#gesomon

DigiMonday - DAGOMON (aka Dragomon)

(Perfect Level/Virus Attribute/Aquatic beast Man Type)

As anyone with even the slightest familiarity with the work of famed American horror writer and noted air conditioner fearer H.P Lovecraft will no doubt notice, Dagomon's design is based heavily on that of easily Lovecraft's most famous creation, Cthulhu. First described in 1928 in the short story "The Call of Cthulhu" (although interestingly the big man himself never actually makes an in-person appearance in his debut story) and apparently intended to be pronounced "koh-luhh-looh", Cthulhu is an enormous, unfathomably old being described as being vaguely humanoid in shape but with scaly green skin and features of both an octopus and a dragon. Like the other "Great Old Ones" who appeared both in Lovecraft's other works and in many later works by other authors inspired by Lovecraft in the form of "The Cthulhu Mythos", Cthulhu was said to have originated in distant space but have been lying in a deep sleep on earth (in his case on an undocumented island surrounded by a twisted, geometrically impossible city called R'lyeh,) with the story ending with the revelation that everyone's favourite mollusc-headed monster man had been awoken and was now lurking somewhere in the eastern pacific ocean while his legions of worshipers prepare to hunt the story's point-of-view character down.

(A statue of Cthulhu as drawn by Lovecraft, image source here. What a specimen...)

While Dagomon's design is clearly heavily Cthulhu-inspired, it also features a few interesting little pieces of religious imagery; the golden bands around its right leg (or, like, right leg-shaped mass of tentacles) appear to be holy rings (little trinkets that appear on a variety of Digis associated with goodness and holiness, and which in the lore(tm) are apparently indicative that a Digimon carries "holy data",) while the necklace of beads around its neck (described as a rosary in its official description) appears to be based on a mala, a type of prayer beads used as tools of worship in certain Hindu Buddhist, Sikh, Jain, Muslim and Christian rituals. Dagomon's official description calls it an "undersea priest", and its title combined with the religious imagery in its design may link to consistent idea in the Cthulhu Mythos that many of the Great Old Ones are worship for their terrible power. The generous sprinkling of worship-related imagery in Dagomon's design may also be an allusion to the origin of its name; first alluded to in a 1919 short story of the same name (pre-dating Call of Cthulhu) and later being fleshed out in 1936's The Shadow over Innsmouth, (Lovecraft's first published book,) Dagon (or Father Dagon, if you're one of his many fishy followers) is another ancient aquatic being and debatably another Great Old One worshipped by a species of fish-like humanoids called The Deep Ones, alongside Cthulhu and a third ancient being, Mother Hydra.

(A doodle from the Digital Monster Artbook Ver. Pendulum of a Dagomon attending to its undersea religious duties (possibly referencing the real-world Abhayamuda pose) while also threatening to clobber a disrespectful Octomon.)

Dagomon debuted in 1998 in the second version of the Digimon Pendulum VPet, "Deep Savers" (which featured various marine-themed Digimon.) Since then its appeared in several pieces of Digimon media (usually depicted as an extremely powerful antagonist,) but in my mind the most interesting Dagomon appearance to date is in the episodic horror-themed anime series Digimon Ghost Game (think Scooby Doo but with Digimon,) where the episode "The Call" takes heavy inspiration from both The Call of Cthulhu and The Shadow over Innsmouth (featuring a Dagomon luring humans towards the ocean and turning them into Deep One-style fish people to worship it.) Perhaps the strangest Dagomon appearance was a total nonsequiter of an appearence in the very much non-episodic Digimon Adventure 02's "The Call of Dagomon", which also referenced The Shadows over Innsmouth and spent the entire episode building up to shot of a Dagomon rising from the ocean in the last few minutes of the episode...only to never address the events of the episode again, apparently as the result of an arc that would have heavily featured Dagomon being cancelled. Oops.

Favourite Dagomon Art: This image from the Digital Monster Artbook Ver. Pendulum, showing a Dagomon and a MarineDevimon feuding over who gets to be the definitive horror of the deep while an Octomon and a Gesomon goad them on.