I Watched The "Digimon Tamers vs Political Correctness" Stage Play So You Don't Have To
What happens when a beloved cartoon gets hijacked by right wing conspiracies?
The writing of French philosopher Giles Deleuze is largely incoherent, obscurantist academic jargon that has proliferated in higher education circles precisely because of its complete inaccessibility. That being said, Deleuze’s understanding of schizophrenia (as illustrated in his magnum opus alongside psychotherapist Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia) as not a mental illness caused by chemical imbalances, cognitive disturbances, or injuries in the brain but as an ontological inevitability remains at least somewhat prescient in the 21st century.
Like many other post-modernists and post-structuralists, Deleuze argued that we essentially live in a perpetual state of schizophrenia as a result of the our constant bombardment by endless streams of information. We are fed so much noise and data that there’s no possible way to assemble coherence or viable meaning structures that actually hold. We exist in a pervasive delusion, we speak in never-ending word-salads, we think we understand what we see — but it’s all a hyper-mediated dream.
Examples of this schizophrenic state are everywhere — especially on the Internet — and a quick glance at news headlines reveals a headfirst tumble into eternal unintelligibility.
When I first heard the phrase “Digimon Tamers vs Political Correctness” (I was told about the play by my friend Robin Enrico, an excellent comic book artist and beloved teacher) my jaw hit the ground. What a bizarre semblance of words to have arranged themselves in front of me! What a perfect example of the deeply esoteric and endlessly confused political situation of 2020!
Apparently, Robin told me, the lead writer of Digimon had taken a hard right turn into paranoiac conspiracies and had released a stage play about the show’s titular characters fighting — quite literally — political correctness and cancel culture. The play was, confusingly, released as part of the franchise’s anniversary celebration. If you search hard enough you can find a torrent of the play, but, honestly, don’t bother. I’m here to tell you what happens so you don’t have to watch it.
But first, let me provide a bit of context. What is Digimon and what the fuck is going on?
Digimon was created by the Japanese media company Bandai in 1997 as a response to the virtual pet trend started by Tamagotchis in the mid/late 90’s. Digimon Adventure, the first cartoon series in the franchise, was released in Japan in 1999 and made its way to the United States shortly thereafter. Most Americans remember the Digimon show as a kind of bootleg Pokemon — the same basic idea but far less popular and way less cutesy. The English theme song was delightfully stupid and annoyingly earwormy. In actuality, Digimon Adventure is far less toyetic and formulaic than Pokemon and featured long, complicated story arcs in which the lovable protagonists change, grow, and learn lessons about friendship while navigating a surreal alternate dimension known as the Digital World.
The Digital World was explained in the show as a manifestation of the vast information channels created by humans through technology. The Digital World was populated by Digimon, of course: little monstrous creatures with various magical powers. A group of human children, through some strange hiccup in the fabric of space/time, were transported to the Digital World, where they formed emotional bonds with a group of Digimon, thus allowing them to evolve into more powerful versions of themselves. The group of DigiDestined kids and beasts embark on a journey to save both the Real World and the Digital World from destruction at the hands of various demonic and corrupted Digimon.
Sure, whatever, you get the idea. As far as political content goes, the show was unrelentingly inoffensive. The biggest controversy it generated at the time was that the word “faith” was changed to “reliability” in the English translation to avoid religious connotations. If one were to really stretch their imagination, one could detect some vague themes about the ramifications of technology on human consciousness in the plot — but it’s a reach.
“Digimon Tamers vs Political Correctness” picks up 20 years after the third generation of DigiDestined had saved the world from a rampant AI known as Malice Bot. Takato, the group’s fiery leader, and his Digimon partner Guilmon, had become time-displaced due to distortions in reality caused by the interactions between the Digital World and the Real World. Meanwhile, a para-governmental organization called NYX was created to help manage calamities caused by intrusions from the Digital World in the Real World.
The play is staged as a sort of table read, with the voice actors standing at mics— separated by plexiglass — reading from scripts. Classic sound effects and music cues from the show pop up throughout, and the actors remain in character for the duration of the production, including during a prologue in which the play is explained as a kind of lost 22-minute episode.
After a voiceover informs the audience of the setup, Chief Officer Yamaki, an employee of NYX, enters the scene lamenting the Japanese government’s passing of the Digital Reform Bill and announces to the remaining DigiDestined that a new threat has emerged in the Real World: Political Correctness. He describes “Political Correctness” as:
“The dark shadows that have fallen upon the Internet! The terrifyingly increasing pressure to conform to a single value system, where anyone who objects is removed! Censorship on the internet is rampant and real news covered up by fake news! People with a different opinion have their online accounts terminated! Even alternative perspectives are set out to be crushed by fact checkers so only uniform answers can exist! At this point, people’s daily lives are controlled by information on the Internet!”
To which one of the DigiDestined children responds with: “W-Well, while that may be true, it’s not really our business … Chief, what you’re talking about is the paradox of tolerance, right?”
The “paradox of tolerance” refers to philosopher Karl Popper’s idea that a society with unending tolerance will inevitably be destroyed by the intolerant — and that a tolerant society requires intolerance of the intolerant. Again: sure, whatever.
Moments later, a NYX computer announces that the enemy, Political Correctness (the phrase always ominously spoken in English) is “materializing” and “forming physical attacks.”
At the coaxing of their partners, the Digimon Impmon and Terriermon evolve into their Ultimate forms to battle the enemy.
The Digimon use their signature attacks but “something’s not right,” says Chief Yamaki.
“Political Correctness is activating Cancel Culture,” announces the NYX computer.
“This is the enemy’s real form,” responds Chief Yamaki. “Now do you see the situation we’re in?!”
The Digimon again launch a volley of attacks against Political Correctness but they have no effect. The NYX computer announces a mysterious transmission from the time-displaced Guilmon, who explains that he’s lost in some unknown alternate dimension. Then, the actors leave the stage. A nice lady in a pretty black dress and a frilly fascinator enters, sings an inscrutable pop power-ballad (choice lyric: “I am unable to tell apart the excuses and lies in these repetitious days”). The camera pulls back to reveal a completely packed theater filled with masked audience members waving glow sticks in unison. Then, the video ends.
See, I told you it’s not worth watching.
It turns out that the play’s creator, Digimon Tamers head writer Chiaki J. Konaka, had faced significant backlash as a result of this production. Following negative critical reaction he tweeted the following, according to ComicBook.com:
"I hope you will forgive me for the unusual contents of this entry … However, if I don't write about this, I don't think you'll be able to understand why I've been speaking so passionately about this anime from 20 years ago."
Konaka had apparently been sharing a plethora of debunked conspiracy theories about 9/11 and Covid-19 on a personal website during a re-watch of Digimon. According to Anime News Network:
Konaka has also been maintaining a retrospective blog for the series, where he writes his recollections and thoughts about various episodes and other aspects of the anime. A number of posts share his thoughts on the current technological landscape, including his beliefs around the suppression of "alternative information" regarding the COVID-19 pandemic.
In a post from May, he wrote that when writing the original Digimon Tamers series, there were certain depictions of violence and the use of guns that he avoided due to the political climate around the 9/11 terrorist attack. Later, in the 2010s, he began to look into the background behind the incident. Although he thought that the early conspiracy theories were ‘unrealistic’ and was critical about the 9/11 ‘Truthers,’ he admitted to maintaining some suspicion around the circumstances in which the attack occurred.
He then drew a comparison to the year of 2020, remarking that he saw the YouTuber James Corbett describe the situation as ‘COVID-9/11.’ (Corbett is a prominent 9/11 and COVID conspiracy proponent.) Konaka wrote that while he did not agree with everything Corbett said, he described him as someone who ‘analyzed the situation rationally, and simply continued to sound the alarm around the dangers, not just of the illness but of the societal situation happening in the world.’
Indeed, QAnon-adjacent conspiracies have actually been shockingly popular in Japan, which — like the United States — faced an upswing in right-wing conspiracy-thinking during the global pandemic. According to The Washington Post:
One of the most active QAnon networks is in Japan, where followers believe the imperial family has been replaced by body doubles and suggest that World War II-era Emperor Hirohito was a CIA or British agent who owned the patent for the atomic bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. QAnon fans claim that the 2011 tsunami was a deliberate act of terrorism overseen by then-Emperor Akihito. They also worry that the government has been infiltrated by ethnic Koreans, whom they view as an enemy. Like QAnon believers everywhere, they fear globalization, believe that pedophilia is everywhere and think that Trump, their hero, was robbed of a win in the 2020 election.
Konaka’s other significant contribution to the history of anime is a terrifyingly strange 13-episode TV series called Serial Experiments Lain that ran in Japan in the Summer of 1998. The series later ran on Cartoon Network’s [adult swim] block of anime in the early 00’s.
Serial Experiments Lain is a deeply paranoid yet oddly beautiful show about a teenage girl who becomes obsessed with her newly created online persona after receiving an email from a classmate who had died. As she delves into the darkest corners of the web, she encounters an entity claiming to be God — which may, in some abstract way, also be herself. The show’s portrayal of pre-Y2K, cyberpunk anxieties had moments of frightening oracularity, including disturbing, pre-Columbine depictions of active shooter scenarios.
Serial Experiments Lain is actually a fairly astute prototype for the type of rabbit hole QAnoners find themselves falling down: her whole reality begins to take on a persecutory quality as she becomes more and more addicted to deep-diving on the Web. Konaka seemingly anticipated his own free fall into madness with the show.
But what to make of all this? I’m certainly struggling to form some kind of meaningful takeaway through all the noise.
Perhaps it’s not surprising that there are now pan-global political factions dedicated to conspiracy theories that in many frightening ways resemble the delusions of people we could credibly diagnose as schizophrenic — that Deleuze’s theories of cultural schizophrenia can actually be interpreted quite literally: Prolonged exposure to the increasingly loud noise of our interconnected information system actually does induce a new kind of schizophrenic thinking which has now been frighteningly normalized into a political movement that actually has considerable power.
Konaka’s attempt to introduce the enemy of “Political Correctness” into the world of Digimon shows a sort of metaphysical category error typical of schizophrenic thought: he imagines “Political Correctness” to be something material, literal — not conceptual or abstract. His attempt to integrate his own political inner turmoil into the universe of children’s cartoons reveals something sadly infantile about far right logic: as if the morality of the world can be as simple as a good vs evil battle in an anime for kids.
Perhaps hints of Konaka’s schizophrenic thinking were always present in Digimon: the Digital World representing a parallel universe in which information becomes tangible, physical, corporeal — the erasure of the line between abstraction/fantasy and reality. Even the show’s original opening depicts the protagonists in a kind of endless falling both upward and downward simultaneously, like Alice into Wonderland:
It’s certainly hard to tell to what extent the actors in “Digimon Tamers vs Political Correctness” truly understood about what they were participating in — we can’t know how much of what they were reading got lost in some impossible chain of signification and translation. The dubious nature of the torrent itself was highlighted by a stern warning from the translators at the front end of the video: “This program promotes far-right politics and conspiracy theories. The views and opinions expressed herein do not reflect those of DATS and The Wild Bunch,” it reads ominously.
If schizophrenia is the result of an onslaught of information, what can be said of its etiology? Perhaps Deleuzian schizophrenia is not only a response to media bombardment, but also a reaction to the deep loneliness, cosmic ineffectiveness, and totalizing mundanity of existence in contemporary hyper-capitalism. Another paradox then: technology created to connect us actually only isolates us further. The DigiDestined would rather stay in the Digital World — fighting monsters and going on adventures — than return to their boring school in Tokyo. There is a pull towards fantasy because our reality is simply unbearable — and there’s nothing we can do to fix it, no comprehensive evil to fight against, just interconnecting systems of information and domination.
Or, in the words of Chisa Yomada in Serial Experiments Lain:
“There was no reason for me to stay in the real world any longer. In the real world, it didn’t matter if I was there or not.”