Digimon Frontier/Headscratchers


 * Kind of a strange question, but how exactly do the Trailmon and Locomon exist in the same franchise, if not the same series/seasons/whatever? It's just a bit confusing that two Digimon (Locomon and Gran Locomon) have adapted for standard gauge rails from Earth and several others have specialized in a single, possibly gyroscope-balanced one rail system?
 * Trailmon is a champion level, and Locomon is an ultimate. It is very likely that Trailmon digivolves into Locomon.
 * Thing is, Trailmon uses one rail and Locomon uses two. A Trailmon and a Locomon could never use the same tracks.
 * This troper cannot fathom why everyone but Koji and Takuya simply spirit evolved against Icedevimon. He's eaten the data of all the Digimon Cherubimon collected and was so dangerous even the Celestial Digimon couldn't beat him, so why don't they at least Beast Spirit evolve?
 * He froze their D-Terminals.
 * The headscratcher wasn't "why aren't Koji and Takuya part of the fight" but "they just had serious trouble with Cherubimon that required unified spirit evolution to fight, yet this enemy is on the same kind of level and the other kids don't think they should use their most powerful forms straight away?". When the Royal Knights appear in the following episode again they only use the human spirits while Koji and Takuya do the smart thing and go straight for fusion evolution.
 * Is it just me, or were the Beast spirits kind of underused? I mean they go through all these issues about finding the spirits, then learning how to control them and then...they just seem to prefer using the Human spirits. Aren't the Beasts supposed to be more powerful? Jager Lowemon only had like three appearences in the entire show. Burning Greymon suffered to lesser extent too (I'm sure someone is going to claim that Takuya was traumatised by his failure to control the spirit the first time, but that's kind of weak when you consider that he seemed just fine the few times he did use Burning Greymon).
 * I always felt that they lost some control while in Beast form. No, the weren't usually animalistic like Burning Greymon but they were prone to overkill and were gruffer. For pure combat, they were excellent but they seemed to lack in utility more than the Human forms. Also, in my head, the power level of their Human forms, the most used, were equal to the the Beast forms, the most naturally strong, due to their experience.
 * Not an issue with the show itself but as far as I know we have still not had this shown in UK. I just found Savers/Data Squad has been showing on a channel called Kix (which has shown some shows such as Medabots last year). Why hasn't Frontier ever been shown in UK?
 * I find it weird how Koji never once had a negative opinion over his dad after realizing that he lied to him about his mom.
 * Kouji and Koichi's dad is really a douche when you think about it. First, when he divorces their mother, he leaves her raising Koichi all by herself, without offering any kind of financial support when her medical issues make it hard for her to work. The icing on the cake? He tells Koji that his mother is dead, as opposed to divorced and maybe would you like to visit her (and your long lost twin that I never told you about for some reason) on weekends?
 * Okay; I have a couple of points to make here. First we're never told that Ms. Kimura's medical issues were present when she married the twins' father. Since they broke contact after the divorce, he may have never known she was having financial or medical trouble. Second Koichi was told his father was dead and didn't know about his brother until his maternal grandmother decided to tell him when she was on her death bed. So...yeah; Mr. Minamoto made some bad choices but he's not the first Digimon parent to do things that turned out to be negative for his kid in the long run or to keep something a secret that shouldn't have been kept. He made some bad choices but that doesn't make him a bad person and it doesn't mean his son should hate him.
 * "Not a bad person?" I've only see the dub so if the Japanese version makes him more sympathetic than I'm missing something but seriously not telling your kid "YOUR MOTHER IS ALIVE ALONG WITH YOUR TWIN BROTHER" is very fucked up. Lying to Koji left him an emotional tramautized to the point he had trouble connecting with people; not just his mother but friends also. Also he denied Koji the oppertunity to know his maternal grandmother. Takuya and Tommy's parents went out of their way to either spoil or nurture their children correctly; they made sure they were happy and good people. Spoiling Tommy might not have been a bad choice because it made him a soft and co-dependant child but it's clear they still love him. And both Koji's parents are to blame for bad parenting; the choices they made tramautized both their sons, especially Koichi, who WAS LEFT SO EMOTIONALLY VALNURABLE he left darkness consume him! Koji's birth mother is weak but puts on a brave face. Dad? Koji's father tried to comfort his son about his biological mother and step-mother issues but Koji wouldn't hear it. His response: Can you at least be nice to her for my sake?" WTF, he could have pointed out how nice his new step mother is or something but it sounds like he's more concerned for himself. Maybe he's not a bad person but he's in the run for "worst dad" of the Digimon franchise.
 * Let me just point out here that in Japan, it is highly uncommon for children to see the other parent after a divorce. Usually divorce means total separation with no contact, and the kids are split up. They don't get visitation. So if you look at it in that light, it makes more sense. It's still not the best way to handle it, but if the kids think their parent is dead, they won't bug you about them anymore. It's a little more sympathetic in this light, especially because if it was a nasty divorce, maybe they don't want to think about each other anymore and that's hard to do with a kid constantly asking about it. Also, this is the same reason that Yamato and Takeru were separated - they were actual brothers, not half-brothers as the dub wants you to think, and their parents divorced and Yamato went with the dad while Takeru went with the mom. It's different when you see A. the actual story as it was originally envisioned and B. the culture in which the story was created, which in anime is generally Japanese.
 * In that light, yes it does make more sense, but as I said I've only seen the dub. And in the context of the dub he's a one-note plot device to explain the source of conflict and subplot between Koji and Koichi.
 * What bugs me about it is, how the hell did Koji not know Koichi existed? It's not like they were split at birth, the divorce happened far more recently.
 * Where did you hear that it happened 'recently'? It is clear that their parents divorced when they were babies, at most one or two years old. If they were older, they would have had little memories of each other and their parents, and it is made clear that they remember nothing (which is why the revelation hits so hard). There are plenty of cases of twins that were separated as babies who do not recall having a twin.
 * Why the hell is it that the dubbed voice for Icedevimon sounds like Christopher Walken with a Brooklyn accent?
 * I don't know, but it's not the first time the dub has 'embellished' a character's voice in ways you couldn't predict from watching the source material alone (think Etemon from season one). I thought the accent gave him an eerie character, as if he was Obliviously Evil and therefore he killed things for little more than 'fun'.
 * It's too bad, because Michael Reisz's rendition of the character in Tamers was so freaking awesome with that smooth voice combined with the things he got to say. The Frontier version got the same kind of epic lines, so I wish we'd gotten to hear them in the old "please, take me here and now" voice instead of a silly one that totally de-Badass-ified the character. Especially with their normal use of homage casting - I mean, doesn't every Monster of the Week Meramon ever get the same VA?
 * Speaking of which, Kenta. Tamers Kenta's VA plays a major character in Frontier so it's not like they couldn't get the actor back. But Kenta gets a totally different-sounding VA for his one line here. This after letting Gallantmon speak with the combined voice of Takato and Guilmon and refer to himself as "we," really planting cross-dimensional Epileptic Trees.
 * The beast spirits of light, darkness, and wood look like beasts, as one would expect. The others, however, are anthropomorphic animals at best and humans with animal features at worst. The beast spirit of metal isn't even based on an animal. What gives?
 * Not an excuse, but if you look at the armor forms, they start off as the digimon in armor, but as they go on they get further and futher away from the concept till you can't even see Veemon in Baromon. The series is good at losing concepts unfortunately.
 * BurningGreymon looked like a dragon. Korikakumon is some yeti thing. Gigasmon is a moleman. Calmaramon is a giant squid. MetalKabuterimon was a beetle, although he looked more like a tank. Zephyrmon and Sakakkumon really dropped the ball, but they are exceptions.
 * BurningGreymon and Korikakumon were still anthropomorphic, though. If that's enough to be a beast spirit, then why is Kumamon a human spirit? Gigasmon looks more like some kind of ogre than any mole I've seen. Calmaramon's entire upper half is humanoid, being more of a mix than a full beast. MetalKabuterimon wasn't more beetle-like than Beetlemon, he was just more heavily armed.
 * Kumamon is more cutesy looking than Korrikakkumon.
 * Animals can be cutesy looking. It's not a human-specific thing.
 * For what it's worth, the true warriors (that is, the "Ancient" forms of the various spirits) had a much cleaner split between the two. Fire, Ice, Wood, Thunder, and Darkness are all much more animalistic, while Light, Wind, Steel, Water, and Earth are much closer to human. Most of them still have qualities of both animal and human, though.
 * Oddly enough, though, Fire and Ice's beast spirits are two of the anthropomorphic ones, and Light's is one of the actually beasty ones.
 * In this series when they meet a group of the same type of digimon there's normally an elder (who looks older, generally with a moustache) and sometimes a younger one who's inexplicably smaller. Since when do digimon age like that? (evolution seems to be treated differently too though so maybe its not following the evolution is like aging rule)
 * Who knows, Frontier is a pretty odd series, levels having pretty much no meaning, Digimon having genders, Digimon having children and the confusing human vs beast conflict described above. Let's just assume they age normally in this continuity and evolution is completely arbitrary.(That would explain why all the kids thought one classmate evolving was weird)
 * Our heroes can't beat Duskmon, the warrior of darkness. Why do none of them ever ponder that this might be because they keep trying to fight him at night? They have a whole twelve hours were he won't be in his element, why not use the wolf form to sniff him out during daylight hours or if they insist on fighting at nighttime, lure him into a forest and then set it ablaze with fire powers so he won't have any darkness to draw on?
 * Dusky's smarter than to come out during the day. He does go after them rather than vice versa pretty much every time.
 * Worse, they were on the Dark Continent, it's NEVER day time there, it's always dark and duskmon has been there the entire time he's been in the digital world. He's basically been sitting on a power up that stacks for months.

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