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Conventional Wisdom: Me & Digimon
🕑 Added 2016-01-24 22:03:07 +0000 UTC Okay, I've put this off for way too long. It's time to talk some Digimon. As I mentioned, Digimon was probably the single most important contributor to my descent into the depths of anime dorkdom. That was where I went from being an anime fan in theory to one in practice, the point at which I seriously got plugged into a fandom and REALLY geeked out over a show. It really was a once in a lifetime sort of experience, and not just because I've since cooled on the whole idea of "fandoms" enough that I'm probably never going to get that deep into one ever again. A LOT of what I do with myself today has its roots in those days of Digi-fandom, so it's high time I sat down and told the tale:
The funny thing is, when Digimon first hit our shores in a meaningful way, I hated it on general principle. Remember, these were the days when Pokemon was the only anime I had access to on a regular basis, so I had a fierce love for it born of hunger and desperation. And when this OTHER show suddenly popped up on the schedule, I immediately figured it was a crass, shameless attempt to cash in on Pokemon's popularity. Heck,they were even shameless enough to put "-mon" right there in the name! A total ripoff, right? (and let's face it, I wasn't ENTIRELY wrong) To make matters worse, my little brother watched the show before I did, which clearly meant Digimon was meant for little kids, rather than the serious grown-up drama that Pokemon was, obviously. Actually, in all seriousness, the first episode of Digimon I ever saw was "Digi Baby Boom", which is all about TK and Tokomon in this cutsy Digimon nursery made out of pillows and building blocks and crap. So yeah, for a while there I honestly thought Digimon WAS a little kid's show where TK was the star! Even after it became clear that there were, in fact, other characters and the show wasn't made for preschoolers, I still had this lingering impression that Digimon was the cheaper, lesser knock-off to Pokemon's quality product.
...and let's not beat around the bush here: if we were talking about anything other than the anime, that's pretty much be true. In every possible form of multi-media franchise BUT animated series, Pokemon beats Digimon like a step-headed redchild. Pokemon was a sprawling RPG, Digimon was a virtual pet. Pokemon's WORST games were still on par with Digimon's very BEST, and Digimon didn't have very many "best games". Pokemon's card game was a hit, while I STILL don't know how to actually play the Digimon card game (we all just collected them to have the pictures of as many Digimon as possible, it was a pre-wiki world). Pokemon had those awesome toys in the Burger King kid's meal, while the best Digimon would work out was some trading cards at freaking Taco Bell (did you even KNOW Taco Bell had a kid's meal?) But those were all secondary to me, I was in this whole thing to watch some anime. And that's where I notice something... troubling. Pokemon started to get kinda boring. After a few months, it had dawned on me that, really, Pokemon only has five or six episodes. They change the characters and add new critters as the games expand, but story wise it's really the same thing over and over and over (and I was realizing this back in season one, too!) That was around the time I started looking at Digimon more seriously, if only out of boredom. I was confused at first, but in a good way, since the confusion came from jumping into a developing plot in the middle. Pokemon could be watched in almost any order with only the most superficial details not adding up, but Digimon seemed to have an actual STORY going on that demanded to be seen in order. What a novel concept! And then came the real kicker: "Return to Highton View Terrace", the episode in which this show, that had been all about a group of kids wandering around an alien world, suddenly became a show set in THIS world. In a Saturday morning Cartoon World where Status Quo was King, that that kind of foundational change to a show's formula was unheard of! And yet, Digimon was doing it, and it was fantastic. My sister was checking out the show at the same time as me, and when this episode ended, she looked at me and said "Dang it, now we have to start watching THIS too!" Oh, how right she was.
So I was in to this show, HARD. What was I supposed to do with that? Well, I did what any dork at the turn of the millennium did about his nerdy passions: I fired up my ancient dial-up modem, wait half an hour for Geocities to load, and start browsing awkward, amateur fanpages! This was back in the says before anybody could just click a few buttons on tumblr or facebook and have a nice snazzy page generated for them automatically. These old pages on oldschool webhosts like Geocities or Dragonfire, they... well, I don't want to turn into the old man talking about how we had to walk ten miles barefoot in the show (uphill both ways) to get a single glass of water, but the Internet was RUSTIC back in those days. All these kids blindly trying to figure out HTML as they went, coughing up sites where only half of the links worked and the rest went to a gallery of the same dozen or so pictures that EVERYONE had gotten off Yahoo. Sometimes the really talented kids would have a menu on the side, or a really distracting MIDI that played every time the homepage loaded up (actually, this IS starting to sound like tumblr), and maybe even *gasp* have a page or two of ORIGINAL FANART courtesy of the scanner at Dad's office! You found new sites by browsing things called "web rings" and you'd sign things called "guest books" and all kinds of antiquated things that Kids These Days won't understand. Needless to say, I wanted in.
One thing I noticed about all the best Digimon fansites (or, at least, all my favorites) was that they all seemed to be built around fan characters. It wouldn't really be ABOUT them (usually), but even if all the fnafics and fanart was devoted to the original series, there'd still be some new kid with a made up Digimon partner that the site would be named after. That was just how the fandom worked, you needed a PERSONA. These days, people use the blanket term "OCs" for all that kind of stuff, but in those days we had our own term: "Fan Digidestined", or FDD. Digimon was uniquely good for that sort of thing, too, since you could just take the basic description of one of the main characters, replace a few words like a mad-lib, and BOOM, you had your own FDD! With a cast that large already, plus the whole "pulled into a strange new world" thing, you could thrown all kinds of extra characters into the mix without it feeling strange. From there, everybody just hung out on each other's message boards, drawing fanart and writing goofy fanfics about each other's characters. Like I said, I wanted in, thus was born "Blitzkrieg's Digimon Vault". Ever wondered why it's "BLITZ the Comic Guy"? There you go, it's a holdover from my old FDD days that I never quite stopped using (basically, I was too lazy to stop using my old e-mail & forum handles) 02 was just starting out, and everyone was fascinated by the idea of the Digimon Emperor, so I decided my FDD would be based on HIM rather than any of the good guys, I basically pasted 02 Joe's head onto Emperor Ken, gave him red hair and made the costume red to match, and BOOM! I had a character (that was another thing about FDDs, you saw a LOT of official art amateurishly edited) My story was that this guys was a hacker that ken knew and had given him some eeeevil Digimon stuff as a result of his own experiments. It was a stupid story, but nobody else was doing one like it, so I was proud of myself. I was also proud of the frankly absurd number of fictional Digimon partners I made up for the guy. By the end of the site's run, ol' Blitz had FIVE completely original Digimon working for him, plus two from the show and several more running around in supporting roles. As anyone who reads Far Out There knows, I like me a large cast.
But yeah, I had my FDD, I had my little Geocities site, it was time to start hanging around with all the other Digimon dweebs. And that was where this little adventure into Digimon Fandom was truly important. For one thing, I was an awkward, friendless loner stuck in a little hick town in the middle of nowhere, so for a while my FDD friends were my ONLY friends. That kind of mattered a lot. Even more important, though, was the fact that it started me making things that other people actually SAW. I'd draw a silly little comic about the other members of a forum and those forum members actually gave feedback about it. I'd write sloppy, over-ambitious fanfics and people actually read them. I'd invent my own Digimon and other people would actually draw their own versions of them. I'd been playing around with artsy stuff for years, but actually having real evidence that other human beings found it interesting was UNSPEAKABLY COOL. And it made me want to do more. When I wrote my first anime convention journals, and drew the first rough drafts of my original webcomics, those FDD people were the ones I'd show them to. And just look at where THAT led.
But whatever happened to that old form of Digimon Fandom? I mean, I keep talking about it like it's a thing that doesn't exist anymore, so something must have happened, right? Well, part of that was just my own growing out of the idea of "fandom" in general. As I got more into enjoying shows at my own pace, having a group to do it with became less important. But there's also the fact that the fandom itself kind of died off as the show's popularity faded. An active, creative community like the FDD one kind of requires a constant influx of new material and new people to keep going, and Digimon's struggling fortunes just couldn't provide that. Digimon Tamers was a big part of the problem, which pains me deeply to say since I adore that show. Still, after two years of getting invested in the universe of Digimon Adventure, the community just couldn't shift gears to an entirely new continuity, yet didn't want to keep doing stuff with one that had ended either. So people started giving up on FDD stuff entirely (also, even if people had WANTED to do their own Tamers stuff, that show's story was so much more complicated that trying to write for it was too intimidating for most people) And then Fox Kids imploded, robbing Tamers of exposure and relegating Digimon Frontier to the barren wilderness of local syndication., so there were no new fans to fill the void the old ones left. And once the show left the air entirely, well, who wants to play around with the universe of a show that nobody can even watch anymore? I probably hung around FDD world longer than most people did, but even in my case it was more to hang out with my old friends than to do anything actually Digimon related.
But man, for a little while there, I was a Digi-fan-content-generating-MACHINE. It's not like I had anything else to do, after all. By the time I stopped updating regularly, Blitzkrieg's Digimon Vault had gotten MASSIVE. Not only did I fill my Geocities account up to the absolute limit, but the site had spilled over onto Anycites and Angelfire accounts, and filled THEM up too. And I'd like to believe it got at least modestly popular, too. At one point, I actually had a handful of regular contributors adding their own stuff in addition to my content. One of those sloppy, over-ambitious fanfics I mentioned won a few awards in some contests, which I was more proud of than I should have been. And Blitz the Fictional Character got a rather impressive amount of fanart drawn of him, so SOMEBODY was a fan. Heck, when my first girlfriend and I got together via the FDD community, there were people who openly shipped us as hard as any fictional characters... which, in retrospect, was actually kind of creepy. Let's forget I mentioned that (especially seeing as how we broke up anyway). The point is, there are times when I'm a little jealous of the amount of stuff younger me had going on, even if it WAS a different Internet back then.
Wow, this has gotten WAY longer than I anticipated. We've long since passed Rambling Old Person levels here, and somehow I only barely talked about Digimon itself. Sorry about that, folks. The point is, Digimon got me excited about anime and cartooning and creating things in a way that nothing else really did, and to be honest, nothing has since. In fact, I still want to play around with Digimon whenever I can find the time. I've been saying for YEARS now that I wanted to do a Digimon fan comic, and I could probably fill up another blog post with ideas I've tried & given up on for one reason or another. Hey, there's an interesting thought...
