you've talked about how yugioh had an impact on your art and character design sensibilities, but i was wondering if digimon also had any, since it really enjoys playing with biological forms
YES, to an enormous extent, even if I had way less access to Digimon materials as a kid versus say, Pokemon, the shreds I got of it had a very profound effect on me. I think Digimon's overall rendering style and the methodology it used for design - Emphasizing "iconised" over "contextualized" design where a wild animal can have a completely incongruous element like a spike collar or an elaborate set of decorative bindings or like an entire missile lodged in their chest remain with me to this day. A while back i did that monstrously extensive "literally rank every Digimon until you find your top 8" quiz and it spat this out, for some idea of my tastes, although I think for me personally as a series it has significantly more hits than misses overall so this is just a "Best of best". I also want to shout out Mamoru Hosoda's Digimon films, specifically the two that got brutally recut into "The Digimon Movie" which I obsessively rewatched as a child. Diaboromon and Cherubimon echoed for decades inside my head.
