It’s interesting watching this after Serial Experiments Lain and seeing Chiaki J. Konaka reusing ideas in a more child-friendly show and with the government conspiracy angle on control of the internet/digital world. I am doing another nostalgia trip here so I rewatched the English dub and while it can be kind of frustrating how the dub cannot let any moment breath without shoehorning in extra jokes and one-liners I was surprised at how often I did actually laugh at those and at least it’s not trying to pretend they’re not in Japan—the onigiri are called rice balls, not doughnuts. I was also surprised, considering all the other censorship, how horny the dub is about Renamon. I guess she just tends to have that effect on people.

Pacing overall can be a bit weird. My memory of the show was that it picks up at the halfway mark when they go to the digital world, but it’s quite the opposite; it becomes quite meandering for a while until they finally get to Beelzemon attacking the cast and kicking off the Jeri suffering arc. The actual fight against the D-Reaper was also very drawn out in ways that were unfortunately not very interesting and not helped by a lot of fairly stiff and limited animation, but it still does the big emotional moments well.

Rika is a great character with an unfortunate arc. I appreciate that they made the character who starts off thinking that digimon are just data and only for fighting the girl of the main trio and it makes sense as an arc for that kind of character to soften up and start to hate fighting, but the combination of those two things and how it’s written ends up with having the main female character becoming more passive and her role in the final battle being giving her power to be support for a guy who showed up halfway through the show, made even worse how this is illustrated by Sakuyamon stripping off her armour.

I also quite enjoy how they use distributed computing à la Folding@home to help the kids get back home as a counterpoint to the bad guy is defeated in Digimon: The Movie via being DDoSed.

Although I had seen Serial Experiments Lain before unlike a lot of terminally online autistic trans women it was not that formative for me and had not left a very strong impression. Interesting to revisit and both more strange and more straightforward than I remembered. It’s rather clear looking at it now how much of the dreamlike pacing, odd tangents and philosophical musings are, as much as anything else, a function of a budget stretched to breaking point. The narrative being put on complete pause in favour of a slideshow of photographs about conspiracy theories is not just a sign of the narrative going off the deep end, but a very obvious sign that the studio has run out of money. Once the show does play its hand I was surprised by how, if not straightforward or unambiguous, quite open it is on the nature of Lain and how she came to be. But Chiaki J. Konaka is more interested in questions than answers and so much of what happens is left to be a strange, hauntingly beautiful picture. The blood-splattered shadows that appear across the show stand out to me in particular, a reminder of everything lurking unseen all around us, of networks, violence and human connections.

While the juxtaposition of the digital and cel animation was interesting in Roger the Wanderer it is hard to deny that the digital animation in the second series just looks so much worse when watching it in bluray quality. Every time they reuse footage from the first series it is a jarring reminder of that. I also don’t much like the new robot designs in the second half of the show. The New Batman Adventures to the first series’ Batman: The Animated Series.

I also think the more serialised structure doesn’t work as well as the earlier, episodic stories for the most part. But what the series does with that story is still really interesting. When I was younger I was much more wrapped up in what was “really” happening in the plot but coming back to it with more of an understanding of themes and even simply a stronger willingness to accept vibes-based storytelling it’s much easier to take in and consider the ideas the show is playing with beyond just the bare mysteries.

These people are trapped in a society built by people who even if they had known what they were doing are too senile now to understand it, ruled over by their petulant spoilt children who understand even less and believe they have inherited the right to redefine the world and who deserves to survive. A system that reproduces itself via the people trapped inside it who are acting in accordance to that system and don’t even understand it while trying to hold on to the idea of being independent individuals even as they are shaped and defined by these systems.

Is that what Konaka was going for? Probably not, but that’s art.

We start with cel animation footage of the finale of the first series interspersed with what are ostensibly flashbacks​—​memories​—​animated in the new digital animation of the second series. There’s a wrongness to this. A sense of a new reality being imposed over the old. There are false memories - retcons. Speeches from characters who never gave them before. Dastun suddenly knows that Roger pilots Big O. He already knew. He always knew, perhaps. Though he definitely didn’t know last season. Everything has moved over to the digital animation now. The priorities of the story are realigned. Everyone is concerned about people from outside of Paradigm City, a mystery which the newly more serialised story is going to focus on now. Roger starts to unravel and wakes up in New York and meets the gargoyles from Gargoyles. When he returns to Paradigm reality has shifted enough to set up for the rest of the show. The parts of Big Fau exist smuggled inside the foreign megadei so that the EU can avoid paying tariffs and the Joker exists now.

Impeccable atmosphere. Moody, gorgeous. It has R. Dorothy in it. What more could you want? The wider lore stuff doesn’t exactly come out of nowhere in the last episode but it certainly feels like the show is trying to rush through it because it doesn’t have any more time. An old man we have never met telling us that the secret history of the metropolis is fake before quickly summarising it for the audience who hasn’t heard it before certainly seems like something that should have played out over several episodes and not a single minute. Still, the finale throwing out as much intrigue as it can at once probably helped the show get eventually renewed.