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chapotraphouse @hexbear.net
WhyEssEff [she/her] @hexbear.net

digimon's just one of those things that I simply do not think I will be able to grasp the essence of through osmosis

yugioh, manga card game, got it. pokemon, video game anime, got it. digimon... tamagotchi anime?

yugioh monsters, projections of cards. pocket monsters, attack pets. digital monsters, like, from what I hear they've got essentially human-levels of intelligence?

I genuinely am having trouble discerning where the hook-on point for this, weird multimedia blob is? It's the anime, right? Because from the outside of having literally no interaction with the franchise over my life outside of like stray mentions in the context of specific contrast to pokemon, it looks like it's a franchise that kinda had a neat little toy, got an anime that hit, and then bumbled into literally every other industry that collectibles do and did them all in a way that made essentially zero cultural impact outside of unlimited contrarianism against pokemon by kids who had a chip on their shoulder about it.

all power to those kids in retrospect, good bit if that was the case, but it's something that's confounded me for a bit: have I been fucking hermetically-sealed off from a major cultural phenomenon? is this like an ozymandias situation where it's all ash in the present? is this just contrarian's pokemon as I thought it was when I was 12? I'm looking at the wikipedia page and my eyes are glazing over, it's like it's designed to be the most unintuitive thing for people who want to get a handle on it.

I don't get it

38 comments

  • looks like it's a franchise that kinda had a neat little toy, got an anime that hit, and then bumbled into literally every other industry that collectibles do and did them all in a way that made essentially zero cultural impact outside of unlimited contrarianism against pokemon by kids who had a chip on their shoulder about it

    Nah that's like 90% of it.

    The other angle is that the anime was better than the Pokemon one. If you were only engaging with these things by watching their shows, you'd think Digimon was the best. Of course the Pokemon games were better than either of these things, but that didn't mean anything if you didn't own a game boy.

  • It's the anime. Watch the first 3 seasons. The first 2 are in the same continuity and are the kind of kids show kids should watch. They really deal with some pretty heavy real shit that like an 8 year old might irl and take that stuff pretty serious and it's just generally a really really good kids show that had care put into it. Season 3 is amazing but it's like if Eva and serial experiment lain had a kid and they somehow barely passed it past kids show censors. I fell off after that

    • You would actually recommend it??? I thought it was just a toy-selling grift. It has positive aspects?

      • The anime at least the first 3 seasons, never watched past have genuine care put into them (adventure 01 is fairly typical until the 3rd arc but that's cause it was to cunically sell toys but then the show was way more successful than they toys and they switched gears). But yeah, Digimon. Has surprising depths

  • The hook up is the anime, mostly talking about the first 4 series (adventure, 02, tamers, frontier) after that it had many breaks and it lost its momentum and unlike Pokemon it didnt have a big game to center its identity on since the many digimons games tried diferent things to see what sticks but that meant it didnt have a mainline game so it could keep getting popular.

    it just kinda fumble on many things so it never capitalized on its early popularity hit like pokemon did with red and green

  • yugioh, manga card game, got it

    yugioh monsters, projections of cards.

    Poor naive woman...

    • i'm reading it rn, it's easier to say that to encompass both Kaiba's holograms and the Shadow Game spirits (if I'm interpreting them roughly accurate, I just finished the DDM arc), both are technically projections of monsters from the cards

  • I liked Pokemon and Digimon as a kid. There’s some good video games that I still like as an adult. The little devices are fun. The creature designs are fun in a goofy, over-the-top kind of way. The new card game is pretty interesting, if you like that kind of thing. I don’t think it has to be any more complicated than that.

38 comments