"Hey, let me tell you about this idea I have for a Digimon fanfic!" (Patreon)

Dear Lord, that’s a terrifying title, isn’t it? And yet, here we go. It’s no secret that I really love Digimon. It’s one of the first anime I could ever watch on a regular basis. It’s THE first anime I ever fully and conclusively geeked out over. The first art I ever put out on The Internet was Digimon fanart. I ran a Digimon fansite that, in its own way, might actually have had a larger fan following than any original work I’ve done since. At this very moment, I’m working on yet another Digimon costume to wear at Otakon, where I’ll be co-hosting a Digimon panel. It’s relevant to my interest is what I’m getting at. And like any good fanboy, my love of the subject has manifested in more than a few attempts to tell my own version of a Digimon story over the years. Few of them have actually made out of my own head long enough to be seen by the public, and even fewer turned out to be any GOOD, but let’s talk about them all anyway? Why? Because it’s Digimon related, so of COURSE I’m gonna talk about it! SHUT UP! *ahem* But seriously, quite a few of these abortive fan projects ended up having an influence on my original creative works in one way or another.  That's why I'm tagging this big of Digi-fanwank as both a Conventional Wisdom and a Far Out There blog.  Neither of those would look quite the way they do now if I hadn't spent the time and energy I did playing around with these ideas, and I'll try to point out why.  Also, looking back over these things, I’m surprised to find a number of instances where official Digimon shows actually ended up using the same kind of ideas that I did. No, I’m not delusional enough to go around claiming that Bandai and Toei were sneaking into by bedroom at night to steal ideas from my notebooks. Still, it’s a nice ego boost to think that, somewhere along the line, I actually managed to stumble upon an occasional idea good enough for real live TV professionals to also consider. So let’s take a trip down terrible Fan Fiction lane!

Legend of the Digidestined: Adventures on File Island

…and yes, I DO mean “fanfic” and not any of those glorified other terms people make up for works that are “like, based on the established universe but, like, still totally my own original thing, man!” No, my first Digimon creation was an absolute fanfic, based entirely around the characters in the original series. In fact, this story basically WAS the original series! One of my favorite fanfics in earlier days had been a Mega Man story called Rockman: The Wily Wars which was essentially a dark and gritty retelling of the first game (this was before The Protomen made that cool). So that’s what Legend of the Digidestined was going to be: the same basic plot as the first season on Digimon, only darker and more mature and with occasional swearing because EDGY. It… I’m not gonna lie, it’s pretty terrible. The first half in particular is guilty of just about every fanfic sin that doesn’t involve terrible crossovers, terrible sex scenes, or terrible sexy crossovers. Don’t even bother looking it up, your life’s too short to waste on that nonsense. In fact, I don’t even think I bothered posting the last few chapters on FanFiction.net. They may have vanished from the web completely when Geocities shut down.

That said, the later chapters, based around the big climactic fight with Devimon, got at least a LITTLE better. I started introducing some original characters, one of whom actually won Legend of the Digidestined some awards in a fanfic contest. You’d better believe my highschool self was super proud of THAT. I also started making some early, tentative steps toward actual long-form storytelling by dropping a few hints that, eventually, would have connected Devimon to Apocalymon. You know, that inexplicable extra bad guy who appeared out of nowhere in the last episodes of Season One? Even at that young age, I knew enough to know that guy should have been set up better, so I was trying to establish him as the great, lovecraftian evil lurking behind all the other bad guys. Oh, and speaking of whom, some of the least sucky writing in Legend of the Digidestined concerned Devimon’s backstory, where I tried to set up more of a sense of history for both him and the Digiworld through lots of vague references to mysterious creepy arcane old stuff. So it was a little mind blowing years later when I started reading Lovecraft and realized he was doing pretty much the same thing in much of his works. Again, I’m not claiming to be The Next Lovecraft or any crap like that. If anything, this just illustrates that we both read a lot of Poe in our youth. Still, it was pretty neat to realize.

Legend of the Digidestined was one of the few Digi-projects I’ve undertaken to actually see anything resembling completion, though even that was just one part. As the subtitle suggests, this story ended with the kids leaving File Island after defeating Devimon. The plan was to cover the rest of the first season, and possibly even 02, but that never happened. For one thing, my plans for later arcs were waaaaay too elaborate to actually do, and too bogged down by grimdark to really be worth it, though I’ll get into that stuff later. The main thing, honestly, was that I just didn’t want to keep doing pure fanfic like this anymore. Digimon Tamers had premiered by this point, introducing me to the concept of “Digimon stories” with no connection to the first seasons whatsoever. If the real shows could make up whatever they wanted and still call it “Digimon”, then why couldn’t I?

Digimon: Revolution

So here it is, the first in a looooooong chain of more original Digimon fan projects that I never finished. In fact, this is one of the few to even get STARTED enough for other people to actually see it. And even then, I don’t think anybody paid anywhere near as much attention to it as they did Legend of the Digidestined. It’s bad enough when a young artist suffers the indignity of his original work not being as popular as his fanworks, try having it happen when you haven’t even fully graduated from that fan stuff yet. NOBODY LOVES ME!!! …naw, I didn’t really care. By the time I actually started putting chapter of Digimon: Revolution out, the whole Fan DigiDestined community I’d started out in was rapidly flying apart anyway. If anything, seeing the old fandom audience dry up emboldened me to start doing even more original work. But we’re not there yet, let’s talk about this fic.

Digimon: Revolution was my last purely text project, and where I decided for certain that my future didn’t lie in prose. (I mean, just look at these blog posts, right?) While a lot of the writing still sucked, there were a few neat ideas worth patting myself on the back over, at least a little. For one thing, main character Robyn didn’t actually physically travel into the Digital world, as is normally the rule in Digimon. Rather, she had this Blue Seed-ish glass bead stuck in her head that served as a sort of transmitter, beaming her consciousness into the Digiworld Matrix-style while her body stayed put. Not hugely original, but it still gave me a bit of a laugh at the end of Digimon Frontier to see them pull a similar mind/body separation thing with Koichi. See? I told you there’d be instanced of Real Digimon doing the same thing as my Fakey Digimon! 

Actually, the most interesting is that I kind of accidentally stumbled onto a HUGE chunk of the set up for Xros Wars several years early. The gimmick for Revolution was that Robyn wouldn’t be the partner of a single Digimon, but an entire army. Like, her I Can’t Believe It’s Not A Digivice COULD make a single Digimon digivolve into some kind of super form, but it could also cause hundreds of Digimon to do a more generic digivolution at the same time. This would eventually result in the kid leading whole armies of Digimon charging into battle like a monster collecting Joan of Arc. I mean, sure. Xros Wars was more about combining various Digimon together to go have one-on-one fights than whole armies charging at each other Braveheartmon style, but it DID boast kids referred to as Generals, with teams referred to as Armies. Also, despite what the ill-chosen title implies, Revolution wasn’t set in a world where The Bad Guy was in absolute control, like most Digimon stories are. The evil forces in this story were explicitly stated to only control certain parts of the Digital World, with the Good Guys in firm control of their own territory, and both sides warring as equals. While later arcs would drop the angle, the first part of Xros Wars had a very similar set up. The Bad Guys only had control over certain areas, and the various human teams were in direct competition to claim more territory. I still think that’s close enough to officially qualify as Interesting.

Alas, I only got a few chapters into Digimon: Revolutions before losing interest. Like I said, I was already kind of over the whole “only text, no pictures” thing, and the scope of this story was well beyond my grasp. I mean, it was supposed to be revealed that the leader of The Good Guys had a sort of Jeckle/Hyde thing going on and was simultaneously a spy for the Bad Guys. I can absolutely GUARANTEE that I wouldn’t have been able to pull that off without the result being cringe inducing. Also, the main characters kind of all sucked, with main girl Robyn in particular being an insufferable brat. Also, I was on a weird Greek Mythology kick at the time, resulting in all the original Digimon characters having these stupidly long names that referenced things that didn’t actually have any significance to the story (so, clearly, I was capturing the spirit of writing anime very well!) I’m pretty sure I never actually posted ANY of Digimon: Revolutions outside of my own site, so unless some Wayback Machine saved a few pages before Geocities went down, it’s probably not online at all anymore. No great loss, really.

That said, Revolutions DID pick up on one of the few decent parts of Legend of the Digidestined: the world building. I tried to put a lot more detail into figuring out what a civilization of Digimon would actually be like, and to fill it with little bits of trivia to give things a sense of history. I wasn’t very good at it yet, but anybody who reads Far Out There knows that the wacky background bits of future pop culture are often a lot more interesting than the actual characters. I suppose this is where all that started! Yay!

Digimon: Signs

So, I said that Revolutions was the last WRITTEN fanwork I did, but oooooooh LORDY is it not the last one period. Once I discovered the mind-blowing, earth-shattering, life-changing fact that people actually drew COMIC for the internet, I started thinking about making a Digimon fancomic. Digimon: Signs is probably the one that came closest to actually happening… or at least, it’s the one that left the most evidence of its existence. Digimon: Signs had a decent amount of character art make it out to the internet. In fact, a full set of character profiles were among the first things I ever posted on deviantArt back in the dark ages. Alas, in what would become a recurring trend, those characters never actually got a finished story to take part in.

On paper, the idea still sounds pretty neat: a group of kids are yanked into the Digiworld so that they and their new partners can use their ultra mega destined powers to defeat the big bad evil Digimon, same as just about every real Digimon show. Unlike those shows, however, the good guy Digis have more than just some vague “human heroes show up and do good” legend to draw inspiration from. They’ve got a huuuuge collection of detailed prophecies telling how these kids will overcome insurmountable odds through the power of determination and friendship and all that jazz. They even know which hero team archetypes each kid will embody. That’s what the “Signs” in the title are, more elaborate versions of the whole crest idea that illustrate which tropes each kid will represent. The problem is, all these prophecies tell the kind of story where one kid can literally punch through mountains because he believe in himself, people no-sell direct hits with energy blasts because they’re worked up emotionally, and things always work out for the heroes even the very laws of reality say they shouldn’t. 

That’s a problem because the actual setting of the story is a grim, gritty, harshly realistic war setting where death is commonplace and even the most skilled warrior can die for nothing thanks to a minor lapse in concentration. Basically, it’s a kid’s show trying to exist in grimdark real life, because mashing those two things together is ALWAYS COMPELLING AND NEVER STUPID. Heck, even the Signs of the title don’t work out, since the kids are nothing like the tropes they’re supposed to embody. Designated gogglehead Hideo is supposed to be a brash, hot-blooded man of action, like most goggleheads are required by law to be. Except Hideo isn’t, he’s actually a shy, quiet introvert (which I’m tempted to say is similar to Haru from Digimon Universe… but that’d be a stretch). Granted, he sometimes ACTS like a loudmouthed class clown, but that’s all it is, an act to avoid getting picked on. But that ends up being the key to the kid’s survival in this world: ACTING. They start deliberately pretending to be like these mythical characters, if only to get the local Digimon to support them, and concoct various sneaky ways of faking the sort of dues ex machine victories the prophesies describe. And wouldn’t you know it, that fakery has such a psychological effect on The Bad Guys that the kids really do start winning major battles, just like the prophesies say they will! As they even start to internalize the more noble aspects of the characters they’re playing, one starts to wonder if these “fake” prophesies they’re imitating might actually be about them after all… and as I write this just now, I’m noticing a lot of Frank Herbert’s Dune, which I’m pretty sure wasn’t intentional. Huh.

Like I said, it sounds kind of neat in synopsis form. Lord knows no official Digimon series has gone to such lengths to deconstruct its own tropes (unless the later episodes of Digimon Universe are keeping some amazing secrets from me), buuuuut there’s a good reason for that. Several, actually, but I’m just going to pick on the most obvious one: THIS THING WOULD BE IMPOSSIBLY DIFFICULT TO WRITE. Lord knows it turned out to be completely beyond my own abilities. I had a rough outline of the plot as a whole, with liberal borrowing of unused Legend of the Digidestined ideas, but nothing about what the specific battles with the bad guys would look like. And that wasn’t just some detail to pencil in at the last minute, not in a story like this, the fights were the whole POINT. Not just in a “nobody cares about boring character stuff, just get to the action” sense, but they’re literally what make the entire story work. The only reason any Digimon follow these kids is because they convincingly pull off the illusion of being prophesied heroes, and the only reason they grow is characters is as a result of their time playing these parts. Every single skirmish would be essential to the overall plot, and would have to be seen in absolute detail, no cutting away to stock footage or creatively flashing ahead to when stuff is over or any of that time-saving trickery. Oh, and did I mention that I’d basically have to write every single fight three times? Once to establish the kid show logic version that’s “supposed” to happen, once to show the real world sneaky version that actually works, and essentially a third version which the kids tell everyone else to convince them that the second is actually the first. Man, I can barely write an action scene ONCE, let alone three interconnected times.

There’s also a greater problem about the characters starting out at complete jerks and the plot as a whole relying waaaay to much on the whole “I’m injecting grimdark into this children’s show because I’M CLEVER AND THIS IS A CLEVER THING TO DO” fallacy, but I’ll save that for the next entry. For, you see, despite my listing it first here, Digimon: Signs was actually the second form of an idea…

Grown Up Digidestined Story:

…yeah, this one didn’t last long enough for me to come up with a clever title with a colon and everything. Basically, it was a Digimon-centric riff on that old and over-done idea of the kid who saves the day in a fantasy adventure having to go back to boring old day to day life. The youngest member of a Digimon hero team, the TK if you will, is now a mopey adult drifting aimlessly through life. He misses the sense of importance he had while saving multiple worlds, can’t fit in with normal society, and is basically really depressing. So when it sounds like there’s trouble in the Digiworld and they’ll have to get the band back together again, he’s a little TOO excited. I hadn’t decided yet if the big twist would be that this guys had actually engineered whatever crisis they needed to “solve”, or maybe wasn’t one at all and he was just delusional, but one way or another this guys wasn’t going to be right in the head anymore. Because, you know, dark twist on children’s show and edgy and blah blah blah.

I should have learned more than I did from the fact that I ditched this story so quickly.  Early on, I started writing the “original” adventure they had while kids, just to provide some background, but quickly realized it was a LOT more interesting than the “real” story about the adults. At the time, all I took away from that was “I like stories with more opportunities for action” …which isn’t untrue, but it misses the bigger point. This grownup story was DEPRESSING, and I don’t WANNA write depressing stuff! I don’t even wanna watch other people’s depressing stuff! I’ve got enough of that crap to deal with in real life, thank you very much! If, by some insane fluke, I actually WAS interested in a work that confronted the sadness and depression and disappointment of life, do you really think I’d be looking for that in a work about colorful cartoon monsters fighting each other? If I’m gonna take the time to sit down and watch or read something, it’s because I want to get AWAY from that crap. It’s especially funny because, not only did I fail to grasp this basic problem while coming up with other Digimon projects, even my original comic took a while to figure this out. If you’ve read any of my things about Far Out There plots that never happened, you know I was DEEPLY convinced the comic’s future lay in sudden, inexplicable detours into drama and horror and the blackest of black comedy. Go look up the original plans for Tabitha or “La Faulx” to see just how stupid I was about this kind of thing. Thankfully, I gradually realized what I already knew subconsciously when I dropped this idea, and have since focused on sticking consistently to the one tone I’m pretty good at doing: fun. Heck, even Conventional Wisdom’s been affected by this, as I’ve tried to move farther and farther away from reporting drama and fandom politics and things a convention does wrong, ‘cos where’s the fun in that?

And just for the record, Digimon Tri has since come along and done the whole “what happens to the Digidestined when they grow up?” question for real, so it’s even less of an original idea than it was when I considered it. And while Tri isn’t perfect by any means, I’d have to say that it approaches the idea in a far more satisfying manner than I ever would have.

The best part is, somewhere deep down I must have known what the problem was even then, because later I revisited the whole “Digimon/Grown-ups” idea in a much more satisfying manner…

Digimon: Wanderers

I have NO idea what conversation led to this, but at some point in my life I found myself asked to consider what Digimon partner Jim from The Office would have. I can’t even remember what the answer turned out to be, but the image of a bored thirtysomething stuck in a job he hated suddenly having the world of Digimon open up to him really stuck with me. So much so, I tried to write a whole story around it!

In this version of the Digimon universe, teaming up with humans isn’t a one-time thing that a select few Digimon do when DESTINY picks them to challenge a Great Evil. In fact, there isn’t even any one Big Bad in this story at all, just a bunch of little small-time villains. When a certain Digimon proves itself deserving in battle, it’s granted a chance to summon a human to partner with and unlock all sorts of amazing new powers via digivolving and blah blah blah. Sort of that confusing moment in Tamers where Renamon chose Rika, only there’s LOTS of kids it happens to. Now, there’s no rule saying it HAS to be kids, but Digivices get their power from the human’s imagination, and everybody knows that humans get all boring and unimaginative when they grown up, so any smart Digimon chooses a kid. Except for one old, battle-hardened Gatomon who uses the Magic Find-A-Human-O-Matic to track down an adult with enough untarnished imagination to be a viable partner. Her logic? Well, human kids grown up eventually, and they grow out of the whole Digimon thing. Gatomon’s been around long enough to have several partners grow up and leave her, so she figures finding one who’s ALREADY grown up will be the way around that. The adult in question is Will, a bored nerd with a crappy mall kiosk job and a deep desire to do something, ANYTHING else with his life. Obviously, a talking cat inviting him to come to a strange alternate dimension and help her fight monsters isn’t quite what he had in mind, but he’ll take it!

I never made much art to go along with this idea, but I did end up talking it up a lot, and people always seemed to find it a lot more interesting than Signs. And honestly, the older I get, the more the whole idea of being the ole adult in an otherwise child-dominated field resonates with me. I mean, I’m thirty three years old and I’m going on for pages and pages about my Digimon fanfic ideas. I obviously know a thing or two about the subject. It also helps that this wouldn’t have been a sad and mopey “oh pity the poor manchild” type thing like the previous idea. I mean, this guy’s not just sitting around playing video games in his room, he’s ACTUALLY GOING TO ANOTHER WORLD AND HAVING ADVENTURES! So what if it’s not an especially “grown up” kind of adventure to have?

Unfortunately, while Wanderers was a promising move away from one of the problems that killed Signs, it was hit twice as hard by its other major problem: I had this great start, but no idea where to go with it. So, Will decided to go have adventures with Gatomon. Okay, what do they actually DO? Again, Wanderers was conceived as a story with no overall quest to topple any single villain. If the official versions of the Digiworld tend to be like adventure games where one player (or team of players) start and the beginning ‘til they reach the boss at the end, then Wanderers was going to be more of an MMORPG.  Kids would be hopping in and out all over the place, completing little quests and generally doing things at their own pace. There’d be bad guys, sure, but only threatening their own little pockets of Digiworld, not conquering the whole place and trying to invade Earth. The idea was to keep the mood lighter and more fun, not to mention breaking away from a lot of the clichés that official Digimon series kept operating under. The problem, of course, is that clichés became clichés for a reason: they WORK. “Get To The End And Beat The Boss.” Simple, effective, and very good a giving weak incidental material greater significance via its place in the grander arc. But if that grander arc is just “wander around and get into skirmishes”, then those skirmishes have to actually justify their own existence on their own. I’m talking about enough plot and character and action set pieces to form the basis of an entire series, being dreamed up from scratch EVERY. SINGLE. CHAPTER. As with Signs, I’m just not up to a project that elaborate. 

I only saw two ways around this problem: change the plot to a more conventional “Everything Revolves Around Beating The One Big Bad” storyline, or dropping the adventure and making this a one-off short story about Will agreeing to go with Gatomon. The later seemed more promising at first, since that first chapter was all I really had written anyway, but it just didn’t work. Without some kind of follow-up adventure to show off the difference he was making in the Digital World, the story came across as too escapist: an overgrown manchild running away from his boring grown-up life to go live in a video game. That was the exact OPPOSITE of what Wanderers was supposed to be about. The other option, making the story more of a quest with a singular villain, also meant changing Gatomon’s backstory and the general concept of how the Digital World would work. I mean, narratively speaking, it’s REALLY weird to have lots of independently operating good guys being brought in to fight a single bad guy. But Gatomon finding Will doesn’t really work in the context of a unified Digidestined team either. The only option for making the story work was the one I just didn’t have the time or skill to pull off.

Still, I would like to revisit Digimon: Wanderers as SOME point. That base concept of a grownup getting to go be a Digidestined still seems to resonate with a lot of people, and if Tri is any indication, it’s resonating with the official writers as well. Always good company to be in, right?

Digimon: Monkees

This… This seems like a joke, and it kind of was, but I still spent a few weeks seriously trying to mash up Digimon and The freakin’ Monkees. It makes a BIT more sense when you understand that I had a general urge to do a anime-esque Monkees fan thing, because… um, I dunno. I like The Monkees? And I’d almost certainly be the only person in the world doing it? All I know is, in the months between my discovering that Flash cartoons were a thing and my realizing I’d never, ever be capable of making then, I was really hung up on the idea of an unauthorized Monkees fan cartoon, and at one point they were going to be Digidestined. I mean, the characters they played on the show were masically giant children anyway, so I GUESS it’s not so much of a stretch but… yeah, this one was really, REALLY stupid.

…and, now that I think about it, somehow the ONLY ill-advised crossover I ever considered. THE ONLY ONE! And it didn’t even involve terrible sex scenes! How could I even cald myself an fanfic author?

Digimon: Apocalypse

Oh man, right from the very NAME this one is cringe-inducing. Since Wanderers had struggled due to my having a neat opening but no idea where to go next, I tried to see what would happen if I wrote a concept backwards. I’d start with the ENDING, then figure out what could build up to that. Sort of the R.L. Stine approach, if you will. Well, it didn’t work, because whatever respite I’d found from the “It’s a kid’s show, but with a DARK DECOSTRUCTING TWIST!” urge was gone when I tried to write this thing. That ending I started with? Humans turn out to the The Bad Guy all along and try to destroy the Digital World, only for the heroes to turn that attack back on humanity, destroying the Earth and requiring the survivors of humanity to live as refugees in the Digital World. Um… Brave and ambitious, maybe?

No, it was pretty terrible, and required getting WAAAAY too dark in its depictions of Earth if the main character’s decision to side with the Digimon against humanity was going to come off as the right move. At least, with such a bleak payoff (with was actually another salvaged idea from Legend of the Digidestined, which gives you an idea how lousy that fic was destined to become). The story was just unpleasant, any characters I came up with who would be a natural fit for such a story were equally unpleasant, and I very quickly lost any enthusiasm for writing it. I guess this represented my final wakeup call to stop trying to wedge “edgy” content into a place it has no business being, a lesson every fanfic writer needs to learn sooner or later.

Ironically, that edgy deconstruction isn’t even all that original. 02 already had a human villain, and the Lovecrafitan horror at the end of Tamers was essentially of human origin (and would have represented a threat to the entire world had it spread). Better yet, Savers ended up exploring the Human As Bad Guys idea AGAIN in a far better way than Apocalypse ever would have. Sure, that show has a lot of problems and lousy characters, but at least it made the whole concept of a bad egg human being the cause of everybody’s problems legitimately interesting.

DPF: Digimon Police Force

So, we’ve established that I’m not equipped to deconstruct or subvert the basic tropes of the Digimon franchise. My response, obviously, was to take those tropes and crash them into a different set of tropes that I know even LESS about! Enter: DIGIMON COPS! That’s not silly at all!

Actually, this is another one where I stand behind the basic idea. It has plenty of precedents in the original shows, after all, since this one would be mostly set in our world rather than the Digital World. The best part of Adventure was the Myotismon arc, a lot of 02’s best episodes were the ones where they spent less time in the Digital World, Tamers is around two-thirds set here and that’s easily the best season ever, Savers may have had problems but the basic idea of an Earth-based organization dealing with Digimon matters was a great one, I like what little I’ve seen of Digimon Universe so far, and Xros Wars… got absolutely terrible once it started focusing on this world. Um, ignore that last one. For the MOST part, Digimon stories set largely on the Earth turned out well. Also, as I’ve often said to the bewilderment of all who hear, I actually respect how the ending of 02 left its world a changed place. Everything ELSE about that epilogue sucked, but its willingness to say “Digimon are common knowledge, human existence is fundamentally changed” and make that conclusive really impressed me. Most seasons end with a big reset button, which makes ZERO sense. If the story’s ending anyway, wny even bother making things “normal” again? ESPECIALLY if the new status quo sounds a lot more interesting than the old one. Humans and Digimon interacting openly? Sounds awesome! I wanna see a story about THAT, thank you! So, when no Digimon series would give that to me, I went and wrote one for myself!

In case you couldn’t figure it out, DPF imagined a world where humans and Digimon have coexisted for at least a generation. Digimon can’t exist in the human world for long on their own unless they’re bonded to a human via a Digivice (I’m sure I’d have come up with a silly sounding new name, but it’s a Digivice) but this time it’s not some quasi-mystical thing that destiny decides. Humans and Digimon both have to go through an extensive screening process to make sure no bad eggs get access to that kind of ridiculous power, ESPECIALLY if they want to go into serious stuff like law enforcement. Again, you could probably have figured it out from the name, but Digimon/human duos are now a common fixture in police forces around the world. Hey, would YOU shoplift if you knew you might end up chassed by a DarkTyrannomon? With a BADGE? The story would follow a group of kids and Digimon as they go through their training, get partnered up, and go on to make TWO worlds a better place… and that’s as far as I got.

Once again, I had a setup, but no actual STORY. There was no big bad to go fight, just a Digimon version of whatever stuff you’d normally see on any cop show. I guess I was thinking that since those shows rarely have any ongoing quest element, it’d be easier to come up with Plots Of The Week in that framework. But therein lied a second problem: I DUNNO CRAP ABOUT COP SHOWS! I watch stuff about aliens and robots and spaceships, not cops on the streets of Insert Major City Here! And the more I tried to supplement my meager knowledge by watching a meager smattering of shows, the more I realized that a meager smattering was never gonna cut it. I mean, the phrase “cop show” covers a LOT of ground in terms of style and tone. Dragnet and Barney Miller and Miami Vice and frickin’ Cop Rock all technically belong to this same genre, but they’re all wildly different shows. And that’s taking a pretty narrow definition of “Show In Which A Cop Is Present.” Theoretically, that could cover everything from Twin Peak to Family Matters… which is getting off on a whole other tangent. The point is, I realized there were a bunch of different Cop Show tropes I could theoretically incorporate, but I didn’t know enough about ANY of them to do it properly.

And looking back over it now, that’s was probably the wrong approach to begin with. Aside from the fact that, again, I SHOULDN’T BE THINKING I CAN DECONSTRUCT THINGS I DON’T KNOW ABOUT, a pure Cop Show/Digimon mashup would be reeeaaally tonally inconsistent. I mean, what, was I gonna have Agumon and Gabumon bursting into a crackhouse to track down human traffickers? Gruff Chief Gaomon telling Guilmon to hand over his badge due to pressure from  corrupt city officials? Would Renamon beat up a pimp? Admittedly, that sounds pretty awesome when I just say it, but it’s awesome in a stupid, ridiculous way, and it only lasts in short bursts. If I tried to actually do a full, continuous story that combined cute cuddly Digimon with the gritty reality of police procedurals, it’d end up a Tequila & Bonetti-sized train wreck VERY quickly. And again, I was wrestling with this same tonal problem with Far Out There for a LONG time. If I hadn’t kept having these Digimon ideas crash and burn on me, I might not have learned my lesson before implementing one of those terrible Serious Plot Twists I had planned for Far Out There. The results would have been catastrophic, so I guess I owe stuff like DPF some heartfelt thanks for that, at least.

It’s still sad, though, because I still really like the idea of seeing how Digimon could be integrated into everyday life, and using crime fighting as an excuse for all the action is still an idea that seems relatively untapped (he said, not knowing a thing about Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth). I’d just need to find the time to actually some up with a full complement of crime fighting stories that are sufficiently kid friendly enough to coexist with Digimon characters. Unfortunately, that’s gonna be a real problem, as I discovered more thoroughly with this next idea…

Suburban Digimon Idea

Yup, another one where I couldn’t even be bothered to come up with a real name. This was an idea I started toying with a little after DPF stalled, but by that point I was pretty deep into doing Far Out There and Conventional Wisdom for serious. The more I worked on those, the less time I had to play around with fan projects. I still clung to the idea of someday, somehow doing SOME kind of Digimon project, because… well, I’ll save the “official” reason for later, but mainly I was and continue to be a big ol’ dork who just likes thinking about this kind of stuff. So why stop now?

If there’s anything to be gleaned from that non-title, it’s that I was rather fixated with the thought of a Digimon story set in a non-urban environment. This was RIGHT after I’d moved out of DC, so I was pretty much at a personal peak of thinking that cities sucked, and I could help noticing that every Digimon series is set in one at some point. I mean, it’s Japan. There’s only so many geographical options these shows can work with. Still, I couldn’t help wondering what it’d be like to set a Digimon story somewhere else. After all, the Digital World pretty much never depicted as a crowded cityscape, but some manner of wide open fantasy wilderness. Why not incorporate some of that wide-openness into the Real World setting? Aside from that DC stint, I’ve lived pretty much my whole life outside of major cities: I grew up in the suburban sprawl outside of Atlanta, spent my teens in rural eastern Carolina, and currently split the difference by living on that veeeeery outer edge of the suburbs that people from the city think is already the country (causing ACTUAL country folk to sigh and shake their heads). Any one of those settings would provide substantially different narrative possibilities than the usual urban environment.

How so, you ask? What thrilling new stories did I invasion by placing Digimon in the lands of the minivan? …not a whole lot, seeing as how this idea never even made it to name-having status, but like I said, that had as much to do with me working on other projects. I mostly just had the mental image of large Digimon crawling all over those massive power line towers and doing battle in fields behind subdivisions, which doesn’t quite count as a story. I DID realize one thing that would have been really important, though: Digimon in the suburbs would mean Digidestined who get their family involved. Every Digimon series that spends enough time in the Real World to involve the kids’ families has those WAAAAACKY scenes where they have to keep the existence of Digimon a secret. It always works, since they’re in an environment where even little kids can act with extreme autonomy. A kid steps outside in a city with extensive public transit, and he can get just about anywhere he wants on his own. Outside the city, however, things are too car-based for that to work. If the Digimon of the Week is causing problems the next town over, the kids can’t get there unless somebody gives them a ride. SOMEBODY older has to be in on their activities, and practically speaking, that somebody would quickly become the whole family. And you know what? There’s a lot of narrative potential there. What do Mom and Dad think of their kids helping living cartoon characters fight each other? What do siblings who don’t get Digimon think of the ones who do? What if nerdy older brother who’s already super into scifi stuff gets, like, waaay to into giving the kids rides to go fight actual monsters from another dimension? There’s a lot you could do with this.

OH! And I also need to point out that both Digimon Adventure Tri and Digimon Universe Appli Monsters seem to be focusing a lot more on doing stuff in the Real World setting than previous shows did. Did I accurately predict a general change in direction for the Digimon franchice years before it happened? No, I almost certainly did not. Still, it’s nice to see that I’m apparently not the only one who wanted to see more of Digimon in non-Digiworld settings.

But, alas, I just never had time to do it. I DID have the idea of making it a photo/drawing hybrid comic though, with drawn Digimon popping out weirdly in front of actual pictures of real North Raleigh suburban sprawl. That idea has recently come to fruition in Conventional Wisdom, to quite a bit of positive feedback, I might add. So I guess we gotta give Digimon: Battle For The WalMart credit for being the seed of that idea, right? Actually, there was a second thing too. What little plot I actually DID scrape together was self-consciously NOT original. For all the changes I’d have made to the Real World setting, the Digital World side of the story was as basic as possible: Bad Digimon wants to conquer humanity, so Good Digimon recruit human children to stop them. By this point, I was finally realizing how stupid it was for me to think I could do some kind of amazing deconstruction of a genre I’d never successfully played STRAIGHT yet. After all, the whole point of deconstruction/reconstruction is to show such a mastery of a genre that one can break it down and do something even better with the pieces. For me to try that here was a bit like a person who doesn’t know how a car works thinking he can take one apart and build a working AIRPLANE out of the parts. And that brings us to…

Digimon: Victory

Okay, last one. This is the Digimon story I’ve been tinkering with most recently, and probably for the longest. Like the last couple, I haven’t actually done THAT much with it, since… well, you’ve seen how much trouble I’m having keeping up with my original projects. Trying to add a fan comic to the pile is even more impractical now than it was in the past. And yet, I continue to say this is a thing I want to do. Heck, I even offered this up as a potential Patreon rewards, though people wisely requested more Becky & Gilb instead. Why? Is it just me being a big ol’ dork again? Well, it’s a demonstrable fact that I am, but I claim to have another reason: doing it as a learning experience. I’m not very good at pacing myself, or reigning my ideas in. Far Out There was deliberately conceived as a sprawling, ongoing project, and Conventional Wisdom has no predetermined structure beyond “based on real cons.” I just start drawing and let things balloon out into whatever lumpy, misshapen form they want… and that hasn’t worked out too well lately. HAH! You thought I’d make it all the way through this without some soul-bearing “here’s why my missing deadlines is something YOU should feel sorry for ME over” rant, didn’t you?

But seriously. I know how to do one-shot single page comics, and I know how to do sprawling endless comics one page at a time. Anything in between? Well, look at the last couple of Conventional Wisdom updates. Look at the last Becky & Gilb. Look at all the Far Out There Patreon stuff that I haven’t even finished yet. I’ve REALLY gotten into a bad habit of making projects that are TOO. FREAKIN’. LONG. I’ve never seriously tried to learn how to write within a predetermined length or format, and it’s resulted in me developing all sorts of unhealthy habits and a general inability to pace myself. The worse this problem gets, the more I like the idea of forcing myself to work within a strict 26 page per chapter, one chapter per plot line framework. And that’s what Digimon: Victory was always conceived to be.

It’s the first Digimon fan thing I’ve played with for a LOOOONG time where actual real character art has escaped from my brain to the Internet at large, so that alone is something. Unfortunately, it’s also the most boring to talk about (he said, assuming that everything up to this point has been ABSOLUTELY RIVITING). Taking a cue from the Suburban Digimon idea, Victory’s general plot is pretty much the same thing as the original Digimon Adventure. I mean, not to Legend of the Digidestined-levels of pure remake, but the overall plot arcs are deliberately the same: Bad Digimon take over the Digiworld and want to take over the Human World next, so Good Digimon drag some Human Kids into their world to stop the Bad Digimon. It’s Generic Digimon Plot 101, and that’s kind of the point. A recurring theme in all those failed ideas before is that I’d burn myself out trying to concoct this revolutionary, subversive, deconstrictastic new idea for the story, and have nothing left for the stuff that ACTUALLY matters. You know, things like enjoyable character interaction and exciting action set pieces and the short episodic plots that made up the bulk of actual Digimon shows. By starting with a familiar formula instead of dreaming up some kind of BIG new thing, I’d have a lot more energy to introduce a lot of LITTLE new things to spice up that formula. And, hopefully, the process would teach me a few things about sticking to a pre-established page limit and meeting regular deadlines. That can only be a good thing, right?

But if I freely admit that Digimon: Victory is basically the same thing we’ve already seen before, why even bother? Well, that’s where those “little new things” come in. I will ALWAYS defend fanfic and fan art, even at their most silly, because tinkering with preexisting properties is how artists learn little tricks they’d never get around to if they had to invent everything from the ground up each time. And you’d be amazed how much even the most superficial of minor tweaks can make a familiar formula feel fresh.  I mean, in the big picture, the Competing Armies idea for Xros Wars didn’t actually result in many stories that any other season couldn’t have told, but it FELT different. The Digidestined as Sentai Team gimmick in Frontier ultimately didn’t change things all that much either (beyond robbing the main cast of the character development that a Digimon partners provide, anyway) but again, it FEELS like a massive change. Even now, Appli Monsters is ticking off a whole generation of Digimon fans for introducing a whole new cast of monsters, but does the whole “What if Yokai Watch was based on mobile phone apps instead of animism?” gimmick really resulting in stories THAT different from any previous series? On a nuts and bolts level, I mean? You can trick out the same basic engine and wheels to be all kinds of radically different vehicles, and it’ll still run the same… I think. I’m really not the person to be making car metaphors.

Okay, so what does that mean for Digimon: Victory? Well, I guess this is technically a bunch spoilers, but the stuff I’ve written for Victory so far does a lot of this whole “playing around with the tropes while still following them” thing. For example: in first few chapters, there isn’t a Gogglehead. I mean, there IS a Gogglehead lead character, but without the actual goggles yet. A pair of goggles are among the various brickabrack that gets sucked into the Digital World along with the kids, but nobody’s wearing them yet because WHO THE CRAP WALKS AROUND WEARING A GIANT PAIR OF GOGGLES ALL THE TIME? More importantly, most shows with a whole team of everyday characters thrust into fantastical situations have that one episode early on where The Leader has to step forward, take charge, and be recognized by the rest of the team as The Leader… which tends to be a bit awkward for the viewer if said leader is already wearing a “THIS MEANS I’M THE MAIN CHARACTER” item of clothing like the Digimon Goggles. Thus, in Victory, the kids have their first encounter with the Bad Guys while still trying to figure out who the Leader is. As nobody has any goggles yet, it’s still kinda sorta up in the air (to anybody who hasn’t already seen my concept art). When that all-important first digivolution and day-saving plan finally happens, it involves a lot of wind-based attacks, so the kid has to put on that pair of goggles to see. Thus, the standard Establish The Team Leader story gets a bit of a facelift, and the character donning her goggles gets to serve as a “crowning” in a meta sense. Oh yeah, “her.” In Victory, the team Gogglehead is a girl. HAH! Take that Thirteenth Doctor! You think you’re so innovative!

And now comes the part where I pat myself on the back for having ideas that vaguely resemble real Digimon projects. Well, for one thing, the Cyber Sleuth games seem to have made the whole idea of a female protagonist a lot less innovative, though I don’t really know enough about those games to be sure. Besides, there were girl Fan Digidestined within the first five minutes of the first episode of Digimon Adventure airing.  It’s not THAT big a deal. What IS a big deal is how Victory’s second half is set in the Human World (ala the Miyotismon arc) and introduces a shady group of government agents investigating Digimon. They seem like a rip-off of Hypnos from Tamers as first, but the BIG SPOILER TWIST is that they’re actually a previous generation of Digidestined (or whatever they’ll be called) who now work for the government. And hey, guess what the most recent batch of Tri episodes revealed about Daigo and Maki? A lot of these “Oh, I totally predicted that!” moments are a real stretch, but that one actually is kind of a big deal… to the point that, if I ever do get Victory made, I just KNOW I’m gonna have to defend myself against charges of ripping off Tri. That’ll be fun.

So there you have it! A comprehensive list of all my various attempts to dream up a new Digimon fan project… excluding the REALLY fanfic-y stuff I did as a more direct part of that Geocities Fan Site. Hmmm….