#tri negativity

[shihalyfie]

It's a loaded topic that I generally try not to bring up much because of the various controversies surrounding it, and a few years ago, I was hesitant to mention this in public because there was no way to frame it in a way that didn't sound like a hate post. (That, and admittedly, I probably was not in the right mental frame to handle it well back then; a lot of things have changed in the last few years.) But now this has been on record and even alluded to via official sources, and I don't see a point in being touchy about it anymore, so here's something I really wish more people would understand when they talk about tri., Kizuna, and 02TB:

Between tri. and Kizuna/02TB, almost the entire production system was overhauled, and there are almost no key staff members in common.

I know it's tempting to treat "Toei" like it's some kind of monolith, but it's very important to remember that any stylistic differences in approach or concept between tri. and Kizuna/02TB aren't just because of answering critical reception, but also because almost the entire production system was scooped out and redone from scratch. The one key member they have in common is Kizuna/02TB producer Kinoshita, who was brought onto tri. as late as part 5 and has explicitly stated that he wasn't involved on its story.

The reason this overhaul happened also wasn't just because of something like "people didn't like tri. (in terms of story content)". For one, tri. was subject to a lot of troubled production behind the scenes -- and I'm not making this up, it's on record that they ran out of budget halfway through and had to rewrite the rest of the plot. But another important thing that may not be as clear to people who only learned about it after the fact is that tri. was a downright PR disaster at the time it was going on, such as:

The infamous "nade-nade" incident (ask anyone who was present during the tri. announcement and they'll probably be able to tell you the details)

The director openly saying things like the fact he deliberately does not look at the source material when making adaptations because he sees it as too limiting, accompanied by a number of other inflammatory statements in magazines, etc. suggesting that he probably had never seen the original Adventure to begin with and saw it as a series he needed to make as more "mature", even to the point of rejecting character-accurate scripts for it (that said, it is very important to remember that a series is far more than just one staff member, and there are other staff members who did say they watched it and clearly did their research, so the point I'm making is that the director's attitude naturally made a lot of people in the audience very angry and is a big reason he started currying a bad industry reputation during and even after tri.'s run)

Magazine interviews with staff members and other Q&As generally being so vague and unwilling to answer questions clearly that it got people upset (for example, when a social media campaign soliciting questions for a Q&A session was held for a screening of part 6, it was said to be "suspiciously" too dark to actually answer the questions)

So when you see discussion about tri. being controversial because of "contradictions in the setting" or whatnot, it's not people getting petty about characterization, it's because the production system for tri. managed to make a ton of public relations decisions that unilaterally pissed a ton of people off, so having contradictions in the lore and characterization came off as being due to carelessness and negligence more than anything.

Right now, the series has been over for more than five years, so I'm not bringing all of this up because I want to start an angry mob against the series or anything (I myself have a lot of favorite things that had clearly troubled production issues and controversial statements from staff members, so I'm not saying this alone should be grounds to evaluate a series). The point I'm making is that I see way too many people talking like tri. and Kizuna/02TB were made under the same mentality by a vaguely-defined concept of "Toei" and that any differences in approach are from some bizarre hypocrisy where they keep contradicting themselves. What happened here was that they saw the public relations fallout, realized it wasn't a good idea to continue getting people mad, and completely overhauled everything with entirely different people and an entirely different approach -- and the fact they did not do a similar complete overhaul between Kizuna and 02TB is conversely why they share more in common.

[digitalgate02]

[sighs]

I'll have to be honest with people and with my own feelings.

When I say I can’t really make ▽ work with my stuff and with the original lore, I really mean it.

I know people might get angry at me for saying this, but it’s pretty much sure that you have either to commit to one or another and CANNOT USE BOTH TOGETHER. What I mean? Well…

I know all of the Adv/02’s lore is still unknown to us, and we got a good chunk of those details from interviews with Kakudou and SekiP, but when it comes to the original Digital World lore… Well, it sounds completely… impossible to use it with ▽ as it was presented to us. I mean mostly what Shiha talked about in this post here, about “canon” and “Non-canon” and such.

Well, I want people to not get me wrong – I’m not forcing you to agree with me, I’m just explaining why it’s so hard for me to work with it, to the point I’m still trying to, even by reusing bits of it except… I’m always walking into a thick wall and unable to proceed with my own plans/chain of thoughts.

Well… The thing is: Since the lore is basically violated to the point I have no other option than put extra thought on how to work with this, I’ll have to talk about a SERIOUS digi-ecosystem problem this series brought.

If you didn’t know, an old stream with Kakudou in it (not sure for which material it was, PSP Adv game or another thing, if someone remember of it, please help me here) had a Q&A section where people sent him questions to be answered there, and one of them was regarding… “what happens to the digimon if a human partner dies” or something like that. Well, Kakudou’s answer was following the logic of “digimon are the manifestation of the human soul” which is… basically something implied in post-series material & interviews. His answer? If a human partner dies, their digimon partner dies too.

Just by saying this you might understand… What my point here is.

Yes, I mean… Nishijima Daigo’s death is a big big PROBLEM to the lore.

Unless there’s some special rule involving the Holy Beasts like, “the HB can undo their ties with their human partners”, the fact Daigo is killed off in the pt6 brings a terrible disaster to the ecosystem. The Holy Beasts are also responsible for the protection of the Digital World, just as Homeo (which is not a “God-like” entity at all, even in Adv & the novels, Homeostasis claims to not be a “God of the Digimon”, it’s just a security system or something like) – And when Qinglongmon explained stuff in 02, he mentioned that the Dark Masters had sealed the HB in the past, but then the Chosen Children broke the seal.

Ok, so you might be aware the Holy Beasts were former Chosen digimon, the mysterious “five kids” (yes, the ones using a few from the Adv cast to illustrate them) – we don’t know when they got to face Apocalymon, but they were said to be the previous group from Taichi & co. and I assumed it meant 1995 before because I wasn’t aware of the math count before… The math count is important and this is why those details should’ve been stated beforehand and not through interviews and Q&A stuff… But okay, I don’t blame anyone for not knowing those details… I’m only upset that ▽ staff didn’t go to get details directly from the original Adv/02 staff. Sigh, let’s go straight to the point:

Killing Daigo was the biggest lore violation this series had committed, because it would’ve caused terrible issues to the ecosystem. You KILLED a human whose digimon partner had become a HOLY BEAST!!

But Why am I so desperate trying to find a solution to this? Well, I don’t want to let go of Daigo and Maki – I love them, and I also love my NishiHime OC Yume. She has a big plot that I’m trying to make it work – but as you can see, this is the thick wall I’m facing right now.

Yes, I know I could simply ignore it, but I wanted her to have a parallel with Daichi and show the difference between them. If I keep Daigo dead this would cause a big big crisis because one HB down. So my only choice is to kill Maki off, right? Except I had plans for Maki too… So this is where I’m sitting here and thinking again and again on how to keep the original plan (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

[shihalyfie]

From my understanding the new voices for the four 02 characters in Kizuna ended up very well received - especially Daisuke. Do you happen to know how the Tri voice cast was received in Japan?

From what I remember, it was about as good as you can expect. Voice actor changes done when the original voice actor is still accessible tend to be inherently controversial (even with the 02 quartet, they still were), and at the time, it wasn't formally revealed that Fujita Toshiko had actually been approached and declined due to poor health (it had to be kept a secret at the time on her request, which, according to Seki, put the tri. producers in a really awkward position). But most people were able to figure out what happened just by logical inference: some of the voice actors had retired, and the rest were swapped out for "consistency", especially since the Digimon voice actors were retained while the kids' were the only ones changed out. Some people did argue that "you could have at least gotten the ones that weren't retired!", but I think most people got it.

So, putting aside the people who were trying to stage a boycott over it or something:

I know Tamura Mutsumi's performance as Koushirou was particularly well-praised (this was before she ended up becoming super famous in the industry, since she's now really popular), and because of that quite a few Digimon fans were thrilled to hear her as Hiro in Ghost Game. It's probably the tri. performance I've consistently heard the most praise about, including even rave reviews from people who otherwise disliked the series itself.

There were people who said that Hanae Natsuki's timbre for Taichi was too distracting (on top of him not sounding much like Fujita at all, he was already a really famous voice actor by that point, so everyone recognized him as "Hanae Natsuki" too easily), but even those people all said that his actual acting ability as Taichi nailed his personality very well.

Hosoya's Yamato also got good reviews, which is interesting because he was also already a famous voice actor by this point, but I think it's because his timbre already enough in common with Kazama's that it didn't feel too weird.

Ones people were kind of iffy on were Mimi (although this also had a relationship with the way she was written in tri., I noticed people had fewer issues with her in Kizuna), Takeru, and Hikari (this one may be partially because both voice actors ended up breaking out into the industry shortly after in very different kinds of roles). Although this one I admit there might be some bias; I personally also think these were the ones that feel closest to miscasted to me, so maybe there was some confirmation bias from me noticing when others talked about it...

While we're here, in regards to the 02 quartet, Daisuke (especially Daisuke, dear goodness) and Miyako are generally well-received, but people tend to be more iffy on Ken and Iori. In the case of Ken, though, when you have the incredibly legendary Park Romi as his original voice actress, and when his new voice actor is Lounsbery Arthur who has his own distinctive voice, reputation, and fanbase, I think you were inevitably going to get some kind of complaint of uncanniness in some direction somewhere...

[shihalyfie]

This is potentially a very loaded question so feel free to not answer if you don't feel like it, but how do you as a woman feel about the handling of female characters in Digimon (anime of course, but also games, manga and even the Digimon themselves)? I've seen takes of all kinds from women over the years so I'm curious how you feel. But again, no pressure to answer if you feel uncomfortable with the subject or too daunted by all the material on the table.

Oh man, I don't mind talking about the subject in itself, but what makes it hard for me is just that the Digimon franchise just has so many things at once with so many different writers and different writing philosophies that I can't really treat the entire thing like a monolith. Especially when you have things running the spectrum from Cyber Sleuth (where female characters arguably drive the narrative far more than the male characters) to Next (which has gotten me angrily ranting about the absolutely awful way it treats its girls, a rant which I would prefer to not subject my followers to).

So before I go ahead, I do want to make sure anyone reading this understands that I'm just talking about my own personal experience and feelings regarding the situation, and I'm very sure that other people will feel differently. I definitely don't feel qualified to comment on what's the ideal way to write female charaters in media or whatever (as if there's even one right answer to that!); I can only truly comment on myself and my own stances on it. (And of course, the OP graciously asked specifically about that, but I just want to make sure nobody reading this post misunderstands!)

Well, I will say that if there's one thing that does seem to be consistent (and I say consistent, because Next absolutely violates this one and Frontier does kind of dangerously toe the line), it's that I haven't really seen Digimon fall victim to the problem of what I call making its female characters the Designated Girl Characters™. Explaining what that is is kind of tricky, but a lot of shounen series will have this very strong "consciousness" of its female characters like they're there to fill a quota, and thus treat them in a way that's kind of alienating. Or in other words, "they section off this character very weirdly in a way they would never do for the male characters." (Note that while Ruki's character arc is made with strong consciousness of her being a girl, the whole point is about condemning the idea she should be treated like some novelty just because she's a girl, so I don't count it as this.)

It was really refreshing to see a 1999 anime portray the girls as mingling with the boys like it was no big deal, and I do wonder if Adventure setting this precedent is a big reason later series have followed in this regard. Adventure through Frontier were made with heavy female creator influence, something that the fandom really tends to downplay (especially because a lot of people suspiciously avoid acknowledging their importance, like how everyone will talk about Hosoda but nobody will talk about the fact Yoshida Reiko wrote the scripts for everything he did, or how people virtually ignored Seki's existence compared to Kakudou until very recently). I think a lot of that shows in its writing; of course, that's not to say there aren't things that really could have used improvement (I think Izumi's treatment in Frontier is the one pretty much everyone universally agrees really left much to be desired, and Tomita even outright admitted he's not very good at writing girls, although that frankly kind of surprises me given how much of his other work has involved writing girls really well), but at the very least it does show a bit more conscientiousness about its female characters than you would see in other shows where female creators were either nonexistent or clearly had no influence in the staff room.

On the flip side, there's also things that were more tasteful in execution than may have even been intended; Sora's character arc isn't that much about her femininity in practice, and Juri does come off as better than your average damsel in distress character, but that doesn't change the fact that the nuance is still there (and that in the latter case a certain writer has outright indulged in that), so all I can do is just be grateful that it didn't get worse.

I guess in the end, my stance is "give or take". I like a lot of other kids' shows (including shounen) that have been better or worse than Digimon's average level, and Digimon itself is so varied that I think it just kind of mingles in there. There are things I like, things I don't like, but at the very least there haven't been too many things that crossed my personal boundary of "absolutely not" (there are, there just aren't many). I think Adventure and 02 in particular are often accused of being more malicious towards its female characters and "screwing them over" than they were intended to be, since a lot of it seems to be a combination of wanting to portray its characters a little too realistically and simply just accidental bad circumstances of how it presented (the fact Hikari's two most famous episodes are by two non-regulars on the series who seemed to be huge fans of portraying her with a brother complex really did not help here), and things like "the same things that feel personally relatable to me are also things that read badly to others, so I understand why people don't like it but I also feel kind of weird when they imply that this kind of concept is inherently Bad" (a lot of things related to Sora and Miyako fall into this category for me). And I mean, part of the reason Miyako became my central character back when I wrote fanfic more often was that I just found her to be an incredibly complex character for the kind you'd usually see in shounen works; I honestly don't know of many other things that would portray someone like her sympathetically instead of cramming her into a "hysterical woman" trope box.

There's also the fact that there's a lot more adult-oriented Digimon media coming up nowadays, so there's that awkward situation where "female character representation" starts having a blurred boundary with "waifu character". Which is not to say that I mind the idea of male fans also liking the female characters I like, but more so that when you get into this territory, I start getting conscious about whether the female characters are more obviously being written in a way to "please the male fans and make them into fanservice material" than it respects them as characters. And I mean, I say it's a blurred boundary for good reason; the aforementioned Cyber Sleuth characters do kind of have that (especially in their character designs), but they are actually written as good characters with agency, whereas you have things like the Adventure girls in tri. who are ostensibly written to follow up on their Adventure character arcs but came off to me as being uncomfortably shoved into the Waifu Character Fanservice troping boxes, especially Mimi and Hikari. (Hooters outfit Mimi and brother complex Hikari are among the few things that I would say have crossed a serious line with me.) So again...give or take.

I will say that the American English dub had a somewhat more misogynistic nuance in the way it treated Mimi, Miyako, and Hikari (it had a lot more condescending tone in the way it portrayed Mimi's airheadedness/materialism and Yolei's penchant for fangirling while also expecting Kari to just put up with Davis harassing her, and it exacerbated the already-kind-of-uncomfortable feelings I had about the unsympathetic way Sora is portrayed in Our War Game!), but it's not to the extent I felt it derailed the entire narrative.

As for the Digimon themselves, the feminine Digimon design sexualization didn't bother me much when I was younger (I remember I really wasn't bothered by Angewomon's design at all), but it does bother me a little more now, especially since you have more designs like Venusmon these days (really? really?). But then there are also really good designs like LovelyAngemon and Mastemon that are just plain cool! And then even designs aside, there's a difference in the way each work portrays them; for instance, you can tell certain anime had more fun with the chest jiggles on the same Digimon that other series were not weird about at all. Maybe the fact Adventure and 02 weren't really weird about Angewomon's design was exactly why I didn't notice it very much back then?

Well, that got long and very rambling, but I hope that answered your question to some extent!

[shihalyfie]

As a fellow l fan of Zero Two, do you feel the cast has been kind of shafted in the movies? In Hurricane Touchdown, Wallace was the center of the story, tri didn’t feature them at all, Kizuna was more focused on Taichi and Yamato (although they got to at least play a part in the story), and now The Beginning looks like will mainly focus on Rui. Diaboromon’s Counterattack was kinda the exception, although it felt more like an action movie compared to the others more character driven stories

I love the 02 kids, but I think it's actually better when things are not about them. Getting more screentime or whatever sounds cool and all that, but when I try to think about what kind of new plot could feature them front and center, I immediately lose interest. These are the kind of characters who want to live simple lives and are just happy they got through the ordeal in 2002 at all, and while I'm not saying they'd never have strife in their lives again after that, I don't want to see them suffer more just so they can have more screentime. (Not an uncommon sentiment, from what I hear.) They had a lovely 50-episode anime about them, that's already more than enough for me.

But more pertinently, I also think having something center around other characters actually makes the 02 kids shine more. By nature, 02 is a story about relationships, and the group excels best in supporting and helping other people. Those skills would thus be showcased best in a story about helping someone they didn't know before and coming to form a bond with them; in 02 itself it was each other and especially Ken, in Hurricane Touchdown it was Wallace, and in the new movie it seems like it'll be Rui. That's for the better. One of Daisuke's best moments in the entire franchise is in Hurricane Touchdown because it's not about him; his skill is bringing others back from rock bottom, so you kind of need someone at rock bottom to bring that out best.

Besides, in general, even as a 02 fan, I still have mixed feelings that they're using 02 as their current outlet to continue milking Adventure. I don't think it's worth getting mad about, so I want to enjoy 02TB anyway, but I really don't want to see these kids get overmilked, and I'd be much happier to see them used as window dressing to have more original concepts like Rui get featured.

I also don't think anything that doesn't have 02 branding is required to feature the 02 kids. I want them to be treated with respect as part of the canon, but I don't necessarily feel like they should have tons of screentime. Kizuna was marketed and presented as an Adventure movie, so I was fine with the little we got of the 02 quartet; frankly, the fact they had so much at all, let alone a drama CD, was far more than I'd have even asked for.

The only thing I was actually upset about regarding the treatment of the 02 kids was tri., but that's not about the amount of screentime they had; the problem I had was how they were treated as borderline inhuman, with the other characters flip-flopping on how much human decency their disappearance should be treated as. It made the narrative hypocritical, with the kids doing things like calling mercy killing a Digimon unforgivable and quickly identifying the fake Gennai as fake by his behavior in the same series where they scorned Ken, killed Imperialdramon, and cheered about it, all while taking elements from 02 that they could milk for fanservice while treating its characters and canon like dirt in practice. I would rather they have not even mentioned them at all, maybe at most putting them on a plane on some exchange program and saying they're too busy; sure, there would be no screentime or concrete mentions, but they'd at least feel like actual humans who have important relationships with these kids than plot objects who don't even deserve bare minimum human decency.

[shihalyfie]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[shihalyfie]

Hi! I love your write-ups! It genuinely helped me appreciate 02 so much more (it was already a favourite of mine but now I know it's more than just nostalgia) That said I want to ask if you can explain why the fanbase likes to glorify Takeru and Hikari so much? As in saying Takeru deserves to be the leader more than Daisuke, or that Takeru and Hikari should have jogressed instead of what we got, or even depicting that the two weren't that close to the new Chosen Children in some fics

Hello! Thank you so much for the kind words! I'm always glad to hear that I've gotten someone to appreciate 02 more. In regards to your question, this is a bit of a multilayered issue that has reasons that vary from benign to insidious (for lack of a better way to put it), so I'm going to go through some of the reasons I can think of.

Firstly, it is true that Takeru and Hikari are in a bit of a special position in that they're the only kids to be both Adventure and 02 kids, and that knowledge/experience gap does inform a bit of their behavior towards the others, especially in the first half of 02. The two did have a tendency to kind of go off and do their own thing without being completely straightforward to the others about what they were doing (most notably in episodes like 13, 17, 22, 24, and 30). On top of that, the series did initially seem to depict Takeru and Hikari as close to each other all the time, and Miyako and Iori were one of the first relationships showcased in the series -- so it's easy to fall into a line of thinking that those should have been the natural Jogress pairs, and that Miyako and Hikari got forced because they're girls and Takeru and Iori are "spares". This especially happens a lot with people who are more casual watchers of 02, because you have to read more between the lines to figure out that Jogress isn’t about pre-existing relationships, but about addressing what the other party needs the most and actively working for it. In actuality, Takeru and Hikari mostly dropped the habit of walking off on the other 02 kids once Iori and Miyako started reaching out to them, but you might not notice this unless you’re counting episodes, and it’s not like they don’t clearly still have a particularly good relationship with each other even after that.

Secondly, in regards to Daisuke, unfortunately, he carries a lot of fanbase stigma because 1) his American English dub characterization singlehandedly ruined him for a lot of people and 2) even that aside, because he’s characterized as someone with a very simple pattern of thinking and simple needs, a lot of the fanbase (possibly even a majority of it) still claims he never got character development or depth whatsoever. (In actuality, I find him to be one of the most multilayered members of the entire cast.) The end result is that a lot of people consider Daisuke to be a reckless idiot who only got the leader position because of shounen character archetype benefits. By this logic, Takeru, who has experience from the previous adventure in 1999 and is more level-headed, should have been the leader instead. In practice, though, the series makes it clear that Daisuke’s forward-thinking attitude is what pushes everyone forward (I would argue that he’s not actually the leader, but in the sense that the 02 group doesn’t really have one), and if you ask me, I personally think having Takeru as the leader in the first half of 02 would have likely ended badly; he may seem level-headed, but he was (usually) non-confrontational and prone to dodging emotionally uncomfortable subjects to the point I feel the position might have overwhelmed him.

Thirdly, a lot of Adventure fans who like Takeru and Hikari often don’t actually like 02 very much. Even if they don’t fully despise it, there’s a certain camp of Adventure diehards that kind of “tolerates” 02 as a weird sequel that’s mainly just useful for seeing more of the Adventure kids (and while most Takeru/Hikari shippers are usually 02 fans, there’s still a group that tolerates 02 as “the series where they became shippable age” and functionally only cares about Adventure in practice). One easy way to tell if someone is in this camp is that if you float to them the idea that Takeru and Hikari are actually closer to the other 02 kids than they are their Adventure seniors, most people who are reasonably invested in both series will at least be willing to consider it, but to that particular set of Adventure diehards that only tolerates 02 in practice, they’ll act like you just said a heathen statement (mostly because you’re threatening the romantic image of the “Adventure eight” in favor of the sequel characters they don’t care for as much). As I said above, it’s already easy to get the idea there’s a mild barrier between the two of them and the rest even just by being a casual viewer, but this camp loves to completely latch onto this and exaggerate it to the point of claiming that they were never that close to the others at all (even though 02 itself blatantly shows otherwise), and that they were tolerating the other four as much as they themselves are tolerating 02.

In regards to that last point, I do think tri. exacerbated the situation as well. I’m willing to believe that the tri. staff didn’t actively intend to make their series be inherently anti-02, but it is true that anti-02 Adventure fans were extremely validated by the franchise treating it like it was ignorable, and also latched onto Takeru and Hikari’s flippant behavior towards the concept of the other four as proof that this was the way it was the whole time. It was really not a fun time to be a 02 fan between 2014 and 2019, because it felt like you were basically being gaslighted into believing 02 didn’t exist the way you remembered it. On the flip side, I’ve spoken to multiple 02 fans who, despite knowing consciously that 02 didn’t portray them that way, still viscerally felt something akin to a backstab at the sight of Takeru and Hikari treating the others like that on screen, and thus couldn’t shake very mixed feelings towards them afterwards. The end result was that this supposed rift started showing up with unusual frequency in fanwork, both from the ends of anti-02 fans making fanwork that portrayed the rift as if it’d always been there, and from 02 fans with mixed feelings on the entire situation putting out work with unusual extra emphasis on the quartet (in a sort of “defiant overcompensation” for their treatment in tri.) in ways that often omitted Takeru and Hikari more often than they would have been otherwise.

Even I have to personally admit that, while I’d rewatched 02 in mid-2020 and confirmed definitively for myself that they were portrayed as close with the others, the fallout from tri. meant I was still personally grappling with an indescribable mixed feeling regarding Takeru and Hikari’s place in the group, one that wasn't fully cleared until the Kizuna drama CD was released later that year (Kizuna itself focused on the quartet for similar obvious “overcompensation” reasons, so it wasn’t until the drama CD that we got an explicit, open portrayal of them as a close six-way group). That drama CD slammed its foot down on the idea that yes, all six of them are close, and this is not up for debate. I've also spoken with someone who was a hardcore Takeru/Daisuke shipper, fell out with the ship after feeling tri. had poisoned it for them, and got really back into it once Kizuna started portraying them normally again. So I’m hoping that this part of the issue can clear up a little with Kizuna and The Beginning, because although I do still see the occasional person insisting that they weren’t/aren’t close, it’s much harder to make that argument when newer material is so obviously showing otherwise.

[shihalyfie]

Are there any canon divergence what-ifs in the Digimon series that intrigue you?

Pretty much the usual, I suppose. These are all ones that I'm sure a ton of everyone else has entertained, but, for instance

Hikari and/or Tailmon being with the Adventure group from day one, or a different kid or Digimon being separated

Osamu's survival and/or Ken never being pushed over the deep end

The actual writing room what-ifs of Yamato turning on the group and becoming 02's antagonist (based on the known Adventure and 02 production timeline, I suspect this idea was eventually repurposed into Yamato's turning on the group in Adventure episodes 44-45) and 02's final boss being a Ken doppelganger (not sure how I feel about the exploding body parts, but the "reduced to an idea" concept is fun and if you look at how BelialVamdemon is defeated in the final episode, it seems to take visual inspiration from that)

Hiroki surviving and/or Oikawa not being pushed off the deep end

The Tamers world without the D-Reaper (if Digimon had still had contact with the world anyway)

Likewise, how the Tamers world would have to sustain repeated Digimon contact if they hadn't been cut off from the Digital World in the final episode

If Kouichi had successfully followed Kouji into the Digital World without falling down the stairs first

Katsuharu's quartet getting the four remaining Spirits (either from the beginning, or taking them up after the defeat of the original four)

The Daimon family if Suguru had been allowed to stick around for his kids' early lives

If Akari and Zenjirou had been able to stick with Xros Heart even during the Death Generals arc (manga doesn't count)

If Kotone and Tatsuya were in the Xros Wars anime timeline and Yuu in the manga timeline (actually, my headcanon is that they do have counterparts, but in this case I mean if they actually had the roles they had originally instead of just making AU counterparts)

If Yuujin had been a normal human and/or had survived the ending (manga doesn't count)

Also, while this is a bit awkward to discuss, one thing I kept running into when attempting to reconcile tri. with Adventure and 02 for fanfic purposes was that whenever tri. seemed to be referring to Adventure's events, it often felt like it was describing a version of Adventure that never actually happened, because the character and lore descriptions didn't match at all. At the time I made an offhand half-joking suggestion that since Adventure is a multiverse anyway, maybe it's actually a sequel to an AU Adventure that does fit the qualities they were describing. I was saying it out of frustration and probably more maliciously than I should have, so I came to regret it pretty quickly, but later I found out on a certain Japanese website that back when it was ongoing, there was an actual fan theory that some parallel timeline shenanigans had happened and we'd get an eventual reveal that this was the source of the contradictions. Of course, that wasn't the case in the end, and tri. still presented itself like a normal Adventure sequel, but the point is that this was an actual legitimate theory someone made in good faith to some extent, so I started more seriously thinking about what kind of Adventure AU would lead into tri.'s events. That being said, even though I'm now trying to be constructive/creative about thinking about this rather than doing it out of the negativity I was guilty of a few years ago, it is still something that comes out of the idea that Adventure/02 and tri. can't be reconciled as-is, and I know that's a stance some people won't like to begin with; without all of the above context, writing a fic or something about it would basically sound like it's something done to make a statement about the series instead of as a simple creative experiment, so I haven't really pursued it besides in conversations with friends.