#the L goes silent in many words if used as a prefix

[spamzineglasgow]

(HOT TAKE) Notes on a Conditional Form by The 1975, part 2

In the second instalment of a two part HOT TAKE (read part one here) on The 1975′s latest LP, Notes on a Conditional Form (Dirty Hit, 2020), Scott Morrison ponders the tricksterish art of writing about music, before riffing on the history of the album as form, questions around genre, nostalgia and a sense of the contemporary, not to mention that saxophone solo and why Stravinsky would love this album.

Dear Maria,

> How pleasant it feels to begin a review with a note to a friend.

> Shoutout/cc:/@FrankO’Hara – I always liked his idea to write a poem like it’s addressed to just one other person. It strikes me as interesting to begin a piece of criticism in the same way. So, this is the mode I will try to inhabit throughout.

> As I read your words, and pondered, and learned, I was caught in the twin state of delighting each time you hit upon something already identified in my own thoughts – some of which I will expand upon here - and equally delighted every time you wrote something I could or would not. Such is the joy of conversation.

> I suppose in this preamble between speakers, which keeps up the pretence of our characters conversing - which will, inevitably, lapse as the form of this review gives way to a longer, more oneiristic, probably, onanistic, possibly, enquiry into the album (an act impossible in real conversation, by the way, imagine, imagine someone actually speaking for this long, how boring and alienating that would be, and yet that is usually what criticism is). Anyway, before all that, to help set the scene, I should mention a few ‘real world’ details. All of which happened either online, of course, or in isolation, because that, as you mention, is the real world now, during the violent interlude of Covid-19.

> I was delighted – that word again, repetitions and patterns begin anew already – to be asked to write this review. Firstly, because, like you say, I am a fan of The 1975. But also, because I am a writer and I am a musician and I am trying just now to forge a new mode of writing about music, one that can be both analytical (technically, socially, historically) and expressive (personally, lyrically, emotionally). And, most of all because I have always been, at best, suspicious, and, at worst, dismissive, of album reviews.

> I wrote, in our Messenger chat, ‘I usually find music reviews unhelpful’, which makes me sound like a bit of a dick, really. But what I meant is, what I meant is.

> There’s a saying I think about a lot, as the aforementioned writer and musician who writes about music: ‘writing about music is like dancing about architecture’ (Martin Mull, Frank Zappa, or Elvis Costello, or any of the other people that sharp quote is blurrily misattributed to.)

> Incidentally, I would love to see a dance about architecture. But sometimes I think the sentiment of the statement is true. Will writing about music always be missing the point? Will it, through words, ever really be able to get to the essentially wordless essence of music? But I am a writer. And I am a musician. And I like writing about music. (Incidentally, I like making music about writing less). Yet I do feel there is some truth to the saying, I guess. Twists and turns. Try again. Here is another way of saying what I am trying to say.

> Music reviews make me hate adjectives. And I love adjectives. But often commercial reviews – for dozens of reasons, many of them valid, most of them related to that capital prefix – become attempts to describe a sound, invariably an artist’s ‘new sound’, again related to that capital prefix. Often, the goal is to generate press, to entice people to listen – or not – and so feed the music industry and the market. And to describe these new sounds, adjectives are piled-up like car crashes. Trying to describe a sound at any great length is, I think, ultimately fated to fail. Adjectives, up to a point, can provide greater and ever-more strident clarity. But, after a certain point – that appears very quickly in most pop reviews - saturation point is reached, and the clarity disappears, and we are left very far away from the music we were originally trying to pile word upon word to reach. ‘Nothing Revealed / Everything Denied’, you might say, if you were into foreshadowing. Which I am (obviously).

> So, I suppose, to continue thinking out loud (in silence, at my keyboard) I am interested in writing around music. Not describing the sounds (‘Let sounds be themselves’, says John Cage, whispering in my memory’s ear), but I am interested in writing that can tease out some of the ideas in and around the music and extend them in new directions. That, I think, is a different and interesting kind of dance worth attempting.

> We understand a review, then, as this kind of dance: as a record of the reviewer’s experience of listening to a record, which will accept that it will largely take as its subject the listening, and not the record. Even better if it’s a dialogue between two. So, here’s what I think about the album.

*

> Ok, before I talk about the album, actually, I would like to talk about a book. I hope that’s alright. There is no objective correlation between the album and the book except the proximity in time in which I experienced them. Let’s get that out of the way at the very beginning. The book has nothing to do with the album. But it does have something to do with how I heard it.

> The book is called An Experiment with Time. I mentioned this to you once already over Zoom. It was written in 1927. My copy belonged to my grandfather, in fact, and his writing – and so his pen and then his hand and then his whole vanished being – appeared occasionally at marginal or pivotal points throughout the text. That was part of what I liked about it, I guess.

> The book – which I allowed Wikipedia to tell me only after I had pushed my way through it – is regarded as an imaginative curiosity, but one which science has never taken seriously. That’s fine for me, because I am far more familiar, fluid and fluent in the language and implications of the imagination that I am of science.

> The book, broadly in two halves, sets out in its first strange span experiences of premonitions in dreams. That will give you the idea of the kind of science book it is. The second half is an attempt at a logical, philosophical, and occasionally mathematical explanation of Time that can account for these premonitory fissures.

> It posits that, in addition to the three dimensions of space (height, breadth and depth, I suppose), that time is a fourth dimension in our universe. I’ve heard that said, but I never really got it before. I do now, and it is very beautiful, because it begins to make me imagine, how, like a sculptor, I can ply, fold and shape with this new dimension. You can imagine how this might be useful to a musician, music being an art that can only exist through time.

> Anyway, the book then goes on to posit that a fourth dimension in which something can be observed to travel (our consciousness), must necessarily imply an observer in a fifth dimension to observe that travel, and then one in a sixth dimension, and so on, ad inifitum, infinite regress, serial time.

> I confess this somewhat surpassed the boundaries of my metaphysics (and/or silently slipped over my head), but the image of the infinite regress has stayed with me, the clickanddrag of old Windows windows ossified and pulled to leave twisting, spiralling trails; the gold-tipped rhythm of tenement window embrasures, repeating, far off, clickanddragged up a hill (hints and twists of Escher), on my daily walks.

> Wikipedia later told me that an infinite regress is a shaky ground on which to base a philosophical proof. Again, this is fine for me: I am a bad philosopher, because I am not competitive, and so this does not bother me very much.

> The infinite regress is a beautiful image, with lots of possibility in it for further imaginings, and it entrances me. So, keep this idea of serial observers and the limitless extension it implies close, please (foreshadowing again, you’re welcome).

*

> I will switch now, briefly, too briefly, from critic to fanboy (I contain multitudes, etc.).  

> Notes on a Conditional Form as an album title made me smile a smile that was very close to a wince or wink. Classic Matty, was probably the thought that came next. You have already summarised dastardly, dear, endearing, calamitous Matty, so I will move on assuming that, Matty Healy, yeah, I know.

> Back to the critic. The conditional form, in this review has already been (drumroll, eyeroll) music reviews themselves. See part one.

> Now I would like to take the album as the form in question – not this album, but albums generally, as this album is an exploration of the album form. The Album, capitalised.

> Albums have become normalised. But let’s play dumb for a moment – one of the cleverest things we can do - and we’ll see that albums are anything but inevitable, especially in the boundless age of streaming.

> Before this, albums used to be defined as collections with physical bounds. The capacity of a CD; before that, a length of magnetic tape; before that, the edge of a vinyl, a shellac, a wax cylinder. That about takes us back to the start of recorded audio media, I think.

> After Edison’s initial, waxy curiosities, albums began - like most things we love and hate - as a product. The form of the album was a circle. The music was a line. The edge of the line was the end of time. Marcel Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs, as a fun aside. And, as another, did you know that there’s a funny B-plot in all of this to do with Beethoven. (It’s always to do with fucking Beethoven.) Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony became the arbitrary marker for the desired length of the CD. It had never before been possible to fit the symphony onto a single, uninterrupted piece of media. And so, the B-plot goes, this is why the standard CD holds the amount of time that it does.

> Anyway, regardless of who shaped them, physical recorded media have, since their staggered births, profoundly shaped culture. Pop songs, especially singles, are still 3 and a half minutes long because that was the maximum amount of time that could be squeezed onto a 78, in the shellac days. Time was short and simple then, seemingly.

> Notes on a Conditional Form is 81 minutes long. It had 8 singles leading up to it, released over a span of ten months. Clearly, physical boundaries and marketing timelines, are not being treated in the usual way. You could just release singles forever now. But the fact this ended up as an album shows some belief in the concept beyond the physical and, yes, the commercial. Let’s press on, look elsewhere.

> Since we’ve started talking about classical music – ok, since I started talking about classical music – I’d like to dwell there for a moment, because there are foreshadows of The Album, conceptually speaking (and this album specifically) several layers up, several parenthesis ago, criticism as serial digression, in classical music.

> Collecting songs as albums was a favourite pastime of the Romantics, early emos. @FranzSchubert, @ClaraSchumann, @JohannesBrahms – there’s another B-plot in that trio if you want to look it up, by the way. Also, Clara Schumann is overlooked, like all female composers, because the classical music world is deeply patriarchal. It’s important to say that whenever we can.

> Anyway, the Romantics did not develop the album as a physical form – the only available recording medium at that time was sheet music, which they did sell in a big way, actually. But really, they helped develop the album as a conceptual form. They collected a group of shorter songs to make a larger statement – Schubert especially. In the 19th century, this was known as a song cycle, a lovely phrase, that makes me think of cycling through meadows, which I have done more than usual recently, as part of my state-sanctioned exercises, though the meadow was in fact an overgrown golf course, and no less lovely for it.

> Schubert’s Die Winterreise is a classic example of the song cycle – and another example of the emo-Romantic - a cycle of poems set to music that take the listener on a journey over time. Sound familiar? Albums. Song cycles. Song spokes. Meadows. Grasses and wildflowers. Meandering journeys.

> Anyway, here we finally return to Notes on a Conditional Form. Collecting songs together allows for an exploration of ideas that can evolve or expand over time – a Brief Inquiry, you might say. Art as a tool of investigation. Process. And this album certainly does that. You already touched on some of the ideas in the album: the climate crisis, the Anthropocene, digital communication, social unrest, calls to action, my favourite lyric on that theme, while we’re here:

Wake up, wake up, wake up, we are appalling

And we need to stop just watching shit in bed

And I know it sounds boring and we like things that are funny

But we need to get this in our fucking heads-

> You explore these ideas well so I will not pursue them more for now. Thank you!

> The other effect of collecting songs – or anything together – is that it gives birth to form. (Gasp, he said the title of the movie!)

> Yes, collecting things together as an album is what creates the form in all senses of the word – physical, commercial, conceptual. Form, pure form, is not the things, or the arrangement of the things, but the relationship between the arranged things. Glimpsing this is like getting a delicious glimpse of time as a fourth dimension. As I may have already let slip, I am very interested in time. And so, I am naturally interested in musical forms, which can only be apprehended through time, with time, thanks to time – thank you, time. We don’t often say that.

*

> This is where I will, at last - god, imagine I had been speaking at you this whole time - this is where I will at last get into the main topic of this review. The remarkable form of this album.

> Wait, sorry, one more thing before I do. A really quick one. As well as time, musical form also needs contrast. For sections to appear as distinct, and thus for us to clearly apprehend the difference between them, and thus get a glimpse of Form, they must contrast with one another, for how else would we apprehend change, notice borders, know we are somewhere else. (An interesting digression here is process music, which I love dearly, and which has an entirely different relationship with form. Look it up, if you like.)

> Anyway, for our purposes now, musical form requires contrast. This could be achieved in many ways: traditionally, it was done with different melodies or harmonies; but it could be done with volume, instrumentation, tempo, texture etc. etc.

> The main way that this album delineates its striking – and, to my mind, for what it’s worth, unique and new – form, how it creates its contrast, is using all of the above tricks, but, even more so, by contrasting styles/genres. This was immediately what struck me and thrilled me about this album, and it’s kind of funny – for me as the annoying writer, perhaps less so for you, the reader, I mean listener – that it’s taken me 2,534 words to mention it. This I think is the brilliance of this record. This is why we can call it not just contemporary, but new.

> The 1975 have always been shifting, but never like this. This album contains, sometimes literally right next to each other: punk, orchestral music, UK garage, Americana, shoegaze, folk, dancehall, 80s power ballads – and, of course, pop, whatever that means. Stravinsky became famous for sharp juxtapositions of distinct musical blocks. He would fucking love this.

> I messaged you, after my first listen, to say that the album reminded me of one of Sophia Coppola’s soundtracks. That was an instinctive, emotional response, but, having thought about it, I can now demonstrate the reason for the similarity. The stylistically varied end products are similar to one another because the methodology is similar: soundtracks select music practically to achieve emotional affects. Soundtrack albums use music as a tool to heighten ideas that lie elsewhere, in their case, in the filmed scenes they accompany. If you believe Matty Healy, this is also what The 1975 do. They use beauty, in whatever style or genre they find it:

‘Beauty is the sharpest tool that we have - if you want someone to pay attention, make it beautiful’.

> What do you make of that, @Keats? No, really, I would love to know.

> I think this is a remarkable musical strategy, that requires flexibility, knowledge and skill. That there is such a high level of all these things in the band is what allows it the strategy to be successful.

> I would like to pause here and consider the implications of this strategy on a personal, social and cultural level.

*

> Musical genre and personal identity have been as fused for as long as pop music has existed. This could be a trick of the market, or it could be a need of the individual psyche, or both. I think there is some truth in theory that in the increasingly widespread absence of God – by which I mean organised religion – people need to find both a guide for their metaphysics and morals, and a structure for their community, as these are some of the most effective tools we have discovered for constructing our Selves, making sense of our lives and the world. Art can provide the guide for many people. It also provides community. These communities, collections – albums? - of political, moral and aesthetic views, then become subcultures.

> Until very recently, subcultures were fixed. ‘Hardcore till I die’, ageing ravers, old punks. Interestingly one never really sees ageing emos. But that’s a subject for another essay.

> This, I think, is perhaps what is so striking here: musical genres are normally culminations (or roots, depending on how you look at it) of lived sub or counter cultures. These usually result from a fixed viewpoint about life and society, shared by the individuals that comprise them. The individuals identify with what the music says, how it is presented and how it looks as much – or perhaps even more - than how it sounds.

> Before now, it would have been shocking to imagine a band switching effortlessly from one style to another – this occasionally happens over the course of a career, between albums, but almost never in the same album itself - because it would feel like a betrayal, if we accept that bands and styles represent fixed ways of life and viewpoints and that neither lives nor viewpoints can change. Which, obviously they can. And which, obviously, they do, nowadays, with increasing speed, @Coronavirus.

> Matty’s appearance is a perfect demonstration of this. Minging Matty, Hearthrob Matty, Matty in vintage jeans, in a skirt, in a pinstripe suit. If we accept the old association of musical style/subculture and the clothing/uniform each produces, what would the ideal garb of a The 1975 listener be? A screen. A real, working search engine, fused with their body.

> Previously, the model was that bands had ‘influences’ which they ‘blended’ to create a ‘new’ sound. Here, The 1975 don’t really focus on blending sounds at the level of individual songs: the blend, boldly, happens at the level of the album. If the album is like a soundtrack, it is the soundtrack to the algorithmic age of effortless consumption of media.

> And I would like an examination of that idea to be the final track on this album. I mean, review. I mean conversation.

*

> The 1975 are inseparable from recorded media. Not just their own, but recorded media from the past. They are not able to invoke and inhabit this startling panoply of styles, to my knowledge, because they have studied in individual places or with masters of each craft or tradition – they are able to do it because they, like us, are able to consume recordings of these styles, and they, like us, have done so all their lives.

> When The 1975 invoke these styles, they are not evoking a tradition, or a way of doing things, or even seeing things. They are invoking personal memories of experiencing recordings, encountering media. We can take a look at a few examples of this.

> Let’s start with the classical stuff. The orchestral interludes do not sound like they are written by classical composers, or even composers of film soundtracks - the use of orchestration is different. It sounds, to my ear, like acoustic instruments playing what were originally MIDI parts. Which, I imagine, is what happened. That would usually be called bad orchestration. I am not interested in saying that. I am slightly interested in the effect of getting classical musicians, with their classical training, to play music written by people without classical training on a computer. What are the implications of writing for the flute as a soundfont, rather than a person, instrument or tradition?

> And what is the significance of placing an orchestra, playing instrumental compositions, on a pop record. These are not backing arrangements in an existing pop song, as we commonly encounter; nor are they classical arrangements of a pop song (see Hacienda Classical et al).

> These are standalone orchestral compositions on a record that also includes shoegaze, UK garage, two-step, Americana, punk. What, then, is the significance of this? The instruments, I believe, are being chosen less for their own sonic timbres, and more for their social or cultural timbres. I will try to explain this thought.

> Matty has often spoken about ‘Disneyfication’; he said he wanted ‘The Man Who Married a Robot / Love Theme’ on A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships to sound like a Disney movie. What does that mean? It means, I think, he wants it to sound like old movies, childhood, nostalgia. The orchestra is a sinecure for the ‘symphonic’, the cinematic, the dramatic; the orchestra is used like a banjo, which is, elsewhere on the album, used to conjure the exoticism of Americana as heard by someone listening to it in the UK, to paraphrase Matty’s words.  

> The stylistic references in the album are as much references to media as much as they are to music. Disney: orchestral sounds, likely filtered and wobbled through VHS cassettes. The orchestra, already made symbolic by its association with movies, made a double symbol, a reflection of a shadow, being invoked through the original sound not really for this sound but for our associations with it. The banjo invoked as both an instrument of yesteryear and over there. The music constructs frames of otherness to facilitate wistfulness, longing, memory.

> The chart success of ‘If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know)’ is that it’s a modern bop that sounds like 80s bangers. Its artistic success is that it contrasts the feeling of halcyon safety created by its imitation of 80s bangers (experienced for millennials usually as triumphant climaxes in movies, jubilant moments on oldies stations), and rubs this up against some of the disturbing parts of the present: the angst of online relationships, nudity with people you don’t know and have not and may never meet. This is a simple but highly effective juxtaposition.

> ‘Bagsy Not In Net’ does this too: a quotidian, painful experience of childhood (not wanting to play in goal in a football game), expressed as a yearning and grand orchestral statement. This is true, too, of ‘Streaming’. This is pop music Pop Art: the contemporary quotidian expressed in the language of an old tradition and invested with the significance of an Art it simultaneously questions the power and validity of.

> And, to linger on ‘If You’re Too Shy’ for just a little longer, what is the meaning of a saxophone solo in pop music in 2020? It is symbolic: a shortcut, practically a meme. Saxophone solos exist in a present in contemporary jazz - they are a living history making new futures. But saxophone solos almost always only exist in pop music as ghosts (careless whispers) of the past. This particular sax solo is so euphoric to us less because of its musical content and more because of the emotions we have learned to associate with sax solos through other media.

> The final, most perfect example of this, of everything I have been getting at, really, is the UK garage references. These are themselves references to artists like The Streets, and Burial, who, themselves, were referencing the primary records of UK garage which they (The Streets and Burial) never experienced in clubs, but as recordings. And The 1975 experienced these recordings of recordings. Layers and layers of reference. And here, abruptly, we find ourselves back at the opening image of the infinite regress.

> At times, this album wants to express the present moment back at itself, and so prompt reflection and action. The fright of the zeitgeist. In this we can include Greta Thunberg, ‘People’, and the overtly socio-political statements on the album. I hope these tracks will be successful. In the future, they will take on the significance of historic artefacts: preserved truths from a vanished time, fixed and rich, like amber.

> But there are long swathes of the album, that do not have this intent, and which will, I believe, have a different longevity. These are the (often wordless) lyrical sections: the abstract, the vague, the instrumental sections – in all senses of the word. Records of the individual imagination listening to another individual imagination listening to another individual imagination. What will these tracks become in time, in Time?

> There is something ethereally delicious about the thought of people in the future coming across people in the past’s nostalgia of another past, now three links distant to their present, compoundly insubstantial, glittering, compelling. Fifth, sixth, seventh dimensions - serial nostalgias.

Notes on a Conditional Form is out now and available to order.

~

Text: Scott Morrison

Published: 26/6/20

[jolteonjordansh]

Thoughts on D-Reaper Arc

It took so, so long for me to get to this point because so much happens in Digimon Tamers that it even took me by surprise. But in a way I’m glad that a show like this could have so many complexities regarding it that I could write on and on about it and still not say everything there is to say. But I need to lay this to rest, and finish talking about the last of the third Digimon series--Digimon Tamers.

As a note, there’s going to be a lot of points I spend talking in this post about my full thoughts on certain characters and elements of the whole show than the overall plot of this specific arc, but I will address everything I can. I’ll try to keep it as linear as possible, but when certain characters come up, I will be discussing them in bulk. So let me get this post rolling under the break.

Honestly, the best way I can think to describe this arc based on past Digimon series is if you took the elements of danger from The Eighth Child/Myotismon arc from Digimon Adventure and the battle with Apocalymon and made it a ten episode arc. It has the kind of stakes you want in the finale of a Digimon series, but it has the sort of abstractness of Apocalymon and raises said abstractness up to 11. There is a lot of depth, and I probably can't dig deep enough into it in a single post, but that's part of what made it so good to watch.

I can't believe it took this long, but it finally takes until the freaking D-Reaper enters the real world that the people of this world realize how dangerous it might be to stick around and begin a mass evacuation of Shinjuku, even if it's a bit gradual. Seriously, were giant boars and equines not convincing enough for you people? Regardless, the Tamers want to do whatever they can to fight the D-Reaper, but their families are naturally against it. These conflicts do allow for some subtle developments, like Rika further reconciling with her mother before leaving to fight the D-Reaper as she's given a new shirt, now with a full heart as opposed to the broken heart one she always wears. And she actually changes into it. It's subtle, but little moments like this can help me really appreciate how Rika has developed in the series to become more open and establish more relationships with the people (and Digimon) around her, even if she won't always admit it. Henry also has to deal with the struggle of worrying his family--especially his mother--about taking such big risks to save others, but it really helps make the family dynamic complex while still not out of the ordinary either (other than Henry and Suzie being Tamers). The kind of conflict Henry's mother especially feels is very genuine and I really appreciate it. Takato doesn't get much here in that he already left his parents to guide Jeri home, but he kind of had his moment where he had to convince them to allow him to escort her anyway. 

Later the parents do get to support the Tamers later on, similar to how the DigiDestined's parents in Digimon Adventure did, but we can really see them go out of their way to do so. The Tamers and their Digimon get invited to Rika's house, making them suspicious, but they arrive to a big meal prepared for them. It's basically the parents accepting that they have to let the kids do what they feel is best and try to stop the D-Reaper, and it is pretty touching. Again, it's a small thing, but it really shows just how much the parents really care for their kids in this series and even when it's so difficult for them, they are willing to support them. Plus, they do start to help out at Hypnos along with the Wild Bunch later. Also, Guilmon gets more Guilmon bread! Hurray!

Even Ryo gets like... a single moment with who we can assume is his dad, but it's not really enough for him. Unfortunately, the best that comes out of this is seeing his partner in Rookie form as Monodramon. But honestly? Monodramon is pretty quirky and adorable, now actually having a hint of personality over being Cyberdramon in a constantly grouchy mood. Still, when the Digimon partner is more interesting and deep than the Tamer... that's kind of a problem. 

Jeri has also started acting... really weird after coming home. And I mean really weird. Not only is she a mindless zombie, but when she isn't she's pinning little kids to the ground and speaking nonsense, she eventually outright disappears. This is where Digimon Tamers starts to get into Nightmare Fuel territory and now I can start to see why the word "dark" is used for this series so often. Don't get me wrong, it was dark from the start, but it just gets downright creepy and surreal here, almost to kind of Silent Hill levels.

But with all of the danger now in the real world, we finally get some focus back on Impmon which we really haven't had since the Gallantmon fight. He finally decides to reconcile with his implied Tamers, Ai and Mako, but they're missing from their apartment due to the mass evacuation. However, they do leave a note specifically for Impmon letting him know they're at their grandmother's house. He decides to give another chance at reuniting with them, and to his surprise the two apologize to him and have learned to share with one another. I have to admit, despite being such minor characters with subtle development, it's really nice to see how they've changed. I maybe would have liked to actually seen this change happen, but that's a nitpick at best--it's still clear that Impmon’s leave triggered said development and I can appreciate that. When they all see the main three Digimon and their Tamers fighting the D-Reaper on TV however, Impmon decides he has to help and promises his two friends he will be back. This leads to Mako giving Impmon a toy gun to "beat the bad guys"--a nice gesture of child innocence. Impmon takes it anyway, but this reconnection with his Tamers not only leads to him Warp Digivolving to Beelzemon, but also allowing a Mode Change to Beelzemon Blast Mode.

This is where Impmon really started to grow on me as probably one of my favorite redemption characters ever. I'm a sucker for the trope, and the way it's executed with Impmon is just really well written and it's given a lot of time and attention to really make this change feel realistic and convincing for the audience. I want to root for him now, whether the protagonists believe in him or not. I want him to follow his newfound convictions and win his battles. I can't believe I've gone from saying "This character is a little shit," to "This character is one of my favorite redemption characters I've ever experienced in any medium." It really goes to show just how powerful and well-executed the whole transition is. From the moment you see his wings sprout and Mako's gun transform with the Mode Change to Beelzemon Blast Mode along with probably the best use of the song EVO, it's hard to deny that Impmon is probably one of the most if not the most developed character in Tamers.

Cutting to the fight on TV, the Tamers find themselves unable to take on the D-Reaper with their Digimon at Ultimate level, so they need to achieve Mega level. However... they can no longer Matrix Digivolve since they're back in the real world and are no longer data. Thankfully Beelzemon does come in to help to defeat one of the D-Reaper Agents, but this isn't the solution to the whole problem. This leads to them being confronted by a strange girl named Alice and her Doberman... Sorry, no, Dobermon (Digimon sure loves making puns with the -mon prefix, don't they?). Fun fact that Dobermon is actually a fan-made Digimon that won a V-Jump contest for original Digimon designs and earned an appearance in the anime. He appears as a messenger from the Four Sovereigns to give the Tamers a special power to allow them to Matrix Digivolve with their partners. But this... requires him to sacrifice himself to give them this power. Come on, a second Digimon dog death!? God, I chose the wrong time to watch this series... Aim straight for the heart, why don't you. I hope the person who designed Dobermon wasn’t too torn to watch the writers kill off their own creation. Anyway, Alice also disappears by the end of the episode, apparently having been dead and was also a granddaughter of one of the members of the Wild Bunch, "Dolphin". Huh, random connections.

So the Tamers and their Digimon are finally able to Matrix Digivolve again and stand a chance against the D-Reaper, but now we see more of the D-Reaper's true colors, and this would probably be a good time for me to talk about how I feel about this antagonist. And as an antagonist, I think it works well. Since it's basically an old security program gone rogue, it's a sort of an AI takeover plot--thinking it's doing the right thing entirely based on logic that all beings are inferior creatures. And that is, technically, the case. The Digimon are capable of easily being erased by merely making contact with the D-Reaper, while humans in general are just flawed creatures. 

Things like our emotions and feelings do cause problems, and it makes things way more complicated than for a machine to make a simple deduction. Just as an example, imagine a person having to make the choice of either killing one person or 1,000 people, but the one person was an important individual like a family member or significant other. By emotional attachment, this decision would be much harder to make if even possible. For a machine or program like the D-Reaper, it could easily decide without hesitation that killing a single person over 1,000 is the best decision that would cause the least amount of damage. And for a series like Digimon Tamers which has focused so much on things like the development and the flaws of people and even Digimon, it does work well. 

Although I do have to admit, I kind of wish we had an antagonist with a little more... sentience? Personally, an antagonist like Apocalymon fits that kind of role perfectly for me, but I wouldn't have wanted them to do the same thing again either so I do appreciate the variance. Still, I can't help but feel like the D-Reaper's threat level somehow goes down in the real world. Remember how I mentioned it could literally delete Digimon by mere physical contact? Well, the Digimon come in contact with the D-Reaper several times in the real world, with Gallantmon even being dragged inside it, but nothing like that happens to them. No deleting, not even so much as disintegration. I guess being in the real world changes things, but it kind of bothered me and made it feel less threatening than before.

Though, when Gallantmon does get pulled into the D-Reaper, it does separate him back to Takato and Guilmon, but they land in an untouched park area since apparently the D-Reaper hates organic life, as told by Jeri who suddenly shows up. Except... the real Jeri has been gone the whole time, and zombie Jeri was simply an Agent of the D-Reaper, while the D-Reaper has been carrying and using Jeri the whole time since her sorrowful emotions have apparently helped power it. The Nightmare Fuel kicks off even further from here, as fake Jeri goes from being a creepy zombie Jeri to this freaking monster. It's scary just looking at it, but the transformation itself is even more horrifying, and it eventually starts wreaking havoc on Takato's mind and manipulating him with thoughts of Jeri. Thankfully, they're saved by the cutest hero ever MarineAngemon, with what else? KISSES! KISSES OF DEATH! He also heals Sakuyamon with these kisses. Gosh, have I ever told you guys how wonderful and adorable MarineAngemon is? Saving the day with kisses since 2002.

Before Takato and Guilmon are able to return to the battle, things seem hopeless for the rest of the Tamers outside as D-Reaper Agents continue fighting them. That is until a mysterious new Digimon conveniently shows up to save the day for everyone--Justimon! ... Yeah, you guys can already tell who this is supposed to be, right? Who else but freaking Ryo? Yep, Ryo has managed to achieve Matrix Digivolution with Cyberdramon. And thus... I have to talk about the worst of the Mega forms in this series, Justimon. Justimon is just really lame as a Mega form and as a Matrix Digivolution. His design is really boring and uninspired, basically just a really bland Super Sentai-like character with no redeeming qualities. I mean, if they had made him a more dragon-like sort of Kamen Rider character that would have been neat (considering even Cyberdramon was more of a dragon than any of Guilmon's Digivolutions), but he's about as much of a blank slate as could be. There's also no hint of Cyberdramon's presence or personality whatsoever. I mean, I get that Cyberdramon basically had no personality, but Monodramon at least had something that could be worked with. All of the other Mega forms typically focus on the personalities of the Digimon with some occasional input from the Tamers. With Justimon, it's all Ryo, who we all know is as bland as cardboard. 

It's obvious that he was just thrown in because the executives wanted an excuse for the writers to use and advertise him more, and that's exactly why Justimon is present. Hell, I only recently realized a huge problem with his existence: How the hell were Ryo and Cyberdramon able to Matrix Digivolve in the real world? Keep in mind, they never even Matrix Digivolved in the Digital World, meaning they just now learned how to do this. The Four Sovereigns solely sent out Dobermon to give the three main Tamers the power to Matrix Digivolve. Ryo got nothing. Not only that, there was no development towards it whatsoever like with the other Tamers. So the short answer? He's Ryo, he can do what he wants. The long answer? The executives demanded it, and the writers either didn't have time to establish a reason or didn't want to bother with one, so they just made it so. But considering how forced Ryo is in this show, I still can't really blame them for just not giving a damn. I mean, considering Ryo never got a Card Slash animation, but Suzie of all characters gets one, you know the showrunners just did not like having this character. Justimon never even gets a Matrix Digovolution animation. He just... shows up, and rarely does anything that meaningful. He's basically always in the backseat and never does anything important--kind of like how he's been the entire show I guess, which really explains everything in the end. For as little as characters like Kazu, Kenta and Suzie do, they still feel more impactful than Ryo ever does.

Okay, so Ryo's not exactly a great character, I think literally the only other thing that actually bores me around the same level on this show would maybe be the Agents of the D-Reaper? Their designs aren't quite as interesting as Digimon designs, and I still kind of wish the Tamers were fighting Digimon. They just feel like a mesh of abstract ideas with not much thought put into them. Maybe that's either the point, or I'm not looking into it deep enough, but most of them have such little screentime that I wouldn't get the chance to really analyze them unless I looked at still frames or official art.

I know I'm ranting here, but I swear there's still a lot of good to Digimon Tamers here. Impmon finds himself working with Calumon a lot in this arc, which is a great irony when you consider how much he picked on him in the beginning and, again, really shows how far his character has come. They work together as Calumon claims to be able to sense Jeri within the D-Reaper, who Impmon does want to try to make up to. Their teamwork is really part of what helps save Jeri, with Calumon able to sense Jeri's presence, Beelzemon being able to break through an invisible barrier containing Jeri, while Calumon is able to get through but Beelzemon ends up captured for a while. Meanwhile, Calumon finds another zombie Jeri, though this is actual Jeri stuck in a trance of sorrow. Seeing Calumon trying to be as supportive of Jeri as possible throughout this arc and basically be like a lending ear and source of encouragement for her shows just how pure and sweet Calumon is.

So now, I can finally talk about Jeri, who I think is probably the most "controversial" character in this series. But honestly? I like her, and I really like and respect her character and the maturity of it. I'm not calling her character herself mature, but rather just how deeply she's written. She could have gone wrong in so, so many ways and she had so much going against her to easily be a bad character in similar ways I feel about early season Kari and Meiko. She could have easily fallen into the Damsel in Distress, the Living MacGuffin and Purity Personified tropes that would have made her an extremely unlikeable character that could have potentially made her even worse than the other two Digimon characters I mentioned earlier. But the execution of her character avoids these easy pitfalls so well and writes her to be an incredibly realistic character that someone in the audience can relate to. Leomon's death triggers serious PTSD of her mother's death, all of which led her to live the philosophy that everything in life is destined and written and it cannot be fought. On top of this, she feels like she's part of this problem, and as humans, it's easy for our despair to lead us to believe that something we have no control over is our fault. It gets to the point that she honestly thinks she's better off dead and even makes a suicide attempt, which really shows just how much she doesn't want to hurt anyone but feels trapped.

This isn't helped by her not-so-good relationship with her father, who does seem like an uncaring asshole from the end of the Digital World arc. But as Digimon Tamers loves teaching its audience, not everything is as it seems. Jeri's father is more of an awkward dad who doesn't really understand how to be a proper dad, likely due to the death of Jeri's mother early on. It doesn't necessarily mean he hates Jeri, because after Takato tells everyone that Jeri is inside the D-Reaper, the man goes out of his way to take action by stealing a vehicle and trying to ram through the D-Reaper with it. It's not that he ever disliked Jeri, but he simply doesn't understand how to express how much he cares about and loves her. And after really understanding what Tamers was trying to do with this situation, it hit close to home since I've had a lot of trouble communicating with and understanding my dad, and he's always been a kind of awkward dad in general. It never made him a terrible father or meant he didn't love me or I didn't love him.

The D-Reaper's indifference and logical mindset really works here, and I can appreciate it's more machine-like nature in how it simply uses whatever it can to throw Jeri further into despair for its own benefit. It utilizes flashbacks of the moment her mother's death, and then turns it up to 11 with some seriously horrifying imagery. It's no wonder she becomes so broken and horrified--How was this show for kids again? Not to mention it tries to use her father's images against her, but now that he's actually standing up to act like a father, the whole plan backfires. Jeri herself isn’t entirely powerless on her own either, as throughout much of her self-reflection she has Calumon trying to cheer her up. And ultimately in the end, she does begin to fight back against the D-Reaper, and she ultimately couldn't have been freed from it nor could have the Tamers and their Digimon been able to bring themselves to defeat the D-Reaper without her trying to break through.

Although... For dub watchers, I can understand why they may not like Jeri because some of the script writing really destroys some of these complexities. What triggers this entire episode with Jeri is Leomon's last words to her, which originally were along the lines of "So this is my fate." This triggered her memories of her mother's death, so not only was she in despair over Leomon, but her own mother, so past memories and pain resurfaced for her. But in the dub... They changed Leomon's last words to "Remember, you have a lion's heart." This isn't just unnecessarily cheesy (coming from someone who likes cheesy things), but it completely ruins the original meaning and can make Jeri's mourning come off as more selfish when Leomon's new words are ones of encouragement to her. In which case, I can understand why more people might find her whiny and be annoyed by her. But for me? I honestly really like her. She doesn't necessarily develop at the same level as some of the other characters like Takato, Henry or Rika, but she's a flawed human being like many of us, and she's a young girl who's still growing up and recovering from some unfortunate events in her life, and I think that makes her a great character. Also, there's some speculation in the fandom that she might be autistic, but there's no official confirmation of this and I am not touching that subject on this website with a ten foot pole despite my own experiences.

Part of this recovery is reconciling with Beelzemon, which is something Beelzemon has to work for himself. And my God, it's so good. This is part of why I love Beelzemon as a redemption character, because he truly has to work for his redemption to Jeri and still works for it knowing she may not even forgive him. After Beelzemon awakens in the D-Reaper and breaks free, he deals with a psychological battle between the D-Reaper and himself as it utilizes the fact that he killed Leomon to upset not only Jeri, but also upsetting Beelzemon for reminding him of his sins. But the fact that he still keeps fighting to save Jeri, knowing he doesn't deserve forgiveness, even when his gun Mako had given him shatters and forces him to fight down to his fists to break Jeri free really shows his desire to help her. Gallantmon even fights alongside him, and eventually Beelzemon breaks the barrier holding Jeri and Calumon by utilizing Leomon's Beast-King Fist, which makes Jeri remember Leomon. But because of this, Jeri is paralyzed with such shock that she doesn't reach out to Beelzemon. This is both an incredibly awesome and badass moment of redemption as well as a tragic one. Beelzemon's determination to save Jeri despite everything against him is honestly inspiring as I've gone on before. But his ability of using Leomon's signature move to save her is, while undeniably a Crowning Moment of Awesome, is a moment of irony as it prevents him from saving her due to his previous actions.

It hurts even more because when the barrier shuts again, he still tries to punch his way through until he's fatally wounded by one of the D-Reaper's Agents, slowly falling as his data disintegrates. This moment actually really got me and is probably one of the most effective fake-out deaths I've seen. Usually, I get extremely mad at these, but the way his redemption was built up only for his attempt to save Jeri to fail does give the impression that maybe he wouldn't be able to earn said redemption and let karma take its course by killing him off. Considering how Tamers really wasn't afraid to kill off characters (except Shibumi I guess), I wasn't entirely sure if the show was going to be willing to spare Beelzemon. Not to mention, for how slow they show his "death", even pushing it to the next episode as a cliffhanger, I was gradually, internally, repeatedly screaming "NO" inside and could feel my heart sinking lower and lower with every second he continued to disappear. Thankfully, Beelzemon is spared and reverts to Impmon, but I honestly do not remember the last time I was so convinced a character could die. Many times I find myself rolling my eyes, questioning what cop-out a show will find to prevent a death or bring a character back to life. None of that happens here, and even though Impmon lives, it's hard to see him reduced so low despite his true efforts. It's such a well-executed set of scenes that it's part of what makes me adore Beelzemon so much as a character. And with how hard he tries to save Jeri, it's no wonder she feels so terrible for being unable to bring herself to reach out to him.

Impmon's savior is one of the more minor but one of my favorite characters in this arc and series. With all that Hypnos and the Wild Bunch have been working on in the background, they've worked on upgrading the Ark that brought the Tamers home from the Digital World. Its communication with Takato and Guilmon wasn't a simple one-off thing, as the Wild Bunch develop and work on him further to make him a steed for Gallantmon--Grani, who's a sort of flying... dragon-horse vehicle whose named after Sigurd's horse from Norse mythology (because HELL YES NORSE MYTHOLOGY IS AWESOME). But Grani helps in multiple battles by giving Gallantmon aerial mobility (something you'd swear he already had from how high he can jump in some shots), making some fights go much smoother as Takato and Guilmon bond with him throughout the few episodes he has, with them even talking to him and thanking him. His sentience is hinted at further throughout the arc, but I'll get to that reveal for the last of the arc.

But after Beelzemon fails to save Jeri, the D-Reaper spreads to the Wild Bunch's HQ and becomes too dangerous for the Tamers and their Digimon to deal with and even they are forced to evacuate. This really makes the whole fight against the D-Reaper feel genuinely hopeless considering the protagonists have to make a full-on retreat--something I can't think of happening in many shows to this degree. It does lead to an interesting bit of continuity with the Battle of Adventurers movie, with Takato's family retreating to Okinawa to see his cousin Kai. Not something the dub watchers of 2002 would have understood, but it's a nice little touch. All hope is lost until the Wild Bunch develops a plan to defeat the D-Reaper while still saving Jeri. It's... too complicated for me to paraphrase, but if you've watched Digimon Tamers then you know how ridiculously in-depth the plan is. Once it's set however, the Tamers say farewell to their families for a final battle against the D-Reaper and go on their mission to save Jeri. With a Red Card developed by the Wild Bunch, the Tamers Card Slash it and can now maintain Matrix Digivolution even when inside the D-Reaper.

This is probably where I should mention one of my other personal problems with the D-Reaper. The last fight... doesn't particularly click with me. It's not really bad, but I was kind of left wanting a little more. This still has to do with me wanting Digimon to fight, the D-Reaper Agents being rather unmemorable to me, and the D-Reaper not having much of its own sentience. The battle is more of a mission than it is a duel of hand-to-hand combat with a specific target, and said mission is to eradicate the D-Reaper and also save Jeri, so I understand why it is the way it is. Still, this doesn't mean the fights with the Agents aren't easy, as Gallantmon eventually falls to the ground only to hear a voice asking "Do you want wings?".

Once again, our savior is Grani! Grani proves his true sentience here, with the ability to talk and make his own thoughts and decisions. This all sadly leads to Grani sacrificing himself, fusing with Gallantmon to allow him to Mode Change into Gallantmon Crimson Mode, giving him more robust, red armor, a new lance and a sword to wield, and of course, has now been given five pairs of radiant white wings. This tears me up knowing Grani ends up being sacrificed after finally talking to Takato and Guilmon, but I don't exaggerate when I say this: Gallantmon Crimson Mode is one of my absolute favorite and one of the best things to come out of Digimon Tamers.

I already talked on and on about why Gallantmon is my favorite Mega form, including because of how well he works for Takato and Guilmon. All of this still applies for both Gallantmon and Gallantmon Crimson Mode. But I do remember one thing I thought of when I saw Gallantmon was "Man, the only thing that could make him even better was if he had wings!” So they gave him wings. And let me tell you, the moment I heard Grani ask Gallantmon "Do you want wings?" I literally was ready to jump off the couch, screaming "YES! YES! YES! YES!". If Gallantmon is perfect, Gallantmon Crimson Mode is absolutely perfect. I literally have nothing to complain about with this Digimon. Its design, its concept, its abilities and its debut... literally the only thing I would complain about is the sacrifice of Grani, but I am glad Grani's sacrifice went to probably one of my favorite things in Digimon, period.

With the entrance of Gallantmon Crimson Mode, he destroys one of the Agents that frees Jeri out of her depression. The rest of the Tamers and their Digimon destroy the D-Reaper, and Guilmon and Takato separate as Takato is thrown into the air to catch Jeri and Calumon (in what I admit is a really sweet shot). And thus, finally the world is at peace. The Tamers can rest with their Digimon from all of the fighting and are able to all reconcile with each other. ... Oh wait, this is Digimon Tamers, where we hate happy endings.

In short, the plan to defeat the D-Reaper known as "Operation: Doodlebug" utilized part of Yamaki's Shaggai program, meaning the Digimon will be forced back into the Digital World, or else they'll disappear just like the D-Reaper. Henry's father is forced to approach all of the Tamers, including Impmon with Ai and Mako, and explain the situation to them as all of the Digimon are regressed to their In-Training forms in order to be small enough to return to the Digital World (except for Calumon and MarineAngemon). Seeing each of the Tamers having to give a tearful goodbye to their Digimon--especially when they're all in heart-crushingly adorable forms--is extremely heartbreaking and did bring me to tears. So yes, the one time I get to see my precious and wonderful Gigimon is at the very end to break my heart. It hurts especially hearing Gigimon ask Takato to promise that they'll see each other again, which Takato agrees to. But honestly? It really shows just how much these two in particular have grown--the boy who once protected the juvenile Guilmon to an unhealthy degree is willing to make a promise with his friend he has grown with to meet again. The use of 3 Primary Colors here is much more effective, while sort of random and out of place earlier in the series, it's so much more meaningful here and listening to it again gets me teary-eyed even now.

This scene is especially hurtful when Henry's father apologizes over and over, knowing there's nothing he could do to make up for this separation between the Tamers and their Digimon. Henry, however, just shakes his head--indicating he has already forgiven his father. It's honestly a really strong and mature message, one about forgiveness and acceptance that's pretty deep for kids but one that should definitely be told. However, this is another thing the dub decided to tweak the script with that hurts the original message. In the dub, Henry's father apologizes but insists that things will get better over time, with Henry shaking his head in response. This completely changes the context of the original message, and it just comes across as cruel. Not only does it feel like Henry’s father is basically dismissing the pain of the Tamers, but Henry shaking his head in response is basically like him saying he can't forgive him for what's happened. It may seem like a nitpick here, but it really is an important part of the original story that gets changed for no good reason.

After a timeskip however, everyone's lives are seemingly back to normal with Digimon no longer in the picture. That is until Takato one day goes by Guilmon's hideout, checking inside to find a portal to the Digital World--giving hope that he may be able to see his Digimon once more. And this is where Digimon Tamers ends.

I would by lying if I didn’t say that when I first watched this ending, I felt a bit of Mood Whiplash. It's great to see the Tamers finally find some peace after the events of the D-Reaper, though I guess to be expecting a happy ending from Digimon Tamers might seem naïve of me. At the same time though, the whole reveal of the Digimon having to return to the Digital World is a little sudden. I'm not saying it doesn't work, as it is an effective sucker punch that hits hard. But at the same time, it comes and goes a little too fast for me. Personally, I would have preferred a little more development with the goodbyes like in Digimon Adventure, but I wouldn't have wanted them to have carbon copy endings either. So I guess a sucker punch bittersweet ending makes more sense for the kind of tone Digimon Tamers has in comparison. At the same time, suddenly resolving the issue with this goodbye by showing a Digital World portal right at the end kind of hurts the impact of such a bittersweet ending.

However, I heard there was a bit of executive meddling in this regard. From what I understand, the network--presumably Fuji Television--was against the producers ending the show with a downer ending, so they asked for it to be lightened up. Hence, the flashforward with the Digital World portal. I can understand the thought behind this, and it would be pretty hard on some kids, but from a story-telling standpoint I do think it hurts some of the impact. Not enough to ruin the ending, but enough to notice how softened up it is. I also heard that the producers decided, in response, to make a drama CD that would have reflected their original ending with the Tamers sending a message to their Digimon in the Digital World. I have not listened to it, so I don't know what exactly happens, but I do know it's pretty sad.

So to make some final closure, I absolutely adore Digimon Tamers. I know a lot of Digimon fans agree it's the best anime series of the bunch, but for me? I'm... not really sure. While I will admit that compared to Digimon Adventure, it's generally more coherently written with a lot more complexities in mind, and overall has better technique. But at the same time, there are some elements of Digimon Adventure that I like more than I do about Digimon Tamers--a certain charm that can't be replicated. This does not make Digimon Adventure better, but it doesn't make Digimon Tamers better either. Personally, I think I love both on an equal level. They both have their own merits and reasons to enjoy them, and a few of their own issues as well. They have a different cast with their own appeal, different Digimon that are loveable in their own ways, and different universes that just work differently. Some people either love or criticize Digimon Tamers for being darker, and while I could feel it is darker in tone I never felt that it was forced. It felt natural enough for me to enjoy it without it feeling jarring, disturbing, or have me rolling my eyes thinking this was Digimon's attempt to be "cool". Digimon was already pretty cool from the start, so having a different tone like Tamers that was noticeably darker but still had enough heartwarming moments made it feel just right. It's fun, it's charming, it's thoughtful, it has depth, it's even scary at times, but it's also just awesome... even if it's filled to the brim with tearjerkers.

But... I'm not done with Digimon Tamers yet, because apparently the showrunners wanted to do more--with another movie.