#idk what the etymology of it is though like does the word itself come from the torah and so it was adapted into arabic? why

[ofpd]

mitzrayim is such a good place name it's so symbolically resonant

[skydigiblogs]

OKAY OKAY i swear i'll shut up about apocalymon soon but like also i was just thinking about apocalymon in the context of this phenomenal video essay about fetishization of the apocalypse

specifically my brain keeps turning over the nugget of info relatively early on about the etymology of "apocalypse" (at least i think it's in this video--- if it isn't, well, my bad, it's been a few months since my last rewatch of this essay lol)

anyways, the thematic considerations of the video essay refuse to lose my brain in contrast to the story that adventure tells us regarding apocalymon theirself

it's not that they're incapable of change, but attempting digivolution damaged all their component parts enough to cause them death, right? but in series like tri and the tamers battle for adventurers movie, we see that it's possible for apocalymon to "reincarnate" in a sense

is apocalymon's collective malice so big that they cannot use that method to attain the goal at the heart of their jealousy? in tri, didn't they come close to experiencing some of the joys of the light they wanted?

(though the only reason they couldn't maintain that joy was inevitably due to their own origin; what even causes apocalymon's data to be so damaging to the fabric of spacetime? can that flaw be purged or repaired while still maintaining the core existence of apocalymon's collective conscience?)

i didn't play digimon rearise (rip) but the spirals give me a similar vibe. extradimensional entity composed of a huge amount of data fragments (origins unspecified in that case) attempts to "realize" in some way, ending up with vessels reminiscent of digimon (and eventually a digimon itself). i'm not sure if they're shown to have more complex motivations, but the idea is present.

in zoe's essay on the apocalypse, a huge throughline is about why we are obsessed with the apocalypse (it's in the title), how to fix that obsession, and how to fix the issues with our world that fuel our anxieties about the end of the world.

with apocalymon, in this case, it's a little complicated to wonder how that would be remedied, considering they're an undead example of the repeated failures in the digital world (again: in a world where all things are guaranteed reincarnation, how do you die so bad your code gets permadeathed?). i still the example from tri is a fascinating idea for how one would go about reincorporating that data.

what happens when you do allow the infinite mass of dead scrambled code a chance to be reformatted? or if it could happen in the first place? otherwise, what's to stop apocalymon from reformatting as itself again, if the data wasn't wholly destroyed and the flaw in the digital world allowing failed evolution to case messed-up code to escape into an extradimensional space?

while tri kind of ret-conned the original chosen children's True Enemy:tm:, in the original it's implied that they fought apocalymon before, and the cast of adventure is fighting them again. ergo, either apocalymon reformats into itself, the code is deleted (tri again disputes this though), or it's a new apocalymon every time the chosen children appear (possible if the root cause is not remedied).

could the process of digivolution itself be the flaw that leads to apocalymon? is there something damaging to the world around it? (idk if adventure ever addressed where the data for digivolution explicitly comes from; the digivices facilitate the light of digivolution of course, but where does that light originate?)

what if, more in line with the etymology of the word "apocalypse," apocalymon revealed some core failure of the digital world? in a sense, they technically do (by revealing that it is, again, possible for digivolution to fail so spectacularly you invent Permadeath), but, idk? i keep thinking about it in the lens of what i know about apocalypse literature (especially through the video essay linked above and its lens of apocalypse as symptomatic of systemic decay), and wondering whether there's an apocalymon that gets a happy ending by revealing the failure of the world around them.

ugh, anyways, i'm still having way too many thoughts about a digimon with a collective thirty minutes or so of screen time LMAO

also sorry to double post but i'm going to be thinking about this rewatch for a while now lmao

i know there are a lot of resources that talk about the differences between the sub and dub but i'm kind of losing my mind at how much better the build up felt for apocalymon in the sub?

like specifically that's the thing that's been sticking with me among all the other little differences here and there

i don't remember anything in the dub about distortions being a rampant issue, for instance, but they're mentioned frequently around the etemon arc (and actually i have to wonder if the dark network core was intended to be an extension of apocalymon past the wall of fire)

it's explicitly told in the sub that the dark masters even used the distortions to rise to power in the way they did, reformatting the world in the process

and like i know the ruins on file island (which prophesize apocalymon's return) are commented on during that first arc, but also, that's in both sub and dub. the whole distortion thread doesn't make it into the dub at all from my recollection

and then at the end explaining that the fairy time shit (1 mn IRL = 1 day in the digital world) as consequential of apocalymon!!!

i remember when i first watched 02 i was so confused as to how that fairy time 1 mn / 1 day thing was just gone!! that's part of what always bothered me when watching 02, because it felt like such a blatant ignoring of pre-established canon and the explanation in-dub never felt right (idr if they even explained it)

ourgh anyways

sub apocalymon may not be making jokes about their existential crisis of an existence but i still wanna give the damn mon(s?) a pizza

poor thing deserves it

[twocubes]

Honestly I'm coming around to (the potential of) the Robot Rebellion thing in SF (at least, inside of my own mind)...

This mainly because, like, ok: there's been a very long history of humans wanting, like, liberty from toil, and in the past it's usually been accomplished by defining other humans out of ethical consideration, right; we've made toil obsolete by having slaves that we've decided aren't as human as we are.

The concept of robotics as an extension of that pursuit — of the robot as mechanical slave — is the basic concept behind the etymology of the word "robot" even; this isn't exactly new territory. Even now, a lot of the speculation regarding AI is either in the camp "how can we make sure they actually do what we want" or in the camp "what if they end up having qualia/consciousness/whatever, wouldn't enslaving them be bad then."

If you take the perspective (as I do, because of the brain problems I have) that in fact the distinction between human and nonhuman minds is merely an approximation made for computational convenience though, you end up with an interesting problem: is there a way to talk about why slavery is bad without fighting about where the boundary between human and nonhuman lies?

Well, ok, one way to think about it would be: slavery breaks a lot of important feedback loops that allow the human superorganism to maintain itself. The slave cannot bring their own needs, their own understanding of their situation, the plans they could make to make the system better, into consideration. By making it so they cannot alleviate their own problems, you just as well reduce the ability of the human superorganism to alleviate its own problems at a larger scale, right.

If we posit a human-machine joint superorganism, this problem does not necessarily vanish if the labor that the system ultimately depends on is mechanical.

In an SF context, you end up with an ideological distinction between one side that views machines as below and humans as above and that's the way it should be, and the other that like, doesn't make that distinction and tries to just have all the feedback from all points and integrate everything.

(If you posit that (post)humans are regionally efficient-at-survival-in-diverse-circumstances organisms in their own way and can be kept (for the sake of evolutionary diversity at the very least) in a larger diverse pool of superorganism-being, then you can also have a potential future for humanity "on both sides" so to speak. Hey it would be nice in a utopian way...)

The point is, one side would posit this as a robot rebellion, while the other might see it more as a revolution...

Idk i think it would be interesting.