shihalyfie

[shihalyfie]

In Adventure 02 Episode 44, Ken Ichijouji is kidnapped in a truck that's right-hand drive. His friends are chasing after him in a car that's left-hand drive. Is it true that a LHD vehicle in Japan is considered to be a major status symbol with a high resale value?

Sort of, but not really. For it to be a left-hand drive vehicle, it would almost certainly have to be an imported car, and it is true that "foreign car = you're rich and have status" used to be a stereotype, but nowadays people will get it because they wanted to invest in a specific model of foreign car for some reason (maybe they were dissatisfied with domestic Japanese-produced ones, and the only models they liked were left-hand). A lot of people will also outright avoid it because of how inconvenient it is to drive in Japan's road system, which isn't compatible with it at all, and it's also much more difficult to keep it maintained in those circumstances.

Of course, that doesn't mean having a left-hand drive car doesn't come with some kind of money and status at all, because buying and maintaining an imported car is expensive, but since the Kido family is a prominent and esteemed family of doctors, it's reasonable to think they'd be able to afford it and would be willing to put up with the trouble if they consider the car to be important enough, especially since Shuu seems to be a traveling scholar. It's a family that tends to be picky and low-compromise, so this probably falls in that category.

Incidentally, Kyoko from Cyber Sleuth also has an imported car (well, putting the other considerations about its, uh, nature aside). While it's not mutually exclusive, I think the modern association with it is probably less "rich and elite" and more "hipster and unique".

[shihalyfie]

Finally gave this post a much-needed update to account for the Crunchyroll releases earlier this year (although ironically I myself can't use most of them, since they're not available for the US) and the Discotek Blu-ray releases. I also added tri., which I originally didn't include due to this being meant as a TV series-centric post, but decided to add upon remembering the whole situation with the Crunchyroll formatting. (To phrase a friend, "telling people not to watch tri. on Crunchyroll is a public service.")

A guide to watching Digimon in Japanese

I get a few questions once in a while about help finding Digimon in Japanese, and it’s a tricky situation because as much as I’d like to plop an official streaming link down and call it a day at every opportunity, we’re still not quite at the point where Digimon in Japanese has official subtitles or is available in every country, even though I would love for this to be the case someday. That said, we are fortunate in that every Digimon series has been diligently translated by someone out there!

For those who are interested in watching Digimon in Japanese (with subtitles or otherwise), it can be pretty tricky to navigate, especially for the older series, so I’ve decided to write a bit of a helper with my recommended versions, with links to watch them officially whenever they’re available. (Unfortunately, some of these official outlets aren’t options for those in certain countries, so I’ll try to provide options in those cases.) I will not be providing direct links to (ahem) unofficial sources, but this should at least be a pointer in the right direction for those, and I’ll also be including links and pointers for where to buy the actual raw Japanese version, in case you don’t need subtitles or you simply want to support the series and have a nice box of your favorite.

For the sake of brevity, this will only include the TV series and their tie-in theatrical movies, but if you’re looking for other franchise side media, a lot of the below translators have those as well. I’ll try to keep this post updated as things change (although I can’t make any guarantees).

Keep reading

[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]

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]

This is something quick I want to make sure is on the table, but every so often I see discussion about Sora's character was handled in regards to femininity and all that, and while the actual debate itself is way more complicated than I can write a full post on right now, I frequently see people mention the ikebana issue and include that among her "stereotypically feminine" factors. So, uh, about that particular one: ikebana practitioners, and especially iemoto, have traditionally been predominantly male. That goes for the majority of traditional "fine arts" and inheritance systems in Japan, which have historically been extremely patrilineal about "eldest son only" in regards to inheritance (and still are to this day). Even the fact Toshiko is the current iemoto would be hard to imagine if the series didn't take place in the late nineties, and even then, it would be exceptionally rare to the point you almost want to think "yeah, only in fiction..." (More on this here.)

Of course, I'm not saying that the association between flowers and femininity doesn't exist at all, but there is such a thing as a double standard where things that are treated as "for women" are suddenly dominated by men when it comes to actual careers. (Ironically, this actually pertains to Mimi's epilogue career as well; you'd think "cooking" is associated with women, but the specific branch of gourmet media she's involved with is also almost completely dominated by men.) And of course, that still doesn't mean that the femininity association wasn't part of the staff's writing choices at all, nor that there also isn't a lot to consider or criticize about how the series handles traditionality vs. modernity or how sensitive it was to put this kind of plotline out in that specific media context, but either way, the point I'm making is: you miiiiight want to maybe phrase your argument in ways that don't involve just saying "it's about flowers, so it's girly."

[shihalyfie]

Hi, I was wondering if you had any thought on Ken's "permanent" escape to the Digital World as some sort of metaphorical suicide? It's a half formed thought, but it doesn't feel too farfetched when I break it down.

1) It's meant to be permanent

2) It's a decision he makes after deciding that he hates the world and cannot bear existing in it anymore

3) In his mind, the digital world is completely devoid of actual life. He is willingly trapping himself in an artificial dream world

In terms of what actually happened, I don't think it's really comparable to suicide as much as pouring oneself into video games would be suicide. It's escapism for sure, but he also wants to have the feeling of having control over something. And it's not like he thought he could 100% escape real world elements (he knew the other Chosen Children were on his tail), so I think it's more of a "I'm done dealing with this" sentiment than having a desire to end it all quite yet; part of Ken's problem as the Kaiser is that he isn't really thinking through what he's doing nor the implications of it, so he's just being an eleven-year-old throwing a tantrum.

That said, I do think the fact his note to his parents had that wording of "not having anything to do with this world anymore" was deliberate, because suicide is probably what his parents thought they were dealing with the moment they saw it. So they went into denial (although in truth, they were actually right in that he was only missing, not dead), and from their perspective, it's a very grave reminder of how disconnected they'd gotten from him and how dangerously close they are to him doing something irreversible that they can't take back.

[shihalyfie]

One of my AUs is one where Hiroki Hida’s would-be killer was apprehended much sooner, so Hiroki doesn’t die in 1999. Since Oikawa isn’t grieving Hiroki when VamDemon is defeated, VamDemon finds a different emotionally vulnerable person to possess and manipulate - my OC Ogawa, a schoolteacher who suddenly lost her husband in the summer of 1999.

My question is - do you think if VamDemon had a different host, would it have resulted in a different Archnemon and Mummymon (or different species entirely), or do you think those two were all VamDemon? Or were they all Oikawa and a different host wouldn’t have created any artificial Digimon at all?

I think the idea of making artificial Digimon was largely, and by that I mean 90% or so, because it was Oikawa. If a different victim had been a similar Digimon enthusiast, perhaps it would have gone that way as well, but even then I don't think any other person would have created Archnemon and Mummymon specifically. Even putting aside the fact that they were made partially from Oikawa's own genes and are implied to have been a part of his work in genetics...call it a hunch, I can't say exactly why, but those two feel like they do have a certain quintessential core that stems from Oikawa, even if it's not in the same way as a more traditional Digimon partner. Like how you can tell who drew a certain art piece from their style, that sort of vibe.

And on that note, I think the concept of "creation", twisted as it is in Oikawa's case, is not something Vamdemon would have valued. Even if he was a terrible parent (so to speak), I never got the impression that Oikawa was anything but genuinely proud of Archnemon and Mummymon as his creations and work, so it was something positive (the birth of something new) that simply happened to be twisted in Vamdemon's favor. I also think Archnemon and Mummymon, or at least something much like them, would have still been created even if Oikawa had never been possessed at all; it's just that it would be done with the proper gravitas creating life would have rather than yanking two full-grown adults with childlike minds out of the vat and immediately putting them to work.

But Vamdemon is the type to value destruction and distortion more than creation, so him using Archnemon and Mummymon was probably more because Oikawa already had the materials and study research stuff on hand that could make it easier for him. Otherwise, I think he prefers things like manipulation, blackmail, and all, and if he did create something he'd probably prefer to make it like "a mindless shadow that obeys his every order" than something that can actually be said to have a consciousness on its own; that kind of thing would be a nuisance.

[shihalyfie]

I dunno if this is OK since you tend to avoid stuff about ▽, but since we're almost hitting its 10 years since its release... And how it's pretty much chillier to talk about this now...

I do think Meiko and Meicoomon's portrayal was essential for the recent human-digimon partnerships and how they worked differently from Taichi-to-Daisuke. Yes, i'm aware that this whole thing of "non-healthy digimon partnerships" started with Ken and Wormmon back in 02, but i feel like Meiko and Meicoomon brought more opportunities to explore non-healthy (and even hella toxic) digi-partnerships. And I do believe Gammamon's role as both protagonist and antagonist in Ghost Game had roots in what was supposed to be Meicoomon's case in the OVA series (i mean, it was kinda... hinted in her character song, according to a friend who's a Meiko oshi? But i never had the guts to listen to all of the ▽ character songs after listening to Hikari's and feeling it was not that good compared to the old series' character songs orz And i'm relieved that i got to like Hikari-Tailmon Kizuna's chara song album haha 💧)

Do you have any thoughts on Meiko and Meicoomon?

(deep breath) You know what? I'm going to do it. I've got some free time for the first time in a long while, so I'm going to use it for this.

I wouldn't have answered this four years ago (holy crap, has it already been four years since I started blogging under this name? The pandemic really did destroy my sense of time...) because public opinion on tri. in Western fandom was all over the place; saying anything remotely negative about it in public would attract harassment accusing you of trying to slander it, Kizuna's announcement and early release made things even worse, and since the stereotypes of "02 fans vs. tri. fans" and "tri. fans vs. Kizuna fans" binaries were rife, I was afraid that talking about it more than the few times I did would get me pinned as making a brand out of being "pro-02 and anti-tri." or something. And on top of that, frankly, my own emotions were still on a runoff from a pandemic rewatch of Adventure/02 and old fandom community-related wounds; I had to write that one workbook to get all of that excess energy out of my system, and even then I wasn't truly capable of being level-headed. I still regret a lot of things I said back then.

But now we've had two more anime series and another movie as well as multiple official statements about the issue, and I think things have calmed down enough that mentioning the series isn't as loaded, plus I've mostly gotten over the fandom drama and am in a much better headspace to tackle this. Avoiding going into the topic of tri.'s content too deeply for the last few years has meant I haven't been able to talk a lot about Meiko, Nishijima, and Himekawa, which is kind of a shame because I actually really like them a lot. Hopefully I can talk about this following issue in a way that will also be amenable to tri. fans and won't come off as an attack on the series (and especially Meiko, because again, I really like Meiko a lot). If I end up failing in this regard...I'm very sorry, I won't try to make excuses for myself.

Anyway. To put it simply, the biggest difficulty that always comes with talking about tri. is that "what the series wanted you to think" and "what it actually came off as" are two completely different things, and when analyzing anything from tri., the biggest challenge is reconciling this difference.

Why production circumstances actually matter here

There is no getting around it: everything points to tri.'s production being a disaster, and this fact reflects too strongly on the final product for me to not take into account. And I want this to be clear: I am not talking about it being a production disaster because I want to dunk on the series nor imply that people should look down on it, because goodness knows I have my own favorite things that were production disasters. I'm saying this because it inevitably affects my ability to do analysis, and unpacking what happened is important to understand why the series is written the way it is and what has to be taken into consideration when handling it.

(I promise, I'll explain how this relates to Meiko and Meicoomon and my understanding of their characters in a bit; bear with me a little here.)

The idea of tri. being a production disaster is not a statement I would make lightly, considering that 02 had also been accused of being a production disaster with writer infighting (in actuality, everything we've heard suggests that everyone in the writer's room had a great time, even if it was a little disorganized), so I'd be a massive hypocrite for lodging this against tri. without good basis. I also do think that bringing up this issue comes with massive risks, since people too quickly equate "production problems" with "bad product", or they assume that the entire staff is a monolith and not that there were actually people who clearly cared and were working hard on staff (they just weren't in high enough positions).

The thing is, everything we've learned about production overwhelmingly towards there being a disaster of such huge extents that even people who know what happened are pretty obviously trying to hold back on the level of how bad it was. I get the impression that part of the reason they're being so touchy about tri. right now is not just because of the series' content itself having a bad reputation these days, but also because talking about it too much would reveal things that would be too embarrassing to say as PR or would even throw certain staff members under the bus. Because even the things we do know aren't pretty, especially when it comes to the director, who:

deliberately does not consult the source material for things he adapts and even publicly said it in an interview as if it were something to be proud of, and, combined with the fact he repeatedly made basic factual errors about Adventure that even a casual viewer wouldn't make, suggests that he never watched Adventure in the first place and was working off a SparkNotes-level understanding of it

actively rejected scripts that attempted to be character-accurate on the grounds of them not being "mature" enough but then neglected to give the writers clear answers on what "mature" was even supposed to mean, and even confused the music composer (who had worked with him regularly!) on what his requests for "mature" meant

generally had such an obvious "well it's a kids' show that we're going to make mature" attitude that he bragged about tri. using the word "kill" because it wasn't a Kids' Show (...but the tri. scene he mentioned in question did not actually use it, whereas the original series did!), and even his last interview about tri. a year later kept going on about the "mature" thing

He's since become a notorious name in the anime industry for causing the exact same problems with every adaptation and spinoff he works on every time, so although I don't usually like to pin most of a series' problems on one director, it seems like he was a significant bottleneck and that this isn't just something based on one fandom's drama. According to his own statements on the matter in the above-linked article (about his work on the adaptation of the second Utawarerumono game, which aired during tri.'s production period and also ended up infamously having the same problems), it seems like he started doing all of this because consulting the source material for something gave him "regrets" about it restraining his creative freedom...so ever since then, he believed that not consulting it at all would be the better move.

(And if you're wondering "if his reputation is bad, why did they think it was a good idea to put him on Digimon?!", back in 2014 when tri. started, he hadn't gotten this reputation yet, and even by 2015 his most notable work was the third Persona 3 movie. Since main writer Kakihara was also on the Persona 4 anime and even Kizuna/02TB director Taguchi did two of the other Persona 3 movies, I'm guessing they figured Persona was a good place to find staff good at dealing with teenagers with psychological problems, which honestly isn't a bad idea. But it seems that, as a series somewhere between "adaptation" and "original series", tri. happened to be the first thing where he had creative freedom and not tightly controlled production, which is why things went downhill starting from there. If you want to look at things the other way, getting Taguchi was a gamble too, because he only started getting huge acclaim after the Bleach Thousand-Year Blood War adaptation, and back during Kizuna he was only known for the 2017 Kino's Journey anime, which was a bit polarizing. Hindsight is 20/20.)

In other words, the fundamental core belief behind this production was that making it Mature™ was more important than actually making sense with the original series. Questions about why certain plot points were done, like why the Mysterious Man pretended to be the Kaiser, get answers like "to make it more interesting" (read: getting a reaction out of the audience was more important than having an actual reason). Even the color scheme was made with "being mature" as a direction! And I think the situation with Part 4 is an especially good demonstration: you had two scriptwriters who were childhood fans of the series and really did care about the characters, and even sounded the alarm by saying "I'm a little worried that people are going to hate Sora with this plotline," but their scripts kept getting rejected, which is how Part 4 seems to be on the right track but then keeps crashing into a wall at the last second.

But even if you try to omit the original series, it doesn't even make sense with itself, which probably had to do with the fact a given movie could have up to four (two is understandable, but four for a single movie?!) scriptwriters, the budget ran out halfway through and they had to rewrite the entire plot, and something nasty clearly happened with production to the point the original producer mysteriously disappeared 2/3 of the way in and Kizuna's production didn't retain anyone significant from tri. besides voice actors, music, and a producer who publicly disclaimed involvement in tri.'s story. Considering how tight-lipped Japanese PR usually is about things like this, the fact they were even able to say this much really makes me wonder how much more there is we may not know about.

A lot of people may be surprised to hear this given how much I talk about creators and production stuff, but I do believe in "death of the author" in that you don't necessarily have to talk about creative intent in order to analyze the final product. But the thing about Adventure content is that it can be very confusing to navigate unless you consult interviews and take pointers on what to look out for. And this is doable with Adventure and 02, because even with those being a ball of knots at times, the creators did seem to be conscientious about consistency and especially consistency in themes, almost abnormally so at times.

But with tri., even though I really don't want to assume worse than better, if you show me something that doesn't make sense and say "well, I'm sure there was some reason for it that you just haven't come up with yet," it is very hard for me to believe this. And if you show me vaguely-written dialogue that requires mental loops to figure out what it means, it's hard for me to believe that it was intentional, and that it wasn't just written vaguely because they were trying to gloss over the issue. We have way too many things that indicate that many of the things that did make sense were flukes and that things that don't make sense were because whoever was up there legitimately did not care about it not making sense.

So if someone trying to analyze it can't figure anything out, that's not their fault for failing at critical reading; believe me, I have genuinely tried, but the series just isn't written to make sense in the first place, and there was no consistent philosophy about what the series was even supposed to be about or what points it was trying to make other than being Digimon Adventure, but Mature™.

(And I've heard that apparently some Western fans have been claiming that tri. just uses some Japanese method of storytelling that Westerners are too ignorant to understand, but the structure in question is functionally no more complicated than "a three-act structure, except it's four," and that certainly would not explain why the Japanese fandom is arguably even more critical of the series than English speakers are. They're the ones who were really pissed off at the series over "lore", because it was seen as so glaringly in contradiction with the original series that it came off as disrespect for thinking the fanbase would eat anything up without caring.)

Meiko and Meicoomon as the series was written

The reason I'm bringing this up in relation to Meiko and Meicoomon is that I personally consider them to be the worst victims of this problem. When Meiko's presence was first announced, I was absolutely stoked because she was an original character made entirely for tri., which meant that she should be one of the most fascinating elements that provides novelty and stimulates discussion over things the original series didn't cover. And I was even pleasantly surprised that they had the newcomer be a girl, since I was convinced that any deuteragonist "new character" would be another male character. (I also love her design; the black-haired hime cut has a certain sense of "normality" that provides a good sense of contrast with the rest of the Adventure kids.)

But now that everything is said and done, she's probably the biggest example of a character I want to just rip out of the hands of her own creators (and believe it or not, that's not something I tend to feel very often). Let's put it this way: her name was picked purely to be kanji slapped onto a placeholder name of "A-ko", testimony from people who attended Q&A at screenings is that she's from Tottori not for any meaningful reason about being from the countryside as much as it's just fanservice about Shimane in Our War Game!, the scriptwriters even forgot she was supposed to speak in Tottori dialect and had to be reminded by her voice actress, and the director made a joke (at least I hope it's a joke) about her existing to satisfy a glasses fetish, and it's like. Could you treat your own characters with a little more care, please?

So once you look at the writing itself, it doesn't seem like they had any clear goals for her character other than something vaguely about gaining confidence and being unilaterally loved by the Adventure kids:

The fact that the Adventure kids unilaterally shower praise on Meiko without bothering to hold her responsible for anything actually hurts her more than anything, because -- well, ever notice that the Adventure kids never actually bother to ask about her life, personal problems, or anything that would actually solve her problems at the root? All they do is shut her down by going "don't say that!" whenever she says something negative or self-deprecating, or they gloss over the problem by saying things like "we've all got our faults!" to Meiko agonizing about her partner causing literal murder. All of this is insensitive toxic positivity in a nutshell and was something the original Adventure and 02 were very conscientious about avoiding; you can say they're friends forever all you want, but I want to see some genuine emotional connection for me to believe the Adventure kids actually did anything good for her.

Meiko and Meicoomon also never have any real heart-to-heart moments in the series nor do we know what kind of emotional impact Meicoomon had on Meiko's childhood, yet the audience is expected to believe that "dandan" alone carries the weight of an emotional relationship as one from Adventure and 02. Constantly repeating "because you're partners!" as a justification for everything does not mean anything by itself (again, something Adventure and 02 were very good at avoiding to the point I even wrote a piece on it).

On that note, since "monologues as partner conversations" are supposed to be the Adventure universe's way of letting us know more about what's going on in the human characters' heads, we end up never really learning anything about Meiko at all and have to guess based on her statements and actions throughout the series, which are often so vaguely worded that it's hard to get anything significant out of it. (This is a problem with the entirety of tri.'s cast in general, but Meiko gets hit the hardest because, as a new character, she has no pre-existing content to work with.)

Which also poses a problem in that we don't actually know how much Meiko knew about the infection or what ties Meicoomon had to it prior to the series. Without any additional information about her thoughts and internal feelings that could give it more nuance, the best interpretation you can make is that she got strung along by everything, and the worst is that she allowed bad things around her to happen without taking responsibility for anything, which is not something I want to believe but is nevertheless an interpretation I can't blame anyone for having because of how little information we have.

We learn nothing substantial about Meiko's past -- it really does seem like Meiko's background of being from Tottori was Shimane fanservice more than it actually meant anything, and even the few times we get a chance to learn more (the trip to the onsen in Part 2 and the ghost story in Part 5, for instance) end up with completely nothing. There are things that could potentially end up somewhere interesting, which I make use of in the analysis below, but they remain unaddressed to the very end.

Were they trying to bait Meiko and Taichi as a romantic prospect or not? Or at the very least, was her relationship with Taichi supposed to be deeper than the others or not? The official answer is no, but there are way too many writing decisions that are way too difficult for me to believe that at least one writer wasn't working under that idea; unlike Adventure and 02, where the only reason you might think something was romantic was just because of them being tropes, certain things in Part 5 genuinely baffle me as to what narrative purpose they serve if not to do this.

On that note, Meiko and Meicoomon's writing is practically tailored to make the audience dislike them (and again, I consider this to be a way they were done dirty rather than me agreeing that people should dislike them). Showering praise unilaterally on a character about how much everyone loves them without really doing much to follow up on that just makes them feel shoved down your throat, and this problem gets especially bad with Meicoomon, whom they keep trying to convince you is the purest soul ever without doing anything to characterize her in any meaningful way. (Apparently, the staff adored Meicoomon to the point people were pushing to have her not die, so I'm guessing what happened was that they took "everyone loves her" for granted and didn't realize that they weren't doing enough to convince the audience that they should love her too.) She's called "kind" in Part 6, but I honestly can't feel anything that actually justifies this, because...

Meicoomon gaslights Meiko on screen, and that is also the only thing we ever see her coherently say after Part 2. She accuses Meiko of abandoning her and running away from her when, factually speaking from what we saw in the series before then, she did not. Meiko swallows this as if it were true, and the series even continues as if this actually were true, as if it doesn't even remember what happened before (which, given how sloppy the writing process seems to have been, may well have been the case). As you said, this should be a great opportunity to go into the potential implications behind a toxic partnership, except given that the entire series is written on toxic positivity, I'm not sure if they even recognized that this relationship is toxic instead of just pinning it on the infection. The character song you mentioned would provide something to work with (which I'll go into below), if not for the fact that the series itself contradicts it; the song suggests that Meicoomon is self-aware about everything going on with her and has her own concerns, but the series itself, especially Part 5, portrays her as 100% oblivious.

In the end, the series constantly flip-flopping back and forth on how sympathetic or unsympathetic Meicoomon is supposed to be means that it ends up shooting itself in the foot because all of the contradictory points about whether she was "born this way" or whether it was a problem that came later create a combination of "someone who was born with a problem so bad that she's impossible to save and is better off dead," which. Um. Is not really something you want to be implying! I sure hope that was not the intended implication!

So if you want to ask me about Meiko and Meicoomon as they were written, I end up running into the same problem that formed the reason why I generally don't include tri. in Adventure and 02 analysis: the details as given are so vague and contradictory that making sense out of it, and especially making sense with it combined with the original series, is just not possible for me to do without fudging and making up so many details that it turns into my own fanfic, and I don't feel comfortable styling that as an "analysis" without stamping disclaimers all over it from top to bottom. I would be willing to believe that "maybe I'm just not trying hard enough" if it weren't for the fact that, again, all evidence points to the idea that this series was not written to make sense to begin with, so it would mean grasping at a potential coherent interpretation that doesn't actually exist.

Now, fortunately, even if it's been years since I've actually written anything, I am still a fanfic writer! And now that we have two more movies under our belt where even official content seems to have run into the same problem and decided to go ahead and fudge things anyway, I have a lot more license to similarly fudge things and force them to work. So let's try things from that angle.

Meiko and Meicoomon with a more flexible approach

My philosophy with approaching what happened in tri. and trying to integrate it into the Adventure timeline is that I want to go with the broad spirit of what was probably going to be the main point before contradictory scriptwriting threw it all into confusion. Which is not to say that I can guess entirely what the staff was going for, but I at least feel like it's more important to take the heart and spirit of whatever we were supposed to feel about Meiko and Meicoomon and how they could tie into the overall Adventure narrative, rather than trying to work logistics out by focusing too much on specific dialogue wording.

In the process of doing this, I'm going to attempt to work under the principle "anything that is not contradicted by the original series nor tri. itself is fair game." So for instance, I don't really feel up to retaining the idea of Meiko's dad running an entire Digimon research facility that was publicly recognized as one, because that causes so many lore problems it makes my head spin (and is all but outright contradicted in 02 episode 39). But I am more than willing to keep the part about her dad being a scientist interested in researching Digimon, because there's nothing ruling out the idea of him being one of the few who had early access to all of this, so to speak. Contrary to popular belief, there is no rule dictating that every Chosen Child kept their partners under the table from their parents, hence why Menoa and Rui are also portrayed as having been open about their partners to their families in Kizuna and 02TB.

The part about Meiko moving to Tokyo from Tottori is also unexplained; in Japan, it's extremely implausible for there to be a mid-year high school transfer without a serious reason (not even for work), to the point an exam is usually involved. Granted, Mimi's convenient transfer in from the US is also even more implausible, so I'm pretty sure the reason for both is just "plot convenience", but in the case of Meiko, she does say that Himekawa helped her move in, so it makes me wonder if some strings were pulled to get Meiko to Tokyo ASAP for some reason, especially with Himekawa's own machinations. (If you really stretch it, I suppose this could apply to Mimi as well.) But at that point we're going to have to go into even more speculation on Himekawa, whose sheer existence poses timeline problems, so I'll leave that there for now and focus on Meiko.

We know that Meiko met Meicoomon as a child in Tottori. Adventure lore dictates that this encounter had to have happened after Meiko had a previous Digimon encounter; my guess is that the tri. staff forgot or didn't know this was supposed to be a thing, because you'd think it'd be brought up otherwise, but I think Meiko witnessing the Digital World in the sky in 1999 is reasonable.

The part about Meicoomon being an Apocalymon shard is...a bit ehhhh. Mainly because Meicoomon's actions don't match up with Apocalymon's motives and past of "being made up of the regrets of Digimon who couldn't evolve", something that Watanabe Kenji himself even observed (he'd tried to devise Ordinemon's design as "being made up of the regrets of Digimon who couldn't fly" only for it to be completely unused). The other lore explanation for Meicoomon's nature given is in Part 6 is regarding her being a memory backup for every Digimon in the Digital World, which was not really hinted at beforehand (most likely it was just a way to have the Digimon's memories come back without making a whole other plot device) but did eventually get used in Hudiemon's profile, so I think there could still be something related to that. (Hudiemon having this backstory has more to do with the themes in Hacker's Memory, but the similarity is interesting.)

Whatever it is, though, we at least know that something was going on with Meicoomon even since the day they first met. Part 5 says that she'd been dealing with this issue since birth, but Part 6 says that it was a result of her good memories with Meiko being sealed away; these don't really make sense together, but 5's is the one that's easier to work with and was probably the originally intended one. Either way, it does seem like there was something going on to the extent that Homeostasis and the Agents that giving her a partner would help alleviate the issue.

Homeostasis's actions in tri. really don't make a lot of sense, since this still leaves open the huge question of why they didn't tell Meiko about all of this nor offer her any help, functionally leaving her out to dry to deal with a problem way beyond her means. This wasn't how they were portrayed in Adventure and 02, since at the time anything that seemed unreasonable or lacking in information on its face was more out of full-on desperate necessity or out of something literally blocking communication, so I'm going to take a very generous re-interpretation of events and imagine something like this was the case again (perhaps they informed Meiko's dad about it, but he refused to give Meiko that information thinking it would be better for both her and Meicoomon).

It's also stated that Meicoomon had some emotional issues that developed out of separation anxiety from Meiko, and that this presumably made her outbursts worse. I imagine that when they first met, Meiko was a kid who didn't have too many obligations, so Meicoomon took for granted that they'd be together all the time, only for things to go south once Meiko got older and had to leave the house to visit places where "she's my cat" wouldn't pass as an excuse.

So with the increase in suspicious events, Meiko did notice how they kept surrounding Meicoomon and even witnessed the lab incident where her presence seemed to bring Meicoomon back from another episode. We also know that her father had told her that she was a "special Digimon", information that was on her mind all the way up to Part 3.

I would prefer to take a more charitable interpretation of Meiko's actions in tri. when possible, so when it comes to Part 3 I imagine she didn't know for sure Meicoomon was the source of the infection and only had strong suspicions about it based on what she'd seen beforehand. (In which case the narrative would have been unfairly harsh to her; she didn't have good evidence of it, so she really shouldn't be blamed for not bringing it up to kids who are still almost complete strangers to her.) Her father was only able to tell that she was a "special Digimon", but there wasn't anything else that would definitively identify Meicoomon as the source.

And in regards to things like Meicoomon gaslighting Meiko in Part 4, again, it doesn't really work if you take the words at face value, but if you go with the general spirit of "Meicoomon accusing Meiko of abandoning her", it makes more sense if you think of it as having a relationship with Meicoomon's separation anxiety: she believes that every time Meiko left the house or did things without her constituted abandoning her in some form, making her needy and clingy but with Meiko, being a young child and understandably overwhelmed, unable to deal with the fallout.

So I think it's possible to read it as a toxic relationship, but in a different vector from Rui and Ukkomon (and I do think it's an easier one to work with in a sense; Rui and Ukkomon had one of those toxic relationships that insidiously seems "perfect" at first but actually has a lot going wrong with it, but in this one it's clear something is wrong even at face value). And when you frame this in terms of Adventure's principle of Digimon reflecting their human partners' inner selves, I think it may be broadly applicable to Meiko possibly having potential abandonment issues or similar fears that she can't bring herself to vocalize.

One thing that particularly struck me (and honestly this is just a Me Thing, I suppose) the last time I watched Part 3 is how the portrayal of Meiko burying her head in her blankets in misery really does match up with depression, and in this case I mean clinical depression, not just depression the way it's used in slang lingo. I'm hesitant to do things like armchair diagnosis, but given the portrayal of Meiko as a rather chipper and upbeat kid in her childhood but shy and withdrawn as a teenager, I think this is a reasonable interpretation to make (and in fact I would be willing to believe this actually was originally intended and simply wasn't properly addressed in the series).

I don't think this would just be because of the Leomon incident. She spent her childhood dealing with a partner who kept having dangerous outbursts that she didn't know how to do anything about, she had to deal with her partner's own emotional immaturity on top of that, and now she's been uprooted from her home in Tottori and temporarily relocated to the city (she doesn't seem to be someone with a lot of experience in the city, and especially one like Tokyo, so it naturally must be overwhelming).

And although Meiko did seem like a pretty chipper kid back in Tottori, I think it's reasonable to imagine that even if she were chipper in demeanor, she might have always been hesitant to vocalize or even mentally acknowledge things that are too uncomfortable to touch on, leading to it all building up inside her. I think that would also track with her feeling guilt about not talking about Meicoomon potentially being the infection source in Part 3; the narrative is being unreasonably harsh to her if it's just about that alone, but if you interpret it as Meiko having dealt with this kind of "guilt for running away from the problem" since the beginning, it's a little more reasonable. It would also work well with Meicoomon's character song and the conflict of being torn between good and evil.

And if you apply this to Meiko's character arc as a whole, I think it would work to read it as a broad "Meiko learns to finally confront uncomfortable things and things she doesn't want to accept" character story (that didn't really happen in Parts 5 and 6 because she actually went along with the "we can't save her, except maybe we can" flip-flopping they kept doing, but it's about the spirit! The spirit!).

Kizuna including Meiko indicates that she is unambiguously canon to the Kizuna/02TB setting, even with them being a bit lenient about what they're pulling from tri. I think Meiko is probably one of the easiest factors to bring in (she and Meicoomon are probably the only original concepts in tri. that don't come with major lore or characterization contradictions just by being mentioned). It's also interesting to think about what that brief appearance entails:

that Meiko and Meicoomon exist and are partners (obviously);

(as per one of the Kizuna novels) that the Adventure group met her "in high school";

that Meiko's childhood was in Tottori or at least the countryside (the house depicted is a traditional Japanese-style home)

Meicoomon is not dead (implicitly suggested by the fact that she's able to appear in Neverland at all, but confirmed outright by Watanabe Kenji in the March 5, 2021 commentary, with wording suggesting that she did die once and came back)

Meiko has enough nostalgia to end up in Neverland, something that doesn't necessarily apply to everyone but would make sense for Meiko given the above circumstances

I think people who tend to put things on a "lore-compliant = good, non-compliant = bad" binary or a "fully canon and not canon at all" binary might be mystified at how Toei seems to flip-flop on whether they're including tri. or not, especially with the incident where they didn't include tri. in the official timeline leading up to 02TB. But firstly, even putting aside the fact that "canon" doesn't really exist in Digimon Adventure to begin with, the way I see it is that it's not like they want to omit tri. entirely, no matter what the fanbase says about it; Kizuna's producer Kinoshita said directly that he slipped tri. references into the movie because he wanted some kind of connection to tri., and I don't think they would do any of these references if they really loathed the series' presence that much.

The problem is simply that everything that has to do with lore or consistency is now such a headache to deal with that there's no way to do that nicely, let alone in a 90-minute movie; after all, even 02TB's producer trying to say something to rationalize it ended up being completely nonsensical. And that's added to the fact that if they're going to do this, they're going to have to do this subtly in a situation where the fanbase is pissed off enough at tri. to flood social media posts with angry callouts (not as much the case anymore, but definitely common back then, especially when it reached its end in 2018). So in the end, they have to settle for meta nods like "characters who suspiciously have Meiko and Meicoomon's color scheme and voice actresses" to not be too conspicuous or interfere with timeline.

But if you reject all of tri. wholesale, it'd be such a waste! Almost everyone I've talked to about it agrees that there really were some good ideas in there, especially by the aforementioned staff members who obviously cared but weren't high up enough to get their ideas through properly. (Personally, I think setting researcher Suzuki had some inspired ideas that clearly came out of some very deep thought about Digimon lore and the 02 epilogue, and I mourn the fact they didn't make it into the final product.)

Point is! Meiko and Meicoomon exist. I have no idea what a more lore-compliant version of their story would look like if official were to tackle it somehow, but I like to imagine in my head that something spiritually similar to what I just described went down in 2005. Naturally, the version in my head also doesn't involve inhumanely treating the 02 kids like expendable fodder nor the Adventure group acting against their core characterizations and motives as much as they do, but there is some kind of spirit that was behind most of the new elements of tri., so I would prefer to not get rid of it as possible.

[shihalyfie]

Fun fact about the Digimon Card Game: out of every human character in the franchise, the original incarnation of Hikari has been featured in the most cards so far, eight in total. This means she beats OG Taichi, OG Takeru and Reboot Taichi, all of who have seven cards to their names. This doesn't really mean anything or warrant any deeper analysis (probably) but I do think it's funny that out of every character Hikari has ended up being the most prominent.

Ha, that is funny! Part of me wonders if this has to do with the fact that one of the ambassadors for the card game, Hideyoshi, is a notorious Hikari fan (apparently he had a crush on her as a kid) to the point bringing her up gets him to start raving in bursts that they have to actually cut out of the videos for time. "I want to hear the Hikari-chan rant!!" is a recurring joke among people watching the videos.

Personally, I always found it funny that the "most prominent" Adventure characters are technically Takeru and Hikari by virtue of the fact that they're billed as major characters in both the Adventure and 02 groups, which means they're almost guaranteed to be billed as major characters in anything Adventure-branded, something even their brothers don't necessarily get. I like to imagine their brothers going "must be nice, huh?" at some point.

[shihalyfie]

I would love Nat-chan and Daisuke analysis, the fact he used "Boku wa" in Reach for you <3 thank u

The "boku" isn't particularly unusual; things like song lyrics have somewhat different rules regarding pronouns, so you'll even see girls using "boku" in lyrics even if they wouldn't do so elsewhere. Using "ore" was fair game in Daisuke's character songs because they were lighthearted songs where "character personality" was priority, but that's also because Daisuke was showing off a little (even Taichi's character songs use "boku"). Something like the Door to Summer songs have a requirement of being a little more poetic, and using "ore" in that situation would probably have made it come off as too shallow.

Regarding the analysis, right now I'm trying to get all of the quick asks out of the way and will need to leave in-depth analysis stuff for later, so I'm afraid I can't answer this for the time being! I did get another ask about Door to Summer in my inbox, so I'll address it there when I'm able to, but I wanted to at least tackle the second half of your question while I could. Hopefully I can get to the rest of it sometime soon!

[shihalyfie]

I noticed the otedama/beans for Daisuke (both versions) do not have the >:) face, but Miyako's (again, both) have. I think she might be the only of the 02(TB) kids to have it...?

I mean, Miyako's the one actively flouting international customs! She knows what she's doing and is proud of it.

[shihalyfie]

This might be something more of my personal interpretation, but sometimes i do wonder if anyone who wasn't directly involved with the Kaiser vs Chosen territory war game is aware of Ken being the former Digimon Kaiser, or not.

I mean, many people in the past had this assumption that Ken did not liked to talk about the Kaiser and to think the group (+ older six) would try to avoid the subject to not make Ken feel uncomfortable (i believe it's because of Miyako's line in ep 31, in which she accidentally started babbling about the Evil Ring they found and then apologizes because she "did make him remember of something he didn't want to" or something?)

But then you have MenAS drama CD, where Ken invokes that persona for a few moments in the track 4, and now the 02TB theater bonus audio drama #3, in which the Kaiser is namedropped -- showing that this is not the case and even Ken himself will simply mention it in the ways of "yeah i did bad things in the past and i admit it, but now i'm doing the right things" instead.

Well, my opinion is that not everyone is aware of it. Some people don't know. And some people could've been pretty much like how Iori was and there could be people who would just use it to blackmail Ken as well if they knew it. So i believe the group and Ken himself wouldn't like to let it be public knowledge. And for the digimon, i don't even know if the entire Digital World is aware as well, possibly because the Kaiser reveal in ep 8 and then 21 happened in isolated places, and the brainwash factor of the rings/spirals makes the digimon not remember those stuff? I dunno...

Anyway, what is your thoughts about it? Is the real identity of the Kaiser public knowledge or nah?

Personally, I don't think it ever became public knowledge. The Digital World residents would have only known him as the Digimon Kaiser, and although I'm sure a lot of Digimon could probably recognize him by face or voice or other means, I don't think the name Ichijouji Ken nor his civilian identity would mean anything to them in the first place (because it's only useful in a real-world setting). And on the flip side, the real world residents didn't know anything about the Digimon Kaiser at all, and by the time they would know, it would be long after everything had passed.

I imagine the kids would keep it a secret, if only because nothing good would come out of it being public knowledge. It would just attract unwanted hostility, open old wounds, and give people more reasons to be angry and upset at his presence, which would be a huge nail in his ability to actually help the communities he'd wronged. If some circumstance made it so that his identity would have to be revealed in order to prevent something worse happening, I'm sure Ken would have no problem taking responsibility, but otherwise, I think Daisuke (who's much more pragmatic) would stop him because it wouldn't actually help anything.

[shihalyfie]

In Digimon Our War Game, the grandma brings food to Matt and TK while they're watching a baseball game on TV. Matt looks unimpressed or disgusted by it. What was on the plate?

It's ohagi, which was confirmed by the official storyboard book (the disparity between Takeru and Yamato's reactions is even noted there!). There's nothing particularly unusual about ohagi, so presumably Yamato isn't a huge fan of sweet things.

Funnily enough, it also ends up being Armadimon's favorite thing in 02, although I don't know if that had been established yet during the movie's production (the same book shows that Miyako was still "the girl in glasses who will be in the second series" and even had pigtails at the time).

[shihalyfie]

Do you think VamDemon has hypnotic abilities while possessing Oikawa’s body? If so, how strong do you think they are? I’m trying to think of a way for Oikawa to manipulate my OC, who is not infected by a Dark Seed, but the idea I came up with is pretty dark, to the point where I’m hesitant to use it.

Hmm, it's hard to say. I would tentatively say "I wouldn't rule it out" in the sense that we kind of saw him use it on...himself(?) in 02 episode 47, but I also don't think he would use it that much unless it were really necessary. For all intents and purposes, he was trying to make it come off as Oikawa being a normal human doing normal human things, and I also didn't get the impression he was able to use his full powerset that easily.

But he was one of those charismatic types in a way, so I think he'd be more likely to go with the usual psychological manipulation as long as there's some weakness he can exploit. The Dark Seeds made it easier for him because they basically provided him with kids with emotional weaknesses on a plate, but, as they say, if you can't make it yourself, store-bought is fine too.

[shihalyfie]

Hi Shiya, is there any info on Daisuke and Jun's past in the lore? I know they were around for the Vamdemon incident but i can't seem to find anything that could give me more info about their life before the series.

There's not a lot, sadly. There is one magazine article that says that Daisuke was born in Odaiba (as opposed to having moved in), and I personally believe that him saying in 02 episode 11 that he doesn't really understand what friendship is suggests that he never really had any super-close friends prior to the events of 02 (I'm sure he had "friends" in the sense of people who got along well enough with him, so he wasn't isolated or anything, but he didn't have any "best friends" on a super close emotional level the way the 02 kids would eventually be). I imagine his life was otherwise pretty ordinary.

[shihalyfie]

If you look at the shots of the Yamato and Taichi being held down by the Digimon partners in Kizuna, you can see one of them is Oikawa's Datirimon.......

I didn't get the impression that it was Oikawa's Pipimon/Datirimon specifically, just that it was a Pipimon someone had (I feel like Oikawa wouldn't be in that position given where he is now).

[shihalyfie]

Who do you think cried the most with tears of joy or sadness, of the main hero digimon like Taichi or Daisuke on the list from the most to the least crying.

I don't remember the exact count, but I remember doing an Adventure cry count back in the day and the highest number went to Yamato by a landslide. That kid is a walking ball of emotions and sentiment.