Thursday DE

[bjornwilde]

Breaking from the theme to steal from a meme:

What are three thing you love about your character or their canon? 

Comments

[angry_friendship_wolf]

I genuinely love how socially-minded Digimon Adventure is. Having your main team include one adopted kid (less than a decade after the legal framework for adopting children in Japan was put in place, at a time when it was still severely frowned upon by both Shinto-Buddhist authorities and the right-wing), two mixed-race kids of divorcees (at a time when neither mixed-race people or the kids of divorcees were treated at all well), and a chronically ill girl was legitimately pretty groundbreaking, and it was a series that really wasn't afraid to delve into how their positions in society affected them (and on the other end of the spectrum, how Sora and Jyou's more traditionalist and high-status families had affected them). The 2020 series has less of this, but it does also have two episodes that are about unions, labour laws, and predatory employers, so honestly it still has some social and political commentary.

And I love its character writing, which honestly I think is most of the reason why Digimon Adventure was an enduring success. It had eight well-rounded, layered, interesting characters with their own struggles and arcs.

And on the other end of the equation, I love how it occasionally turns it right around and goes 'these are kids with normal lives and personalities, but there is also something inhuman and divine about them. As human as they are, they're also the gods of nature, and that part of them is not necessarily comprehensible or merciful.' So littered in amongst the humanity is also, in both the original and the 2020 series: Hikari, Yamato, and Taichi glowing at points and becoming silent but visibly ancient and wrathful; Yamato briefly cutting loose and cleaving a mountain in two; Koushiro having a vision of the future; Jyou unintentionally compelling an entire army into worship (and making the ground shake) with the power of his voice.