Arp's Digital Domain

Recently we had Tomoro reinforcing the dream of a world where humans and Digimon can co-exist, with a very sentimental story building off that while delving deeper into this whole Gift operation. Clearly they’re building to Gift exploiting that sentiment for their own purposes and kicking off this arc proper, right? No! That would be silly! We need to ruin the little momentum we had to waste even more time catching up on what Tactics are up to… even though Hotaruko and Granit were implied to be in a stable situation and Raito’s off doing Raito things that can drop him back into the story literally whenever he’s needed. It’s bad enough sidetracking an arc that’s already sputtering, but we don’t even accomplish all that much. We find Hotaruko and Granit are indeed in a stable situation, just maybe not where we expected. It’s a terrible time for the show to stop what it was doing to give us a beach episode… especially when the only fanservice was Tomoro and Raito being idiots as usual.

All of this would be far more forgivable if the inevitable threat of the week had literally anything to do with current events. Give them a reason to fight Meto and Kanon. Throw another wrinkle into what we know about Gift. Put Rose in a swimsuit! Anything would be better than a couple Tactics alumni trying to get the band back together by taking out the team that ruined the operation. A team, incidentally, that were lower ranked than Raito’s… who let’s not forget weren’t even good at their jobs! Their ability to take out enemies was pretty damn impressive, but nobody cares about the threat of a rebuilt Tactics because nobody took them seriously to begin with. All Team One accomplished was taking out two of the three returning characters that should be getting the attention and giving us more of Tomoro and Gekkomon fighting.

Should we be happy to learn that Hotaruko and Granit are getting by peacefully working a small seaside grill? Sure. But if it was so important that we know that, there are better ways to pass that along than wasting a whole episode. The focus on Raito and his actions is clearly more essential, particularly his new association with Kaito… a character that actually does need to get back into the fold. But what’s actually changed about him? Are we supposed to applaud the fact that he only pretended to leave everyone in the lurch? He’s still an ass about it. We can celebrate the knowledge that some characters haven’t been forgotten and will presumably be involved in the story down the road, but with the lack of anything else of value, this episode could have been an email.

One of Beatbreak’s secret weapons has been featuring a lot of adults as supporting characters. We got plenty out of the likes of Kyo and Klay even before learning about their pasts, but even the presence of Maki, Yosshi, and Kawarazaki fill out the world and make it feel like something more than children having an adventure while the hapless grownups twiddle their thumbs. The infrastructure may be a dumpster fire, but these characters are our best links to it. Every so often we do get the full stories, and it’s nice to delve into a character’s history and get something that isn’t about a five year old. However old Maki is in this flashback (we’re not asking the lady her age), she’s put a life together, already had a history with Digimon, and when Panjyamon shows up on her doorstop the reaction is something beyond “ooh, cool/cute/smokeshow monster, what adventures await us?” There’s instant melancholy, a feeling of inevitable heartbreak that she still allows to manifest and fall victim to. It also helps the episode build out the world in a way that’s been frustratingly lacking so far this arc.

The worldbuilding is important considering how little Glowing Dawn actually does here. They’re present, but it’s a pretty conventional bounty for all of them. The value comes in seeing how chaotic human-Digimon relations were before the Cleaner system, and how that introduced its own host of problems. We also see Maki’s early interactions with Kawarazaki, how she came by her life goals, and how that led her to Kyo. We’ll see how necessary it was that these blanks were filled in, but for now it’s nice that they are, and through a story with some emotional weight. It also ties directly to these Gift people, whom Beatbreak kinda forgot about for a few episodes despite them literally providing the name of the arc. We get better insight into how they operate, who they target, and the vast number of agents they have mindlessly offering their surveillance and battle support. The sheer number of agents they have and their lack of, well, agency, paint the organization in a different light than what we saw from Riku and Jokermon’s deranged-yet-sentient owner.

Having that many agents and presumably plenty of Digimon at their disposal does make for a clumsy ending, however. Yes, Fumamon’s taken care of, but that alone shouldn’t make Gift give up on eliminating Maki. They still know where she works! The only indication that Gift dropped the pursuit is in Miharu’s observation of Tomoro. Her interest in him as a Gift ally was telegraphed in the Jokermon affair and was a pretty obvious direction for the arc to go. It’s necessary for the overall story and his act of stopping Maki from killing the defeated Fumamon make it appropriate for this episode. It and Maki’s talk about her dreams tie in nicely with Tomoro reminding us of his in the previous episode. But for all the mechanical sense it makes, it’s a weird resolution for a mob to be threatening someone’s life and then just… quietly stop over vague aspirations about somebody else.

You let Leomon live for one season and suddenly “Algomon doing Algomon things” takes over as a recurring Digimon trope. We all know the drill by now: Algomon and its various levels shut down a town with its electricity-harnessing power and its plant-type powers make it a challenge to stop. It may or may not be intrinsically linked to a little girl. The twist this time is that Algomon actually cares about her. That’s important in an episode that covers even more familiar Beatbreak ground: Tomoro stumbling into the bounty of the week, Hitomi delivering the plot and disappearing, a Five Star’s team of minions making a big show while utterly failing at their jobs… as dramatic as the situation presents, it can’t shake the prevailing feeling that all this has been done before.

All this precedent makes the fight hard to watch. It’s hard not to see Tomoro fighting Algomon and think about Adventure: 2020, not only a season unmatched in action sequences, but whose Algomon fight was so strong it tricked us into thinking Adventure: 2020 would actually be good! And that sequence evoked Our War Game, one of the best fights in old-school Digimon. No matter what we get here, odds are the action won’t look good by comparison. So what we’re left to appreciate are the particulars of this specific crisis. It stems from a girl bullied into isolation who can only stand going outside because of her Digimon. Algomon wants her to feel safe and protected, and its desire to manifest that leads to… well, you know the drill by now. The sad appendix to this already tragic tale is that Algomon’s the perfect Digimon to tell it. Its exponential growth starts to consume the girl it’s trying to protect, and it only relents when Tomoro points that out and convinces Chihiro to let go. Tomoro asking for mutual heartbreak for the greater good? We can work with that.

It’s a reminder of what Tomoro (all of Glowing Dawn really) is actually fighting for. With all the uphill fights against seemingly all of society, it’s easy to frame all of this as a struggle to carve out a little piece of existence against all the madness in the world. But they could probably manage that if they’d just kept quiet and created a little commune at Nirinso or something. No, they’re in this for world change, and Chihiro’s struggle reinforces that to both us and Tomoro. As we venture into the thick of whatever Rose or GIFT has in store for them, it’s good to keep in mind. Especially after that was Hiro’s exact dream in Ghost Game, and he only surprised everybody by going and doing it out of nowhere at the very last second.

We haven’t dove into Makoto’s backstory much, but we also haven’t needed to. He’s the product of a rich family that won’t tolerate a Digimon, so he’s got a Digimon instead of the family. It simple enough to understand, and while potentially devastating for a child to go through, Makoto carries himself reasonably well. He stands by Chiropmon and found a welcoming home in Glowing Dawn. As it turns out, stopping to properly attend the tale adds some details that not only color things a little better, but also makes the whole affair so much worse. So much that amidst the surface-level signs of Seiji reaching out to mend things and welcome Makoto back to the family, Makoto doesn’t buy it for a second. For good reason, it turns out, because Seiji’s actions here allow Makoto to instantly lap Touma, Kiriha, and Hiro to claim ownership of the worst dad in Digimon! Congratulations!

What adds so much heartbreak to Makoto’s story is the addition of choice. If things had just happened to him, the family just yeeting him out the door for owning a Digimon, that lack of control makes it easier to shrug off. This whole time we’ve been operating with that assumption regarding Makoto and his refusal to dwell on it. But no, this is a world where there’s a Ministry more than happy to eliminate Digimon for the sake of powerful families. Seiji wouldn’t just abandon his son when he can just as easily throw Chiropmon into the wood chipper. Worse, he forces Makoto to either agree to it or abandon his family (surely assuming that there’s no way a child would abandon his family). Makoto was never forced to leave, so he’s been living with that choice this entire time. As it turns out, this doesn’t bother Makoto much since his family seems to have more generational pressure than the Takenouchi, Asuka, and Madrigal families combined. He gets that he’s better off without it. But it does a number on Chiropmon, who sees himself as the thing keeping a boy and his father apart, and how things would be so much more normal if he weren’t around. It only takes an uncharacteristically crude outburst from Makoto to reassure him that normal isn’t the ideal. This renunciation of his family triggers an evolution to the Batplane. Because to Makoto, his parents might as well be dead.

Complicating things further is that Seiji had a spare Makoto lying around, twin brother Tsukasa cruelly aware of his status as the backup. This put him in full Ken Ichijouji mode, even going so far as to rat out Chiropmon to daddy. At least Ken only believed he took his brother out of the picture. So not only does he inherit all the pressure Makoto shed, he gets to watch Seiji go to extreme lengths to bring Makoto back. At some point it dawns on him that maybe Makoto’s not the bad guy here. He wisely waits until after his act of redemption to confess and apologize for his earlier betrayal, so Makoto instantly forgives him. While things worked out fine for Makoto, you just have to hope it gets better for Tsukasa.

Oh, and the technical villain of the piece is part of GIFT. That’s literally the only reason this belongs in this arc and not the interlude. Remember that next time you watch the cruise ship episode.