Anyways, I don’t know who introduced me to Spaghetti Eddy’s. It wasn’t my parents, I can say that for sure. A friend from high school perhaps? Or maybe a family friend? I don’t know, I couldn’t tell you. But I can tell you about a notable time I went there and shared the experience with others.

It was my first year in college, I must have been in my very early twenties at the time. I was in school for Video Game Design, something I wouldn’t end up pursuing or finishing schooling for due to a multitude of reasons. However, for that time I held onto hope I could complete it and befriend my classmates. I had left high school in a burning ball of drama that was happening more around me than to me, having less to do with my perspectives or actions and more to do with others fighting around me, and was anxious to make friends with other people.

So, in our campus situated in the midst of downtown London, Ontario, I suggested after class one day that I, a local, show a few other students some of the best places to eat out around the campus building. A handful of students agreed, one citing he just deposited a cheque and wanted to spend it, and we marched to Dundas and Richmond and then down Richmond a ways to Spaghetti Eddy’s.

Spaghetti Eddy’s is a somewhat precariously placed restaurant, its entrance situated down a narrow alleyway lit by hanging lightbulbs and then through a large wood door into a basement restaurant. Most people, upon seeing the entrance, raise an eyebrow at the location at least, more likely make a crack about it or show concern. In this case, several jokes were made by my fellow students about getting mugged in an alley before the door opened.

Once the door opens though, suspicion gives way to confusion, and then awe. See, the door to the establishment is held closed by a leather boot hanging from a pulley system, and once you notice the boot you will almost immediately notice how many other objects are hanging from or situated in the ceiling of Spaghetti Eddy’s. Bikes, old cameras, lamps, a booth that one might play a demo playstation at in a department store circa 2001 or earlier, there is no end to the wonders hidden in the ceiling of Spaghetti Eddy’s.

Once your prompted to look down from there however, you will see rustic wooden booths and breadbaskets also hanging from pulley systems. At this point a waitress calls for you to seat yourself, and you’ll sit down and notice each booths wall is covered in names and dates scrawled by various visitors over the years. When I asked the server about this last time I was there, she simply replied with a shrug and told me people like to do that.

the atmosphere is undeniably rugged, but also very whimsical. Theres something about it that feels like a magical place hidden away from the rest of the world, something about the cluttered rafters and wooden booths that feels otherworldly and yet, very warm and inviting. At least, thats what my fellow students told me at the time, in so many words.

Spaghetti Eddy’s, as its name suggests, specializes in pasta. They have chili and nachos and other such foods on the menus, which are all situated inside laminated record covers of records from the 80s and 70s, but you aren’t here for that. You want that Spagheddy.

Alright, I lie, my standard order is not Spagheddy because I personally dislike tomato based sauces. I get the seafood fettuccini. Alfredo sauce, (likely imitation) crab, and shrimp. Yum.

At the point where your pasta arrives is when you start to understand the point of Spaghetti Eddy’s, if there is one. The bowl is almost the size of a mixing bowl with the dinner portion, there is no skimping on sauce or toppings, it is a giant portion of pasta you receive here. And its…. Not actually all that spectacular. Not to say its bad, its not at all bad, its great to be honest, but its not going to blow you away like the atmosphere will. Tastes good, is contenting, and a huge portion, but good, not amazing. Its got a sort of loveable mediocrity to it. A comforting feeling of not breaking any boundaries but still being good enough to come back for when your in the mood or area.

So, my fellow students were pretty thoroughly impressed with the large portions and warm atmosphere, as you do when your a hungry broke 20something just learning that eating out costs more than cooking, but there was one small problem. See, there are many add ons you can get to your pasta at Spaghetti Eddy’s. I don’t usually unless its a special occasion, but you can get extra cheese, meat, vegetables and what have you, and the guy who deposited his cheque recently was surprised to learn add ons do add up to a pretty expensive pasta. His cheque also hadn’t processed yet. Poor guy.

So, I was nice enough to foot the bill for him, and he not only paid me back, but also bought me coffee every time we had class together for the rest of my time in the Video Game Design program. I appreciated it a lot, and when I was struggling in our drawing and character design classes he also taught me techniques for sketching that I have recently passed on to my roommate in his pursuit of learning to draw better. 

I haven’t kept touch with anyone from that program, but going to Spaghetti Eddy’s that day taught me that it was a fantastic way to introduce people to London as a place. Its a hidden gem that balances a comforting mediocrity with a strange and unique atmosphere if your willing to go digging for it. It really is the true essence of London, Ontario at its best.

Since then I’ve made it a tradition to take long distance friends to Spaghetti Eddy’s every time they come here for the first time. It’s a good introduction to the vibe, and when Other London Volume 2 came out, we had a party of about eight or nine people crammed in there. It was fantastic and lively, I’ll never forget it.

So, if you’re in downtown London and any of this appeals to you, check out Spaghetti Eddy’s. It’s a London staple for a reason, I suppose.

And, as a side note, if you need to take home leftovers, which you probably will because man thats a lot of pasta, don’t carry them around downtown with you in a duffle bag. My roommate learned that the hard way his first time there, his Spagheddy exploded all over his bag in the middle of Museum London, it wasn’t good.

Frozen is a movie that somewhat pains me to look back on, as while it is one of the most accurate and thoughtful portrayals of what growing up with a mood or panic disorder is like, allegorically through Elsa’s powers, it is also one of the most over marketed films on the planet and not an especially interesting story otherwise. I personally have been tired of ‘subversive’ fairy tales for most of my life, after seeing Sondheim’s Into the Woods in a Stratford theatre as a kid and determining that was the best it was probably going to get.

However, when Frozen came out, something came up that was a surprise to me, and my friends of the time. It seemed strange, because I’ve always held an interest in folklore, fairy tales, and mythology, and thought I knew those subjects as well as I could in my teenaged arrogance, but for some ungodly reason before the debut of Frozen I had never heard of the Snow Queen before.

This was a true fact! That particular Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale was unknown to me. I could tell you all sorts of odd and obscure stories I had picked up from around the globe, but I had never heard of the Snow Queen. Not to say Frozen is an accurate adaptation of the Snow Queen, it certainly isn’t, but it is at least loosely inspired by it, so it struck me at the time I had never heard of it.

Now, it turned out this was because my mother really hated the Snow Queen. She found it a kind of freaky and upsetting fairy tale when she was a kid, and its not like she actively tried to keep it away from me, but it never came up as a result of her dislike of it at the age where mothers ought to be sharing fairy tales with their children.

But this is how, many years later, I ended up having to do a little bit of prep work to read the webcomic Demon’s Mirror by Harry Bogosian.

Demon’s Mirror is an adaptation of the Snow Queen story, and probably a more accurate one than Frozen but it also goes off track a bit by keeping a lot of the side characters around for more of the story and being set in the same universe as Bogosian’s other work, A Better Place. We’ll get to that.

When I discovered Demon’s Mirror, it had started updating daily on a website connected to the webcomic publishing collective Hiveworks, in preparation for the release of its less-Snow Queen oriented sequel, Angel’s Orchard. For those who don’t know, Hiveworks comics all have a little bar on their website that links to other Hiveworks comics, so you can easily flip between them. I discovered Demon’s Mirror by chance this way, and like I always do, checked the comics “About” section before reading the comic.

in said “About” section, I discovered the comic was an adaptation of the Snow Queen and instantly thought, well, thats no good. I still don’t know anything about the Snow Queen, it’s no like Frozen taught me much of anything about the original Fairy Tale and it had been almost a decade since I read up on it for Frozen.

So, to better understand what I was getting into, before reading Demon’s Mirror, I went off and read the Snow Queen. Gonna agree with my mom here, thats a kind of creepy fairy tale. I understand why as someone with very thick glasses she would be kind of squicked by the concept of magic glass getting in your eyes to do horrible things to your perception of the world.

So after reading the Snow Queen, I sat down to read Demon’s Mirror… only to discover I was still missing something to get the full context here. See, each page of the comic has some cryptic and often funny lore notes in the description of the post. At the beginning of th comic, those start off talking about God, and a brother, and… what? How is this relevant to the Snow Queen? Well, it isn’t. This is information relevant to A Better Place, the creator of Demon’s Mirror’s other comic that acts as a prequel to Demon’s Mirror and explains how its world came to be the very strange way it is. 

Now, It’s not that Demon’s Mirror doesn’t stand on its own fine, it certainly does, but when people in the comments keep talking about someone named “Hannah” who clearly isn’t in this comic, you start to wonder what your missing.

So, I tracked down and read A Better Place. And wow, I’m glad I did, because it was extremely good. The entire concept behind it is basically that a young girl gains god like powers and takes over the world, remaking it how she thinks things should be and becoming the world’s god. The whole thing is thematically about the concept that nobody knows whats best for the world and everyone in it, and that trying to make it a better place (har har) by force will never succeed, but its peppered with bombastic action, clever character design, and worldbuilding that never ceases to be as cool as it is unsettling. In a lot of ways, it reminds me of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, with how it balances its themes with its over the top action and visuals, although it is significantly more cynical a story.

But, by this point I will have read a fairy tale and a whole comic to read Demon’s Mirror. I’m sure your wondering, how’s it then? Is Demon’s Mirror good?

Yeah its good. I like it. It doesn’t quite have the philosophical backbone I loved from A Better Place, but I liked it enough to support the artist on patreon so I could read early updates of its sequel for a good long while before my finances changed and I had to cut a bunch of patreon subs I had to do some other stuff that needed doing.

I’d highly recommend all the mentioned webcomics here if you like philosophy, over the top action, and kind of grim worldbuilding. I’m just amused I ended up reading so much background just to read one comic, because I probably didn’t need to.

And he doubles over laughing.

Just, howling with laughter in the snow at this entire image.

And he stops, grinning.

And then points at me and starts laughing again.

              The night before the day my grandpa passed away earlier this year, I had a dream.

              In this dream, my mother and I were stopped at a convenience store/fast food joint on the side of the highway, my dad still in the car in the parking lot as usual. We started looking around for a charging cable for my phone at the convenience section, only to find it rife with memorabilia featuring negative, fascist imagery such as swastikas. I commented angrily to the man behind the counter that it wasn’t ok to sell such things, and he denied any problem.

              The dream continued as we decided to leave the establishment, only for all the people in the fast food portion to jump up and start chasing us, grabbing our hair, attacking us, shouting angrily. We needed to escape, and we tried, but the crowd was too large and aggressive.

              As soon as my stress within the dream peaked, a blinding light appeared before my mother and I, the mob vanished, and before us was the Digimon Angemon, floating down with his wings spread and offering me his hand. I took it, and in a flash of light I was in a cozy campground, a fire blazing in a pit as my grandpa stood next to me and put his arm around me. He comforted me and laughed, saying everything was fine, and told me I could have his ‘secret stash’ if I wanted.

              Time passed in this much calmer dream until I found myself in an empty space with Angemon again, who smiled at me as I woke up.

              I wasn’t there as my grandpa passed away the next day. My mom, her brother and my uncle, my dad were there, but I was three or so hours south at home when I got the call that he was gone. He went out laughing, apparently. Happy to be around the people who loved him.

              Now I don’t have stress dreams about societal concerns often, I usually manage myself fairly well in this skewed system. Dreams about Digimon though? Yeah, that tracks, I have those a lot. Dreams about Digimon taking me to people I know isn’t even something unheard of with me. Heck, having dreams about relatives shortly before they pass is a familial thing, it happened to my mother a few times. This all tracks.

              I told a few friends about that dream, actually, and we all came to the conclusion that Angemon was the perfect Digimon Partner for my grandpa.

              See, my grandpa was a devout man, and he really truly believed in “loving everyone” as Jesus taught. He didn’t understand homophobia, transphobia, racism. He thought everyone deserved to be treated equally. He did copious amounts of community service even in his old age. He called my dad crying tears of joy and excitement when he found out conversion therapy had been banned in Canada.

              I am not a devout person. I think fairly lowly of most churches, even if I thought very highly of my grandpa. He proved that they could be so much better and stronger than they were, and yet Christianity was still the source of so much hate and anger and intolerance in the western world. I had so many friends growing up that had to live in fear of their family finding out they were queer due to religiously fueled prejudice, and had so many hard conversations talking people down and supporting them over that illogical hatred.

              I’m a dirty heretic who dabbles in occult nonsense when I’m feeling up to it and calls myself a god because of a noodle incident in high school. I own several books on supernatural shenanigans and enjoy a good ghost hunt. I have a good friend who has a shrine to Odin in their home, and I’ve considered putting a shrine to Apollo in my own home in hopes of gaining some inspiration for my writing.

              I was also the one chosen to inherit my grandpa’s personal bible. The bible he read every day, and took note of all the moral lessons he could from. I have mixed feelings about this, honestly. I’m surely not going to use it for religious purposes, but I’m not entirely sure Grandpa would have been bothered by that. He was accepting, honestly if I told him I wanted to make a shrine to Apollo in my living room he probably would have been confused but laughed it off.

              I was actually chosen to receive that bible because I’m a writer, and honestly you can never have too many reference materials of religion, mythology, culture, or anything vaguely under any of those umbrellas. My mom hoped I’d use it as a reference in my writing, if I ever needed a bible verse for some character more religious than me to reference or a monster design insane enough that grabbing something inspired by Revelation would be suitable.

              That bible will most definitely be used by me. I’ll definitely read it once in a while to learn something. It’s just mildly ironic that the person who inherited it is probably the person who respects the belief system surrounding it the least in the family.

              Anyways, at the time I’m typing this it is only a couple of days until my Grandpa’s celebration of life, because funerals are too dreary for someone as spirited as him. The day before, I’ll be meeting with a friend and fellow Digimon v-pet collector to chat, swap v-pets, and hang out.

              Fact about me, but I tend to bring a Digimon v-pet with me everywhere I go. This is largely because they have a clock on them, and I have a horrid sense of time, so having to check the v-pet to look after it forces me to check the time.

              Starting immediately after I post this, I’ll be booting up a good old v-pet and NOT raising Angemon on it. I really wanted to bring Angemon back to him for his celebration, but after talking it over with friends and family we all agreed he'd want me to bring a Digimon i found comforting and helpful for this emotional time. He'd want me to bring something that symbolized what I believe in, not him. He was good like that.

              Oh? What’s the secret stash he left me?

              Heck If I know, we’re still trying to figure that one out!

              It’s probably just a dream but… I’ll let you all know if not.
             
              Either way, I'm glad I knew you, Grandpa Mike. Go give whatever God greets you on the other side a high five for me.

              When I was a kid, my parents and I lived in a fairly affordable co-op townhouse in the middle of a rather wealthy neighborhood. It was the sort of place where all sorts of strange, elderly, and broke people came and went, but because the rent was cheap, and it was close to some schools the little townhouse co-op was also full of families.

              It was a great place to grow up honestly. In the center of the messy circle of forward-facing houses surrounded by a bigger circle of much more extravagant houses was a little playground, reasonably well kept, where all us kids who had no idea how out of place our co-op was amidst the wealthy neighborhood around us would play and laugh and pick on each other, as kids do.

              It was also a place of a lot of development in my youth. While now you can go there and find a suburban sprawl all around the co-op, at the time there was nothing but a metal chain link fence separating us from the construction site in which houses none of us would grow up to be able to afford were being built.

              I knew from a very young age that older kids liked the sneak across that fence and explore the mounds of dirt and barely built foundation that covered the land there. I was actually a pretty well-behaved child when not dealing with bipolar disorder-induced mood swings, so I never had.

              Enter a child whom I will refer to as wolf child.

              Her and her sister, who is less relevant to this story, were from a household which is presumably some kind of background issues that led both of them, at around the same age as me, to have different ways of coping.

              While her sister decided she wanted to grow up and be a teenager right away, getting into make up and fawning over boys as a small child, the wolf child was all about tall tales and extravagant stories.

              She told me she was raised by wolves until being rescued shortly before we met.

              She told me she could talk to her hamster.

              She told me all sorts of things in this vein, with wolves being a common reoccurring theme.

              I, at age six, was greatly amused but didn’t really believe her. I was enthralled with her dramatic storytelling ability! I did not lend it much credence, although I’d never tell her that.

              One day the three of us were playing and decided to build a fort.

              I had never built a fort before, but I had seen characters do such on TV. Wood and tires and cardboard came together to make a child sized fortress! It was a wonderful sentiment. I wanted in.

              Sadly, the Co-op didn’t have a lot of spare boxes and scrap wood and tools to work with. The sister, ever charismatic or at least assuming she was, went off to go try and charm some adults into giving us a box or two. The wolf child had other plans.

              She turned to me and told me that across the fence lived the magical wolves who would show us where to find materials for our fort.

I gave her a blank look and said I wasn’t allowed over there. She dismissed this and ran off without me and I, not wanting to be alone when I said I’d be with her, followed.

I’m not an agile person. I was not an agile child. Scaling the fence to the construction site was not something I had an easy time with while she climbed over like a spider monkey scaling a branch.

Tumbling across the fence I nervously tailed her in search of these magical wolves. However, being so much less agile and so much clumsier, I very quickly lost track of her while stumbling from dirt pile to dirt pile. I was sweaty and tired and now very dirty, and I got my leg stuck in one such dirt pile.

I called for her, but she merely called back “Beware the rattlesnakes at the bottom!”

I didn’t believe her. There were no rattlesnakes in Ontario!

… right?

I was sad and crying and stuck and a complete mess when I heard another distant shout calling my name.

Sure enough, in the distance, by the fence was my father calling for me. I waved and yelled and pried myself out of the dirt pile, stumbling down and rushing to him, foot getting caught in the spring mud before he found me.

We were supposed to visit a family friend that night, but we did not. I needed a bath. It turned out that the wolf child’s sister had been the one-off say where we went and point my dad towards where I had been abandoned.

I imagine there was some shouting between parents when I hadn’t been around, some scolding of the sisters who got me into this mess. I however just remember my parents’ relief and residual terror when they found me, so I never snuck off like that again.

The sisters moved out at some point before we did, I would have been maybe eight or so when they did. I have no idea what happened to them, and both of their names are the sort with twenty spellings so I couldn’t look them up even if I wanted to.

I do remember those days of mischief and exploration though, and I treasure them as formative experiences. Sometimes when I’m in the neighborhood I look out on the now suburban sprawl where that construction site once was and remember all this. I consider walking around there to see what its like now.

After all, I never did find those blasted magical wolves.

              My parents have had a PVR for as long as I can remember, my mother using it to record her procedural dramas and home shows mostly. When I was around ten, we started recording a Korean cartoon called Pucca, a comedy about a girl who worked in a noodle shop and her romantic pursuit of the local ninja boy. I loved Pucca, it had the kind of madcap sense of humor I had picked up being surrounded by theatre folk, and therefore skilled improv actors, my whole life. Well, maybe more madcap than the theatre folk honestly.

              Sadly, around the time I turned eleven, Pucca stopped airing in its usual five AM slot and something else took over. I distinctly remember being very sad when my mom told me Pucca wasn’t recorded and something else had. When she told me it was Digimon that had recorded, however, I was much less disappointed. Digimon hadn’t been on in years! It was probably a rerun of the first season, which I hadn’t exactly seen all of since it aired when I was very small. I was very excited.

              Except, it wasn’t the first season. It was the fifth season, which at that point I had never heard of. The fifth season, known as Digimon Data Squad in the west, followed the adventures of Marcus Damon, a teenage delinquent who joins the organization DATS, which I kid you not, is literally just the men in black but with Digimon instead of aliens. They fight criminal Digimon, but every agent is a tamer with their own Digimon. Marcus himself joins when he beats his own partner, Agumon, in a fight. That’s sort of Marcus’s thing see, fighting. He’s very hot blooded, he will punch Digimon several times his own size. He’s the absolute coolest and nobody can tell me otherwise at any age.

              I almost instantly decided I was going to make my own fan character. I was from DATS Canada, I had a way with Digimon, and my Digivice was yellow – a colour not yet taken among the ranks of DATS in the show.

              I don’t remember if I ever told my friend about this specifically. I had a friend at the time, see. Only really one. She was another neurodivergent youth, and the two of us had met through a social skills camp that neither of us particularly liked. We almost instantly clicked though, due to a shared love of Pokémon, and later Digimon.

              She watched Data Squad with me. Every Sunday the two of us would meet, as we went to different schools and could only see each other on weekends. Our mothers would chat with each other while we would play, talking endlessly about the episode of Data Squad we had seen the morning before our meeting.

              We talked about how much we despised the main antagonist, Doctor Akihiro Kurata, and his mistreatment of Digimon. We would talk about who our favourite Digimon seen that episode was, about Marcus’s incredible feats of strength, and about the comic relief villain Gotsumon’s slow redemption.

              Most of all though, we dreamed what kind of Digimon we would have if we met one. Which ones we felt drawn to, which ones we disliked, how we thought getting a partner digimon would really work.

              If there’s one thing I regret most in life its how I treated this friend. My mental health wasn’t good when I was eleven. Although I don’t remember them I know many of the rage episodes and mania I had as a child must have been directed towards her. I had been hospitalized only the year before for a meds review, and things wouldn’t consistently look up for me for a few years yet.

              Soon after these happy days watching Data Squad, I would cast her aside when I was thirteen. I claimed it was because I “couldn’t connect with her anymore”, but that was my fault, not hers. I was on the verge of a great depression that would last almost into my adulthood, and I was sick and didn’t know how to deal with having another person watch so closely.

              Nonetheless, she is credited with changing my life in a great way. Not for doing anything normal or grounded that changed it, but for asking me a question that would launch me to the places and people that would define the rest of my life and my journey to feel better.

              One day she asked me, plain as day: “Do you think Digimon are real?”

              The answer to this question may be obvious, but where it sent me to answer it was well worth the quest for an obvious answer.

You see, it is not uncommon nowadays to feel like you’re not worth love or kindness. It is not uncommon to feel, in the depths your depression and anxiety, like you’re a terrible person and everyone secretly hates you. The thing is that often time that feeling doesn’t have much to back it up, for the average person. When you apply logic to it, it often doesn’t make sense to see yourself as an irredeemable bastard.

              Now realistically, there is very little sense to this. After all, its not like it was my choice tohave a serious mental illness. I felt remorse for having rage episodes, and episodes had been getting less and less frequent since my I had received new medication and treatment at age ten. But my younger self’s logic came from what I had experienced: berserkers in fiction were not terribly well written, and rarely framed as getting over it in any way. They were often enemies, and their violent tendencies served to point out why they were enemies. No one had ever written a story about someone like me who overcame it to my knowledge, although I would find some later in life.

              Now, when my one friend asked me if I thought Digimon were real, I found hope in that question. Not because I seriously thought I was ever going to meet a real Digimon, but because if I pursued that question, maybe I would find someone who would talk about Digimon AND many worlds theory with me.

My dad, see, had spend most of my life teaching me deep scientific, theoretical, and philosophical concepts since I was around five, and ideas in the vein of Everett’s many worlds theory and Schrodinger’s cat were among my favourites. None of my peers however wanted to discuss the stranger side of physics with me, or Digimon. Maybe, if there was someone who believed in a real Digital World, they would talk about both!

              Short answer: nobody wanted to talk about physics with me. But they did talk about Digimon! A lot!

              My friend who asked me this was not good with search engines at the time, something I had developed as a skill early in life. As such, I was tasked with finding out if Digimon were in fact real. Months of on/off searching and videos made by fans of the series later, I received a private message on YouTube (when that was a thing) with a link to a forum from someone who had seen my brazen comments on various YouTube videos.

              It was the summer of 2009 when I chased that link to a forum called the DRP, a domain now used for archiving virtual pet information. At the time though, it was a secret-ish forum populated mostly by nerds of varying ages, who like me probably wanted to talk about a specific science more than real Digimon but found common ground in wishing real Digimon were a thing, at least.

 There were people who would talk about true artificial intelligence and related technological developments, but also people who would share strange dreams and sightings of ‘real digimon’ as if they were psychics or cryptid hunters. It may all seem very cult like and strange in retrospect, but there was a level of irony and self indulgence to it at the time that made it far less actually cult like compared to later endeavors.

              I was an obnoxious brat wanting to prove myself and was frequently stuck up and rude in my hubris. I wasn’t kind, and the chip on my shoulder was as painfully obvious as the crude internet slang in my posts. Despite being this little gremlin with no regard for anything, I did manage to make a few lifelong friends on this forum and stay in touch with more than half of the people I regularly spoke to there, even as our interests diverged, and we grew out of the pursuit of ‘real Digimon.’

              It was trendy on the forum to talk about your Digimon partner. Who is your Digimon partner? What is their personality like? What do they like or dislike? What do they evolve into? I of course have always been self conscious and indecisive, never very good at pinning myself down. One day, however, I spoke up.

              “I think my Digimon partner is Kuramon.” I said, “Even though I am afraid of jellyfish.”

              Kuramon is, of course, a baby Digimon. Its very small and looks like a little lavender jellyfish-like blob with a big red eye giving a look of morbid curiosity. It’s a pre-evolution for the demonic and destructive Diaboromon, but in this state it isn’t very much of a threat on its own.

              I was in fact, terrified of jellyfish at the time. I would freeze up in sheer panic at the mere picture of one. But I was also afraid of myself, and if Digimon reflect yourself, then surely someone who fears themselves would have a Digimon with a form they fear. I chose the baby form, the smallest and most harmless form of the most destructive Digimon I could think of, because I desperately wanted a chance to avoid its evolution. I wanted to change my fate, as I would often say, by evolving a Digimon built for destruction into a Digimon built to protect.

              Not a very healthy mindset I know, but were you full of self awareness and good health in your early teens? It may seem counterproductive now, but at the time it was the only way I knew how to express what I was feeling. I had essentially only just realized how different I was from others as I entered my teens, only just suddenly figured out how drastically different my bipolar disorder had made me.

              I wanted to change fate, but to change fate you must first acknowledge what the present fate is. You can’t change anything if you don’t know what you’re avoiding. At the time, I refused to admit what Kuramon would evolve into, because I didn’t know what the best version of myself was. I didn’t know what my partner could become that would make me feel good about myself. In a way, I had never really felt good about myself in a meaningful way at the time.

              In the end, after a year on the DRP, I had a falling out with one of those lifelong friends that resulted from something I had done. I hurt them, badly, and as I entered high school I entered with a deep depression and a desire to avoid Digimon as much as possible.

              Of course, that didn’t exactly go as planned.
 

              So, have you ever experienced depression? You might have, honestly. It's not uncommon. I spent the entirety of my high school experience in a deep, upsetting depression over my accidental betrayal of a friend. Of course, I hurt them. I was a terrible person, only capable of destruction.

              … is the easy way out, admittedly. Its easier to self deprecate than to actually address the problem and move on with your life with the pain, after all. This feeling led me down dark paths though. I’ll spare you the details, but at age seventeen I was hospitalized once more and came out slightly better. It was around this point that I lost a good chunk of my high school friend group, as tends to happen when you get hospitalized and come back to the status quo having changed. It was upsetting, but I still had my online friend group.

              Sort of. It had come to my attention in my late teens that one such member of the friend group hung out with a group of people from a separate Digimon Believer forum I had been less than kind to in the past. There reached a point in the year I spent on the DRP where another community, the DFT, started joining our forum. They were mostly younger users who seemed to believe in invisible imaginary Digimon living all around us, something I mocked them relentlessly for as a thirteen-year-old.

              The member of my friend group hanging out with them was younger than me, and I had a bad feeling about them spending time with them. I would be proved correct in the coming years, in which they would just vanish from the face of the internet in what was later assumed to be an attempt to get away from the toxic community they had found themself with. Right now, however, they were their friends, and I tried to be courteous.

              I avoided those who I called “the dafts” for a very long time, partially out of bad feelings and partially out of guilt for picking on them so relentlessly all those years ago, but soon enough our friend groups naturally merged and soon enough they started telling us about their invisible Digimon who lived all around us.

              They were clearly a troubled bunch. Many had harsh childhoods and untreated neurodivergences, any number of other things that would make them want an escape. Their fantasy, however, had grown too complex for them to avoid. Instead of having one or two Digimon partners, they often had around twelve and were bonded via faustian contract to powerful Digimon-like entities called Warriors the lent them power in exchange for eating their soul upon death. They also claimed to know what happens when people in general die. It was, in fact, deeply unsettling and cult like.

              I wanted to shut them down, but I very quickly discovered too many people were a part of this story to easily cause them to stop. Other people tried, and failed, and got banned for opposing the cults will. On top of this, there was a significant amount of unsavoury treatment of users young and old going on behind the scenes, and nobody spoke up against it. I didn’t almost entirely because they all held some disdain for me, presumably for having the critical thinking skills to question their lore, I wasn’t getting through to anyone without disappointing my less aware friends

              I spent a couple years in and out of this community, uncomfortably watching as friends were told how strong they were how many Digimon they were allowed to have and whether or not they were allowed to feel strong in this story the dafts had created. There was a hierarchy see, and you were only allowed to feel strong if you were at the top. Those at the bottom were side characters and frequently told that no, they didn’t have a Warrior or the Digimon they wanted, who would never be important.

              Not that I especially wanted to be important in their game. I didn’t like that I was by default considered weak, but I also didn’t want to be involved. I had seen what getting too close to overactive imaginations about real Digimon could do to people back on the DRP, I didn’t want to go there again.

              You may be wondering why I was there in the first place if it was such despicable place, and to answer that I tell you that I ended up there mostly by accident. My friend group merged into it somewhat, and while I tried to avoid it I couldn’t exactly if this chat was where all my actual friends were hanging out, usually in trying-not-to-judge awe of what was going on there.

We were all around seventeen or eighteen in the beginning and legitimately had no idea to react, so when teen drama and disagreements led to my friend group falling apart, I was left with that daft place as my main chat I knew people in. Just coming off of that horrible depression I didn’t really have the confidence to go anywhere else.

              Anyways, despite that their view of things was that people could have many Digimon partners, I only wanted one. The whole thematic point of having one partner was that they were a foil to you who helped you grow, if you wanted a whole team of monster friends you should just go play Pokémon. The friend who would eventually leave the dafts felt the same, and within their narrative they somewhat reluctantly participated in they only had one imaginary Digimon.

              Around this time a lackluster Digimon mobile game called Digimon Crusader came out. It had a thematic tilt towards Greek myths, and on a whim one day I discovered Aegiomon while browsing wikimon. Aegiomon wasn’t very creative looking as far as Digimon were concerned, he was a satyr with red tattoos and white hair. For some reason, I felt strong about the idea of being partnered with him, and told my friend who I had met the dafts through. He immediately, without consulting the others who were “important” declared that Aegiomon was my partner.

              I had wanted to move away from Kuramon for a long time, because the past of how I came to obtain it was too tragic. i wanted a partner that made me feel strong, even if it was just for fanfiction and drawing purposes as opposed to the dafts narrative. This was the only place I knew where I could seek that notion.

              However, as time passed, I grew tired of being seen as weak. It was degrading to be surrounded by an imaginary world where you were basically always being told you weren’t allowed to feel strong. My Aegiomon was declared a weak digimon, and I was declared to have low potential. I didn’t engage terribly much with their narrative, but it was still insulting.

              The kicker to all this was the notion of motifs. Of something was one person’s ‘thing,’ it wasn’t allowed to be anyone else’s. One time I had one of them make death threats against me for trying to change my username to something related to snow when they were “the ice-themed one.” This would happen often and frustratingly. I didn’t really know better or have the confidence to leave this toxic environment though, and things went on like this.

              I would learn later in life that these are all markers of the abuse seen in real cults and abusive relationships. If someone doesn’t feel strong, they can be controlled and kept there easier. If someone has something that makes them feel strong, take it, degrade it. They aren’t allowed it. And of course, I had spent my entire teens abusing myself with the notion that I wasn’t worth anything to some degree, of course I was going to fall victim to being kept there as much as I didn’t want to. I had no strength to leave.

              It was around now that a life changing event happened in my life. My former friend, who I had betrayed the trust of on the DRP and thus triggered my depression, offered to speak with me again now that we were both adults. You may remember earlier I referred to them and the other friends I made there as lifelong friends and this is why, because of the all of us meeting and reconnecting all this time later. We mended the broken bridge that had caused all my sadness these past few years.

              They said something to me when we met again, that they couldn’t blame me for things I did when I was fourteen. This is a valuable lesson, because it was the first step to forgiving myself, and the first step to feeling strong again.

              You see, I made a very good friend among the dafts who was also tired of their bull. Them and I bonded over a disdain towards organized religion and a nostalgia for older versions of the Digimon believer community. Eventually, them and I decided to leave together, and escaped like two outlaws on a stolen motorbike in search of a world without roads. There was a single problem with this however. My significant other at the time.

              They were from the original friend group that had melded into the dafts, and had befriended the dafts as well, much more than me. They were allowed to be strong. If I may be blunt, they were terrified of loss and did not handle it well. After the falling out of that original friend group and our good friend vanished avoiding the dafts, they were so terrified of loss that they refused to leave the dafts, no matter how much of their toxic behaviour came to light.

              I kept dating them for a year after leaving the dafts, bouncing between chat groups, trying to make friends. I knew I deserved better, so I kept moving, and I knew they deserved respect, so I admittedly tried on several occasions to persuade them to leave as well. As you can imagine, we inevitably broke up.

              We broke up at the same time I cut ties to the daft chat for good. Someone had been speaking ill of me for things I had done when I was fourteen, ironically enough, and I had gotten in a little spat with someone who deserved better than she got over it.

              By the time we broke up, however, the friend I had left with and I had become brothers in arms, and I had found a whole new group to spend time with, far away from the dafts world. We had a whole life ahead of us. We had our own lives to lead.

             The dafts still exist to this day to my knowledge. Their story has not ended because I left. They still hang around various Digimon themed discord servers I’m in. I don’t know what they’re up to now, as I haven’t spoken to them in several years. I do have it on good authority their story never ended, and they are still as cult like as ever, even a decade or so later. However, I as a storyteller have never been so happy to have put down a book, so to speak.

              I have been through much in my life. I’ve been through bipolar disorder, with all the mania, depression, and rage that entails. I’ve been through anxiety and panic attacks. I’ve joined two separate Digimon cults of varying intensity. Cults aside though, most of what I’ve been through has been internal. A lot of mental illness and the ensuing trauma from that more than anything else.

              I felt some degree of guilt about that for a long time, knowing plenty of youth with abusive family and friends beyond what I had any hope of experiencing. I felt like my pain wasn’t valid because I had a fairly happy family life and didn’t live in poverty. As I got older though, I realized how much I survived, against the odds. Most doctors and teachers didn’t think I was going to make it through elementary school, let alone graduate and become a published author. Trembling miracle that I am, I made it.

              It’s been a while since I taught you something about Digimon, so let me tell you about the X-antibody. The X-antibody storyline never had an animated series adaptation, barely had a comic adaptation, and only got a game adaptation in the middle of another game nearly a decade after it first came out. It was primarily told through flavor text on trading cards and the booklets that came with the Digimon Pendulum X virtual pet. It’s also one of the most beloved stories in all of Digimon, so let me share it with you.

              The story goes that the Digital World was once facing an overpopulation issue. It was so bad, that Yggdrasil, the very Abrahamic god of the digital world, decreed that he would wipe out the vast majority of the Digimon living there with the X-virus, and move the survivors to a new server to live in. it’s a Noah’s Ark story, essentially, but with a twist: some Digimon survived that weren’t supposed to! They developed the X-antibody, which also mutated them into… I’ll just cut to the chase, people love the x-antibody storyline because many beloved Digimon got redesigned as x-variants, where they basically looked even more marketable to preteen boys than ever before with even more guns and pointy bits.

              However, they also introduced us to the concept of natural carriers, Digimon who naturally had the x-antibody to survive with. One such Digimon was Dorumon, a purple fox dragon thing with a fluffy tail and a red gem on its forehead marking it as a natural carrier. I had first seen Dorumon in Digimon World 4, a game I had on the GameCube as a child that was insanely hard single player. I had no friends to play with, so I just ran around the hub area as Dorumon, rejoicing in his jumping animation and twitching tail.

              As I got older I identified with Dorumon’s status as a survivor, being a natural carrier. Maybe I’d never lived through genocide, that’d be an exaggeration by far, but I knew pride in my ability to make it through things. As a child on the DRP I thought I didn’t deserve Dorumon, but we’ve been over why thirteen-year-old me wasn’t a reliable person for opinions on themself. Eventually I forgot about Dorumon until I was in my twenties.

              After leaving the dafts, several old friends caught in their loop, and running off into the sunset with my now-brother in arms who had also left the dafts, I found myself in a new friend group. This one was much calmer, and much healthier than any I had ever had. It’s delightful to be the cause of most of the drama in a mostly-drama free friend group. It shows that I have a lot to learn, yes, but it also shows that the others aren’t causing anything, which speaks volumes about them.

              Very early in, I told them all about how much I love Digimon. I refused to let the dafts ruin that for me. I haven’t really made the Digimon cults much of a secret either, but I don’t speak openly about them as much as they have just come up. I guarantee these stories will be the first time most of them hear the whole tale of the DRP and the dafts. In any case, also very early I was informed by them that I have strong Dorumon energy, which is how we began the trend of government assigned Digimon partners.

              Government assigned Digimon partners is basically a running gag of sorts where I assign Digimon partners to members of the group so I can write silly self insert fanfiction about them all. Admittedly, I’ve only done that once, but it created the ongoing joke that Dorumon is my butler. The very worst butler.

              I survived so much, and over time I slowly began to realize I didn’t hate myself or believe as many negative things about myself. I want to say I pulled out because of these people I know now, but it was because of me not giving up hope that really did it. I didn’t just survive, I thrived. i moved forward. I reconnected with people I thought I’d hurt so bad I’d lost forever. I overcame my fear of myself. I left a toxic environment and relationship in pursuit of my own happiness.

              Did you know that Dorumon debuted on April 26^th, 2003 on the Digimon pendulum X virtual pet? That was the spring before the summer I received my bipolar diagnosis. In the lore of Digimon, the stories of the virtual pets, like Dorumon’s trip on Noah’s Ark, happen the same year the pets were released. In a way, this means Dorumon and I have been on our journeys together since day one.

              There’s a scene, in the third season of the Digimon anime, where the main character Takato has a bit of a philosophical discussion with a strange man aboard yet another ark. Was his partner created for him? Was he created for his partner? It’s said in the first season that everyone has a fated Digimon partner, but what does that mean?

              I don’t expect to ever meet a real Digimon, but the pursuit of finding one has brought so many wonderful people into my life. There were so many coincidences and events that could have gone so many other ways, but they ended up right here, with me learning to love myself and being surrounded by people I care about who care about me.

              The fate I so feared brought me through these trials… and allowed Gatomon to become Kuramon to become Aegiomon and then Dorumon. I don’t feel ashamed of all these childish shenanigans pursuing worlds that probably don’t exist, I don’t feel ashamed of myself for taking this journey and everything on it. It got me here, to the point where I not only survived but thrived. A Digimon Partner is and always has been a symbol of personal growth, and I've grown so much from my childhood to now.

              And I’m glad for it.

             So, this is the story of how I started with Digimon and found my Digimon Partner, what's next? Well the rest of this series Is going to be commentary on various Digimon media, mostly virtual pets, and how i grew alongside them from my teens through my twenties. Look forward to it, I guess.

              Until next time, everyone.

I hope you all find your Digimon Partners too.