I've been thinking of changing the title in light of Nintendo's recent mass DMCA of adult works on Newgrounds.
We're currently snagged on the runner-up to Riolu that came up while my husband and I talked about the issue over breakfast. Namely, that Digimon is perfectly acceptable as an alternative and that we have two great choices for the rename.
For those joining in for the first time, this is a project about Queer Erasure, Obscenity Law, and the disastrous policy spiral of purity policing pornography. It also is about wanting to fuck cartoon animal people in your mind palace, which really shouldn't need rationalizing but we live in a society(tm) that really gets horny about punishing thought crimes. Read on for some thoughts about Digimon.
CW's: Mostly SFW content, NSFW blog, discussion about Pornography.
On one end, I want to go with the Patamon Paradox, because Patamon is a fantastic example.
- Small, Round, Cute
- Ageless, literally impossible to clock by human standards
- Digivolves into Angemon, which is a full grown dude
On the other is going with Guilmon Paradox,
- Character has so much range you can depict them on-model as extremely immature to very adult
- Character personality is starkly immature, in text behaving much more child-like, and definitely not of-age if you interpret events literally
- Other digimon features including maturing visually via digivolve but does not meaningfully mature intellectually/emotionally as Growlmon, having effectively the same personality as Guilmon
- Also Ageless, minimally possible to clock by human standards due to the more feral bodyplan
I think Guilmon is the stronger example, but Patamon is a fabulous comparison too. Guilmon is instantly recognizable by the furry fandom for the most part, famously the reason we have Dragoneer, also a big part of early Narse and I think even the late Athus. Guilmon's involvement in the questionable maturity of characters on Furaffinity is historic, as an animation by Dacad between I think 2017 and 2018 had seen him effectively soft-banned until clarification via closed door discussion was had. This would've come up in my exploration via text anyway, since Dacad's involvement in this exact incident is why he redesigned his Riolu OC.
I still plan to talk about Riolu intensely as part of the case studies, I think I'm going to focus on Guilmon and Riolu, and pair both examples with respective peers Patamon and Charmander, who have less textual controversy over their interpretations. Riolu being more cute than Guilmon makes for a good contrast point too, allowing for the character to be an example of how initial concept changes the read despite in-text reasons to interpret it more dynamically.
What makes Digimon more interesting than Pokemon is that the displayed maturity of characters between Digivolution forms is very much a variable. Characters can become more mature looking, but act irrationally like a child, but then return to a cute form that behaves like they're a fucking mountaintop sage. It really is worth the consideration that Digimon are the final test of the "Ageless Sexless" hypothesis on fictional characters in pornography, if you interpret the cartoon/anime as variants of the same extended canon, the same series Guilmon is from has Renamon, who goes OUT of her way in the English Dub to clarify that "Digimon don't have gender", despite having... gendered personalities. We kind of have to read between the lines on a translation and cultural lens that's like 20 years old, I think Renamon means [Normalized Sex Category], not the act of expression of a social performance indicating your mating status.
I have initial approval from the artists Dacad and Shugowah to send some pre-screened interview questions to them, which I think I'm getting close to having actually assembled. Really bothers me that I've not been able to think so clearly on this all of the time, also the research is tricky because so much of the academics attached here involve uncomfortable search terms and single-publisher works behind paywalls.