#adventure02

I know that 02 isn’t a popular season in the overall fandom, and I can understand the arguments why (except the irrational hatred for Daisuke/Davis). But for whatever reason, I really latched on to this show and group of characters as a kid. I was going through a really difficult time family-wise at this point in my life, and seeing a show that placed such strong emphasis on healthy, supportive relationships and bonds meant a lot to me. More than that, it was the first time that I had seen an example of someone going through a lot of the same struggles that I was, as a child genius who had also conquered a parallel digital universe and enslaved its inhabitants , as a kid who also came from a deeply neglectful, perfectionistic, dysfunctional family and displayed a lot of the same unhealthy coping mechanisms to go along with it (hyper-productivity, identity erasure, self-isolation, distrust, family love/hate confusion … ). I couldn’t identify these connections at the time exactly, but just seeing another kid who was struggling with some pretty serious stuff on TV, just like me, was very comforting, even though it was sad. Ken was sad, and I was sad, and we were sad for sort of the same reasons, but Daisuke, Miyako, Hikari, Takeru, Iori and Wormmon reached out and loved him in their own way, and maybe I could find that kind of love, too.