A little disclaimer before we begin: I haven't seen 02... ever. Every remark on the quality of the writing is going to be directed at the writer and its work, not at the series itself.
So, how do I begin? Well, I'm doing a marathon of the Digimon franchise, so I went online to know what people think of each and every series before starting it. Turns out that many people don't really like 02 all that much, calling it an inconsistent and boring sequel to an amazing show. And considering that I really liked Adventure (I gave it a 9/10), and that I watch series and shows for fun, I decided to skip directly to Tamers.
This is where this horrible carnival of angst comes into play. Some people suggested this fanfiction as a good substitute to the actual series. Now, I don't really have this amazing relationship with fanfictions in general (most of them are... how do people say these days... cringy), but I wanted to have something to read between the episodes of Tamers, and many people were praising it so much that I had to at least give it a shot. My God.
First of all, the prose is... well, it could be better. There are no real grammar mistakes, but the prose itself is a bit stilted. It's not really all that professional, although it gets considerably better with every chapter. But that's not really the problem here. The problem is... or better, are the characters.
Now, what do I think when I think of Digimon Adventure? Well, surely not horrible characterizations and terrible drama: the fanfiction has this weird idea that what makes a story mature is a forced, stilted sense of darkness and angst that overrides the characters and their personalities, making you completely uninterested in them as a consequence. It really gets to the point of killing one of the characters (I'm not gonna say who, because it's a spoiler, although I don't know why would anyone want to read this), ignoring any potential that same character might have possessed. Everybody's emotionally inconsistent, and the weight of the story suffers because of this. It seems like the author didn't really care about the characters he was writing, to be honest.
But the reason why I'm so harsh is that the mere concept of this story is enough to bug me in the wrong way: the idea that this is the "better"... no, "real" version of what happened in a show simply because whoever was writing it didn't like it? But that's not all: at the beginning, we learn that everything that happened in the actual series is fake because Takeru (who has become a writer) is writing the story in a way that pleases his editors, and the reason why the ACTUAL story comes into play is because his wife tells him that the people aren't going to like it. The wife, here, is clearly an insert of the writer (and most of the fandom)'s opinion on 02. This is extremely dense, and it makes the story even worse by comparison: it's like the author's saying "oh yeah, this is the actual Adventure sequel guys. This is what Adventure, that amazing series, deserves". No, it doesn't. It deserves much better.
This is a clear 3/10: if you take it seriously as an Adventure sequel, it's a disaster. And you know what? Now I'm actually going to watch 02, just to spite the author and see how bad it truly is. It can't be worse than this, for sure.
Maybe there was a reason for that
A little disclaimer before we begin: I haven't seen 02... ever. Every remark on the quality of the writing is going to be directed at the writer and its work, not at the series itself.
So, how do I begin? Well, I'm doing a marathon of the Digimon franchise, so I went online to know what people think of each and every series before starting it. Turns out that many people don't really like 02 all that much, calling it an inconsistent and boring sequel to an amazing show. And considering that I really liked Adventure (I gave it a 9/10), and that I watch series and shows for fun, I decided to skip directly to Tamers.
This is where this horrible carnival of angst comes into play. Some people suggested this fanfiction as a good substitute to the actual series. Now, I don't really have this amazing relationship with fanfictions in general (most of them are... how do people say these days... cringy), but I wanted to have something to read between the episodes of Tamers, and many people were praising it so much that I had to at least give it a shot. My God.
First of all, the prose is... well, it could be better. There are no real grammar mistakes, but the prose itself is a bit stilted. It's not really all that professional, although it gets considerably better with every chapter. But that's not really the problem here. The problem is... or better, are the characters.
Now, what do I think when I think of Digimon Adventure? Well, surely not horrible characterizations and terrible drama: the fanfiction has this weird idea that what makes a story mature is a forced, stilted sense of darkness and angst that overrides the characters and their personalities, making you completely uninterested in them as a consequence. It really gets to the point of killing one of the characters (I'm not gonna say who, because it's a spoiler, although I don't know why would anyone want to read this), ignoring any potential that same character might have possessed. Everybody's emotionally inconsistent, and the weight of the story suffers because of this. It seems like the author didn't really care about the characters he was writing, to be honest.
But the reason why I'm so harsh is that the mere concept of this story is enough to bug me in the wrong way: the idea that this is the "better"... no, "real" version of what happened in a show simply because whoever was writing it didn't like it? But that's not all: at the beginning, we learn that everything that happened in the actual series is fake because Takeru (who has become a writer) is writing the story in a way that pleases his editors, and the reason why the ACTUAL story comes into play is because his wife tells him that the people aren't going to like it. The wife, here, is clearly an insert of the writer (and most of the fandom)'s opinion on 02. This is extremely dense, and it makes the story even worse by comparison: it's like the author's saying "oh yeah, this is the actual Adventure sequel guys. This is what Adventure, that amazing series, deserves". No, it doesn't. It deserves much better.
This is a clear 3/10: if you take it seriously as an Adventure sequel, it's a disaster. And you know what? Now I'm actually going to watch 02, just to spite the author and see how bad it truly is. It can't be worse than this, for sure.