Theokal3
Since: Jan, 2012
09/11/2020 00:00:00
I sympathize. Season 4 had its own problems, but even it didn\'t annoy me quite as much as that one. I just couldn\'t stand Masaru and his shonen cliché, which frankly at times bordered on anti-intellectual.
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Worst Season of Digimon
A hefty judgement but I stand by it. Digimon Savers feels like the bastard child of Shonen Jump and the Digimon franchise. The series drains all of the magical wonder and character interaction to put a large focus fighting, training, and unlocking even more potential.
It's not that I hate shonen plots but the plot and characters feels so unoriginal, so lifeless that it feels like the creators are trying to mock the genre. The characters follow their roles almost fanatically with no flexibility . The series also seems to obsess over fighting with battles taking multiple episodes with only minimal scenes of dialogue between characters.
What suffers the most in this series are the characters. Masaru is the Frankenstein of stereotypical shonen traits. His characterization is hot-blooded delinquent that seems to be only capable of speaking in stock phrases. He often leaps at some giant monster to punch it which makes me wonder why the monster doesn't just eat him. He practically forces a rivalry onto Tohma, so that they can have some fake conflict in the story and ignores Yoshino to the point that she practically doesn't exist.
However, judging by the way Yoshino is portrayed, I can't blame him. Yoshino acts as if she is trying to win the Ms. Faux Action Girl of the Year Pagent. The writers of the show have to actually shoehorn an explanation as to why she is so weak. Her character development consists of "stop being useless" which is overcome with simply by willing herself to be better which makes me wonder why she didn't do it earlier. YMMV on how much it really works as she is still the weakest of the four and disappears from the story late into the plot.
Tohma plays the aloof rival personality with a weak subplot about the Littlest Cancer Patient to complete the trinity of shonen cliches. His superiority complex is broken by Masuru but one could just chalk it up to Masuru's plot invincibility and its not as if Tohma learns anything. Tohma is an aloof jerk even at the series end.
The Digi-Destined are supposed to be team but I feel like they would never trade words if they were not fighting monsters. They refer to each other as friends but show such disdain for each other, it lacks sincerity. While previous seasons had a family dynamic, this season was a slugfest of dysfunctional teenagers.