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fawn's personal digimon fandom history
i first encountered digimon as a small child and fell in love instantly with the monsters, dutifully memorizing the names and evolutions of the main cast like i already had with every pokémon. i didn’t watch a lot of TV as a kid and preferred to rewatch VHS tapes of movies, so i only caught a couple episodes of adventure here and there and never watched it all the way through while it was airing. despite this, i still had an adventure-themed digimon birthday party when i turned 7 in 2001.
a picture of my 7th birthday cake stolen from my mom's scrapbook vs my 27th birthday cake
my first memory of 02 was from a digimon book i begged for at my school book fair called “kari’s tour of the digital world” filled with low quality screencaps and bad clipart of all the characters. i was particularly enamored with the page in the book about episode 8, which had a screencap of daisuke tripping ken on the field and two close-ups of ken’s bleeding ankle. i remember this book vividly but don’t know where my original copy ended up, so when i recently became special-interested in digimon, i tracked down and bought a new one!
the sacred texts
i didn’t watch 02 all the way through until around 2007, when its reruns were airing on jetix. (it was at this time that i met my own digimon partner!) i started recording the episodes on our tivo and watching them together with my younger sibling. we watched 02 all the way through to tamers together, avoiding frontier for the lack of partners and giving data squad a chance when it started to air but hating it. i don’t think we ever really watched adventure though. 02 just totally had my heart, especially after episode 26 introduced actual heart stuff.
cue baby fawn clenching in her seat
you see, i’ve been obsessed with hearts and heartbeats as long as i can remember. this fixation is extremely important to me, instrumental to my identity and how i view the world. (and also a fetish, which i realized as soon as i discovered what that word meant xD) so of course when i saw the scene in episode 26 where daisuke and ken hear each other’s heartbeats, i was hooked. i remember rewinding and rewatching the scene in fascination, hoping my parents weren’t looking at what i was doing. i did the same thing with the scene in episode 28 where daisuke describes jogress to his friends and puts his hand over his heart to describe ken’s, again totally enraptured by what was happening on screen. at the time, i didn’t realize how hard i was shipping daisuke and ken, because i didn’t know what that meant. but i knew something was going on, and when i discovered yaoi soon after around 2008, i figured out what it was.
daisuke, you can't just... SAY that
i’ve been shipping daiken ever since. i joined the daiken livejournal community, reading fic for them (and miyakari) and looking at fanart. i started rewatching the 02 and tamers dubs every other year or so to keep them fresh, and although i’ve always loved it and squeed over my OTP, digimon never quite made it to special interest status until 2020 rolled around…
is that my fucking SHIP???
at the beginning of 2020 i was just falling out of my last special interest, disillusioned with the current atmosphere of fandom on twitter and longing for a return to the good ‘ol days of shipping freely on LJ. and like it was destined to be, that same month i came across pictures of daisuke and ken in kizuna, followed by some of meruz’s fanart that had a comment by ladyanatui. i saw that she ran a daiken server and decided this was my chance to finally delve into this lifelong OTP, and i’m so glad i did. i watched the series for the first time in japanese, and the rest is history!!
...literally, because digimon is no longer my special interest as of summer 2022, when hunter x hunter stole my heart. but that doesn't mean i don't still love digimon! i'll continue to keep this site updated with my ever-growing digimon collection! fandom is forever!!
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