This is MJ. I'm an author, I'm an artist, I'm a Digimon Analyzer. Find all my work at MJMunoz.com.
Get ready for a next level discussion of those monster friends for the boys and girls.
Digimon Paradox Chapter 2 by Ayumaminato was pretty interesting. I liked a lot of stuff that went on in it.
There was one thing I really didn't like in it that is more of an aesthetic thing. It's the risk, the danger of being a fan of anime and manga type stuff coming from Japan.
It doesn't work for me sometimes. Let's just say somebody gets Evangelion or somebody gets Raid or Shinji. I don't know how you put that.
If you know those things, you get what I'm talking about. It was interesting because it almost turned into this life type of thing, but then there's a battle in it too.
I didn't think it was boring. I didn't think the pacing was bad. I was just surprised at how light the action was. I was surprised at how it took this interesting time travel story.
It went ahead and slowed down on the time and then raced through some of the time as well.
It really gave the opportunity. I don't know if it's because it's a time travel story or if it's because it's almost like this more slice of life thing or exactly what it is.
It in fact gave these characters a lot of time to spend with each other and it provides a lot of legitimate reason for them to have changed and have different feelings by the end of it than they do at the beginning of it.
Or from the ending of the last one because like I said, months passed. But something interesting though that I don't know if I actually thought it was bad or if I just thought it was interesting is that apparently they have been having no interactions with this Devithra Mon or anything else.
They have been having no interactions with any wild Digimon. Let's say there's been no Digimon out breaking and attacking or causing issues in the real world at all.
In order to get our one action scene, they decide to basically use a DigiPort to travel from one area to another. They were traveling to Kyoto and I don't know if they were literally traveling to Kyoto or if they were traveling within the network to Kyoto.
And that's how they got in this place with all these torii gates where there's this really cool thing with the torii gate to help them beat this Digimon.
Which is MetalGreymon. I'm not trying to hide it.
I just wanted to double check something. So the time passes about three months or April, May, June. Over the course of April, May, June the bulk of the story happens or the bulk of their time together happens so far in this chapter.
And in June is when they enter into the digital world or into the net to travel so that they can see the torii gates and Eve can see what the summer is like.
So I feel like they're actually going to go out, pop out of a computer or a phone or whatever over there. And there's all sorts of network things that they could, you know, network connected devices that they could exit on.
And it's cool they're traveling. It's cool that Mamoru Hosoda had such an effect on Digimon that, you know, the R-War game stuff, the way that they travel through the internet, that's just like the visual.
It's part of the visual language of Digimon. So they're traveling through and then they encounter this Digimon have this fight after nothing's happened and she's made no progress in getting her time machine back or destroying this Digimon, the Divijimon that supposedly is the source of the paradox.
Or that Reiji is hoping is the source of the paradox. But then they encounter this MetalGreymon and they fight it and it's really cool.
Elecmon turns into a DarkTuranimon, which looks really cool and there's a couple of colors flash pages for this fight.
And when they have the opportunity to kill, well it's funny, Kuwagamon says like, look, I can kill DarkTuranimon, he's Digivolving Weird and this might be the cause of the problem. I can kill him right now, just give me permission, Lady Eve or just Eve.
And she says, no, don't do it. And, you know, support them. And then eventually they defeat the MetalGreymon and then instead of killing it, she decides to have it frozen because that's an option.
She can freeze it and contain it, I guess, somewhere somehow with her weird built-in arm band Digivice thing that she has.
And then later on we see Elecmon recovering to a certain percentage. We see this right out on a computer screen. So he's recovering from a fight, it would appear.
So that's all very interesting. We're getting to see this more human side of Eve and she's been humanized through spending this time with Wanya and Reiji and I guess going to school too, I guess that's helping her.
We see her at school, we see her in her school uniform, we see her in her school uniform at a temple or yeah, it's a temple of some sort.
And it's very old-timey. It might be Kyoto, but I don't know for sure that it is. But I feel like they go there, they spend the time there, they do the festival stuff. She gets a fish and a fish bowl. It's like a pet for her, I guess.
And she's disappointed at first that they can't eat it, but it's fine.
And then they end up, you know, she ends up getting humanized basically through all these different circumstances. We don't get to see any more interaction with his sister, although she's the one that held register in the school and said she was a relative and stuff like that.
But anyway, at the end we get this kind of crazy revelation of this weird otaku, you know, evo moment where she grabs his hand, he falls on top of her, and then she grabs his hand by the wrist and puts it on her breast so he can feel her heartbeat.
Which, by the way, I'm a married man. I've had to feel my wife's heartbeat from time to time. You don't have to grab a woman's breast to feel her heartbeat. In fact, that doesn't help you feel her heartbeat, and I hope that's not too gausher of me to say.
But like, you put it on the middle, like where you do the Pledge of Allegiance if you're an American. That's the kind of area where you feel the heartbeat, not on the breast. It doesn't help.
It looks great in a manga and anime, I guess. That's your kind of thing, but it's not quite how that works. So, anyway, just saying that for all you people who don't know.
For all of you who've never known the touch of a woman, that's a little advice for you. So, when a woman tells you to feel her heartbeat, don't grab her breast, just put your hand in the middle.
Anyway, um, I'm not cutting that out. I don't know if that's a good idea or not. Anyway, um, so, like that was weird. But then we get this revelation that she's an AI.
But then again, it looked like in the past, we saw her, she's reflecting on her world, and this is what I meant to get to, and I got distracted looking at other stuff. No, not that. Other stuff. At the calendar scene.
Anyway, um, it turns out, or there's very much this AI that, there's a little girl who looks like a little Eve, and then we learn that she's an AI.
So, I don't know if she's an AI based on this little girl, if all the AI are based on certain people, or what.
But it's interesting, she says the world is so messed up, so destroyed, that it never stops raining in the future.
And, like, the global population is severely diminished because of Digimon being these weapons of war. And that's all really interesting and compelling, and it makes you feel bad for her.
And Reggie has this great moment where he reflects and he says, she's all alone in this era. Like, she's completely isolated from everybody else, and me and you, we're all she has.
And, like, I genuinely want to help her. I don't just want to save your life, which I do, but I genuinely want to help her and help her fix the future and help her get back and have a happy life and a happy future there.
Which is really cool, makes Reggie out to look really good, it makes her out to look like a very sympathetic character.
But then again, there's this conflict of is she an AI or was she a little girl, or, you know, is she based on her, or, like, how does that all work?
What does that mean when he's touching her heart? Is the ba-dump-ba-dump that we get at first his heartbeat because he's on top of this girl who's in her Huchimama top again?
Or what? And then when his hand is on her, there's no confirmation that he's feeling her heartbeat. We don't know that. It's not- that information is being withheld from us.
Maybe we're supposed to assume that he's not, because she's an AI, she's maybe even, like, a robot type of person. I don't really know.
And that's very interesting and very weird, but then they flash- like, they show more detail, and there's this, like, apple symbol on her leg with, like, a number on it.
By the way, it's apple number four. You know, she's called Eve, there's this tree imagery, there's this weird large tree on the very first page that has all these, like, tubes connected to it,
and the tubes have on them these apple- like, the tree logo with the apple with the Roman numeral on it. So she's number four, it shows number seven, number six, and number two talking to her,
and then there's this mysterious guy who's probably going to be hunting them down next, and who's that, Adam?
He supposedly had gone missing because she- everybody who'd gone into the past before Eve has gone missing and hasn't returned to the future, they haven't gone back to the future,
and she's trying to be the first one to make it back to the future, and I'm thinking this is another time agent who went back and either died or maybe didn't come back because of, you know, weird complicated time travel stuff,
and I guess he's going to oppose them? He seems to be the one that had the metal terranum on. Maybe he's the source of the paradox, maybe the paradox is that in trying to go back and stop the paradox from happening,
they caused it to happen in the first place. I don't really know, but it's interesting stories so far, it's, you know, I'm liking it. I was thrilled when I saw her in the schoolgirl uniform,
and I thought, oh good, she's going to be wearing normal clothes, and then she went back to the abnormal clothes, so that's kind of a funny point, that's a sticking point for me,
and I'm sure everybody else is thrilled with it, but, you know, whatever, that's fine, but this, you know, whole idea, and I think this story has to end by part four,
and I'm assuming part one and part two were about the same length as each other, so I would assume, I think they're all going to be kind of the same length, to have like a standardized format.
I'm interested to see what happens with all this crazy time travel stuff, and with her humanity. Is she human, is she not? How human is she, how human can an AI be?
Is she based on a human? All that stuff, like, how will that all play out, and how will that work with this other guy?
And that all goes to help explain why she was such a cold killer, and why she was willing to just kill one and it wasn't a big deal to her.
It's not just that she's desperate to save her future because she's connected to it and she cares about it, it's because she, ironically, doesn't have the heart,
and she gets the heart and she gets the feeling throughout the course of the story.
But I'm just wondering, like, there's the apple, there's the tree, she's called Eve, there's this guy, like, you know, is there like weird Adam and Eve? Like, are they all Adams for the men and all Eve for the girls?
Are the women, did I say men? Men and women. Anyway, like, why are we getting this, you know, Adam and Eve stuff? Like, you know, are you a woman or not too? I wonder, like, what the motivation is behind that.
It feels kind of like it could just be like an Evangelion type thing, like, oh, I'm just going to use this imagery, it'll be really cool.
And that's fine if it is, but if there's something more so you can get to it, I'd be curious to know what that is and what exactly that means.
Yeah, I want to know what you think about it too. Which Eve outfit do you like better? What do you think is going to happen in the future? What do you think is behind this imagery?
And what else? Give me your feedback. I want to know.
I want to know what you think about it too.