How Digimon Universe Came To Be, The Completion Of Multiverse, and the 2006 Remaster

So, a bit of news on the Digimon FDD front, having finally figured out how to have a news feed on my Google Sites site. First, for those who don't know, FDD is a fandom term from back in the old days of MySpace and internet anonymity and it's basically fan-made Digimon novels with OC human characters and (sometimes) OC Digimon partners which follow a story formula similar to an anime.

With that out of the way, as you may know, I've been posting the link of the newest episode of Digimon Multiverse in the Digimon Fans Facebook group as well as on my personal timeline on Facebook. This series is a sequel to a 2006 series that I and a few friends worked on on an RPG forum. At some point, Mario, the admin of said RPG, wanted to call it quits because he had self doubts about the plausibility of the story. He was like "Alien Digidestined? Seriously? No one's ever done that" and I argued with him. I was like "Dude, that's what makes it so interesting! We've got our own unique little gimmick going on." You know, just as every anime series has something about it that separates it from the others, so our RPG had something that set it apart from the rest as well. And when I say RPG, I mean that it's pretty much like Dungeons and Dragons with a "Dungeon Master" (that would be Mario) and written descriptions of what your characters are saying and doing. But I couldn't convince him to keep going with it, so he canned the project. I asked him if it would be ok if I just took everything we all wrote, compiled it, and then turned it into an FDD and he was like "Go ahead". So I took the reigns and wrote everything from episode 35 onwards. Unfortunately, I was a pretty crappy narrator at 14 years old, so although I think the story is alright, the parts where I contributed needed to be upgraded in terms of how it was typed up. If you've clicked on episodes of the 2006 Digimon Universe series and noticed some narrative changes, that's because I'm currently in the middle of a "remaster" of that series. I'm changing hardly anything at all to the original 2006 series except for providing more professional looking narration; i.e describing the scenery, the characters' expressions, their actions, their settings in more detail, describing what the Digidestined and Digimon characters look like rather than assuming everyone's going to go over to the bio page and see the artwork, and so on. I have introduced some creative liberties and expanded Evander's and Jessica's introduction in the first episode, but I wanted this series to be readable to anyone who would be interested in it. I didn't want people to click off of an episode because it looked like it was typed up by a 7 year old.

Although I have provided some edits in the early parts of the series to touch up the narration (again, leaving almost everything storywise and dialogue-wise unchanged), from episodes 23 and onward, I have elected to leave them completely alone. Although a few misspellings and grammar errors are present, it's pretty decently narrated and readable (if for no other reason than that my 14 year old self didn't contribute as heavily to it). I have had to recreate some episodes whole cloth because for some reason, when I was archiving the episodes, I did not save those episodes for some reason. The forum on which this RPG was made was deleted many moons ago. The only way for me to retrieve those episodes is to get into a time machine, go back to the year 2006, go to a public library (to avoid making contact with my teenage self), get on that computer, and then copy/paste them to a Word doc, create a Yahoo e-mail, e-mail it to me, travel back to the present, and open the e-mail in the present. Aside from that, there's nothing I can do. So, for episodes like 19; "Back In The Real World! Evander Meets Tameron!" and Episode 22: Jijimon Explains It All (Part 2)", I've pretty much had to recreate these entire episodes and do so in such a way as to be careful not to create plot holes with other episodes or reveal information that we didn't know at that time (e.g the name of The Digimon Ruler).

As for the sequel series, I approached these with the same amount of rigor as if I were writing a marketable novel. Disclaimer; it's NOT marketable, but I took it as seriously AS IF I were writing a novel series I was going to try to pitch it to a book seller. In my own personal opinion, the two sequel series I've written in 2021 and 2022 titled "Digimon Universe: Invasion Of The Aqualians" and "Digimon Multiverse: Digimon Universe Next Generations" is far superior in quality to the original series. I may be my own biggest critic, but I was prompted to write these sequel series because I felt like the world of Digimon Universe was not explored in enough depth. The lore of other alien planets Aqualia and Felnia was left largely untouched, and no explanation whatsoever was given for how the red stones came to be. I also think I did better with the pacing of the story, character development, and so on really well. But, of course, I'll let you be the judge of that.

The reason for a remaster of the 2006 series was that I was afraid that people would click on that and read that first. While Invasion Of The Aqualians and Multiverse are written as sequels, they are written in such a way as for you to be able to follow the story without having read the original 2006 series. Nevertheless, I would wager that most people would click on that first and then the 2021 and 2022 series. Ergo, I felt the need to put a new coat of paint on it. What I've been trying to do, essentially, was make a "faithful remake" of Digimon Universe. If this were a video game, it would be the equivalent of a Digimon World remake where nearly everything's the same except updated graphics and a small handful of new game play features.

Sadly, though, I've been on sabbatical from my normal content creating over at www.cerebralfaith.net for 6 months and I've used that time to make these sequels (I had ministry burnout). Time I normally wouldn't have had. Digimon Multiverse is now completed and half of the 2006 series has been remastered, but I told those who follow Cerebral Faith that I'd be back to creating content in May and it is April 25th at the time of writing this. When it comes to episodes that I and only I have contributed to (e.g episodes 35-54), I find that a lot of work has to be done to make it look more like a professional novel and less like a kid playing around. I have no idea if I will get it all done by May 1st. I'm also (hopefully) getting a new job and that is also bound to shake up my normal schedule.

However, if I don't have the ability to completely to completely remaster it in a timely manner, hopefully you won't judge my newer works based on the quality of my older works. Keep in mind that the original universe was written by a group of tweens and young teens in the first half Whereas "Invasion Of The Aqualians" and "Multiverse" were written by a 29 year old man; A 29 year old man, mind you, who has read lots of novels, lots of manga, and has studied the philosophy of good story telling to a certain extent. As a result, in the newer works, virtually everything I've written was done with a very conscious purpose, even down to the designs of the Digimon partners and names of the characters, which I'll get into in a future blog update.

To cut down on my workload, I'm just going to restore the lost episodes and edit the second half of the series given that the first half (Episodes 1-34) wasn't that bad. I wish I had done this from the beginning rather than having spent a week touching up every episode, but I am satisfied with the remastered versions of some of those first-half episodes, especially episodes 1 and 13.

Given that Multiverse is finished, I will continue to drop those episodes every week without a hitch. And maybe a total remaster of Digimon Universe 2006 is just something that I'll have to take my time on.

Of course, all of this may just be the ramblings of an overly self critical perfectionist. Does one really expect fanfiction to read like a Harry Potter novel? Well, that's what you'll get in the sequels, but if that's not what you're expecting, perhaps it won't bother you as much. I'm also concerned that a post like this one might dissuade people from giving 2006 universe a chance. To that, I will just say that I hope you read it. Again, much has already been touched up and improved upon, and if you get to the second half and think "Wow, this is really bad", come back later and you'll see that it's much better.