Hello everyone!
We just finished recording Episode 129 where we cover episode 33 and 34 of Digimon Savers so we’ll be sending our discussion notes out to backers pledging $5 or more a month and our LLLOOOONNGG unedited recording of us arguing for over three hours to those pledging $10 or more a month.
We’ve also set up a third weekly poll due to said arguments. Episode 129 will be out normal time (Saturday morning) so please wait until you’ve listened to Episode 129 before voting as it relates to a discussion we had. Jay didn’t want to put up the poll but wanted their to be a poll so May got to pick the wording! The question is:
During the fight with Nanami, Tohma had a succession of realizations:
– Acting purely in the way he would think wouldn’t always yield the best results (e.g using tactics Masaru would use)
– The fact that Nanami, Ivan and Kouki had been genetically modified by Kurata, proving his understanding of the human body and genome
Later on, his meeting with his father and hearing Kurata’s proposal forces those two world-views to clash again:
On one hand, he is of strong opinion to prove himself correct over his father. On the other, he can’t argue that Kurata can stand behind his promise.
Added to that the fact that Nanami, who is allegedly equal to Tohma in intellect, had been persuaded to work for Kurata, does hint that the latter has a strong ability of convincing others to agreeing with him.
All that said, it’s hard to think that Tohma would so quickly turn against his friends without apparent hesitation. My vote goes to Jay.
*I voted that Jay is wrong – but actually, for the most part, Jay is wrong because he’s basing his entire argument off the premise that this is all the explanation we are ever going to get as to the reasons behind Tohma’s heel turn. Which, as he will see when he watches next week’s episodes, is an objectively wrong premise.*
*And yes, I know, obviously he hasn’t seen Savers before and it’s his job to just comment on the episodes as they come along, but even people watching this for the first time should be able to appreciate that there’s more to this story that we haven’t seen yet. Jay has a good point that all of the buildup May described might still not be enough to justify advocating genocide. But the appropriate response to seeing this is not to go, “welp, I guess this is just bad then”. The appropriate response would be to have a reasonable amount of faith in the writers and go, “okay, I wonder what else is going on behind the scenes or in Tohma’s head that we don’t know about yet. I hope it’s something that makes sense and that I’ll enjoy”. And Jay can’t respond to this argument by saying he doesn’t think the writers deserve that faith, because he openly acknowledged that the writing of all the buildup itself was actually really good, so he acknowledges that Savers writers can sometimes be very good at writing, and specifically in regards to Tohma!*
Jay’s been guilty of this kind of mindset a couple of times before, too. When Mercurimon and the others talked about hating humans when they first appeared, he complained about there being no reason for that, not assuming that a reason would presumably be given at some point. Which it was, and I don’t think he minded the human-hatred after that point. When the Bio-Hybrids showed up, he said he didn’t like them because they had no backstories or reasons for serving Kurata, and he clearly didn’t assume they’d ever get any, even though they’d been around for only two episodes and no reasonable person would expect villains who’d only just been introduced to suddenly have backstories dumped on the viewer that soon. And then when they did get backstories (Nanami and Ivan at least), he did appreciate them! It’s… a little disappointing that Jay has this habit, given that he’s otherwise usually quite a respectable critic of fiction.
But as to the actual intent of the poll, which I believe was meant to be “do you agree with May or with Jay about how believable the heel turn is?” – because your discussion just boiled down it being enough for May to believe it but not enough for Jay to believe it – I also agree with May. On my first viewing, I liked this part a lot, even though I could tell that there was clearly more going on and we didn’t have the full reasons behind it yet – I mostly liked it because it made me really intrigued to learn more. (Knowing the full story, I like it even more than I first did.)