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This is MJ. I'm an author, I'm an artist, I'm a Digimon Analyzer. Find all my work at MJMunoz.com

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Get ready for a next level discussion of those monster friends to the boys and girls.

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I'm going to be talking about Digimon Knuckles right now, which is by Ichigo Satora.

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So, here's the little factoid, a little description of it. Haruka is a boy whose father has gone missing.

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He's visited by the Royal Knight, Gankuman. Gankuman is coming to act as his father?

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In Tarot Bang? Question mark exclamation point.

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So yeah, that's basically the premise of the manga.

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And we...well, I'll just read through my notes.

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I liked it overall, and I'm excited to see more of it, and I'm excited to see where exactly it's going to go.

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There's...it was funny, it was like a really low-key story, but there's already like a hook there.

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And it's like a 2 or 3 leveled hook, I would say.

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And I'll explain more about that after I read through my notes real quick.

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So, Mojiman was oddly not so scary for Haruka. Maybe the artwork played it off a little bit funny.

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But Mojiman himself looked desperate when he was wanting food.

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And we get this thing going on where the Digimon are not in full control of themselves,

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and then Gankuman slaps them around, and then they get more in control of themselves.

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So, if I...if you exclude my clicking, as I go back over here through the manga to see,

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like, yeah, when he's about to get hit, or no, when they're fighting, Haruka falls down and is shielding himself or whatever.

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He tries to run away, but at first the way that the Mojiman comes out of the shadows,

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he's just kind of standing there still. Maybe he's too shocked to react at all.

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And then he gets shocked. He's still staring at it. Looks nervous, I guess, maybe by the little sweat drop thingy.

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And then Mojiman is desperate, asking for food.

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And, yeah, I guess at that point he falls over. Just, like, I know it's supposed to be scary, and I get it.

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And I understand that in real life this would be scary, or, you know, this is a scary moment.

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If it was animated it would definitely come off as scary. But I guess his shock, the fact that he froze in fear, kind of threw me off.

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But, like, the Mojiman actually coming out of the shadows is really cool. It looks really, really good.

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But, yeah, anyway, there's...I mean, the art is excellent, and the art is excellent, and I like that a lot.

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That little moment kind of...oh, everything's falling apart! Oh, no!

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Oh, wow. You think I'm going to cut that? Of course I'm not going to cut that.

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I mean, that's gold. I gotta leave that right there. Whew! It's cold in them hills!

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Anyway, so, yeah, it was, like, an interesting moment. Anyway, moving on from there.

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So, Gonkuman seems neat. His firebird spirit dragon thing is kind of weird.

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I don't quite understand. It's like a burning, like, a Graymon bird guy who has an interesting name, something Kamui,

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and that threw me off because I looked at that word a lot, and it was difficult for me to say. Let me see.

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Oh, let me try to find him. The thing is, I'm sure there are people who know exactly who this guy is and are irritated that I don't remember.

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I really like this line in here, though. I never thought I'd be yelled at by a pubescent human. That's pretty funny.

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Huh. I'm not seeing his name at the moment. Pretty sure it comes up later.

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Whatever. People know. People know what this Digimon's name is. Oh, yeah.

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Hinu... I guess it's probably just Hinu Kamui, but Kamui is a weird word. I know it from X, you know, the old Clamp anime.

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But I didn't think Kamui would be spelled like that, so it's really throwing me off. Hinu Kamui. Hinu Kamui.

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I don't know. I don't know what that means. Is that bird Kamui? Is it fire Kamui? Because he seems like a fiery guy.

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Doesn't matter. Just a little detail there. But the weirdest thing probably is his little mustache. His little pencil mustache, which I always find interesting.

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Especially, like, I don't know. He's got some very strong Japanese coding in his design.

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He's got, I don't know what the shoes are called, but he's got the split toe and he's on the wood platform shoes, wood block platform shoes.

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And he, like, generically has like a samurai spirit or like a martial arts type of spirit.

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I say martial arts versus samurai because he's not using a sword, he's using his fists. So that's interesting.

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I think he's got horns too. Is he supposed to be like an oni knight? Like a, you know what I mean? Like a demon knight or something like that?

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Anyway, I'm not 100% sure, but he looks cool and he's got some cool flair and I enjoy him overall.

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Just trying to figure out what exactly he's about. But that's the thing. This issue isn't about telling you what everybody's about.

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It's about setting up the pieces and giving you a little bit to go on. It's about hooking you in and then having you go from there.

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So, I don't know what to say about that.

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Okay, so let me see. Oh, so Haruka is oddly heroic, which I like. He doesn't want to run away.

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He tries to shield the boy with his body and when his watch activates, then he uses the, you know, nightman shield or whatever.

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And he doesn't know what Digimon are. Digimon are not a thing in this world. They're just like some completely different thing.

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This is the origin story for Digimon or whatever. This Digimon world has its own origin story.

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So, he doesn't know anything about them, but the watch came from his dad. And Gankuman says that Hajime, Haruka's father, has the same type of watch.

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Because he says he's seen that before. And I would suspect that there's multiple watches like this out there.

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We see a little stinger, a little teaser at the end that somebody has one. It looks like there's a Digimon that has it on one of its claws.

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And at the tip of its claw it has a watch. So, I think it's got to be a pretty sizable Digimon.

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But yeah, I don't know. Haruka's interesting. Like, he is kind of...

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In a certain way, he's kind of like a weak, timid protagonist because he just lets Gankuman come over and he feeds him stuff.

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And he's letting himself be posed upon. But at the same time, he steps in front of this kid and is willing to give up his life for him basically to save him if he can.

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And that's impressive. That's very hard. That's tough. And there's got to be some sort of grit to him.

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But I don't know. He's like an interesting character. We don't get a lot from him, but the little that we get is a little contradictory.

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He's very tough. He's got a lot to resolve. But he also is willing to let people kind of push him around, walk all over him in a way.

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And that's an interesting combination of things.

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Hajime's disappearance raises so many questions. Apparently he's been working on seeing if humans can migrate into the digital world.

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Now, we've got these watches. The watch came from his father. And if Hajime has one, and then there's that third one out there,

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how many more Digimon watches are there like this? And where do they come from? Who manufactures them? How do they have this power?

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Is it any watch can be synced with the DigiForce? Or is it specifically that these watches are being manufactured by some sort of organization, some sort of corporation,

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some sort of entity that is behind this connection between the real world and the digital world? And we don't know.

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But it raises all those questions. And it makes me wonder, is there a team that he's working with, or was he working on this solo? Or what?

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I don't know. I couldn't say. We do not have that information yet. And I think that's part of the hook.

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It's a mystery being set up there. And there's a lot of questions that aren't stated directly.

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But there are things that are left out of the narrative. So we were left to wonder.

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We're left to wonder what those things mean. And then there was that I think it's a Veedramon is what it's called.

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Or is it? Is that Aramon? I think it's Veedramon. That's what I think. So I'm going to stick with that. It's not XVemon because it looks pretty different anyway.

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And it looks like Zeromar, right? It was the original Veedramon from whatever that Digimon manga. Come on Digimon. Is that what it was?

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Whatever. Doesn't matter. The one with Ty, the Digimon Emperor style Ty. What? Ty looked like the Digimon Emperor. Yeah. Look at the Digimon Emperor.

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Look at the Ty from that manga in the world of the cape and the shoulder pads and stuff. Digimon Emperor right there. Anyway, we'll talk about that more later.

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But yeah, that kid's dad disappeared and then all of a sudden this Veedramon shows up and I'm thinking literally this guy's here.

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Gankuman is here in place of Gankuman being the dad who stepped up. Gankuman is literally here in place of his father Hajime because they're friends or whatever.

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But I almost wonder if there's some sort of principle of exchange. There's been equal exchange.

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And Veedramon is going to go hide in the woods and Mujaman ran away. So he's not killing these Digimon.

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How is he going to get them back to the digital world? What's going on there? Is there the necessity of that transference?

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There's a mega level Digimon and a single human. Is that same? Is it one to one regardless of power level? Is it about mass? Is it about who knows what?

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I don't know. Displacement of the universe. I couldn't say. And like it leaves it open for a lot of questions, a lot of questions to be answered, a lot of storytelling potential.

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So I'm really curious to see what happens from here. I like this one. I like that there's no Huchi Mama in this.

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I mean, next episode we'll get our Huchi Mama and then we can all be happy about that, I guess.

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But yeah, I like this. This seems cool. Seems fun. Seems nice. Seems like it could be a really interesting story.

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What did you think about it? I'd like to know.

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By the way, if you want to see this Royal Knight guy, you should really go to the show notes, look at the website and find the entry for this episode.

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There's an image of him there, a static image, or you can watch the video version, which is also linked in the show notes.

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So here it is, possibly the most majestic of all the Digimon I've done. I didn't even know about the Royal Knights concept from Digimon when I developed this guy.

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I'm pretty sure the Royal Knights came out in Digimon Frontier, which was the fourth season, which came out in, I guess, 2002.

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And I had already been working on this in 8th grade, for sure. Maybe a little bit in 7th grade. I don't know. I got kicked out of most schools.

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I wrote a Digimon fanfic with all my family. This is supposed to be my cousin's. It started off with, I think, Larvaman, and then he becomes Knightman.

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So here's cute little Larvaman there, his little ant in soldier armor. Actually very much inspired by... Oh my gosh, I guess I'm just like a thief.

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This guy is very much inspired by the worm that was working with the guy in Monster Rancher, who was kind of a servant of Moo, maybe? But not really.

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You remember Monster Rancher? I remember Monster Rancher. Anyway, I watched the whole thing two years ago. It's a great show.

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Except Pixie's very lewd, so the only thing I don't like about that show is that Pixie's far too lewd.

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Anyway, she's not a succubus. And then the literal succubus is... Well, let's just say Pixie probably wins that contest. Anyway, moving on.

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Then we've got this very much Gundam-inspired guy. I was probably watching a lot of G Gundam at the time, but I thought, you know what would be cool?

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If I had an ant guy and I made him have a toy form, a champion toy form. And I think this guy is literally supposed to be... He's probably like 3 or 4 inches here.

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He's probably supposed to be maybe a 6-inch action figure. You can see the ball joints I have on here. I love, love, love, love Spider-Man.

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As a kid, probably the thing I loved most about Spider-Man was that they had super-posable Spider-Man toys from the regular Marvel collection.

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I don't know if it was Hasbro or... I don't think it was Hasbro. I don't know who the toy company was. It was like ToyWiz, I think. T-E-O-Y-W-H-I-Z.

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Anyway, pretty sure ToyWiz did those toys. And they had like 32 points of articulation, a bend in the torso, and all these ball joints all over the place.

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They put Spider-Man in all those crazy poses. They even had finger joint things so you could have him do either a palm out hand or doing the classic, you know, I love you Spider-Man web shooter finger thing.

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Anyway, so this guy is a toy. And I think he's supposed to be able to masquerade as a toy for a kid.

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Because like in Digimon, when they went into a dive-in and stuff, they pretended that their Digimon were stuffed animals or whatever.

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But I thought, how else could you do that? He looks like an action figure. That would be super cool.

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Although other kids would want to play with him, that could cause problems. Speaking of Spider-Man, going from the super posibility of a Gundam.

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So like, I stole this from Monster Rancher. I stole this from Gundam. And here we go. This is like a feral, vicious, crazy ant version of Spider-Man.

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He's like a soldier ant, basically. And yeah, he's a killer. Look at those big stingers he's got that come out of his arms here.

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And I think this was before, yeah this was way before Ultimate Spider-Man. In Ultimate Spider-Man, did Peter get those crazy stingers? I think so.

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Anyway, so this is way before that. But like I've got, you know, I'm pulling on the Digimon lore. Like Tentomon has on his biceps and stuff these little ridged muscle pieces.

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Some of the other bug Digimon have them. Not all of them that I can remember. But yeah, I try to make him like a thin, soldier, feral kind of guy who's going to rip you up with these things.

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Crazy like. I guess if you turn, if you mix Spider-Man and Wolverine together and made him an ant guy, maybe that could be it.

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And I'm not trying to say that I'm completely derivative. I'm just trying to not lie about my influences.

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And for here, again I was enjoying G Gundam, and I thought, hmm, I'll do a King of Cards. Not a King of Hearts, a King of Cards.

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But you know what? I'll tie him to cards because I love the playing card theme. So I'll give him one, two, three, four swords. And each sword could stand for one of the four suits of cards.

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But I thought, you know, the King and Queen on the cards are so European. Let me throw a different flavor in here.

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So I'm going to give this guy forearms like, you know, an ant should have, you know, six appendages total.

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And then let me give him like an Arab vibe, an Arab influence. Give him a nice long beard. Give him, you know, whatever they call their head covering. It's not a turban, it's something else.

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And let me put him in like leather armor with some plating on it with some spikes. Make him a little fierce. Give him a cool sash type belt.

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I don't know what this thing is on the front of it. Is it from somewhere else? Does it reference any of these other designs?

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No, it does not. So I don't know what that's doing there. But I like the sash, the little buckle thing doesn't quite make sense.

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And I figured this is like a cool, like desert friendly leather armor type deal he's wearing.

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And then he's got, I love these shoes and these, you know, baggy pants for breathability. And look, you can even see the blade behind his thigh there.

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It's, you know, I'm a real artist here trying to put all these details together. So anyway, that's my Ant Digimon that I drew.

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He's a royal, he starts off as a part of a colony. He's a knight of one sort or another. And then he's a royal, he's a king.

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So he's the very first royal knight ever to exist, I'm going to say. And it was created by me, nobody in Digimon.

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I hope you enjoyed that. Please remember to like, share, and subscribe. I invite you to comment, ask questions, and share your thoughts with me.

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It's always more fun when you're part of the conversation. Until next time, shatter despair apart and show me your brave heart.

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