#digigallery

Dear Tumblr,

If you watched the Digimon Con 2022 livestream a few weeks ago, you might remember a Digimon themed website getting mentioned a few times during it called Digimon Partners. There was some exclusive Digimon Con merchandise for sale on the website's store, but it sold out pretty quickly, leading to me and likely many others not giving it much thought. They didn't do a great job at explaining what the website was or why people should visit it beyond the store it has, but this video by Based DIGIMON piqued my interest in it and led to me creating an account there. While he has some criticisms regarding the site that I agree with, I think it's worth checking out if you're a Digimon fan.

Digimon Partners is an official forum for Digimon fans across the world to connect together through. It was created in the hopes of bringing all Digimon fans together in one place, making the process of delivering news and selling merchandise to fans easier. It was originally intended only for Digimon fans in Japan, but the website can now be displayed in English, making it possible for English speaking fans to join the community. The Community page of the website features five tabs, each with their own content to browse. Home is pretty self explanatory, but I'll briefly go over My Page, the DP Shop, and the other four tabs to give you an idea of what to expect while browsing Digimon Partners.

The first thing you'll want to do when checking out Digimon Partners is to make an account. It's pretty easy to do, but you'll want to make note of the Digimon Shindan quiz. It's a short personality quiz with four questions. After you finish the quiz, your account will be created. You'll be assigned a partner Digimon based on your answers, but you can change this partner Digimon at any time by retaking the quiz later. With your account created, you'll be given a Membership card, located under the My Page tab. It's basically your profile that other users will see. You can edit your bio, profile picture and retake the Shindan quiz here. To the left of My Page you'll find the DP Shop. This is an official online Digimon shop for fans to buy the latest merchandise, similar to the Pokémon Center online store for Pokémon fans. I'm not sure how purchasing items here would work for westerners like myself, as I believe everything for sale is sold in yen. With the shop currently down for maintenance though, there isn't any way of knowing for now. I might do another post regarding the shop in the future if I buy anything from it, but the bulk of Digimon Partners at the moment is the Community page, which I'll go over now.

The first tab in the Community section of Digimon Partners is DigiTalk, the conversational side of Digimon Partners. Here, users can write their own posts and attach images to them for others to see, and other users can leave comments and hearts on them. Users can also leave tags on their posts and can search for posts via tags listed at the top of the page, which I really like. It helps narrow the content exclusively to what you'd like to see. There's also a search bar if you're looking for a post with a specific word or phrase. DigiTalk has a bit of a public forum vibe to it, similar to news feeds on other social media platforms. Occassionally, there will be official posts from the Digimon Partners staff account, such as this one below. It asks users which partner Digimon they have. These are used to spur conversations between users and to help keep DigiTalk active. I find myself scrolling through DigiTalk every once in a while just to see what the Digimon community is saying.

DigiTsushin is next, and this part of the website is the main draw for most Digimon fans. Official news regarding new merchandise, promotions, and events is posted here by the Digimon Partners staff account. Similar to DigiTalk, posts here are catagorized by tags, and you can narrow which news posts you'd like to see by the dropdown menu at the top of the page. Just like DigiTalk posts, you can leave comments and hearts on these as well. It's very convenient having all the latest Digimon news in a single place, but you can get this news elsewhere on places like Twitter and YouTube. It's similar to DigiTalk in that regard, as it doesn't do much to stand out from other social media websites on the internet. That being said though, I still check it daily.

The DigiGallery tab is filled to the brim with fantastic community created artwork! It's a place for Digimon fans to share their Digimon artwork with the rest of the community. Just like other posts on the website, comments and hearts can be left/given to the artist. I really like the idea of having a dedicated page for Digimon fan art, and I think more franchises should do something similar for their fans. DigiTalk doesn't offer much you couldn't already get from a Digimon Discord/Facebook group, but DigiGallery is a lot more unique, even if other places to host digital art like DeviantArt exist. I find myself checking it daily along with DigiTsushin. Here are a few of the submissions I saw on DigiGallery that I really like from an artist known as Smacky! #1 #2

The last Community tab is another neat idea, called Partners' Projects. Here, you can vote on polls to decide what new Digimon products in a particular line will be made! For example, a new product line known as Digidigi Otedama (Digimon beanbag plushes) was announced here recently. Fans casting votes on a poll determined what Digimon would be included in the product line! The most recent poll, "Main characters that have not yet been made" got a lot of attention. After the votes were counted, the top four Digimon in the poll were shown in a new post. They will be part of the Digidigi Otedama line on the DP Shop soon! I really like the interactivity with fans that Partners' Projects offers. Being able to weigh in on the future of Digimon's merchandise is a really cool level of fan interaction I haven't seen anywhere else.

Overall, Digimon Partners is a pretty cool website for Digimon fans, but it lacks enough uniqueness from other social media platforms to make using it regularly enticing. The site's coverage at Digimon Con really didn't help matters either. There is more here on offer than what was shown there, and I'm glad I saw Based DIGIMON's video about it. That being said, I agree with a lot of the things stated in his video. I think there are some great ideas here, like the DigiGallery and Partners' Projects that increase fan interaction with the franchise more than I've seen elsewhere. However, Twitter pages and YouTube channels repost the news from DigiTsushin, and DigiTalk offers very little that platforms like Facebook and Discord don't offer already with their social features. Most of my reasons for logging into Digimon Partners daily are because I don't use most of these other platforms, so it's my one of my only places to get Digimon news from or to talk with fellow fans.

There's a need for the website to be more enticing to people who love Digimon and can also get the information/experiences it currently provides elsewhere. Based DIGIMON had some good ideas for solving this issue, such as having Digimon Partners do raffles, giveaways, have early access to content or offer a monthly gift box subscription service like LootCrate to help incentivize users to return to the site more frequently. In its current form, the site is still worth logging onto and browsing if you're a big fan of Digimon. For now, it's a nice place to hang out with other fans and discuss things, share art and vote on new merch. However, I think it has a lot of potential that isn't being tapped into at the moment. I hope that will change in the future.

I hope you liked this week's post! With Ghost Game still in limbo, it's hard to say when my normal style of posts will return. I'll continue making weekly posts as usual though, so stay tuned for next weekend's post! I've thought about writing something unrelated to Digimon for a change. I'm new to Digimon personally, so I don't have a lot to write about regarding Digimon outside of Ghost Game yet. I'm currently watching Digimon Adventure while Ghost Game is "ghosting" us all, and I've been really enjoying it so far! I don't feel comfortable writing about it until I've watched it all though. I'll give my thoughts on Digimon Adventure in a future post when I finish watching the final episode. Other than that, if you'd like to follow me on Digimon Partners, feel free! I don't really post anything on there, but I do browse/heart/leave comments on posts that other people make. Have a good rest of your weekend, and if I hear anything about Ghost Game, I'll keep you posted. I'll see you next week!