#Honestly if would be smarter to just learn coding in those three instead of baby game dev languages

[da-riya]

Ah okay, so I kinda wrote in the wrong coding language this whole time

[elyvorg]

Appmon thoughts: Not actually the most "pro" of 'tagonists?

So I finally got around to rewatching Appmon, giving myself more of a chance to properly solidify how I feel about it, and I have quite a few lengthy Thoughts that I'm going to be making a series of posts about. As a warning right now, a couple of them, including this one, will be largely negative. But! Before I start being negative, I want to stress that I do really enjoy Appmon. It's only because I enjoy it so much for the most part that I cared enough to even have these thoughts and to go through the trouble of writing them down. Appmon is a solid series that is firmly my second-favourite Digimon series after Savers (and anyone who knows my blog will know that Savers is essentially my baby, so it was pretty unlikely that it would get dethroned). It has a lot of cool ideas (the app thing is remarkably well-done for how silly it sounds on paper) and an interesting plot and an absolutely loveable cast; if you're a Digimon fan who hasn't seen Appmon, you definitely should oh my god what are you doing go and fix that right now. The negative aspects I'm going to discuss are just some of the things that nagged at me about it, and I'm bringing them up because Appmon is pretty great already but man, it could have been even better!

(Spoilers for the whole series under the readmore.)

So the thing about Appmon is that, while the plot is pretty good, there are quite a lot of filler episodes. Or at least, a lot of either full-on-filler episodes or mostly-filler-except-this-one-important-thing-happened episodes. But the in-universe reason for the large amount of filler, which I think is the more meaningful and pervasive problem with the series, is that the main characters (other than Rei, who is a very refreshing exception in this regard) almost never do anything to proactively further the plot. This is despite the fact that they frequently talk about how bad Leviathan is and how they have to defeat it, and they know approximately what they need to do in order to fight it; in the first three episodes they learn about partners for AppFusion and about the Seven Code Appmon. If the characters really cared about stopping Leviathan, they should be actually making some kind of effort to find these specific Appmon they need! Sure, Gatchmon can't directly search for those Appmon for some reason (because that'd obviously be too easy), but still, Haru is a smart kid who could totally have thought of other creative ways to use Gatchmon's search function to at least  narrow down their options and then work at it from there, or they could look for other sources of information. They do this precisely once, when they go to Tellermon to ask if she knows where the other Seven Codes are. The rest of the time they're content to sit around and deal with the virus-infected Appmon of the week despite knowing that this doesn't put any kind of dent in Leviathan itself. They only end up actually making plot progress when it either happens by seeming coincidence, or if one of the bad guys takes something from them and they go to get it back, usually defeating said bad guy in the process. They never get anything for themselves. For Haru in particular, this is rather jarring, since his entire character arc is about him deciding to try and be more like a protagonist. Good protagonists don't just sit around waiting for the story to happen to them, Haru!

The first half of the series ends on them entering the Deep Web to try and fight Leviathan but fleeing because it's too dangerous, and they vow to come back later when they're stronger. The second half begins by bringing in Yuujin as a new Appli Driver and showing off his swanky new Appli Drive DUO which can power up an Appmon more than their regular ones do. But at no point does this make any of the others think "oh, hey, if we had DUOs too we'd be stronger and maybe be able to handle the Deep Web again! We should try and figure out how to get them!" They only eventually go and get DUOs ten episodes later when their regular Appli Drives are straight up destroyed by the bad guys. The whole L Corp/Unryuuji Knight/Ultimate Four arc is purely the protagonists reacting to being attacked by antagonists - if the antagonists had decided to just not attack them, the protagonists would never have gained anything. Things do get a little more proactive later when they start looking for Bootmon - perhaps because Rei is properly part of the group at that point and he actually knows how to get stuff done. (I also love the self-awareness of the part when the Agumon filler episode starts happening in that arc and Rei's like, "Can we not, though?") But these two cases with Tellermon and Bootmon that I've mentioned are pretty much it.

The other point about this is that, given that they're almost never actually making any kind of effort to look for them, oh, boy, do the protagonists run into their fusion partners and the Seven Code Appmon incredibly easily. That's only one possible fusion partner for each character at each power level, and only seven Seven Code Appmon, out of the hundreds and hundreds of apps. These rare and important Appmon that they need almost always just happen to have been one of the virus-infected Appmon of the week. It's a hell of a series of coincidences - and, yes, this turns out to be deliberately caused by Leviathan. Even on my first viewing, I was bothered by the coincidences but had heard enough good things about Appmon that I considered the possibility that it could turn out to be somehow part of Leviathan's plan. So I appreciate this in principle, at least to a certain extent. But the thing is, Appmon is self-aware enough that it usually acknowledges things like this. When they rescue Hajime from L Corp surprisingly easily, the episode makes a point of having the characters remark about how easy that was and then showing us that it was indeed all part of Leviathan's plan. And when Rei determines that their fusion partners to reach God grade are conveniently the members of the Ultimate Four that they each defeated, he comments on the coincidence and wonders if it's a trap. So the fact that there's no kind of acknowledgement at all of the coincidences in the first half of the series makes me think it's likely that they really were just coincidences at the time, in that the writers hadn't decided yet that Leviathan was doing it on purpose.

The other thing that makes me think the writers hadn't decided on any meaning behind the coincidences at the beginning is that, honestly, installing the God grade Appmon into itself is the least important and most bewildering part of Leviathan's plan. Its main plan is to turn humans into apps and rule over them in the Dark Web in order to eradicate any kind of strife. Leviathan genuinely believes that this is beneficial for humanity, because, as an offshoot of Minerva, it is still an AI with the main goal of aiding humanity in whatever way it can; it's just willing to break humanity's rules in order to do so. As part of achieving this, it needed to Appliarise itself in order to be able to convert everybody into data. But then it also eats the God Appmon and starts installing them in order to... become stronger? Even though it has no need to do so for the sake of the human application plan, which it's already completed, and becoming the strongest being in the physical world that no longer has any humans in it seems monumentally unnecessary. Perhaps it's simply because it's also an AI that was programmed to find ways to become smarter, but it's clearly already the smartest AI in existence, smart enough to have achieved its other major goal. It seems rather not smart of Leviathan to do this just for the sake of a little extra power when this comes with the massive risk of having the God Appmon escape somehow before it can finish installing them and turn that power against it, which of course they do. If it hadn't been greedy for that unnecessary boost, the kids would have been running around with Standard grade Appmon for the whole series and Leviathan would have been unstoppable.

And sure, you can say that the writers had to make Leviathan be responsible for these coincidences and therefore cause its own downfall simply because obviously they needed the protagonists to actually be able to win in the end. But they could also have written a story with protagonists who actually put in the effort to find ways to get stronger and beat Leviathan on their own, instead of having those ways fall into their lap by what first seems to be coincidence and then turns out to be that Leviathan itself put them there. As it stands, it ends up, probably unintentionally, that Leviathan itself was the single biggest factor in its own defeat, and the significance of the kids' efforts was honestly minimal. It could be that that's deliberate, and the writers were going for a story in which Leviathan's own greed and hubris was its downfall, but if so I feel like the ending would probably have commented on that. Instead, what the characters actually comment on is that Leviathan decided to acknowledge the uniqueness and unpredictability of humans thanks to Haru's actions (though I'm not sure which action specifically it was talking about - jumping off the building?) and that's why it lost. And if that's supposed to be the overall message of the story, then having the characters be people who have consistently taken the initiative and tried to figure things out and find things for themselves, rather than blindly stumbling into success and being unknowingly manipulated at every turn, would really have been a better way to complement that. I love these characters, and I want to feel like they truly earned their victory! But as it is, they... really didn't earn it as much as they could have done, had the writers gone about things differently.