An Author Who Can Eat More Breadsticks Than You

So, this story is the prelude of a collection of tales and memories about my personal experiences with Digimon as a series. the prelude are about my experiences in my youth with Digimon and those who believed them to be real, and the follow up posts are about specific virtual pets, anime seasons, and games and what i learned from them. I'd recommend reading the prelude first. You can find the rest when they're updated under the "waitingonmydigimonpartner" tag.

cw: depression, cult themes, discussion of mental illness including bipolar disorder

              When I was a child, I had a very specific experience with Digimon. It was the first time I met my Digimon partner.

               So, if you somehow got here and are wondering, “what is a Digimon partner” or “what even is a Digimon?” reading this, I can give you a brief overview, for posterities sake. I get not everyone is as neck deep in this franchise as me.

              In their own series, Digimon are, in short, talking monsters that live in a world, known as the Digital World, that exists parallel to ours and came about due to the rise in our technology, our networks. They make technology behave strangely around them and can be partnered with humans called “Tamers’ to become stronger, evolving into new forms based on their tamers ‘heart.’

            There's a hefty implication throughout the series that they used to be Japanese youkai or European faeries before the rise of the modern age forced them to adapt to what humans believed in now, and another hefty implication that their world is shaped not just by technology, but the human collective unconsciousness. It's all very American Gods honestly, and I personally love it.

               A Digimon partner is a Digimon who is partnered with a human tamer. Digimon normally evolve to greater forms with age and training, but a human partner can allow them to become a stronger form temporarily to protect their tamer.

               Some parts of the series claim they’re like Daemon from Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials and are actually a manifestation of the human Tamer’s soul fated to be with them.

             Other parts frame it as a compatibility thing, some humans are more compatible with some Digimon and vice versa. To a child though, it’s a lot less philosophical than that, and more about the promise of a perfect friend who will protect you and help you grow.

             I knew none of this when I was a child and a family friend’s kid, who was several years older than me, invited me to play Digimon with him. I think I was only five, maybe six or seven, and mark my words I had seen the Digimon show, but it being much more serialized a story than Pokémon I had a difficult time following the plot.

             Nonetheless, our mothers were very best friends and he had been asked to look after me while they gossiped and chatted, so I agreed. Let’s play Digimon.

             This was how I learned about Digivices. In the show, a Digivice is a little gizmo that looks sorta like a Tamagotchi, based on the Digimon virtual pets, that acts as a connection between Tamer and Digimon. In short, in glows very prettily when the Digimon evolves, and the kids get to hold it up dramatically when calling on their Digimon.

              I would go onto a lifelong hobby of collecting Digivice toys, just out of a simple love for virtual pets and Y2K aesthetics, but that’s beside the point.

               The family friend, around age ten I’d say, escorted me to his room and handed me a Digivice. It was silver in colour and had a vibrant red ring around the screen, and a similar red fabric strap on top, giving it a keychain-like appearance.

                 I was sure I had seen the same one on the show, as the third season had started airing in Canada relatively recently before this. It belonged to a boy with a blue shirt and goggles mounted on his forehead, although that descriptor could be any number of Digimon protagonists.

                 I remember quietly delighting in the family friend not giving me a pink one or something girly like that, as if he trusted me to handle a ‘boys’ Digivice. I didn’t think he might not have a pink one to give, or that they might not have made a pink one at all. I was just an insecure kid who would later come out as nonbinary and liked that I wasn’t being called a girl.

                “Ok,” he said to me, trying to look very serious, as only a preteen boy can. “I’m going to give you something important.”

                I nodded, trying to look as serious as him. I likely failed, I was quite small and unimposing at the time.

                He handed me a plastic card, around the size of a credit card. It was a bright, aquatic blue colour, with an image of a pixelated, roaring dinosaur in yellows and blacks in the center of it. I examined it, before quickly noticing the slit in the side of the Digivice.

                 A flash of memory from the TV show, of the characters dramatically running a blue card like this through their Digivices before their Digimon appeared or gained new powers or evolved. Naturally, my serious façade faded as my eyes lit up and I attempted to swipe the card through the card reader.

               “No!” the family friend exclaimed. Neither of us looked very serious anymore. “You have to let me explain to you what it does!”

                I sheepishly stopped my card slash and pulled the card out of the Digivice to hear him out. Sure enough, he explained what I expected. The Blue Card, which was very literally called that, allowed one to summon their own Digimon partner. As he explained, he rummaged around in his drawers, before taking something I couldn’t see out quickly and tucking it behind his back.

              “OK. Now you can.” He said confidently.

             I pouted a bit at his long explanation keeping me from doing the cool card slash thing, but I obliged and excitedly swiped the card through the reader, noticing the device hadn’t done anything and likely had no batteries to avoid random beeping. In a flash, he whipped out the object behind him and held it up to me.

             “Hi! I’m Gatomon! Your Digimon partner!” he said in a high-pitched voice, waving around the object to indicate it was who speaking.

             The object was a small stuffed animal, similar to what you might get in a fast-food kid’s meal (I later learned that yes, that’s exactly where he got it.) it was a cat, with big blue eyes and purple tufts on its ears and tail, its white body shape offset by the large striped and clawed gloves on its paws.

             I grabbed it immediately from him, in awe of how cute it was. I had seen this one on the show too! I remembered pretending the family cat was this Digimon when I was even smaller! He smiled and presented another toy, I can’t even remember what, for Gatomon to fight in the name of protecting me. We laughed and played all afternoon like this.

            When it was time to leave the family friend took the Digivice away, much to my dismay, and I was about to go out the door when he ran up and handed me Gatomon. I don’t remember what was said. I just remember being overjoyed I got to keep my Digimon partner.

            “Digimon Partner” as a concept is one that would be deeply formative to my mental health for the rest of my life. At the time of receiving Gatomon, I was well on my way to being diagnosed with bipolar disorder at age seven, and dealing with regular episodes of sudden, rage-like mood swings and mania.

            As I grew older Digimon became a crutch for exploring my mental health in visual ways, designing my Digimon Partner and their evolution lines as ways to express how I felt about myself as a person. Digimon partners are supposed to evolve into forms that reflect their tamers ‘heart,’ so “what does my Digimon look like now?” became an easy and effective tool for introspection.

               I went through a phase in my early teens, even where out of guilt for all I hurt during those mood swings I associated heavily with demon Digimon, feeling I wasn’t a good person. As I moved beyond that and forgave myself, I found kinder Digimon I liked, dragons and holy beasts, and even the occasionally caterpillar.

              I suppose it was fitting that I started with Gatomon, as her whole conflict as a character in the first season of the show is also over believing she isn’t capable of goodness or trust. She eventually evolves into a giant angel woman as a sign of her growth and becomes close friends with her human partner, so I think it's safe to say she had a happy ending too.

                 I am currently writing this from my desk in my small apartment I share with a kind roommate and three cats, procrastinating my actual book writing work. I started thinking about this story because right next to where I keep my coffee cup, sits Gatomon.
             
                So, did you know that Digimon had a long break of airing between 2003 and 2006? Not to say there weren’t things going on in the series at the time, the virtual pets and trading card game were going in wild directions with the X-antibody storyline and such, but all that was happening in Japan. None of it came to the west, and with the fourth season of the anime over, there was a blank spot where we all thought Digimon was gone until 2007, when the fifth season came to North America after airing in Japan the previous year.

              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.