snapthirty:

Cast your minds back, if you would, to a magical time known as 1999. The 21st century was still on the horizon and virtual pets were all the rage. Born out of some kind of business trickery that co…

This article brings up some interesting questions about why Digimon floundered in the west, but it fails to answer those questions, seemingly implying that there’s no apparent reason. This quote in particular sparked my need to discuss this topic:

[I]t’s not like the franchise has fallen into obscurity, there’s still new anime being created, still being dubbed in English even. Therefore it remains a mystery to me why there have been no recent attempts at continuing the gaming side of the franchise.

Except, it’s really not a mystery. First, let’s talk about the first half of their statement, here. It’s a bit inaccurate to say the Digimon anime is still being produced. The most recent season, Digimon Xros Wars (Digimon Fusion for the dub), ran from July 2010 to March 2012, spanning three distinct arcs. The first of those three arcs ended in March 2011. Now, taking a look at the English airdates of that first arc (September 2013 to June 2014), that’s about three years from Japanese airdate to English. That’s a pretty long time.

Compare to more recent anime. Let’s take Kill la Kill, for instance, a rather popular anime that’s been all over the place recently (as a cursory glance at Tumblr should prove). That show first aired in October 2013. The first dub episode will be showed at a special event in Los Angeles Anime Expo this July. That’s a turnover of less than a year from original airing to English release.

The fact that Digimon took three years to get a dub release, as opposed to more popular anime taking under a year to get the same, should tell volumes about how popular the Digimon franchise is considered to be in English-speaking countries.

(it should also be noted that, while Xros Wars did about average in terms of viewership in its home country, it sold toys ridiculously well. Toys that were not remade for an American market, as the west instead received cheaper, lower-quality toys. That should tell you something about how much money this dub was expected to make.)

So where does this perception of Digimon fandom come from? Well… honestly, if Bandai Namco believes Digimon is unpopular with the western fans, it’s because the fans do a damn good job putting that attitude out there. No, seriously, bear with me here.

If you take a look at Digimon fandom anywhere on the net, odds are most people you find are going to insist that only the first two seasons (Adventure and 02) and occasionally the third (Tamers), are the only “real” Digimon. Have you ever seen the subset of Pokemon fans known as “genwunners,” the people who think only the original Game Boy games were any good and everything after was a horrible personal insult to their childhood? Yeah, it’s like that. And the thing is, Digimon’s got it even worse. Since Digimon’s anime changes universe, cast, and monsters with each new iteration - unlike that other monster series which keeps popular monsters and characters with the new in one consistent continuity - fans who are resistant to change tend to have a kneejerk reaction and automatically reject the new stuff out of hand, instead preferring to bury their faces in the comfort of the old.

You may think I’m exaggerating, but there’s fans who refuse to watch the fifth season, Digimon Savers, simply because the lead character doesn’t wear goggles. It's that bad. And if you’d like to see some examples for yourself, one only needs to watch the video linked here (with excellent commentary by a dear friend of mine), where a purported Digimon con panel devolves into a nostalgia-fueled discussion of how only the early seasons were good and inevitably leads to the whining about how much the epilogue of 02 sucked because their favorite ships didn’t pan out. It was 13 years ago, folks, get over it. Or maybe you could listen to this podcast, run by three fans that discuss Digimon. Only one of them seems to have given the later seasons a chance in any capacity. Another one of the members shouts down the other panelists on multiple occasions when they suggest they liked something better than Adventure. The podcast even describes itself as “critically nostalgic,” a blatant oxymoron that should tell you critical analysis is the last thing you’ll be getting here.

So what am I getting at with this? Digimon fandom projects an attitude that they don't want anything new because they’re too focused on a version of the series that has been over for nearly a decade and a half. They’re unwilling to grow up and try new things because their attachment to something from their childhood is so strong they reject any changes out of hand.

Now, the article that sparked this long post is specifically about the upcoming Vita game “Digimon Cyber Sleuth,” but it also mentions the game “Digimon World Re:Digitize Decode” and the petition known as “Operation Decode” to get it localized. This article seems to believe that the petition has some chance to get Decode localized, but keeping in mind what I’ve already discussed: what do you think the odds of that are?

I’m always a little bit saddened whenever I see people pushing Operation Decode enthusiastically, because these people seem to want to play the game but don’t realize how futile their movement is. The petition started nearly a year ago as of this post, aiming for 30,000 signatures. Only recently has it begun to close in on its goal. While that’s impressive on paper, there’s a few problems with that.

First of all, Decode is a remastered version of a PSP game that came out in 2012, with the 3DS remake (Decode) coming out a year later. It’s been two years since Re:Digitize came on the scene, with a new game already on the horizon, and the petition still hasn’t reached its goal. There’s also the factor of the Japanese game’s sales figures. Combined, the PSP version and 3DS version have, in the two years they’ve been out, sold just over three hundred thousand copies. Operation Decode is struggling to get just a tenth of that number. It’s sad to say, but anyone who seriously thinks the game has a chance of getting localized is deluding themselves, because such a venture is obviously not profitable. And that’s not even taking into consideration how much it would cost to translate, localize, reprint, and distribute the game. If they even did bring the game over, it would be a minor miracle if western sales even made up the cost of having done so in the first place.

To summarize, there’s no mystery why we see so little of Digimon in the west anymore - and why when we do, it takes so long to come over. If Digimon is dead, then it’s because the English-speaking fandom killed it and has beaten the corpse for well over a decade, and the people in charge of the series have been paying attention.