YMMV / Digimon Adventure 02: The Story We Never Told

• Alas, Poor Scrappy: During Ken's redemption arc, Cody's reputation by the fans hits an all-time low as a result of exaggerating his unforgiving attitude towards Ken^note True he has a good reason to hate Ken considering that Ken beats him up when he is still the Emperor but the other Digidestined are as just as impacted as he is. to the point that in spite of all the good things Ken had done, he tries to duel Ken to the death. But all of a sudden when Ken dies just as the duel is about to commence, Cody completely breaks down in tears as he realize how cruel he is to Ken despite all the good things he had done and now he will never be able to reconcile to Ken. Even though he is quite dickish to Ken prior to the climax, a lot of fans felt bad for the kid as he finally began returning to the polite and humble kid as he was at the start of the story to the point that he got Rescued from the Scrappy Heap as a result from the Character Development that he receives from the death of an important Digidestined.
• Broken Base: The decision to kill off Ken was met with mixed reactions from readers; some thought it was an interesting plot development that gives well deserved Character Development for many Jerkass characters, while others thought it was a very bad decision due to ending Ken's story arc anticlimatically and without any real closure, with the event benefiting other characters while throwing Ken's character aside, making Ken seem almost Stuffed in the Fridge.
• Complete Monster: Yukio Oikawa was a member of the original DigiDestined whose obsession with the Digital World caused him to become something much worse. When his former teammates chose to move on with their lives instead, Oikawa engineered the car accident that killed two of them, leaving their son Izzy an orphan. Oikawa also orchestrated Ken Ichijouji's Start of Darkness, making him indirectly responsible for the latter's crimes as the Digimon Emperor. He also allied with Dagomon by enabling Dagomon's forces to invade the real world, resulting in mass casualties. Whenever his pawns have either betrayed him or outlived their usefulness, Oikawa either has them mutated into abominations as he did with Arukenimon and Mummymon, or simply dispose of them as he did with Ken. He attempts to do the latter to the new generation of DigiDestined by forcefully reprogramming their partner Digimon to turn against them. In his ultimate scheme, Oikawa siphoned data from the Digital World to create a Floating Continent and plans to send it crashing into the human world, eradicating the whole of humanity and rule over the reborn Digital World as a god.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The reception of the friendly Digimons after the fight with Dagomon seemed to be mixed with the general public seemed being somewhat positive while the experts and lawyers are more wary of them. But at least they have defenders in contrast to the aftermath of a conflict in Digimon Adventure tri. where the reception against them is overwhelmingly negative with both the general public and the higher-ups outright distrust them after their fights destroyed an entire facility.
• Ho Yay: Oikawa was friends with Cody's father Hiroki Hida, possibly the former's only genuine friend. By the start of the story, Hiroki is long dead, and talking about him is one of the few things that actually causes Oikawa to lose his cool. The way Oikawa talks about Hiroki, down to screaming his name before being killed fighting the Digidestined in the penultimate chapter, it reaches debateably-obsessive levels.
  • Mimi and Yolei's brief sideplot could qualify. Despite the entire point being specifically to help Yolei grab a boy's attention, the two get quite emotionally close, and in the case of the bathhouse physically.
• Moral Event Horizon: Oikawa becomes irredeemable in the eyes of his former friends when he arranged a car accident of Chidori and Mitsuo, both whom are also members of the Digidestined just like him.
• Nightmare Fuel: The fate of Arukenimon and Mummymon: they are forcibly fused into a single being, which is left in constant agony, and thrown still alive out into the Void Between the Worlds. It's enough to make what happened to them in canon seem merciful.
• Schedule Slip: Typically did a good job of keeping rather consistent updates, but fluctuated towards the end of an arc.
• Shocking Moments: Chapter 64 Disillusionment reveals that Oikawa has been manipulating the kids from the start, with the D3s being programmed to help siphon data from the Digital World, Veemon, Hawkmon, and Armadillomon being created by Oikawa, and the DigiArmors are actually a fake form of digivolution. It's also revealed that he, Hiroaki Ishida (Matt's dad), and Haruhiko Takenouchi (Sora's father) were among the original Digiestined Gennai spoke of near the end of the first anime.
• Signature Scene: Whenever a reader thinks of this story, it will always be the moment when Ken dies mostly because almost no readers ever saw it coming.
• The Woobie: Hoo boy, Ken. Just Ken. Much like his canon counterpart, he endured living under his brother's shadow only to lose his brother in an accident. What makes it even more tragic than canon was that Ken in a fit of jealousy caused the accident that killed his brother. Then, he becomes corrupted by Oikawa into becoming the Digimon Emperor, and compelled to do many horrible things to innocent people and digimon alike. Then he loses his partner Wormmon for good who sacrificed his life to save Ken. Then, when he joins the heroes, he is constantly and unfairly mistrusted by Cody and Matt. And just as he managed to redeem himself in the eyes of his teammates, Cody was about to kill him, only for Ken to die a pointless death at the hands of Oikawa.