Digimon: Children of the Fire - Reality

[branchandroot]

There is no doctrine of forms in our philosophy. We were put [so it's said] into our bodies, as fire is put into a pan, to be carried about; but there is no accurate adjustment between the spirit and the organ, much less is the latter the germination of the former. So in regard to other forms men do not believe in any essential dependence of the material world on thought and volition….[but this is false] For we are not firepans and barrows, nor even porters of the fire and torchbearers, but children of the fire, made of it, and only the same divinity transmuted, and a two or three removes, when we know least about it.
–Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Poet

Now, in general, I think Emerson is one of the hardest blow-hards of US literature, and that’s saying something, but this quote seemed to speak to the idea of how digital and real world interact in Digimon.

Bioengineering and Family

As I mentioned at the start of the first page, I see some bioartificing metaphors in here. Particularly the idea that intention has a good deal to do with whether something that is alive will develop benignly or malignly. Or, in fact, develop at all. With Ken, we have examples of both. On the one hand is Chimeramon, a digimon created by more than usually artificial means, solely with an eye to his power. And, of course, that’s exactly what the problem is. Chimeramon is uncontrollable, the fleshed out spirit of hostility and aggression in which he was created. Frankenstein, anyone? On the other hand, there’s Wormmon, who can’t evolve to Adult until Ken gets off his it’s-all-a-game power trip. It’s clear, as the show goes on, that the digimon depend on their human partners for the motive force to evolve. It isn’t until each human realizes and accepts her/his potential for fill-in-the-attribute that the mon have the energy to evolve. This set-up doesn’t actually have much in common with Frankenstein at all. That story is a case of a human trying to break into the powers of nature/god and doing just a little too well, spiritually, and a little to badly aesthetically. This is more the other way around. Chimeramon has no soul, and Ken-as-Kaiser isn’t capable of sharing enough of his soul to let Wormmon evolve.

The biological metaphor stresses investment. If you’re not invested in the beneficent progress of the life dependent on you, as you would be in the wellbeing of your very best friend, development won’t happen or will go catastrophically wrong. The political/familial metaphor is actually fairly similar.

Andrew Tudor designates some useful categories of scare-stories like this: “secure horror” and “paranoid horror” (qtd. in “Panic Sites”, Susan J Napier, Contemporary Japan and Popular Culture, ed. John Whittier Treat). In the first, “the collectivity is threatened, but only from outside, and is ultimately reestablished” (240), while in the second “danger comes not from outside in the form of alien invaders…but from one’s friends, family, even oneself. As Tudor describes it, ‘gone is the sense of an established social and moral order which is both worth defending and capable of defense. Gone too is the assumption that there are legitimate authorities who can demand our cooperation in exchange for their protection’” (248). The cases in point, respectively, are Godzilla and Akira. By these terms, I would call Digimon’s corrupted-human theme secure horror with paranoid tendencies. The collectivity is threatened from within, but also is preserved, and while authority (parents) screw up they also straighten themselves out. Authority is not totally de-legitimized, but I would note that this is one of the few children’s shows I know of that sets forth the concept of reciprocal responsibility on the part of parents and kids. Ken’s parents have to realize their mistakes in pushing both their sons too hard for the sake of their own pride before Ken can return to a more traditional relationship with them. They need to have the same kind of investment in and care for their son as he needs to have for Wormmon. These parallels are striking, to me, because the digimon are never presented as in a parent-child relationship with their human partners. They are freinds, and the digimon often provide words of wisdom that their humans need. Indeed, on the most notable occasion of human priorities dictating digimon priorities, when Garurumon and Greymon get into a fight because of the conflict between Yamato and Taichi, it’s presented as about the worst thing that can happen–as Yamato being taken over by evil and Taichi getting sucked in. If you turn it around, the implication is that parents and children need to have relationships of a certain equality.

I see this as part and parcel of the populist politics that seem to crop up in anime right and left.

I also find it interesting that in Tamers the focus seems to be different. It’s the one-ness of the children and the digimon that is emphasized. Note that it’s Takato’s particularly strong cross-identification with Guilomon, to the extent that Takato feels the blows that Guilomon takes and finds himself vocalizing the attacks that Guilomon makes, that makes his partner digimon so strong. As the show goes on, this extends to the biomerge phenomenon, wherein the digimon reach Ultimate (that is, postPerfect) status only in physical merge with their human partners. This gets us back to collectivity in a big way, emphasizing as it does the power of lending one’s very self to another to accomplish a common goal. At the same time, I would note that it’s the partner who seems more directive (the Tamer) who does the lending. So I think we also have an implicit message here about the nature of public service and leadership. A good leader gives him/herself over completely to those who put his/her will into action.

Frontier, of course, turns the whole thing in a somewhat different direction. The children are the digimon. In Frontier, the message is hitched to the way the group interacts among themselves. While a lot of fans felt that it was a cop-out to spend the last twelve episodes with Takuya and Kouji being the only two who could evolve sufficiently to kick butt, the whole thing was a classic set-up. Junpei even makes it explicit: Takuya and Kouji are the ones who can be the focal point; that does not mean that the other children are not important. Without the support of the others, Takuya and Kouji would be useless. It’s really a very practical moral: when individual strength is not enough, decisions have to be made about who will carry the hope and weight and honor of the collective. This dynamic even shows between Kouji and Takuya when the two of them are in the last fight with Cherubimon. Kouji says that he will be Takuya’s shield, to get him close enough to attack; when Takuya protests such a sacrifice, Kouji points out that as MagnaGarurumon he isn’t equipped to do anything else at this critical point. Kouichi, Izumi, Junpei and Tomoki give up their strength so that Takuya and Kouji will be able to fight effectively, but the flipside of this is that those two give themselves up to the will of the collective.

Reciprocality.

.

Im and Material

The boundary between the material and the non-material is crossed and re-crossed in this show. The immaterial attributes like faith, kindness, courage are translated into something material. They become the digimon’s sustenance. At the same time, the immaterial nature of apparently solid digimon is made graphically clear twice–when Angemon and Wormmon are both destroyed, reconfigured and reborn. In Season 01 Yamato finds that the apparently real digital world is a computer program, but is quickly disabused of his notion that this means the humans are unhurtable; damage will translate back to their real bodies.

The message that what happens inside your head is real is pretty strong here. And, in addition to the biogenetic metaphor, we have something that hardly qualifies as a metaphor, it’s so direct a parallel–the net. The digital world reminds me so much of a MUD it’s alarming. It particularly reminds me of the way people who are very involved in any form of gaming talk about their adventures. It’s always “Well, when the dwarf died we tied a rope around him and used him to check for traps ahead” (the dwarf-player was rather irate, if I recall). I’ve seen this manner of speaking severely throw off people who don’t understand the basis and think that there’s a graphic element involved, or even physical acting out; they tend to be a little wigged out to find it’s all text (or talk). But that’s what makes it alive–everyone participating to create, in their heads, a commonly visualized world.

And just ask anyone who’s ever been the victim of harassment or abuse via the net–what happens in-there-out-here is real.

Digimon makes this point with a sledgehammer. The realization that finally breaks Ken down is that he’s been taking out his hostilities on real creatures. Real defined here not in terms of molecular makeup, but in terms of behavior, feeling and self-awareness.

I think someone among the writers agrees with my In Favor of Productive Debate arguments. Ken and his Kaiser persona remind me forcibly of the way people take personas out on the net and take that demi-anonymity as liscense to act out all their most anti-social tendencies. The subtext of Ken’s anguish at realizing that he hasn’t been acting out in his own private, self-created and un-real world, but rather in a real and public world shared by others that he’s been abusing, is that today’s realms of virtuality require care to navigate. I suspect there’s a message here about the long-standing cliche that it’s all right to read/watch/play out graphic violence (and sexual violence) because it’s cathartic and helps one contain those urges in real life. That’s certainly what Ken thought he was doing. But the consequences were very real.