#maybe on a rewatch ill do a proper liveblog and like review

[kideternity]

FINISHED DIGIMON TAMERS. I liked it! I don’t think it’s perfect / without flaws though. Nothing is. But I enjoyed it. I'm glad I finally decided to watch it. It was fun!

Under the cut will be I suppose my more full length review

Things I really liked about tamers:

- Really cool digimon. Ive very much come around to the designs and lore etc of the digimon in tamers, they’re really nicely designed and have really interesting personalities or lore behind them

- I liked how it tackled family and family dynamics better than savers did. Savers had a very strange like, “biological blood relations are The Most Important Thing Above All” attitude about it which I hated, but Tamers was much more nuanced about the family relationships and I liked seeing the more unconventional family structures, like Ruki's mom being divorced

- Generally I love how global it felt. I loved how there was so many different characters from all over the world, and how the existence of people and countries outside of Japan genuinely mattered and influenced the plot

- The world-building for the digimon is REALLY really cool especially the lore about how digimon and the digital world was created. I love seeing it actually get discussed and explored how things work, whats the correlation between humans and the digital world, etc. like how the devas and holy beasts were inspired by irl folklore and mythology and cultural beliefs

Things I didn’t like about tamers or had gripes with-

- To me, the biggest flaw of tamers was whatever the hell sort of theme or messaging it had going on. I know it’s supposed to be trying to say something about morality and power and violence, but all of that comes across extremely muddled or aimless- do you want to leave it open to interpretation, or do you have a specific stance you want me to take? It just felt like saying words for the sake of saying words. And along the way, I felt like the series just dropped all of it anyways to follow other themes commonly found in digimon media, like the power of friendship between digimon and humans or humans coming to respect digimon as real beings with autonomy. They have this whole scene about how depending on perspective, the deva are good or evil, but then the show literally pegs the majority of them as inherently evil anyways and kills them???? It’s frustrating. Only really Beelzemon sort of lives up to the idea of moral ambiguity / is given any sort of character arc regarding morality and power, but one well written character can’t save all of it.

-Connected to the above, generally, I didn’t like the villains of Tamers nearly as much as I did the villains in Savers. I just made a post about this so TDLR: The D-Reaper is a terrifying eldritch abomination, sure, but they’re an extremely one note and uninteresting villain who again, is portrayed as objectively evil and must be eradicated / destroyed. They’re not very compelling and they mostly really get any sort of narrative weight due to their connection with Juri, and how they connect to their character and her trauma, and thus, how it affects everyone else and their attempts to save her. Idk. Idk.

- I didn’t like how Tamers was generally more about romance or hornier than Savers was. It was really weird to me. I understand that kids think about love and stuff too, obviously, but most of its inclusion was just weird to me and made me uncomfortable in certain episodes. I Don’t Want To Think About The Love Lives Of 10 Year Olds. I Am Twenty One Years Old.

General other comments-

- Plot and main + side Characters were generally pretty good! I liked all of the characters in Tamers generally, though I will say that I don’t feel as though you get to connect with the characters in tamers as much as say Savers. It might be due to the much larger cast, or the fact I'm not like, you know 10, but I didn’t really get to know the characters I feel as well as I got to know the savers characters. And generally, I felt some of the character writing was very weak- Ryo and Cyberdramon were the only characters I genuinely didn’t like, because they felt overall useless and meaningless to the narrative as a whole- they don’t really add anything outside of deus ex machina style Actions That Progress The Plot. #Justice For Hirokazu for fucking real. I liked Leomon, but he also very much felt like a filler character designed just to die. Sorry.

- The tonal dissonance, especially when it would play the songs, was a mixed bag. Sometimes it was very funny and endearing and cute to watch the characters go from a harrowing scene to a much more lighthearted setting, and other times, particularly near the end of the series, it just drove me absolutely insane how it felt as though Nobody Was Acting Like A Real Person and taking this Seriously Enough. The music was good, but most of the times whenever it would start playing it would just completely take me out of the scene, especially the more serious ones.

I'm sure I'm forgetting other stuff I've wanted to say 😭 this isn’t really meant to be a serious review or anything. Again at the end of the day I don’t regret watching tamers, i'm really happy I did. But I think even for kids shows, it’s important to keep a critical eye, you know? To not be blinded by nostalgia. Idk. Idk.