Apocalymon | DIGIMON ADVENTURE In Retrospect

0:10 [Music] foreign quite now before i get into episode 53 i want to mention that in episode 52 we had a few odd scenes interspersed within the ongoing battle

0:56 with pymon there we saw gennai in centaurmon overlooking two flaming geysers inside a cave and as we're told these flames are a literal firewall a firewall being in reference to a computing system designed for network security a lot of exposition is laid out here setting up a final boss battle now i didn't mention this scene in my analysis of episode 52 because it's awkwardly placed i mean you have the ongoing battle with pymon where tensions are supposed to be rising and the children are fighting for their lives against the final dark master and then all of a sudden we cut to gennai and centaurman casually talking about this firewall and the prophecy and need it be said that any mention of the prophecy is out of place at this point we'd only recently established that the

1:42 entire prophecy was false right and what was divulged in episode 45 was that the chosen children were selected by homeostasis to maintain balance in the digital world during the same night that greymon and parrotmon fought each other on the streets of odaiba homeostasis had taken the opportunity to scan a number of the children in the real world and that was the event that played out during the 1999 digimon adventure movie and we aren't told very much about how homeostasis selection process actually worked other than that the children selected just so happened to be present and visible during that time what i mean is there were millions of other children around the world who would have boasted the kinds of traits that the children in odiba had and would therefore have made them eligible for selection but those children simply weren't in that particular place at that

2:28 particular time and concerning the prophecy we still don't know anything about who wrote it when it was written and how long ago it was written does it even matter at this point there were some hints dropped here and there but nothing is substantial and as i said in episode 45 homeostasis never really elaborated upon its details either anyway the long and short of gennai and centaurman's conversation is that a great evil has recently been able to breach this firewall and enter the digital world spiral mountain's destruction while a victory in its own right only hails a new tearing of the fabric of the digital world a rift that then draws the chosen children into the abyss and as they arrive in this strange new realm koshiro makes contact with gennai again who confirms that their ongoing fight against the forces of darkness has taken them to the source of all evil

3:14 according to gennai this creature is so powerful that its very existence is what forced the digital world inhabitants to reach out to the real world and summon the chosen children further revealed here is that this great evil had originally been locked away by another group of chosen children who existed before taichi's group however the invention of a previous group of chosen children seems arbitrary the existence of a previous group might have been an interesting detail if they had been hinted at earlier and or if the writers had stated or even implied that these children had actually died in their efforts to save the digital world in fact one may have very well assumed that they had died since these children are never brought up again during the course of the digimon adventure series until adventure taurai that's right adventure zero two

3:59 completely glosses over their existence moreover concerning everything i just said about homeostasis induction of taichi's group the involvement of a pre-existing group of children actually runs contrary to that supplanting this idea i'd have gone with what was theorized by koshiro in episode 19. let me explain so in episode 19 koshiro had stated the possibility that the bodies of the chosen children in the digital world existed separate from their bodies in the real world he had said that perhaps their real world bodies were asleep or in some kind of stasis while their conscious minds were awake in the digital world this will feel a little weird [Applause]

4:51 now if i had been writing this i'd have pushed this idea further by introducing the concept of snapshots for those unfamiliar i'm not talking about photography here but a computing term analogous to photography a snapshot is a form of data backup and the suggestion that i'm making here is that the data constructs in the digital world taichi and his friends are actually digital copies based on the real world children in odaiba what this idea entails is that the real children were never actually brought into the digital world in the first place the real world children were just used as a template to create digital copies like how a camera snapshot captures an event at one point in time a storage snapshot captures data at one point in time specifically a storage snapshot is a set

5:38 of reference markers for data at a particular point acting like a table of contents it's not an exact replica of data but a quick picture of how data looked at that moment in time that users can roll back to [Music] in other words taichi and his friends would still exist in the real world and go about their lives completely unaware that copies of them would be adventuring in the digital world it's an idea that promises both interest and terror at the same time given the kind of existential crisis such a prospect would hold in such a conception taichi and his friends might discover they weren't the original copies they were just the most recent versions all versions however would have been

6:23 based on a real world template updated as necessary in order to meet the demands of an ever-evolving digital world and so imagine a scenario where the current versions of the children learn that there existed a set of copies that died in the past but temporarily saved the digital world in the process moreover what would their reaction be if they discovered that homeostasis had been left to create even more copies improved copies in preparation for future engagements with the forces of darkness furthermore this would be how nanamon was able to clone sora in mimicry of the technology used to create the digital chosen children he would manage to create a knockoff sora with which he planned to use in conjunction with sora's digivice or tag and crest it's the kind of storyline that might have unraveled if say nanomon had been allowed to become a more prominent

7:08 antagonist of the series but all of these ideas are best left told in a different story for now let's get off this tangent start talking about apocalypse [Music] from what we're told apocalype is the darkness itself a presence whose very existence has warped space-time and created all the distortions throughout the digital world

7:55 and the real world alike the only thing that stopped apocalypmon from completely enveloping either world was the existence of that wall of fire however that wall has now been breached leaving the chosen children to face their final enemy within his very lair apocalypse isn't simply the surrounding abyss however he does have a physical form that steadily reveals itself to the children now something of note here and throughout my commentaries is i haven't spoken much about the changes that were made between the original and english versions of the show i wanted to focus more on the elements of the original story in and of itself but nevertheless i'll talk a bit about the english dub here as that commentary will help support some of the things i'll say right now concerning apocalypse and how he is illustrated

8:41 so for the english dub a number of characters throughout the franchise were voiced by a man named derrick stephen prince and as a side note i have a lot of respect for mr prince by all accounts he loves the franchise and has on a number of occasions gathered loyal fans of the anime to talk about the show and ask him questions in digimon adventure prince does the voice of piedmont and adds a distinct flavor to the character that let's just let him describe it so as it relates to season one piedmont anybody remember pipeline yeah okay one of the scariest dark masters that was a homage to tim curry as frankenforder from rocky horror picture show how about

9:26 that so let's compare prince's voice to that of japanese voice actor chikawotzka i'm not a sicko i'm a collector in these new items have such sentimental value to me [Laughter] [Music] corrections would have been about 74 years old around the time digimon adventure was produced and thus provides a voice that is surly marked with age unlike mr prince who provided a very cartoonish homage as he calls it olska played the character rather straightforward and so in contrast with the flamboyance of prince's voice otsuka's pie mon comes across as far

10:13 more creepy in comparison now i don't say this to degrade prince's performance in the english version of the show he makes paimon appear far too much like a cartoon and far less like an old man encased in the trappings of a cartoon if that makes any sense olska's portrayal of paimon on the other hand adds a very tragic element to the character he seems far more reserved in the japanese version almost like he truly is a grown adult unironically wearing a clown costume even as he exercises his cruelty in the japanese version one gets a keen sense that paimon truly is a mockery of maturation which as i've said is part of the coming of age theme and the whole reason i'm speaking of paimon right now is because coincidentally otsuka would also lend his voice to

10:59 apocalypse and many of the themes attributed to paimon may also be attributed to apocalypse as well note this is holy and utterly a facet of the original version of the show as i i said the ultimate evil complete with hot and cold running water wait a minute what am i laughing at i'm supposed to be depressed always save your receipts the warranty was probably still good on those things why do all of you get the pizza while i get the crust oh i can't take all these metaphors but in the japanese version one is given a sense of fear pity and disgust for what apocalypse

12:08 reveals itself in the form of an ominous decahedron this prism sprouts several claw-like extensions attached by chains that resemble dna strands and the chains represent much of what apocalypse is the refused strains of digimon that disappeared in the evolution process meanwhile the decahedron resembles the morphological structure of a virus as indeed apocalypse is a virus of magnanimous proportions from one area however the symmetry of the decahedron is broken an aperture appears from which protrudes the torso of some humanoid creature this creature greatly resembles devimon and therefore functions as a callback to the original evil that the children had encountered on file island the visage of this torso is disgusting

12:54 to behold and appropriately so attached to the larger decahedron by a series of fleshy tendrils and tubes the torso appears to be anchored to some kind of elaborate life support system an exaggerated picture of say a hospitalized patient sick in bed thematically this may be tied to hikari's propensity to become ill and an interesting detail which i've mentioned before about ikari's illness was the fact that she was the only child who could be possessed by homeostasis and as we know homeostasis also refers to the state in which the body maintains a sense of normalcy and so even as homeostasis maintains a state of balance in the digital world apocalype is an opposing force a malady a virus he is sickness incarnate

13:39 now there was a recent comment on my channel that suggested apocalypm may also represent the y2k problem or junk data and true he may very well symbolize those aspects and yet there's an onus to explain what those aspects mean to us the audience in the grand scheme of things of us watching this story unfold remember that computers are not natural objects they are built by people and as i mentioned in the mugendramon section of the dark masters arc technology has no purpose outside being acted upon by people in this manner a y2k bug or even junk data are ultimately human flaws within human creations as perfect as we prefer to assume our man-made systems are they are flawed and they remind us

14:24 that we too are flawed and indeed while that may be a route of analysis worth exploring i believe apocalypse represents something more something deep seated the image of this upper body locked in place hails back to classic depictions of satan imprisoned within the depths of hell as derived from the illustrations in dante's inferno lucifer himself is chained in place and his lower half is embedded in a sheet of ice trapped and made to suffer eternally so too does apocalypse speak collectively as if he is more than one creature this pattern of speech could be a reference to the hebrew bible and the demonic host named legion whom jesus drove from a possessed man although apocalypse may appear as a singular entity he is in fact the collective embodiment

15:10 of all the digimon who were in his words thwarted through the evolution process the digimon analyzer remarks that apocalypse may even defy the digimon classification given what he is or rather given what it is a further interest however is that aside from the protruding torso apocalypse does have an intricate and symmetrical design not at all what one would expect a creature of chaos to look like although again i mentioned that the void itself is apocalym the decahedron is the incarnation of his body formed from an otherwise formless void and why would that be significant well consider what koshiro says in response to apocalyman's mentioning that some species do indeed disappear during the evolution process of course what koshiro is referring to is the natural selection theory that

15:57 evolution is based upon a biological process wherein individual organisms with favorable traits are more likely to survive and reproduce while weaker organisms will simply die out this is the first time digimon adventure has ever formally laid out a philosophical underpinning to anything going on most of my analyses are done based on what is illustrated through thematic imagery but here there's a direct commentary to glean from natural selection is often thought of from the standpoint of modern science however philosophically it's a concept that has been around since the classic era and the underlying idea is that order is derived from chaos you see if you consider the big bang theory the idea that an explosion of global magnitude was necessary for the spontaneous generation

16:42 of life on earth that would lead to the underlying philosophical conclusion that only through destruction can form a rise the paradox is that life or order can only come as a result of chaos this is significant here because apocalypse formless void manifests itself as the decahedron order arising from chaos as such the decahedron is like an island amidst a black ocean and of course when the children first arrived in the digital world where did they land upon an island isolated surrounded by a vast ocean order amidst chaos it's the kind of thing that's also classically remarked upon in such tales as homer's odyssey adventures on a boat at sea and file island would be no exception to this theme it's a primordial microcosm a kind of petri dish so to speak mixing several distinct

17:29 environments into one and also appropriately serving as the birthplace of all the digital monsters and if you want a real world analogy that remarks upon this theme think of japan and all its islands criss-cross by a number of crustal faults in the earth throughout history many parts of the country have experienced devastating earthquakes and tidal waves tsunamis illustrate the capacity of the earth's oceans and seas to unleash devastation upon the world destroying civilizations and thereby throwing order and structure into absolute chaos and in the wake of a tsunami one would walk away with the idea that any semblance of order and structure within the world must be a rare and unnatural thing and so what of the primacy of chaos often in the story telling the forces of chaos represent evil arrayed against the forces of order the good guys

18:16 the heroes of the story yet i contend that this scenario has been flipped on its head in digimon adventure the true agents of chaos in this story are in fact the chosen children themselves they are the anomaly working to undermine the foundations of order enacted by the powers of evil consider mugenjimon in the ironic state of his amalgamated city or even the dark masters construction of spiral mountain itself despite the despotic dispositions of the dark masters the four of them did indeed construct some form of order amidst the chaos of the digital world eugendraman's realm serves as primary example of form imposed upon the formless moreover in its own twisted fashion spiral mountain was also a picture of order out of chaos yet what happens to both of these is

19:01 that the chosen children arrive and unravel spiral mountain by destroying its overseers the big bang theory presupposes that the world itself took form as a result of a spontaneous explosion and under such a theory the earth need not owe its intricate design to any intelligent hand neither would humanity but that is the audacity of mugendramon's great city all of its magnificence do human design yet governed by an entity who owes no allegiance to humanity in fact mugendraman's will is set against humanity in the form of the chosen children his will is to kill them in this manner the dark masters war against the chosen children is a picture of rebellion against god for what are the chosen children too the digital world but god-like beings from another realm granted holy relics and given the power

19:48 over evolution like the tower of babel in the hebrew bible spiral mountain was built by rebellious beings those in conflict with god or in the case of the digital world homeostasis however just like the tower of babel the dark masters were also in conflict with one another incapable of cooperation they were set apart none aided the other in the ongoing battle against the chosen children and so one by one they were picked off remember too devi man's own fear of the chosen children he was utterly reluctant to engage them in combat because he knew they held power that could destroy him and yet in his hubris he was also overcome the children are not made out to be anything special sure there was some prophecy that they heard of and they are referred to as the chosen children of course but coming from homeostasis in episode

20:34 45 the children really were just cherry-picked from odaiba during the greymond parrotman battle otherwise taichi and his friends are really just eight regular young people who were pulled into an alien world and told to partake in a conflict in which they had no personal stake or say digimon adventure isn't a show about heroes it's a show that undermines the whole idea of what a hero is in fact the incarnation of a hero was most obviously seen through taichi as taichi repeatedly tried to embody the archetype yet that was dismantled what happens throughout the show is that he is humbled again and again he can't win on his own and above every other instance we saw this in the mugenderman section of the dark masters arc we saw how weak and defenseless tai chi was against his new enemy and yet he's saved not by any act of

21:20 heroism on his part but by the strength of his sister hikari agami the youngest and weakest of all the children even in her sickness became the primary opposing force against the likes of mugendemon whose power was thought to have been infinite without pure and absolutely unbeatable and so the weakest of us is the strongest of us what's being illustrated here is a type of christian hero it's a hero who is not a mighty conquering warrior but one that is humble and meek much like christ himself and with regard to all of this one better understands apocalypse protesting his fate here in a grand paradox apocalypse insists that he is the true victim here never mind all the evil he has wrought throughout the digital and the real world in his words he comprises all the

22:06 resentment and all the hatred built up by all the digimon who disappeared during the evolution process he remarks on his jealousy of the children and their digimon enjoying the fruits of the digital world and once again this is in reference to him being of satanic origin for so too does jesus christ make reference to those in hell made to bear witness to those in heaven a great chasm has been fixed between us and you so that even those who wish cannot cross from here to you nor can anyone cross from there to us this is apocalypse eternal torment in his dismay he has been fixed upon this side of the gulf that separates the darkness of his abyss from the light beyond in gesture of his suffering apocalypse digs his claws into his arms drawing his own blood this was also censored by the english

22:52 dub yet serves a very poignant illustration apocalypse torments are self-inflicted at a glance he is a victim of outrageous circumstances beyond his own control he claims his being outcast is unjust and that he was never given the chance to revel in the happiness beyond all of that is a lie however yet in his insanity apocalypse might very well believe in that lie the kind of villain he represents here has been remarked upon in the past superbly by the german philosopher frederick nietzsche who very brilliantly used the word resentment to describe a very real sentiment held by a great many people resentment is the french form of the english word resentment but carrying with it the subtle undertones of a persistent hatred rooted in one's own impotence

23:38 what this all means is that apocalypse is attempting to justify his evil deeds by assuming the role of a victim and so he bleeds himself clawing at his own arms in this manner even as the chosen children are supposed to represent christ-like figures apocalypse himself is their antithesis he is an antichrist he is a mockery an imitation of true suffering and for apocalypse no better attribute can be applied than that term resentment and for his inability to reach the utopia beyond his realm he lays blame not on himself but on the chosen children and their digimon partners in a sense he lays claim to having been victimized by them as if his state of being is all their fault ironically however he regenerates from his self-inflicted wounds

24:24 revealing such a gesture to be insubstantial hollow he is less one victimized and more so one who has instead learned of the powerful possibilities of assuming the role of victim and in turn he uses such power to inflict a new brand of suffering thus the oppressed has become the oppressor in further mockery apocalypse sets his wrath upon the children and their digimon labeling his attacks as love friendship and justice and even before the children can muster themselves to counter him apocalyn reaches out with his claws enveloping the digimon partners and then reversing the revolutions furthermore in an effort to increase their disparity he robs the children of their tags in crests shattering them into a thousand pieces and so the children are left to scramble for options given their digimon can no

25:10 longer evolve but apocalypse is one last trick up his sleeve extending his arms outwards he begins some mysterious chant whose words i would love to have transcribed to make sense of but i can't understand them nevertheless this causes the children and their digimon to be reduced to mere data particles if one wonders why apocalypse would not have just killed them outright i've assumed that he simply wanted to cast them into another abyss to have them float in oblivion and despair in a similar manner as he had been made to [Music] yet the children and their digimon remain even as bits of data now here's a strange moment where one wonders how the chosen children and their digimon even retain any cognitive abilities given

25:55 they're supposed to have been scattered into a thousand pieces and tai chi and the others even remark upon what had happened to them koshiro explains everything although since this is a completely novel experience to all involved it's a wonder how he even realized what they've become and getting back into thematic details this area serves as a kind of limbo a world between worlds where taichi and his friends are given the opportunity to rally themselves for one final go at their greatest enemy to use a sports metaphor this entire sequence functions as one big huddle the children and their digimon take this time to recount their experiences to reaffirm their bonds and psych themselves for another go at their enemy all in all it's heartwarming and to the point i think the only reason i dislike it is because maybe i'm too cynical that's me criticizing myself by the way i'm not

26:42 criticizing the show for this i probably should enjoy this sequence far more than i do as corny as it may seem to me but indeed the show is drawing to a close and here we're pushing a very cliched power friendship trope out the door before we bring the final fight to an epic conclusion and in this instance i believe the show may very well have earned this moment once again i'm saying this beyond my own desire that this kind of thing be played out in a far more subtle or casual manner during the course of their adventures we have seen the children stumble fall and rise again it shouldn't surprise anyone that here we have what amounts to characters openly reaffirming the strength of their convictions and purpose for such is the power of despair that it does cause one to question one's resolve

27:27 appropriately the crests that were destroyed by apocalypse miraculously reappear although emblazoned physically upon the bodies of each child now the children have grown beyond the need of mere symbolic representation etched upon material objects for who they are their very identities have now been written upon their hearts former hearts of stone replaced with hearts of flesh yamato includes a line here that goes a long way in explaining how the crests work although the functionality wasn't entirely taken to extensive practice throughout the show specifically and based on his dialogue the crests don't just activate based on the individual attributes expressed by each respective child but they also may activate based on how other children act upon the bearers for instance yamato's crest activates

28:13 upon his being a friend or upon others being a friend to him and likewise takeru's hope activates his own crest or when others pin their hopes upon him that might better explain how anjaman was able to defeat devimon and furthermore how hikari's crest had strengthened the powers of others in the past so here's the reality the show is drawing to a close all of these last minute revelations are being laid out because of that even though it doesn't make much sense for yamato or koshiro or anyone else for that matter to just start saying hey i just realized how all this power works now the whole reason i harp about this point is because this is the difference between telling one's audience what to think allowing them to think for themselves

28:58 this is a point i have and will continue to talk about in all of my analyses a hallmark of good storytelling is when those writing a story know how to convey certain thoughts and feelings without having to tell their audiences how they're supposed to be thinking or feeling and so generally speaking the exposition here is not well written and i'm not saying this because the scene is terrible don't get me wrong the symbolism is on point what i'm trying to say here is that characters in a story should not just exist as life lesson generators even in media made for children in this story digimon adventure contains enough information already to make such moments of exposition redundant in practice the story has already played itself out we've seen these characters grow

29:44 accordingly it's why this show is exceptional it's why we love the characters in it they are just regular kids stumbling about doing what they can to save two worlds they're not supposed to be idealists working by the numbers to give audiences moral guidance they're supposed to be real people but like i said the show is almost over the crest transference is a wonderful moment truly significant the symbolism speaks loud and clear as to what's going on the journey in the hard-fought battle has all but come to an end episode 53 then closes out with a montage of all the digimon partner evolutions after that the children and their digimon re-materialize back to face apocalymon in full force no explanation is given for how they

30:29 re-materialize by the way but at this point in the game i suppose it's just as well this is a given at best one assumes that they're lifting themselves from their despair is what restored them to their former selves moving into episode 54 the last episode of digimon adventure we bear witness to the final battle and it is spectacular to say the least each of the perfect level digimon carves a path through apocalypse claws making way for the war greymon and metal garurumon combo to unleash its fury upon their adversary's main body and the attack is successful a pokemon is then consumed in a barrage of fire and ice victory seems at hand and yet the villain has one more card to play an apocalypse in and of itself the decahedron then primes itself and detonates threatening to doom everyone but a

31:15 miracle occurs wherein the resulting explosion is contained by the power of the digivices one assumes this explosion was also meant to be all-encompassing that in his dying breath apocalypmon would have taken both the digital world and the real world down with him but the digivices form a cube around the explosion each one set upon a corner eight corners requiring eight digivices ultimately this may have been the reason why eight children were required to save the digital world in the first place eight children eight digivices eight corners forming the cube used to contain the apocalypse and thus both worlds have been saved the face of the digital world disappears from the real world sky to the grand relief of all onlookers from tokyo and elsewhere

32:01 shinkido and indeed all the parents of all the chosen children may rest assured the mission has finally been brought to completion and the adventure is soon to come to a bittersweet conclusion so if you've found you enjoy this channel's content please give the video a like and subscribe additionally you may support me through patreon but i also take donations through cash app think of it like a tip jar the links for both can be found in this video's description thank you all for watching and stay tuned for more

32:51 you