In Digimon Beatbreak , nearly everyone carries an egg-shaped device called a “Sapotama.” Serving as a sort of cell phone/Amazon Alexa/virtual pet, the Sapotama runs off its owner’s e-Pulse, a sort of digital life energy. Society itself hinges on the Sapotama, and everything one does, from using it as an alarm clock in the morning to paying for food and performing in their jobs, requires a union with it. And despite its cute anime trappings, the Sapotama contains shades of our own reality. How many times have you been asked to create a personal online profile when you were doing something as simple as ordering fast food? Or applying for a job? How many notifications have you gotten recently from your phone about tasks that need to be done, steps that need to be counted, news that needs to be read, and questions (already formed near the search bar) that apparently need to be asked? RELATED: Digimon Adventure Felt a Lot Like Making Friends on the Internet This is not new for Digimon . Rather, it’s the latest stage in a franchise that’s been concerned with our connection with technology and the internet since its beginning. And as we become more dependent on it in an increasingly inextricable fashion, so does Digimon , with Beatbreak serving as the latest reflection of our real (digital) world. Digimon itself began as a virtual pet — Bandai’s rowdier cousin to the Tamagotchi. It was at a time when little “pocket” monsters were exploding; just take a look at how far this whole Pikachu thing has gone. But Digimon was singular in the amount of focus put on how we relate to the unreal. In the Pokémon world, they’re impossible to ignore. The whole crux of Digimon was affirming how we bonded to critters that did not exist with us, but in a world alongside ours. Our relationship with them was based on the importance we lent to that idea. If you didn’t buy into it, they were nothing more than a rambunctious keychain. If you did, they were a gateway. Koshiro “Izzy” Izumi, carrying his laptop around in the real and digital world in 1999’s Digimon Adventure , fit into the latter category. Even as computer and internet availability in households was skyrocketing, it was still fairly rare to see a TV character who was both so indebted to technology and so casually consistent about its use. He wasn’t a stereotypical hacker or some whizkid outsider. Instead, he simply knew the most about computers out of all of his friends. That laptop itself was prone to fantastical liberties. Izzy is able to use it to connect to a variety of places, and it becomes a key item in unveiling the lore of the Digital World, a place built from Earth’s own electronic networks. By the end of the series, it’s clear that the Digital World is no Narnia, but rather forms a sort of collective with Earth, feeding off of and sharing in its technological growth. And when the “Digi-destined” bid goodbye to their wonderful monster partners, we understand that whatever connection we have with the “unreal” can be as profound as any human-to-human friendship. It sets a precedent for the franchise from which there is no chance of going back. RELATED: I'm So Happy Digimon Story Time Stranger Exists In retrospect, the early Digimon anime’s depiction of the internet and the way it provides us with both information and a model of community is simultaneously prescient, naive and optimistic. The generation watching it would be the first to join chat rooms and message boards and the first to believe that deep friendships made in cyberspace were a relatively normal aspect of life. That you have emotional ties that reach further than what you encounter in flesh and blood shows up in the Our War Game! movie as well, with the apocalypse being averted because young people online have connected on such a scale as to live-stream it and stop it. Successive series add folds and advance this theme. Adventure 02 ’s conflict with human villains can be viewed as young people first dealing with antagonism or “trolls” online, an inevitable encounter (though Digimon hopefully frames this as an aberration) that is eventually overcome by the latent power of the bad guys’ humanity. Digimon: Tamers is more bittersweet in its messaging, with the mystery of the internet’s capabilities being replaced by inner structures (like secretive organizations) that seem constantly at war with the nature of the internet itself. It’s a place of viruses and programming, ill intent and regular business. It is at once the Wild West and the sheriff meant to wrangle it. In short, by Tamers , we learn that online connection is no longer the outlier experience. It is, potentially, everything. RELATED: Toei Animation Producer Hiromi Seki on the Difference Between Making Digimon Series and Films 2006’s Digimon Savers , with its young protagonist being inducted into a group that aids both the real and digital world, presents access to the internet as having become so normalized that it’s a rite-of-passage/coming-of-age tale. It’s an inevitable crossover into the next stage of your life (and possibly precludes the loss of your childhood innocence). Digimon Xros Wars only solidifies the internet as a marker of irreversible transition. The first episode handles the journey to the digital world so matter-of-factly that it’s odd that they didn’t just decide to start the adventure there. By the time of 2020’s Adventure reboot ( Digimon Adventure: ), we’ve come a long way from Izzy being the lone tech geek among his pals. When Taichi is transported into the internet and has to stop a nuclear disaster with Agumon, he switches into action hero mode in no time. In the background, the internet and our ability to connect online has turned us all into Izzys carrying our laptops around. No longer are we relegated to the big computer desk in the corner of the living room or home office. Instead, we have it by our sides at all times, often in more portable forms than a laptop (a device that, in 1999 monster anime, was framed as an unparalleled tool of tech-savvy mobility). In Digimon Universe: App Monsters , our portal to digital creatures is smaller than the magical digi-vices that only “chosen” children were granted a little less than 20 years earlier. Though App Monsters takes place decades in the future, where the internet has helped bring about an unprecedented degree of equality and stability (though its trademark goggles will never be as rose-colored as they were in 1999, the Digimon franchise always maintains a sense of curious idealism), its proliferation of mobile apps has only gotten more timely. That apps are the things that monsters come from is up to you to dissect. But App Monsters takes the time to reinforce a theme of hubris, that we can become so mindlessly reliant on technology that we will barely be prepared when it all falls apart. RELATED: 10 Supernatural Anime That Highlight How Unique the Genre Is This notion of the way technology can warp our frame of mind is in Digimon: Ghost Game as well. Premiering in 2021 in the midst of arguments about the dangers of misinformation, troubling to the extent that it can cause us to essentially hallucinate a new reality for ourselves, Ghost Games’ monsters are first introduced as scary “Hologram ghosts.” That they’re mostly discussed on social media as borderline conspiratorial happenings strengthens their correlation to real-world events. It’s a fun way to introduce a new Digimon series, but if taken as one of the latest steps toward Digimon more fully realizing how the internet has changed the real world today, it’s sobering, too. This brings us back to 2025’s Digimon Beatbreak , in which digital connectivity has gone far past our ability to communicate or explore online. Instead, it’s pure, daily utility. One truly can’t live without it. How this will play into the portrayal of Digimon in the episodes to come has yet to be seen, but if the past is any indication, it’ll mean just as much to our real world as their digital one.
