#xm0c

[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]

I think it's funny you posted the meta on character colors and how Takeru was being associated with the color orange, and since then we've had the Summer Festival art, the first couple minutes of "The Beginning", and the Kizuna phone cases from Partners, which now associate him back to green.

I repeat: (ノ°Д°）ノ︵ ┻━┻

The phone cases are understandable since they're supposed to be based off the colors of the devices they're linked to, so since Takeru's D-3 is green it makes perfect sense for his phone case to be green as well. It's just funny that the one time there was an outlier, it was in the movie itself, but also, said movie makes a mistake with Daisuke's phone case despite the fact the reference sheets had explicit instructions to use a different design whenever two Crests were involved. (Look carefully at the shot and you'll see that it uses the triangle design Taichi has instead of the X design it's supposed to.)

Which is funny because this is the only time one of the phones that should have this pattern appears in the movie, and they still messed it up. Kizuna is a very thorough and accurate-to-detail movie in most other aspects, but as far as this one goes, seriously, they had one job! So this is one of the few times I'd defer to the merch and liner notes even if they contradict the animation footage itself, because the merch has been consistent with Daisuke/Miyako/Iori having the correct back patterns and Takeru having a green case. Or maybe Takeru has two phone cases. That's not out of character, I suppose.

But yeah, the new GraffArt collab also goes with D-3 colors, with Ken being a bit purple because of the difficulty of working with pure grey (basically the same cheat method as Kouichi). This hasn't been in official merch as much as you'd think, but I see it a lot in fanwork, so it has precedent. The partner coloring is probably the most "consistent" in that it applies the same rule to all six kids with no outliers, but the D-3 coloring here is probably the second "neatest" color matchup that's commonly used, and it has the benefit of feeling closer to the original series since the "partner" coloring was never used back then.

But still.

(ノ°Д°）ノ︵ ┻━┻

[shihalyfie]

Something I'm curious to get your opinion on: I was reading a forum on With The Will on character archetypes, specifically on the "Sixth Ranger" trope in Digimon (like Hikari, Ken, Kouichi, Ikuto, Yuu, and Yuujin). There doesn't seem to be any consensus on who the sixth would be for Tamers; Ryou & Cyberdramon or Impmon. I use to say Ryou, but now I think Impmon fits best, since technically speaking Ryou isn't a Tamers character. I'm wondering what do you think.

The tl;dr answer: I don't think it has one in the first place.

The longer explanation: My stance towards things like archetypes is that one should make use of them "as long as they're helpful", and that it doesn't really help anything to get so obsessed with classifying the characters by archetype that you defeat the purpose of why you wanted to classify them to begin with. Archetypes help to compare characters, but if you're at the point of trying to force a square peg into a round hole just to say that this character counts as the archetype, at that point it might be better to accept that it was so outside the usual setup to begin with that it doesn't merit comparison. This is also why I tend to exclude Xros Wars a lot when trying to compare Digimon protagonist groups; it's not me wanting to be exclusionary, but rather me feeling that it wouldn't really be respecting Xros Wars' unique setup and way of organizing its characters if I tried to cram it into a structure it was deliberately made to not follow.

The concept of a "sixth ranger" comes from Super Sentai (and by extension Power Rangers), and it is undeniably true that Digimon's way of having teams with variations on the same power set takes a lot from Sentai, which is why situations like Hikari and Ken resemble the concept so much. But let's take a look at the explanation of "additional warrior" in the Sentai context as defined by Pixiv's wiki via the tenets you generally expect of one:

Was not present at the time of initial production announcement, or if they were, was not announced as part of the protagonist team

Usually shows up in the middle of the series in order to change things up once the tone has been set, although not always since it depends on toy sales schedule

Usually has different motives, origins, or powers from the original team

Usually causes some kind of drama dynamic with the rest of the team in terms of what happens when they try to integrate themself with them

…so as you can see, these tenets are looking at them in a broad, production-based or structural view instead of being too married to their role in the story. This is probably because Super Sentai has been running for so long with such variety in series that these kinds of production circumstances are the only thing these "additional warriors" have in common at this point. The concept has also carried over to Toei's magical girl series PreCure (known as "additional Cure"), with pretty much the exact same idea. But if you look at what's being suggested here with these points, the answer probably is Ryou; even if he's not originally from Tamers, the version seen in Tamers is functionally treated as a Tamers character, and in terms of having an ability set comparable in power and structure to the main cast, he checks off those boxes.

Obviously, that doesn't really make a lot of sense from a story perspective; as you said, Impmon has more relevance in Tamers' narrative, and this is what I think is an example of the limitations of trying to square-peg-round-hole an archetype and structure into something not built for it. Tamers already gets this with the question of who's the "rival"; I know people like to insist it's Ruki because she has a cold attitude and is associated with blue, but I think this also ignores the fact she never actually ends up establishing a particular dynamic with Takato in the way Jian does, and in the end the Tamers trio is really a trio (more on my ambivalent feelings about the "rival" concept here). And even with Ryou in play, unlike most Digimon media that's usually diligent about including their "additional warrior" in post-series merchandise, there's still quite a significant amount of modern Tamers merch that singles out the trio as a trio without anyone else, implying characters like Ryou and Impmon were more “guest helpers” than core members of their groups. So if you wanted my really honest answer about who the "sixth ranger" or "additional warrior" in Tamers is, it's that it simply doesn't have one nor does it have the Sentai structure to begin with to merit that comparison. Any potential response to this requires enough forcing that I feel it's missing the point.

On that note, I don't even feel like I agree with the concept of Yuu being of the sixth ranger/additional warrior archetype in Xros Wars either, considering he never truly "joined" the team until Hunters (where he was definitely announced in the initial production lineup). Xros Wars doesn't use the Sentai format to begin with. In fact, I get the impression Xros Wars is more significantly inspired by Toei's other series Kamen Rider (of which Xros Wars' head writer Sanjou Riku is known to have written some landmark entries of). I'll leave this more to the Rider experts reading this post to chip in on how they feel about it, but Rider doesn't typically use a "team" structure, with its individual Riders being more likely to simply have clashing ideologies of differing natures (there is a concept called the "Second Rider", which has had its own discourse, and its Xros Wars analogue would probably be Kiriha, but trying to force a comparison to Sentai would be messy because a Second Rider can be equivalent to a "rival" or an "additional warrior" depending on the series).

Personally, when I was a kid watching Digimon and wasn't incredibly good at analysis, I did make the observation "Digimon series really seem to like having a prominent character that starts off as an enemy but joins the protagonists later" (TV Tropes, invoking pro-wrestling lingo, calls this a "heel-face turn"). Even now, I find this to be more useful, because it's much more broad and less restrictive than the "sixth ranger" concept but still allows you to make ample comparisons between how each of these characters started off and under what circumstances they ended up turning. (In this case, the characters in question would be Tailmon, Ken, Impmon, Kouichi, Ikuto, all of Nene/Kiriha/Yuu but probably mostly Yuu, and Rei.) Even with characters who are clearly more of "sixth rangers" like Ken or Ikuto or Yuujin, the circumstances of how they join are often so different that comparisons aren't really all that useful and don't say as much about their characters. (Of course, this is just my way of seeing it to the very end, and I don't have any negative feelings about anyone else seeing more worth in it.)

[shihalyfie]

I know you’re busy with work, but have you considered taking meta analysis submissions? I know you’re blog has gotten me to think about a lot of topics regarding Digimon (the movies, filler, how the anime adapts the core aspects of the franchise, amongst other things).

It's going to be less of a question of whether I'm willing to take suggestions (I'm absolutely happy to try answering any question anyone has, provided it's not in bad faith and doesn't deal with an overly uncomfortable/personal topic) but whether I'll even be capable of answering in a timely fashion. If you have something you'd like me to cover, I definitely recommend asking me now instead of later, because the more time passes, the less I can guarantee I'll be around to answer it.

I know I do look somewhat prolific even now, to the point it probably makes my current (edit: last) pinned post look a little embarrasing, but the truth is that I'm mostly scrambling to answer asks and write while I can, and I'm definitely not capable of making those extremely long meta posts with 15+ images every other day the way I used to. Even the things I can put out now are with the help of my group chat. Right now the only one of significant length I've got on the backlog is the Survive one, and if the game had been out a year or two ago I'd have finished the game and the meta a week after release date, but obviously now that's just not happening. I'm also fairly certain that even if The Beginning ends up becoming the world's greatest movie with a whole PhD's worth of meta material, I probably will not be able to cover it as thoroughly I did Kizuna. (I mean, maybe my love for 02 will create a miracle, but I can't assume that right now.)

I wrote that pinned post because sometimes I do have time and sometimes I don't, and I really do not know what could happen even a day or a week or a month from now, so I wanted to have my bases covered as long as I still could. Fortunately, the last three months at least gave me enough room to answer asks and put the occasional longform thing out here and there, but there is still a reasonable possibility I might just completely vanish from this blog entirely out of nowhere tomorrow or the day after, and it won't be because I want to, but because that's how real life has decided to treat me and I need to pay the bills. But I still do want to be around, and it's not like I'm bothered, so as long as you're okay with the fact I may not finish quickly or even at all, or with the idea I may not be able to cover it particularly thoroughly and the resulting "meta" will be very short, please do feel free to try your luck, and I'll try mine.

(Of course, there are also topics that I won't be able to cover in depth simply because I'm not good at those topics. I try to keep up with as much as I can, but I'm a single human being, and even with my group chat there are some things I may end up giving very disappointing one- or two-sentence answers. I'm sorry about that!)

Anyway, thank you for the kind words -- I'm really happy if my writings here have been interesting or useful in any way!

[crystalgem-confessions]

I think Yellow Diamond took Rose Quartz’ rebellion/betrayal personally. That is the biggest reason she wants the Earth destroyed: it’s a constant reminder of how she lost her friend, or even lover.

- xm0c

[crystalgem-confessions]

I think the show has way too many plot threads going around. We have: Peridot’s redemption, the Cluster, the Diamonds and Homeworld’s potential invasion, the Gem Mutants, the whole thing with Malachite, and the corrupted gems.

- xm0c