back of his neck, it is not entirely off to be making a comparison with Ichijouji Ken.

Shuuji’s role in helping achieve the Truthful outcome happens because he decides to become the Professor’s assistant, meaning that Shuuji is actually incredibly capable and intelligent to the point where his observations help the Professor reach a level of understanding he wouldn’t have been able to otherwise. Shuuji himself says that he decided to start working under the Professor because he wanted an adult’s example to follow, which is important because this is basically Shuuji realizing that the other adults in his life had failed him. For all his father gave him grief for being a bad leader, he wasn’t exactly setting a fantastic example himself about what a good leader should be, and Takuma notes that Shuuji is starting to take on some actual leadership qualities just by being more confident and being more assured of what he wants. Shuuji says that he’ll talk to his father and brother once he gets back, and it’s not entirely clear whether this will go well (personally, I’m willing to put more bets on his brother, whom I imagine is likely to be a victim of their father as much as Shuuji is), but the important part is that this will mean Shuuji asserting himself and what he wants back at his family, pursuing what he wants to do and being a leader figure in his own way, rather than doing things just because his family expects him to.

It took a much longer and much more painful way to get there, but Shuuji was able to come to a forward-thinking conclusion for himself not entirely unlike the one Jou reached at the end of Adventure, which I think is pretty neat.

Kaito and Dracmon, Miu and Syakomon

Kaito and Miu’s character stories are so intertwined that I honestly feel it would be better to combine their sections here (I also know Miu would probably hate this, so I give my deepest apologies to her). Of course, it probably goes without saying that they’re Survive’s parallels to Yamato and Takeru, in the form of an overprotective older brother and a younger sibling who wants to be more independent. However, Yamato and Takeru’s situation was heavily influenced by their family situation, which is very different from Kaito and Miu’s, resulting in some pretty significant differences.

Back in Adventure, Yamato and Takeru’s parents having divorced meant that the brothers only got to see each other once a year (Yamato jokingly compares it to Tanabata in 02 episode 17), and Takeru had gotten his parents to agree to let him join Yamato’s camp despite not even going to his school. Thus, Takeru was openly affectionate with his brother because he was happy to even have the chance to be with him at all, and Yamato was overprotective because he didn’t have very many opportunities to do much for Takeru to begin with. Both of them were still heavily hurt by the divorce and coping with it in ways that were not entirely dissimilar to each other; Yamato started judging his own self-worth by his ability to be independent and via comparisons to other people, and Takeru suppressing everything and pretending he had it together and everything was fine, even when it wasn’t. Yamato derived his self-worth from his overprotectiveness of Takeru because he was afraid of the idea of anyone providing that role better than him (such as Taichi), whereas Takeru’s insistence on independence came from his desire to avoid difficult things and to not hold everyone back.

In Kaito and Miu’s case, the two still live together, but the inciting incident that defined their current relationship was the fallout from Miu being targeted by a stalker and Kaito dealing with him violently, resulting in the family relocating to the countryside and both of them blaming themselves for it; Kaito blames himself for not sufficiently protecting Miu during the incident, whereas Miu blames herself for causing a burden on her family and everyone around her.

While Miu’s desire to be independent and tendency to retreat into escapism reflects Takeru’s, her way of reacting to it is almost the opposite; Takeru responded by trying to present himself as a responsible, mature kid who had everything together, whereas Miu shirks responsibility altogether and sinks herself into occult hobbies and mischief. (It’s for this reason that while Part 4 contains a scenario that greatly calls back to the Princess Mimi subplot from Adventure episode 25, it’s Miu who is the central character instead of Mimi’s actual counterpart Saki, who’s significantly less selfish.) On Kaito’s end, he becomes so obsessed with his role as Miu’s protector that it becomes more about him than it ever becomes about Miu. His description of her as a frail girl at the beginning of the game is horrendously off, and his hot-headedness is to the point where Miu calls him out for defaulting to solving things with violence and using her as a proxy for it. (Yamato did lose his emotional composure enough to start punching Taichi out in Adventure episode 9, but this wasn’t treated as something that would have normally happened if not for the immediate stress of the situation he was in, and his punch on Taichi in 02 episode 10 came from him knowing Taichi would understand what he was intending to do with it, but Kaito going as far as to even slap Miu in Part 9 makes it clear that it’s not really about her as much as it’s Kaito wanting his way in being her “protector”.)

Of course, Kaito’s abrasive nature masks the fact Kaito genuinely does want to be friendly and simply has a hard time expressing it, but when Miu dies in the Harmony route, the despair brings the worst out of him, and his more self-centered stake in the equation ends up taken to its logical conclusion. Having basically centered his entire life around Miu’s existence and his own relation to her, Kaito decides that the entire world can burn for all he cares despite it being very obvious Miu wouldn’t approve of that (and when everyone informs him of this fact, Kaito merely retorts that they don’t have the right to say they know what she would think, as if he would know any better). In the end, Kaito is only barely brought to his senses before being destroyed by what he helped create.

Things end up better for Kaito and Miu on the Moral and Truthful routes, although, interestingly, the problem is not completely solved over the course of the game; Kaito keeps lapsing into overprotective tendencies, but he admits to Takuma that this isn’t good and that he needs to start doing better. Even if Kaito wants to do better, this kind of habit is not going to go away overnight, so it’s important that he keep this in mind going forward, especially since the end of the Moral route has him remind his shadow that he’s not going to be a very good brother to Miu if he ignores the fact she can take care of herself. Miu, on her part, stops shirking responsibility and becomes more aware of her need to not cause more trouble for others; on top of her compassion winning out in Part 4 when she realizes how much her immaturity had been causing others pain, she also starts taking more proactive roles as each route progresses, and the Moral and Truthful routes have her be more willing to admit that she doesn’t want to have a bad relationship with her brother despite everything.

Dracumon has a much more put-together personality than Kaito and is key in getting him to chill and hold back instead of losing his temper, similar to how Kaito is aware that he needs to do better (thus, him completely succumbing to his own despair and selfishness results in him willingly throwing Dracumon out for the sake of more power). Syakomon and Miu are like-minded enough that they have the best relationship among most of the partner pairs in the game, but Syakomon is significantly more down-to-earth and pragmatic, and she serves as a reminder of the responsibility to others Miu knows she’s shirking when she goes off to do things at her own convenience.

Miyuki and Renamon (”Haru”)

Fun fact: Due to Hikari’s natural sensitivity to Digital World-related phenomena and the fact she outright channels “the one who wishes for stability” (novel name: Homeostasis) in Adventure episode 45, quite a few Japanese fans have taken to  calling her a “shrine maiden” (miko), basically comparing her to a Shinto priestess who helps communicate with the gods and convey their will...so, naturally, her Survive counterpart is an actual shrine maiden.

In fact, comparing Hikari and Miyuki is a little difficult, mainly due to the fact their contexts are so different -- the more detailed nuances of Hikari’s characterization didn’t start popping up until 02, and her comparatively short time in Adventure had her with a cold, so she wasn’t exactly in her most optimal condition. Thankfully, if we do retroactively reflect Hikari’s further characterization in 02 back on Adventure (especially since Miyuki seems to be closer to 02!Hikari’s age anyway), Miyuki is actually pretty similar to Hikari’s nature of being bright, assertive, insightful, very put-together, and incredibly selfless. (Also, the scene of her immediately going right to the blackboard and drawing out the relationship between the worlds brings to mind Hikari’s Jogress mockups in 02 episode 28 and her parallel worlds diagram in 02 episode 34.)

As for Miyuki herself, she is at least significantly more willing to be vocal and outspoken about her feelings instead of clamming up to dangerous levels and risking falling into despair about her own welfare like Hikari would (Adventure episode 48, 02 episodes 13 and 31). In addition, the fact she grew up as a “responsible older sister” instead of being in the shadow of an older brother like Taichi means she grew up with the expectation of having responsibility for Akiharu, and her independent streak seems to be in line with that (it’s commented that even despite Akiharu now being much older than her in age, she still seems to have it more together than him). However, being born to the Minase family meant she was trained as a shrine maiden from the very beginning, which ends up causing much more misfortune for her than it does Hikari; Hikari’s sensitivity abilities were more of a “factor” than anything, and her ordeal with Miyako in 02 episode 31 allowed her to assert herself in spite of her special position, but Miyuki understands her role as a shrine maiden to be a duty, which includes considering it her responsibility to sacrifice herself for others and the world if need be. And while Homeostasis ultimately borrowed Hikari’s body after negotiating with her and left after courteously explaining themself, the entity that ends up taking possession of Miyuki for the last few chapters of the game is...decidedly not as benevolent.

Takuma’s initial contact with the “real” Miyuki in Part 8 is very brief (fittingly, it’s during the chapter he has contact with the real world, like with Taichi’s brief visit and meeting with Hikari in Adventure episode 21), but it’s enough to convince him that she should be considered a trusted friend worth saving, which puts him a bit at odds with the others for a short time after his return. Unfortunately, Miyuki remains somewhat of a damsel-in-distress for most of the rest of the game, and in two of the four routes (Wrathful and Harmony) she unceremoniously dies when the route’s main antagonist absorbs her. On the flip side, however, she becomes extremely instrumental in saving everyone in the Moral and Truthful routes, and is also granted a way home and a much happier future with her brother.

Interestingly, the parallel continues with Miyuki’s partner Renamon having a very “complicated” relationship with her partner and with loyalties or morality in a similar way to Hikari’s partner Tailmon-- but in an inverted sense. Other than the obvious partnership reasons, Tailmon’s absolute loyalty to Hikari came from a past lifetime of bitterness gained from blackmail and abuse on Vamdemon’s part, so it’s only natural that she jumped ship at the opportunity and took the chance to be with someone who would treat her with love. (She did initially start off on a bit more of an abrasive note with the other Digimon, most notably setting Gomamon off with her attitude in Adventure episode 45, but she eventually settled in.) Renamon is the opposite; her absolute loyalty to Miyuki and desire to be the one to make her happy (even to the point of taking the form of someone she hates) results in her stooping as low as trickery, betrayal, and submitting herself to an abusive master just for the chance to get Miyuki back (and, more selfishly, to prove that her bond with Miyuki means something, in the sense that she can’t stand the idea of anyone being more important to Miyuki than herself). It's an interesting contrast where, in both cases, the arguably most morally upright person in the group has a partner who ends up most closely associated with questionable morality, but it also goes to show you that even the best of intentions can end up with very bad results when sufficiently pointed in the wrong direction.

Professor (Akiharu)

Every Digimon series needs a designated infodump character to unpack what’s going on with the worldbuilding and all, and back in Adventure Koushirou was the main bearer of this role -- in fact, he was so important that he ended up constantly showing up in 02 despite not technically being a part of the advertised main cast. At first, it seems as if the Professor really is mostly just this, and it’s initially even questionable how helpful of one he’ll be when it seems like he’s died at the end of Part 3. But not only does the Professor return to provide more info behind what’s going on, he also ends up becoming instrumental to determining the difference between the endings, because whether he’s present or not and how much he’s learned become the biggest influencing factors on the outcome. (The Harmony route involves the gate being opened much less aggressively than in the Wrathful route, but it’s implied things still had a worse outcome than they did in the Truthful route because the Professor wasn’t able to be there anymore to give any guidance, and the Moral route has everyone seal off the gate because him never uncovering the truth behind the Master meant they destroyed it and thus the system that gave the boundary between worlds any stability.)

The Truthful route happens thanks to the chain reaction of Ryo saving Shuuji and Shuuji becoming the Professor’s assistant, allowing him to more effectively dig up the truth regarding the Four Holy Beasts, the Master, and Haruchika -- hence why it’s called the “truthful” route, not simply in terms of being a “true ending”, but also in terms of it being the ending where the truth behind it all was revealed. Through flashbacks and eventually some outright statements, we learn that as even as a kid, Akiharu actually had quite a bit in common with Koushirou, in terms of being timid and deferential yet bursting with intellectual curiosity and a desire to know more. Back in Adventure, Koushirou managed to uncover some very important things about the Digital World thanks to the fact he actively pursued anything he was interested in, and while Akiharu spending his life studying the Kemonogami might initially seem to be his way of coping with the traumatic loss of his sister and memories, he tells Garurumon in the Truthful route that it was simply his encounter with him that inspired him to learn more and teach others.

The ending of the Truthful route draws parallels between the siblings Haruchika and Yukiha with their descendants Haru and Miyuki, but their situations are reversed; Haruchika was the one “abandoned” by his sister, whereas Miyuki was “abandoned” back in the Digital World when she sent her brother back, and thus the Master attempts to claim Miyuki as someone who should sympathize with him only to find that she bears absolutely none of the malice he does. And like Yukiha, Akiharu doesn’t give up on finding his sibling again and eventually manages to do so, despite going through trauma and memory loss (and some scorn from the scientific community) to get there. On the flip side, Garurumon ends up bearing the emotional pain of being left behind, but in the Moral and Truthful routes he can’t bring himself to hold the grudge for too long once it becomes clear Akiharu really didn’t mean for that to happen. In the end, despite all the trouble that happened between Akiharu, Miyuki, Garurumon, and Renamon, none of them were able to hold onto their grudges, and that’s what eventually allows them to save Haruchika from his own.

Haruchika

You might be wondering, wait, what, this guy? Well, you see, in the Truthful route we find out that he was a sacrifice for others to have power, and he decided to take out his feelings of betrayal out on the world and bring it down with him. Now how does that correlate to anything in Adventure --

-- oh, okay.

I’m sure a lot of Adventure fans who finished the Truthful route were probably at least able to figure out the parallel overall, but inspecting it closely reveals there’s even more than you might think -- Haruchika is deliberately drawn as a parallel to Akiharu in a sort of Survive equivalent to a “fallen Chosen Child”, and his laments rather parallel Apocalymon’s “we wanted to live and speak of friendship, justice, and love!” And in the Moral route version of things, the Master forces the kids to go through trials of overcoming their darkest feelings and reaffirming how far they’ve come, quite similar to the reaffirmations in Adventure episode 53.

Fortunately for Haruchika, his much deeper contextual relation to Survive’s story and themes (and therefore sympathetic qualities) allow him to be saved and to pass on properly with Yukiha, which certainly beats going out in a failed suicide bombing. Adventure, as a sort of pioneer for Digimon works thereafter, had Apocalymon serve as the “inhibitor of evolution” compared to Adventure’s “story of evolution”, but Survive, which spends more time examining what a Digimon partner even is in the first place, thus has Haruchika represent more of a challenge to what the Survive kids learn to find and what ultimately saves Haruchika himself in the end: as the theme song says, turning hatred into love. Haruchika himself is said to be the first to have realized that bonds between humans and Digimon made each other stronger -- basically being the inventor of Digimon partnerships in this universe -- only for him to end up succmbing to his own hatred and the malice of the world.

Also, when you really think about it, the Master is the closest thing you can say to entities that “chose” the kids as the Survive equivalent of Chosen Children -- at least, in the sense that their distortions dragged the kids into the Digimon world in order to prey on them. Homeostasis and the Agents were still guilty of dragging Adventure’s Chosen Children into the Digital World and not really giving them good explanations, but Homeostasis rather courteously explains in Adventure episode 45 that they were doing it out of desperation for lack of many other options. However, Homeostasis also made it clear that they didn’t have many abilities on their own besides housekeeping, and that the kids would have to be the one to figure the rest out on their own (the novels clarify that it’s really nothing more than a security system), whereas the Master does pose himself in a deity-like position and even has the entire stability of the Digital World depend on him -- it’s just that they’re also quite the opposite of cooperative. So in both cases, regardless of the initial circumstances, the groups involved had to solve the problem on their own will.

[shihalyfie]

So if you’ve known Digimon Adventure for long enough, you’ll know that it has some very strict color-coding for its characters thanks to the Crests: Taichi with orange, Yamato with blue, Sora with red, Koushirou with purple, Mimi with green, Jou with grey, Takeru with yellow, and Hikari with pink. There’s also a very strict “order” of characters, which is exactly the order above (it’s the order in which we saw their Digimon’s first evolution, and in the second ED). The franchise has followed this with strict consistency for almost the entire time since Adventure’s airing (it took until a little after 02 for the order to completely solidify, but after that it basically hasn’t budged). For Tamers fans, the order for the main three characters has also been consistent -- although there are rare exceptions, it’s pretty much always Takato, Jian, and Ruki in that order, associated with their D-Ark colors red, green, and blue respectively.

On the flip side, 02 and Frontier have been...decidedly less straightforward. Things like color coding and character ordering probably don’t matter much to the average viewer, but for fanartists (like @digitalgate02 and @demonoflight, who graciously assisted in helping me write the rest of this post), this can easily drive a person absolutely nuts. However, thanks to DigiFes 2022 and other surrounding events, these questions have finally been cleared up!...Maybe.

Let’s take a look at the history of 02 and Frontier’s color handling and ordering (with some bonus series thrown in)!

02

So as I said earlier, generally speaking, the Adventure order and coloring has been very straightforward, and when you involve Adventure and 02 in a group of twelve, the order for that has been consistent for the most part after 02′s airing: Taichi, Yamato, Sora, Koushirou, Mimi, Jou, Takeru, Hikari, Daisuke, Ken, Miyako, Iori. (This ordering has basically all been all but completely solidified on the Kizuna website and in most Kizuna promotional materials thereof.) That said, things get a little more complicated once we talk about the 02 group specifically, especially because of Ken’s unusual position -- usually “latecomer party members” are added on at the end, but Ken ends up in a right-hand man position to Daisuke in terms of the story, so it feels a little awkward to tack him on in the end like that. If you go by rough order of “evolution introduction” for the series, that implies a Daisuke-Miyako-Iori-Takeru-Hikari-Ken order, but other materials have offered a “Jogress order” (Daisuke-Ken-Miyako-Hikari-Iori-Takeru) or “original order but with Ken moved up” (Daisuke-Ken-Miyako-Iori-Takeru-Hikari).

Things get even trickier when you get to figuring out their image colors. You could try doing the Crest colors (orange and blue for Daisuke, pink...? for Ken, red and green for Miyako, purple and grey for Iori, yellow for Takeru, and pink for Hikari). But not only does this cause overlap with Ken and Hikari both having pink of some kind, it’s also just not very good for design and merch, due to the lopsided nature of three of its members having two colors while the others have three (the Kizuna website attempts it, but only on the character square borders).

The seemlingly easiest and most straightforward one to use is the D-3 colors (blue for Daisuke, black/grey for Ken, red for Miyako, yellow for Iori, green for Takeru, pink for Hikari), and we do have quite a bit of precedent on this one, most notably in 02′s second ED. Unfortunately, this color scheme comes with one major issue: grey isn’t exactly a very easy color to use in design, especially for merch. (Jou merchandise struggles with this issue a lot, and it’s really only offset by the fact he’s surrounded by a whole seven others to make the impact less noticeable, plus the fact it’s explicitly a light grey, unlike Ken’s dark grey and black D-3.) Ken’s D-3 remaining black was a very important symbol of his penance in-series, but it makes merchandise making a bit tricky. It also is not very easy to use for shiny glowy things, and even this same ED struggles with that:

...yeah. (White is never used for Ken anywhere else.)

And then there’s the fact Ken’s Wormmon is associated with being the “green” side of Paildramon, and Daisuke and Ken’s Jogress D-3 combo is blue and green...but because the other combo colors (red/white and yellow/white) aren’t really ones that are easy to make hard matchups with, it’s still hard to say that there was any hard association with green and Ken back in 02, especially since that makes it more complicated with Takeru.

Even Kizuna struggled with this for a bit. The movie shows Takeru with a yellow phone case, in a context where the other five members of the 02 group have cases matching their original D-3s, but in all other contexts -- promotional art, merchandise, the card game, the character song album -- it’s back to green, matching with his D-3. But there is merch that associates Takeru with yellow, his Crest color, overlapping him with Iori...and giving Ken green. Generally speaking, it’s understandable that any context with all twelve Tokyo Chosen Children will have to have a color overlap somewhere, but Takeru particularly sticks out as one they don’t really know what to do with.

(Note that the card game’s backing colors don’t apply; the card game’s mechanics are tied to its own set colors, which means that characters are placed in there for reasons closer to their Digimon’s archetype than their own original series image colors.)

However, starting with the Kizuna character song albums (technically also the concurrently-released Digimon Stitches, but that one also had a contradictory palette in the same set), it seems like recent merch (especially in relation to the upcoming movie) is finally consistent about color -- but what’s interesting is that Takeru is now orange. That was never used in 02. That wasn’t even used up until 2021!

The theme behind the new colors seems to be, quite simply, their partners’ colors (V-mon’s blue, Wormmon’s green, Hawkmon’s red, Armadimon’s yellow, Patamon’s orange, and either the pink from Tailmon’s ears or Angewomon). This does seem to be in line with the angle taken in both Kizuna and the new movie that this group is rather unusually close with their partners, possibly even more so than their seniors. The benefit of this color scheme is that, with there being a consistent baseline for all six of them, there’s now proper justification for Ken being associated with green, while also not putting Takeru in an awkward position.

These colors were used for the official DigiFes 2022 penlight, which explicitly lists the following colors as the kids’ “image colors”: "light blue" for Daisuke, "red" for Miyako, "yellow" for Iori, "orange" for Takeru, "light pink" for Hikari, and "green" for Ken.

Perhaps acknowledging the truly chaotic nature of this issue (probably fitting when this group is concerned), the Karatez collab firmly, undeniably associates these colors with the original 02 kids instead of just the Kizuna-era ones, but also strings a bunch of other colors here and there to reference their other associations: Daisuke’s orange glasses and shoes (Courage and Friendship), Ken’s black shirt (D-3), Wormmon’s green maracas and blue band (Jogress with Daisuke and V-mon), Miyako’s red shoes and green guitar (Love and Purity), Iori’s purple guitar and grey shoes (Knowledge and Faith), Armadimon’s orange tambourine and green band (Jogress with Takeru and Patamon), Takeru’s yellow shoes (Hope), Hikari’s pink keytar and shoes (D-3 and shoes), and Tailmon’s red keytar (Jogress with Miyako and Hawkmon). That’s basically about all you can cram in there at once. Whew!

(As an aside, some of Miyako’s merch tends to toe dangerously close to purple at times, including in this very collab, but it’s probably intended to be pushing the boundary of what can be considered “red” as far as possible; her smartphone case has some noticeably purple tones, probably to prevent it from overlapping too much with Sora’s red.)

It is still probably a bit weird that this color scheme is obviously retroactive, since it wasn’t ever in 02 itself or anywhere near its airing, but it’s nice to finally have something consistent to work with for once after all these years. Will future things continue to maintain this? Hopefully. Probably.

As for ordering, unfortunately, this is still fluctuating, because even the same sets of merch can’t seem to decide whether Ken is second or last. It does seem like most merch so far has been favoring the Daisuke-Ken-Miyako-Iori-Takeru-Hikari ordering, putting Ken next to Daisuke for obvious reasons, which the movie website also supports -- and the added benefit of this ordering is that if you put them in two rows or columns of three (which is done quite often), the Jogress pairs will still be next to each other. So for the most part, I’d say it’s safe to say things have mostly settled on that one.

Frontier

Frontier is explicitly based off Super Sentai, so that means a lot of its visual compositions with the cast are focused on Takuya in the center. However, unlike Sentai, Frontier doesn’t really have ordered roll calls. And while the OP gives you a Takuya-Izumi-Junpei-Tomoki-Kouji order, putting Kouji last feels a bit off considering we pretty much all know he ends up being Takuya’s lancer character for the series (and unlike Ken, we know this very early in the series). Besides, if you watch Sentai, that’s pretty much just how it goes. The first ED offers multiple different orders, so it’s confusing. (And on one hand, it’s possible to make an argument that it’s refreshing that the orders seem malleable, but on the other hand, this is jarring since ordering is a staple of Sentai.)

Also unlike Sentai, there hasn’t been a lot of consistency with the colors, which is especially strange considering that producer Seki explicitly mentioned that Izumi should be associated with pink due to Sentai’s precedent. In fact, a lot of older materials do seem to want to associate Izumi with pink specifically:

But as you can see, there's already some contradictions in regards to color associations, because we can't tell if Takuya's supposed to be orange or red (Sentai associations would suggest red), whether Junpei should be blue or yellow, or whether Tomoki should be light blue or green...and to make things even more complicated, the D-Scanners all have two colors each (and that’s in base colors, because Takuya and Kouji get new ones later).

And, unfortunately, you shouldn’t expect the elemental symbols to help you either, because not only does Kouji being associated with pure white pose similar problems to Ken having black or dark grey, the combo of red/white/light blue/pink/dark blue/purple also isn't really very balanced in terms of design (no yellows...).

While Frontier didn’t get a consistent stream of merch to be contradictory per se, it turns out that by the time we get to the 20th anniversary stuff, we still don’t have a consistent answer!

(ノ°Д°）ノ︵ ┻━┻

Well, okay, it’s not that bad. The same penlights that doubled down on the new coloring for the 02 kids also offered some official image colors for the Frontier kids as well: “orange-red" for Takuya, "blue" for Kouji, "light green" for Tomoki, "purple" for Izumi, "orange-yellow" for Junpei, and "light grey" for Kouichi. Keeping in mind that the colors have such specific names mainly to not give them too much overlap with the 02 kids’, it’s probably better to consider it as red for Takuya, blue for Kouji, lavender for Izumi, yellow for Junpei, green for Tomoki, and purple-tinted grey for Kouichi. In addition, there’s a consistent aspect about this: they correspond to the grip colors on the D-Scanners (the original ones in the case of Takuya and Kouji), so we have a baseline too! 

Kouichi does seem to consistently show an angle of wanting to use proper grey but not really wanting to ruin design composition, so some obvious purple tints are put on it to make it blend nicer with the other colors. This is probably something that’s only possible because unlike with Ken, Kouichi ends up actively embracing his association with darkness, which has a purple elemental symbol and has been associated with “darkness” to some degree in the past (the current card game uses it for darkness-aligned cards even besides Kouichi). On the flip side, the bonus about acknowledging Izumi as having at least some kind of purple tinting to it means much better consistency with Izumi/Fairymon/Shutumon’s coloring.

As for the ordering...well, still, good luck. However, I personally feel that merch lines have been more likely to depict the Takuya-Kouji-Izumi-Junpei-Tomoki-Kouichi order, and if you have to ask me, I personally prefer this ordering as well because it makes a nice alternation between the Hyper Spirit Evolutions (fire/wind/ice and light/thunder/darkness).

Bonus

It seems like it’s always the group ensemble things that want to drive us nuts, because other than having this problem again, that’s what Appmon also has in common with 02 and Frontier. The good thing is that there does seem to be some kind of baseline -- usually Haru-Eri-Astra-Rei-Yuujin seems to be somewhat of a followed order, and Yuujin isn’t really put aggressively in the second position like Ken is because his looming presence in the series isn’t nearly as conspicuous. In addition, the Appli Drive covers also seem to be consistent between the original model and the Duo -- red for Haru, blue for Eri, yellow for Astra, and black/grey for Rei, and this seems to be consistent with their Buddy coloring as well. So one could probably extrapolate and decide that purple for Yuujin would work based on his Duo color and Offmon...but then the second OP decides to mess with you at the last minute.

Of course, the reason why is obvious, and it’s possible it really is just for that OP -- again, grey/black tends to be a hard color to work with, and Yuujin really doesn’t seem to fit the image of purple himself (that’s more Offmon). Sadly, Appmon never lasted long enough to get merch runs to really lock down on any of this, so it’s more “vague” than “contradictory”. But it is at least interesting that Haru is consistently associated with red, despite his temperament completely lacking the tropes associated with the color and the consistent underlying question of whether he’s suitable to be a “protagonist” or not.

But hopefully, this won’t continue to be an issue in the fu--

OH, COME ON

[shihalyfie]

Digimon Survive’s production background, story themes, and relationship with Adventure

Here's a little story. Fresh of the heels of the relative success of Re:Digitize and working on the 2013 PSP adaptation of Digimon Adventure for the franchise’s 15th anniversary project, Digimon game producer Habu Kazumasa (known for being rather communicative with the fanbase at a time the franchise had a tendency to be a bit out of touch with them) had the opportunity to work with Kakudou Hiroyuki, Adventure’s original director, who was working on voice direction for the game. Around then, Kakudou told him about a certain background concept he’d had for Adventure: that Digimon may have originally been like youkai that had made human contact before, but become more recognizable to the human world via technology (a concept that was alluded to in 02 and related media but not explicitly stated).

Habu was enthralled with this idea, and two years later, he directly used it as inspiration for the “ghost story”-like quests in Cyber Sleuth, released in 2015. This carried over into the game’s later-released interquel, Hacker’s Memory, released two years later in 2017 -- but, interestingly, in interviews for it, Habu alluded to working on another Digimon game with “set partners”, or a game that would allow for “what-if” scenarios that allowed you to pursue different evolution branches...

And so, one year later, in July 2018, Digimon Survive was announced. (And then it got delayed for a few years due to development circumstances, but that’s not the point.) So what is this game? How does it relate to Adventure, and the ideas behind its production that captivated Habu all the way back in 2013?

This post spoils all four routes, so please be aware of this before reading further. (I also will be spoiling Adventure and 02, in case you haven’t seen those yet. Hey, you never know.)

Two Years’ Vacation and Lord of the Flies

Back when Survive was first announced in 2018, frankly speaking, it was a lot to take in for a Digimon fan -- “survival horror visual novel” was not exactly something you would easily expect from the Digimon franchise (the SRPG part was probably the least weird part of it). The “survival horror” part especially ended up turning off some game publications off the bat, declaring that this kind of content was unfit for Digimon, but veteran fans coming from the days of World and Adventure were quick to point out that it’s not like Digimon hasn’t been a mild survival horror before. The over-the-top silliness made it harder to really feel the weight of it, but “getting trapped in another world where a lot of things are interested in killing you” could even be said to be a return to origin in a sense.

Shortly after the initial announcement, Habu explained that it would be a reimagining of Adventure’s concept with a more direct expression of Adventure’s “Digimon partners as a literal part of their human partners’ souls” and “Digimon as youkai” concepts -- but also more vividly depicting the “survival story” part of Adventure’s isekai, describing it as the Lord of the Flies equivalent to Adventure’s Two Years’ Vacation. What does that mean?

Let’s dip a bit into a brief history of survival stories, as well as Survive and Adventure’s relationship with them. “Two Years’ Vacation” is an 1888 novel by French author Jules Verne (you probably know him from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Around the World in 80 Days, and other similar adventure stories). Two Years’ Vacation is virtually unknown to English speakers, but is very popular in Japan due to a famous translation from 1896 with the new title “The Castaway Story of 15 Boys”, followed by more Japanese retranslations and media adaptations, including a Toei anime. (Although the "15 Boys" version of the title is more well-known in Japan, there have since been other Japanese translations that use the original "Two Years' Vacation" title, and interestingly, Kakudou's own references to the book have used the original title, perhaps unsurprisingly for someone who tends to be rather infamously in-touch with Western media.)

Two Years’ Vacation itself is one of a whole bandwagon of “Robinsonades”, a trend of books all taking after the 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe, a story about a man who learns to survive after getting shipwrecked on a deserted island. Verne wrote Two Years’ Vacation under the idea of making Robinson Crusoe for kids as a way to show that kids could be brave and admirable under harsh circumstances, too. Thus, after getting stranded on an island during what was supposed to be a British school summer vacation, fifteen boys set up a home there, brave harsh seasons and wild animals, fight and make up, and eventually hijack a passing slave trafficker’s boat and escape. In line with Verne’s usual work, it’s a feel-good story about kids being cool and brave.

The 1954 novel Lord of the Flies by British author William Golding (which you’re probably more likely to have heard of) is a much more cynical take on the concept. Golding wrote the novel as a scathing response to another survival Robinsonade called The Coral Island, an incredibly, incredibly imperialistic narrative involving British boys fighting against “savage, uncivilized native” archetypes and converting them with the goodness of Christianity. (While Two Years’ Vacation was not immune to racist or imperialistic notions, especially regarding the part where the boys treat Moko’s lower status for being black as a given fact of life, it was generally more focused on the boys figuring out how to survive in the first place, and the differing social backgrounds between the boys is depicted as a source of conflict they have to overcome.) Thus, Golding wrote Lord of the Flies with thinly-veiled parodies of Coral Island’s protagonists, with the point being made that instead of being righteous Christians who purge the area of evil, the evil instead comes from the boys themselves as they turn on and try to kill each other.

With Two Years’ Vacation being so famous in Japan, it’s no wonder that it was directly specified as a reference for Adventure all the way down to its original planning documents. (Naturally, most Japanese fans of Adventure are easily able to spot this as the inspiration.) And thus, Adventure is a story of kids from different backgrounds being put in a survival situation together, bonding, and proving their resilience and wit. But when Kakudou released his non-exclusive list of works that were used as reference for Adventure, among Two Years’ Vacation and a number of other charming adventure and coming-of-age stories, Lord of the Flies is also there. (In case anyone’s wondering, Kakudou later revealed that it was mostly to do with the part with Pinocchimon and Yamato and such.)

So, all things considered, I think the metaphor of Survive being the Lord of the Flies to Adventure’s Two Years’ Vacation is actually pretty apt -- but not just in the sense of Survive being Adventure except with more fighting and kids dying. Two Years’ Vacation had its share of friction between the boys, and Adventure itself had a bit of Lord of the Flies in it too; it’s just that Survive takes the parts about putting internal loyalties and individual characters’ selfishness more to the test.

I also do feel the need to point out that despite what it looks like at first glance, Survive is still, to the very end, a love letter to Adventure (no matter how morbid that may sound to some people at first glance). A frustrating byproduct of having works that are supposedly something “but darker” or “a deconstruction” of something (to which I will simply respond with this well-worded tweet “a deconstruction is when I like something in a genre I disrespect”) is that they often tend to be malicious works that are condescending towards the original by insinuating that it’s “unrealistic” or “too idealistic”, and even if the work itself isn’t actually like that, the fans are certainly likely to read it that way, both in well-meaning and insidious senses. But even if you didn’t know the fact that Habu is infamously known for being a hardcore Digimon lover to the point he convinced staff members to join him out of sheer passion (basically, if you know anything about him, it’s laughable to even imagine he would willingly treat Adventure with that kind of condescension), playing Survive itself and seeing how its endings are framed makes it evident that at no point does it ever ask the player to give up on the idealistic values Adventure is built on. The setup is harsher, and the kids are put through the kinds of trials that the Sunday morning kids’ timeslot would be very unlikely to approve of, but the journey to reach the best possible ending still falls under the same lines, and the outcome that everyone strives to reach is the same.

The four routes and endings

Although the game presents the three main routes as much as they’re “equivalent”, that’s not really true, and in fact the routes and their outcomes are pretty obviously presented on a scale of morbid to ideal:

Wrathful: Aoi/Plutomon attempts to assimilate the Master and everyone and forcibly yanks the gate open herself, resulting in the two worlds rapidly fusing even after the party defeats her. Without Miyuki around to manage the gate, and with humanity given no time to prepare, the end result is in chaos, destruction, and social strife, forcing Takuma and his friends to form a resistance group and shelter Kemonogami and their partners. Although Takuma and his friends take as positive of a stance as they can, this ending is so bleak for everyone involved that Takuma himself even outright wonders if this really was supposed to be how their adventure ended (or in other words, the game directly hint-hints that this really isn’t it).

Harmony: The party defeats VoltoBautamon, but the gate remains open and the worlds slowly merge. With not everyone finding their partners and with humanity not given enough time to learn about Digimon, social strife breaks out between those with partners and those without, and Miyuki isn’t there to manage the gate nor is the Professor there to be able to conduct studies, leaving the kids to have to set up research facilities and try to bridge the gap hoping for a better future. Aoi considers themselves to be “chosen kids” for the job of pioneering relations between humans and Kemonogami.

Moral: The party defeats the Master, although as he dies he ominously mentions that he was responsible for maintaining the stability of the Kemonogami world; with the worlds threatening to fuse and the kids’ partners sensing that this isn’t the right time to start trying to unite the worlds, the kids leave their partners behind and return to the human world with Miyuki closing the gate behind them. The human world returns back to normal, leaving the kids, the Professor, and Miyuki unsure if they’ll meet their partners again, but they decide to come back to the campsite a year later for a trip, and the Professor speculates that the Kemonogami world being sustained by everyone’s feelings and modern digital communication will make it resemble the human world more so the gate can open again someday.

Truthful: The party discovers the truth behind Haruchika’s situation and, with the help of the Four Holy Beasts’ partners, Yukiha’s spirit, and the feelings of the world, manage to put his soul to rest. The worlds begin to slowly merge (Miyuki explicitly states that it’ll be happening at a slow pace) to return to the state they once were as one world, while humans begin to slowly seek out and accept their partners. While the Wrathful and Moral endings emphasized that not everyone was able to find their partners due to the chaotic nature of the worlds merging, this ending implies that everyone will eventually be reunited with their other halves in due time (presumably because of the more graceful way the worlds began to merge again, instead of everything falling apart due to the one upholding it being violently killed).

As you might have noticed, the Moral ending is the one most analogous to Digimon Adventure’s, whereas the Truthful ending is the one based more on the 02 epilogue (which is driven in further when members of the “new generation” of kids chance upon a Chibimon -- note that the V-mon line, along with the other lines from the 02 quartet, is not recruitable in the base game). In fact, the 02 epilogue was actually intended as the ending for Adventure before it was greenlighted for a second series, and was always the planned endpoint for Adventure’s “story of humanity’s evolution”, so it follows that this would be treated as the outcome Survive’s characters end up reaching as their ideal as well.

The correlation between the accumulation of Takuma’s karma choices over the game and how this leads to the routes is a bit vague, since the lineup of whether Miu (Harmony), Saki (Wrathful), or nobody (Moral) dies doesn’t take direct influence from Takuma’s choice in Part 8, but the outcomes do roughly correlate with the general ongoing theme behind the alignments:

Wrathfulness choices correlate with Takuma prioritizing himself and forcing his way through regardless of how others feel; Takuma’s choice in Part 8 is that he decides to save the world only for Agumon’s sake. As a result, Saki feels even more determined to not die with regrets and sacrifices herself during the amusement park incident, Aoi falls apart from the extra stress of having had to take extra charge as de facto leader, and the ending involves Takuma’s closest allies (besides Minoru) being Kaito and Miu, with Kaito addressing things with physical fighting while Miu is freely doing her own thing.

Harmony choices correlate with Takuma picking choices along the lines of “doing enough to not rock the boat” (this route is deceptive because although it’s ostensibly about “teamwork”, it has somewhat of a passive “as long as everyone gets along” nuance to it); Takuma’s choice in Part 8 is that he’ll save the world because he doesn’t just want to sit around and do nothing while the world ends; thus, he manages to maintain good relations with Aoi and Saki, but it’s not enough to prevent Miu and Kaito from fighting, and Kaito from completely snapping in response to Miu’s death to the point of refusing to see reason. The end result is that Takuma and his friends end up in a situation where they can at least do something to try and establish peaceful human-Digimon relations, but the uncertainty is thick and the sentiment lukewarm.

Moral choices correlate with Takuma picking choices that are about “the right thing to do”, whether it’s about not abandoning friends or saving people who need help, or basically the kind of values that shows like Digimon Adventure would like us to take to heart. Takuma’s choice in Part 8 is that he can’t abandon his friends (the choice initially seems to be a Harmony one in that it prioritizes friends, but the nuance is that Takuma’s doing it because he knows he has a duty to not abandon them, rather than simply doing something only because he doesn’t want the world to end around him); thus, he takes charge during the amusement park visit in Part 9 in trying to save Miyuki and prevent victims, the group doesn’t split up, and nobody else dies. The end result is that Takuma and his friends momentarily give up on their desire to stay with their partners for the time being so that the world can be in peace for the time being. This is blatantly the game’s favored route out of the three main ones, since it has a significantly more “complete” story and resolved plotline compared to Wrathful and Harmony.

The Truthful route involves Takuma going out of his way to connect with Ryo in spite of Ryo not initially looking cooperative, and in helping Ryo have the will to survive the events of Part 3, Ryo helps keep the group together even further and gets to the root of Shuuji’s issues in turn, which results in Shuuji assisting the Professor in learning the truth behind the Kemonogami world and Haruchika, allowing to get to the complete source of the problem and resolve it at the root. Thus, the ending involves reaching a solution that allows everyone to achieve the goal of the worlds coming together again in a way that’s more appropriate.

(All this being said, the fact this game so blatantly favors Moral does make this one of the franchise’s most glaring examples of its tendency to be biased towards Vaccine types. Strangely, Wrathful/Harmony/Moral do not correlate to Virus/Data/Vaccine’s expected parallel with Chaos/Neutral/Law. It’s understandable that, as a part of a franchise with its deepest roots in a kids’ series that’s traditionally favored the power of friendship and doing the right thing, the game would have a bias towards Moral, but many of the Moral choices in the game are closer to what you’d expect from Neutral alignments on the Law/Neutral/Chaos scale, so seeing this correlate to Vaccine is a bit unusual.)

So although there isn’t technically a strict cause-and-effect correlation, you can see how Takuma’s attitude in approach has an influence on the course of the story, and the take-homes are: try not to be too selfish or self-centered, be proactive in doing the right thing, and try to make sure you know what’s really going on in making decisions. It’s a surprisingly didactic game for something that’s not advertised as kids’ media, but, again, this is probably what happens when it’s something that owes so much of its lineage to it.

Incidentally, while it wasn’t outright stated in 02, the time period between 1995 and 2028 involved the number of Digimon partners doubling every year. In particular, early contact with the Digital World was minimal, and the early years had the pioneer Chosen Children (like those depicted in Adventure and 02) helping keep things on the downlow, and access to and from the Digital World was still dependent on gates that could be opened or closed -- that is to say, it certainly didn’t involve the worlds messily fusing into each other. Given that, the world actually had a pretty reasonable “slow burn” period to adjust to the presence of the Digimon and adjust society to accommodate for them, so when you think about it, the 02 epilogue had it comparatively easier than the chaotic scenarios in the Wrathful and Harmony endings.

While we’re here, let’s also discuss why this game is a visual novel with branching paths. The first reason is to do with Digimon evolutions; Habu stated (in a part of an interview that’s totally about Survive, even though it wasn’t formally revealed yet) that he wanted to find a way to express branching possibilities of evolution with what-if scenarios, citing the SkullGreymon incident in Adventure as an example. But beyond just that, it also allows us to see sides of certain characters that would happen in different, mutually exclusive scenarios, and see how characters would reach rock bottom under what circumstances and situations, with their weaknesses cracking under the worst of stress tests. This means that even when you go into the “better” endings like Moral and Truthful, you understand what those characters had to overcome by not going in that direction, even if it wasn’t directly expressed in those routes. Thus, I don’t think any one of the routes alone constitutes the “complete” game, because certain routes are obviously written in ways to show off those contrasts (in particular, Wrathful shows Kaito and Miu doing spectacularly well in contrast to Saki and Aoi’s unfortunate fates, and vice versa for Harmony). And while the Survive characters can’t really compete with the Adventure kids having 54 episodes plus major recurring appearances in another 50 plus an unholy amount of drama CDs, material books, theatrical movies, and even a novel adaptation to flesh out their characters in excruciating detail (and that’s before we get into the post-2014 additions), the visual novel format allows the characters to explore them in a certain kind of intimate depth not always possible in other formats.

A Digimon game that can barely be called a Digimon game

Most of us know that Adventure is so influential on the Digimon franchise that pretty much everything that’s come after it has taken massive cues from it in some way. And given that Survive is pretty shameless about referencing Adventure in particular, this should only go without saying. But to put things in perspective, let’s imagine you went back in time before Digimon Adventure began airing and struck up a conversation with someone who knew “classic” pre-Adventure Digimon (with V-Tamer, Digimon World, and the like). And then you tell them there’ll be a game like this:

There is no Digital World; there is an “other world”, but it’s a youkai world that’s implied to have existed since feudal Japan

There is no Digivice

The Digimon aren’t depicted as being made of data per se

The Digimon aren’t even called Digimon, but are instead “Kemonogami” and are connected to human souls

...they’d probably look at you funny and think something has gone fundamentally wrong with the Digimon franchise. Of course, the fun of Digimon “null canon” is that it’s not something every work has to be particularly married to, but this game has almost none of the standbys that should normally define something as a Digimon work, with the only ties to the “digital” premise being that a smartphone seems vaguely able to interface wtih the world, and eventually the Professor’s prediction that the prevalence of digital technology and social media will become the sustaining force for the Kemonogami and their world. So when you think of it this way, Survive is getting away with what it’s doing because it’s taking so many things directly from Digimon Adventure...but moreso the “Adventure” parts than the “Digimon” parts.

That being said, while those parts aren’t necessarily solidified as part of the Digimon franchise as null canon rules, they’re definitely a part of the franchise identity to the point people now assume they come part and parcel with Digimon partnerships. Think about how immersed it is in public memory now that Digimon evolution is tied to human mental epiphanies; had it not been for Adventure, we could have easily had many more series where evolution was tied to item fetch quests or martial arts training (the latter would certainly be more V-Pet-accurate). Even entries like Tamers or Ghost Game, which are stronger on emphasizing Digimon individuality distinct from that of their partner, tend to imply some kind of emotional connection being directly linked to evolution. Of course, there are exceptions that do handle emotional growth and Digimon evolution on a separate basis, but the Adventure-based concept of “partners” is generally considered to be the default at this point.

It’s interesting that this game’s development timeline ended up coinciding with Last Evolution Kizuna’s production cycle as well (from what we’ve heard about official statements on the matter, the game and anime timelines are generally almost entirely separate with the exception of minor things like collab DLC, so any major similarities are likely to be coincidental). In short, we basically got two things playing around with and more directly addressing the implications and potential extremes of this kind of Adventure-established partnership, especially since Adventure’s take on it is probably the most intensely psychological out of all of them. The part about Digimon partners being literally a part of the human’s own being was not actually something stated outright in the original Adventure nor 02; it was really something you had to glean by context, the word “partner” didn’t even come up as much as you’d think, and while “Digimon partners die when their human partners do” was part of the original lore, it never came up in the series and we only found this out through behind-the-scenes stuff and post-series interviews, probably because Adventure and 02 had more than enough morbidity before adding that on top of it. But here, Survive spells all of this out clearly for its own Adventure-inspired setting; the phrase “destined partner” (localized as “fated partner” in Survive, but the term is “unmei”, the same one that had plot relevance in Kizuna) is prominent, the characters have strong awareness of partnership as a concept from the very beginning, and the link between their life and death is clearly depicted from right off the bat.

However, there is one significant difference between Adventure and Survive’s takes on the issue. In Adventure’s portrayal, it was implied (although still considered an unknown by the character in-universe) that there had been limited contact with the Digital World over the years, and it was only very recently that digital technology became able to connect with it on a more reliable basis. (The narration describing the history of the Digital World in the Adventure novels implies the connection with the human world to be just as new to the Digimon as it was for the humans.) On the other hand, Survive’s lore states that the Kemonogami world and the human world were actually supposed to be one to begin with and were split apart by the fallout from the Minase family’s actions and their impact on Haruchika and his friends. You can especially see the difference in the way the Four Holy Beasts are treated between Adventure and Survive’s takes; Adventure(’s novels) had the Four Holy Beasts be partnered to some of the earliest Chosen Children, implied to be from around 1997-1999, and the “first Chosen Child” retroactively implied to be from 1995, but Haruchika’s discovery of the concept of human partnership (thus making him Survive’s equivalent of the first Chosen) and the establishment of the Four Holy Beasts goes back to around the Kamakura feudal era of Japan from around 1000 years ago.

(Incidentally, a brief digression in terms of production and meta: Huanglongmon didn’t exist at the time Adventure and 02 were produced, but the 15th anniversary drama CD has a skit where the kids are given advice by the Four Holy Beasts in the Digital World to try and recreate the original Chinese/Japanese setup with their own partners in Kyoto. The end result is that they end up using some comedically forced reaches in trying to force their Digimon into the roles of Gabumon as the "blue dragon", Gomamon as the "white tiger", Piyomon as the "vermillion bird", Tentomon as the "black turtle", and Agumon as the “yellow dragon”. The natural conclusion of Agumon ending up representing Huanglong is fitting, but the rather irreverent, comedic tone of the CD drives home the idea that while the Four Holy Beasts are still important to Adventure’s world and connected to Japanese folklore around Kyoto, they’re not necessarily formative presences in both worlds, considering that the issue was ultimately addressed not by the Four Holy Beasts’ power, but by bribing a rock.)

So why the difference? Adventure and 02 only used the concept of historical connections with the spiritual world as a minor note in a story that was mostly about the present and future, so it still had a strong sense of being about digital technology as it was starting to become more involved with the world. That was something facilitated by its setting and the year it was produced; 1999-2002 made up of the years where digital technology was just starting to become something normal in households and kids were starting to get a feel for how it even worked. On the flip side, despite eventually becoming a story to do with an era long before digital technology even existed, Survive premises its existence as a “Digimon” narrative by saying that the transmission of thoughts and feelings is synonymous with digital technology, illustrated by people liveblogging Agumon and Piemon’s fight on social media and the resulting inflow of support from the crowds coming in almost immediately -- something that wasn’t easily as imaginable in this sense back in 1999-2002 when the Internet was still on dial-up (something like Our War Game! or Diablomon Strikes Back would be the closest you could get).

This was pointed out even back when Appmon finished airing in 2017, but “and then the kids were separated from the Digital World for an indefinite amount of time” feels a lot more incongruous these days than it did in Adventure, now that wifi and smartphones and so many other things are prevalent in our lives to the point it’s a better argument that you can’t escape technology these days. Conversely, with Survive’s context both in-universe and in real life, suddenly the idea of “digital technology is so fundamentally intertwined with human communciation and thought that a world made of thoughts will become more attuned to said technology” seems much less far-fetched.

Adventure frames the “Digimon evolution as human growth” metaphor with the idea that the road to the 02 epilogue and everyone having a partner is “humanity’s evolution” -- that is to say, the idea that the ability to have self-awareness in the way a Digimon partner gives you would be the next step in how humanity “evolves” overall. Therefore, the focus mainly sticks to portraying the kids as pioneers into completely unknown territory. On the other hand, Survive, being somewhat more conscious of its position as a reimagining of an anime from 1999, has a stronger theme of taking things from the past and passing it onto the future in a new form. Part of the reason Haruchika is initially unable to move on from his rage is that he and Huanglongmon still expect the world to be as war-torn as his original era (Yukiha says that Huanglongmon being purified means he’ll finally be able to “gaze upon the world” as it is), and Yukiha is only able to reach out to them by having faith that one of her descendants can convey the will she was never able to in life. The kids are still referred to as the “new generation” that’ll be able to make something out of the world in the current age, but even then, another “generation” of kids is depicted a year later as being about to go on their own Digimon adventure inspired by Takuma’s.

The flowers yearn for the leaves, and the leaves for the flowers

Thanks to this changed setting, Survive’s premise regarding the concept of separating human and Digimon partner is that they were originally supposed to be parts of the same whole, so separating them is actually going against what was supposed to be the case originally. (While Adventure had Digimon partners meeting them before they were formally partnered, with cases such as Oikawa Yukio, it also had partners like Taichi’s Agumon not being born until after 1995, or Daisuke’s V-mon having been born in 1999.) Thus, both humans and Digimon partners are portrayed as having somewhat of a sense of loss if they’re torn apart, and recreating something resembling the Adventure ending in the Moral route is given a more dissatisfying aura than it had in the original series due to this. In particular, looking back at the Moral route after knowing about the revelations from the Truthful route, insisting on keeping the worlds separate is basically reinforcing Haruchika’s cynicism about the world in a way (and to be fair, it’s not like even the Truthful outcome is a guarantee everything will go well, and as far as the circumstances in the Wrathful and Harmony routes go, he wasn’t entirely wrong about that one).

The themes of the game are reflected in its theme song, “Kizuna” -- first in the sense that it talks about the yearning of those meant to be together but torn apart, and in the sense that it advocates to “turn hatred into love”. It’s a fairly simple concept, and perhaps not even a particularly deep one, but it is nevertheless a theme that’s part of the core of both Survive and the franchise as a whole. Back in Adventure, Apocalymon served as something that tried to inhibit or hold back evolution out of grief and jealousy that the entire world got to evolve instead of him, and the kids defeat him by resolving to move forward with the help of the world’s feelings; in Survive, Haruchika succumbs to his own resentment from his isolation and feelings that are trapped in the past, and is ultimately saved by his sister and the world’s feelings reaching out to him.

That concept of “bonds saving people from their negative feelings” is basically a fancy way to say “power of friendship”, but nevertheless, the ending makes it clear that it wasn’t just human and Digimon partnership that constitutes a bond, but also the bonds between Akiharu and Miyuki allowing them to retain faith in each other despite being separated, the bonds between Takuma and his friends as he chose to go back to save them after having a chance to return to the real world, the bonds that Ryo and Shuuji are able to successfully form after being saved, the bonds between people as they’re bridged by digital networks, and so on and so forth. It’s a recurring, important theme through the Digimon franchise (again, it’s pretty funny we coincidentally had a movie also named “Kizuna” just now, but it’s a word constantly used over iterations of the franchise for good reason).

The game itself leans on symbolism regarding the spider lily flower, and most people familiar with Japanese anime instantly picked up its associations with death and therefore the fact this game was advertised as potentially having characters die. The theme song, however, brings up another meaning of the flower: that it represents bonds between those who are separated, represented by its leaves and flower petals never being visible at the same time, yet still part of the same plant. Haruchika initially lost faith in his bond with his sister after he believed she betrayed him, but Akiharu and Miyuki never did even after being separated for fifty years. Even if they’re torn apart, whether it’s through digital networks or emotional connections, it’s important to never give up on those bonds.

[shihalyfie]

Seems like someone translated the now unavailable stage reading from DigiFes2022 and i'm shocked about some things like, the twins not being all lovely around each other (a very common fanbase's interpretation/guess) and how Kouichi does not seem to be a shy (??) person like Ken (another fanbase guess regarding him)

Any thoughts? 😗

There is so much to unpack here. So much. So, so, so much. I thought I was going to answer this quickly, but then this post got too long because I had so much to say, so I'm going to tuck the rest under the cut, but my goodness. I'm actually offended this is from a "vanishable" stage reading (and that the official stance is even that the contents are meant to be disposable and not taken as canon -- to hell with that, material like this, let alone for Frontier, is too valuable to let go of). I don't know about other people, but this checked off all the boxes for things I wanted to see addressed or confirmed, moreso than even The Train Called Hope from 2019 (which I did still like, but to be honest, this one felt more like it was "at home" in a sense).

Well, let's start with stuff about production background (skip to the bullet points below if you don't care about this). This script was penned by Yamatoya Akatsuki, who was an episode writer for Frontier, and was presumably brought on because he's also working on The Beginning right now. But despite working on Kizuna and sometimes being advertised as a member of original staff, Yamatoya was actually very minimally involved on Adventure or 02...and on the flip side, he was a regular writer for Frontier and wrote quite a few of its landmark episodes. In fact, he may be right behind Frontier's head writer Tomita Sukehiro in terms of how significant he is to Takuya's characterization. Him writing for this is arguably more at home for him than Kizuna/The Beginning are -- not to say that he isn't doing amazingly with the Adventure and 02 characters, but I imagine Seki has probably been doing a lot of intervention with them, and while it may just be mental bias, there's a certain sense of comfort that just especially works here with this stage reading's dialogue for the Frontier kids, since Yamatoya was personally responsible for building up these characters to begin with.

(If you're wondering why Tomita wasn't the writer, he retired from anime writing in 2011, so any Frontier content "with original staff" has to be done by one of its episode writers. This sounds like a bad situation at first, but this is where I have to remind people not to get too hung up on auteur theory; Adventure, 02, and Frontier already had drama CDs partially or wholly written by episode writers, and said episode writers deserve way more credit for their influence than people give them. Please reference my posts on Adventure/02 and Tamers staff for more info...actually, I really ought to make a Frontier one too if I have free time, huh... (edit: okay, now I did)

However, our last bit of post-canon Frontier material, The Train Called Hope, was written by a different writer, Masaki Hiro (who also was an episode writer for Frontier). Because of that, and especially because these two "dramas" were written in reverse chronological order (The Train Called Hope takes place in their high school years, whereas this one takes place two years after Frontier's finale), I do have to admit I feel a little dissonance, especially in regards to the portrayal of the twins -- a lot can happen in several years, but it does feel weird to think about the fact that two years later they'll be close enough to bicker with and troll each other, but in high school they'll go back to being a bit more awkward...? Of course, it's very easy to reconcile both portrayals at once -- humans are very multifaceted creatures after all -- but from a writing perspective it's a bit weird. But between the two portrayals, the new drama's interpretation makes a lot more sense to me, and is also just a lot more satisfying in general, so I'm honestly very relieved to have this solidified, and judging from reactions on Twitter I can tell a lot of twins fans were also very satisfied.

(Disclaimer before we go forward: I'm afraid of giving the wrong idea, so to be clear, I do like The Train Called Hope quite a bit, it's just that this current drama was a lot closer to my personal preferences in terms of what kinds of details I wanted to know about the kids' futures. Given that Tamers 2018, which came out in the same batch as The Train Called Hope, was said to have been explicitly inspired by tri., I feel like they were kind of on a kick of trying to give the Tamers and Frontier kids the tri. treatment of big timeskips and future stuff, and I certainly don't mind it but I also felt a little sad at the fact that the character dynamics were a little thinner and we didn't get to see much of the group as a whole because they were busy trying to cram in so much info about everyone's career prospects.)

I already wrote about Ken and Kouichi last year, and this is especially prominent given that Yamatoya wrote both this and the Kizuna drama CD, even using similar story formats, and yet it's very clear that they (and their respective groups) are very different. This stage reading may be one of our most valuable resources for Kouichi lovers, because unfortunately during the series itself he was a little shy with the others due to the circumstances of how they met, and Izumi even admitted that she felt she didn't know him very well at the time (although to be fair, she also admitted she understood Kouji even less). But there were multiple hints within the series that Kouichi was normally very open and sociable, arguably even more so than a good chunk of the rest of the group, and more similar to Kouji in temperament than you might think at first -- so this is the one time we basically got hard confirmation of that. And it was exactly as I said: now that we're seeing Kouichi outside a very stressful situation where he had a lot of things to be worried about with this group, it turns out he really isn't very different from his brother after all (at most, he's a little more down-to-earth...just a little).

Anyway, bullet-pointing the other things I found to be of interest (I am frankly amazed at how much information Yamatoya is capable of conveying in only short lines of dialogue):

We finally get an answer to the question of whether the Shibuya train station elevator is still connected to the Digital World, and the answer is that, at least as of two years later, it’s not there anymore. My impression is that the implication is that it only supernaturally manifested in Shibuya Station at all due to the events of Frontier, and now that it was no longer “needed” it vanished. But the restaurant that replaced it apparently has a connection despite that...

The Frontier kids are confirmed to basically be on “penpal” status. The Train Called Hope made it clear they were still in contact, but to what degree was unclear. So as of this one, it’s confirmed that they don’t see each other super-often and still have to catch each other up, but they also do seem to contact each other regularly to the point it’s a given they have each other’s contact addresses and have rough awareness of certain things ongoing in each other’s lives. (I imagine once smartphones are invented, they might make a LINE group like the Adventure kids have in Kizuna...if they can bring themselves to swap out their phones.)

Izumi has a junior who likes her! (Well, likes her in some way.) I think that’s a pretty good sign that the whole making friends deal has been working out for her.

The group certainly has an interesting perspective on Kouichi, in that apparently they’re aware he’s not the type to throw random uncalled for surprise parties, but also Takuya seems perfectly capable of imagining him as some kind of action hero.

Speaking of which, while the entire group seems to be devoid of any brain cell whatsoever (if anything they might be in the negatives at this point), Takuya seems to be the most “pure-hearted” because he easily believes whatever theory he’s hearing at the moment. Since all of the kids are showing equal degrees of chaos, I like those little things that stand out.

On the other hand, Tomoki has now become genuinely terrifying with his ability to become deadpan at the most unnerving times.

Kouji stopped calling Kouichi “nii-san” as far as we can tell, which is in line with Things I Want to Tell You and The Train Called Hope, as with the portrayal of the twins here as significantly more rough with each other than they were back in the original series. As Izumi points out, the fact they’re so rough with each other is conversely a good sign about how comfortable they are with each other as actual brothers now.

The twins go to the same middle school. I cannot emphasize enough how much of an incredible bombshell this is. This cannot have been an easy feat to pull off, since the twins didn’t live in the same area at the time of Frontier. While it’s not stated in the drama itself, I have to imagine that at this point all three parents are aware and on board with this (possibly even directly assisting with it), because there’s no way the twins could have pulled this off by themselves, but hey, maybe their parents decided to help them to make up for lying to them for eleven years. (Okay, we’re getting into real headcanon at this point.)

The twins look alike enough that they can be confused for each other by appearance alone (basically, it’s confirmed that they have the same hairstyle at this point). I think headcanons were split as to whether both would want to look like each other or stick with their own individual styles, but I do know it’s a popular Japanese headcanon that Kouji only had long hair in imitation of his supposedly deceased biological mother (therefore favoring the idea he’d cut it after the series as a sign of moving on and as a way of looking more like his brother), so I think a lot of people were feeling very validated on that end. I am kind of amused at the fact that their voices are canonically considered to be different in-universe (I’m not sure if that’s actually possible in real life, but it’s definitely a meta joke).

Kouichi apparently has a girl who likes him (whose feelings he doesn’t reciprocate). Well, I mean, the twins are very popular among real-life audience members, so this isn’t really surprising...

Not only have the twins gotten a lot closer, Kouji is not above just completely messing with his brother for the hell of it. I’m not sure if this is a voice actor joke (Kamiya and Suzumura are close friends in real life, and Kamiya is infamous for being a troll who pranks Suzumura quite often), but at the same time Takuya also specifically singles out Kouji as being more on the antagonistic side. Right now this may be the one key difference between the twins in terms of temperament, since it’s otherwise clear that they are incredibly similar now, and it’s probably a byproduct of how Kouji started off with thicker social boundaries than his brother’s and is thus is a little behind in in having a more active social life.

That said, I am sorry to anyone who hoped the twins would be among the more sensible members of the group, because at this point they might actually be the most unhinged. The two of them happened to get in a bickering match this time, but them both ganging up on Takuya at the end makes me really scared of what they’re capable of if they do start conspiring together the way Junpei theorized they were doing.

Katsuharu is still close with Tomoki (this is consistent with The Train Called Hope), but he’s since fallen out of contact with the others.

The twins seem to perceive Izumi as the most sensible of all of them (operative word: perceive)...

The Frontier kids are utter idiots. I say this with all the love I can muster, and I mean this in a way that the Frontier kids truly are uniquely chaotic and borderline unhinged in a way other Digimon groups just can’t match. I already pointed out earlier that there was a difference between how the 02 and Frontier groups handled their chaos, but this is now pretty much as clear as you can get between Yamatoya’s takes on the 02 kids in the Kizuna drama CD and the Frontier kids here -- both follow similar formats of zany comedy followed by a sentimental conclusion, but while the 02 kids were mostly just getting out of control because they were too excited, the Frontier kids actually accusing each other in a game of whodunnit with increasingly absurd justifications is just on another level. This is truly the fun of Frontier in a nutshell -- the shamelessness, the misfit nature of the cast, the chaos, and just the lovable sentiment of it all.

By the way, I really, really love this fanart. If you haven’t seen it, you should. I think combined with the script, it really feels like I finally got to see these kids again after so long.

I basically only have two real complaints, and both are shared between this and The Train Called Hope. The first one is that I feel like they really haven’t figured out what to do with the Spirits, and they feel a little like an afterthought at this point; I know they’re kind of in a tough position because they’re simultaneously the kids and also not, but I would have liked to see a bit more thought put into what kind of relationship they have to the kids besides just vaguely connected guardian spirits. The second is that there is a terrible lack of Bokomon and Neemon, who should be at least hanging out with the Spirits back in the Digital World (I wonder if Sugiyama Kazuko wasn’t available...). They were important too! Don’t forget them! In fact, if anything, this new drama may have indirectly confirmed that Bokomon was possibly the main reason the kids didn’t completely go off track and actually managed to get anywhere in the Digital World, because without him they risk being extremely unhinged. Please give your thanks to Bokomon for saving the Digital World.