The Firefly Collective: A Review

NC native and Brownsville, Texas denizen, Ryan McGinnis has just graced us with his newest novel, The Firefly Collective. It was published just last week and out of his four novels, it’s certainly the best of the bunch. I’m told his next is hot on its heels. In the past two years, since McGinnis’s debut as a novelist (Tears of the Dragon), he has been honing his craft and developing stronger and stronger material all the while. This newest novel evinces those newfound powers and leaves readers, myself included, begging for more (and hopefully even longer) installments in the future. To stay updated on his process and get first dibs on chapter excerpts from those upcoming projects as they appear, follow his website and be sure to join his email list.

In The Firefly Collective, McGinnis turns his focus back to the cast of characters we’ve come to know quite well through the first three novels and one novella of his Xavier Greene series. After the events of The Osiris Initiative, when Xavier, Stacy Martinez, and Bill Logan-members of different governmental and secret organizations-were forced to join forces to take down the mysterious Axion corporation; and The Delicate Art of Death where Stacy’s attempt at a peaceful return home is foiled as she investigates a series of suspicious murders in her hometown before becoming unwittingly ensnared in the web of a cryptic hunter of men; a new terrorist cell in Europe is targeting major tech companies and the crew once again cross paths to uncover what’s happening.

The Firefly Collective deepens the layers of complexity, conspiracy, and intrigue of the previous novels, drawing as much from imagination as from the stuff of life. Tech headquarters fall one after another, with no rhyme nor reason, seemingly being engulfed in flames by a series of detonations with no physical trace. that is, people know the buildings are being sabotaged, but cannot locate the bombs or bomb debris. And this despite the fact that the bombings are always presaged by warnings to media outlets and the corporations themselves with specific locations and times in each correspondence. This firefly bombing is ultimately revealed to be the product of a malignant force everyone in the Arab Gulf has come to dread in the 21st century: drone strikes. However, instead of the US targeting innocent civilians (or single individuals near civilians retroactively labeled collateral damage), terrorist organizations are targeting big business. Yet, their m.o., unlike that of the total warfare of the eco-terrorists in Tears of the Dragon, is commendable. They alert businesses ahead of time to the destruction, allowing employees and personnel to be evacuated, and destroy facilities (hitting the capitalists where it hurts them most: in the means of production alone) without collateral damage or loss of life of any kind. Nonetheless, Xavier takes an interest in the bombings and makes it a point to identify who is responsible and to prevent them from continuing.

If left there, the novel would unravel into little more than a pro-business, corporatist apology (The old non sequitur that only evil people use force to fight back against hegemonic forces). Instead, Xavier learns that the terrorist cell, the titular Firefly Collective, were once freedom fighters and progressive activists pushing back against the statist absolutism of British government. The head of the organization, Francisco Ortega, was once an idealistic young man working to change things and improve the lot of working class people. When his brother became terminally ill, requiring a costly life-saving procedure that the NHS would not provide him, Francisco found himself-through economic privation in a sick society-victim to what was left of Axion. The corporation offered the collective a huge payout to stage and enact a series of bombings, strategically placed near different targets than the tech companies themselves, and Francisco obliged. The novel is another strong indictment of how power corrupts, but McGinnis complicates the portrait with the context of structural inequalities and indictments of UK attempts to privatize healthcare and defund the NHS. The story calls readers to think more deeply about many associated issues such as organizational belonging and responsibility, the ineptitude and inefficiency of bureaucracy and bureaucratic compartmentalization, global economics, and homesteading and off-the-grid militancy (an attractive alternative to surveillance capitalism). At the end of the day, the novel is also a good spy thriller, a perfect airport read, and a work that engages one intellectually only as far as they wish to take it.

The Firefly Collective maintains its focus on the working of international cabals, secret syndicates, spycraft, assassinations, and gripping fight sequences that have held our intrigue thus far as readers. However, in the new novel, McGinnis displays an ever increasing deftness in his plotting and character development that had me riveted to my laptop the whole time I was reading. This is proficient work peppered with ruminations on power (both how it is gained and how its capture co-opts those who hold it by illicit means), manipulation, and the Realpolitik always operating beneath the surface ideals of state and corporate actors. And as always, the novel is just long enough to captivate the reader before dangling a wonderful bauble, a hint about what comes next. Think big, think ostentatious, think Japan!

The Delicate Art of Death: A Review

Carolee Schneeman, “Eye Body #11”

I’d be remiss here if I didn’t qualify this essay with an apology. Rocker, novelist, and Brownsville denizen Ryan McGinnis released his third novel The Delicate Art of Death about 9 weeks–March 1st to be precise–and its popularity has since rocketed the first novel of his Xavier Greene series (Tears of the Dragon) into the top selling spot, I’m told, for five different categories on Amazon’s best seller lists! It’s a killer turn of events for a writer working so hard at his craft to finally see some financial return on time investment and a growing readership, as well as the dozens of reviews the new novel has received in writing and video format. So, with the semester’s grading behind me, I thought it about damn time I offer my thoughts on this newest installment of McGinnis’s work, surely his finest and most tightly scripted and executed novel to date.

The newest volume of the Xavier Greene series is an engrossing vignette in the life of Stacy Martinez, set in the wake of events from the previous novels. As Stacy returns back home and tries to re-integrate, to some degree, back into everyday life and to re-establish a rapport with her friends and family, an odd series of murders, a black car whose tail she can’t seem to shake, and an unnerving sense that things are awry increasingly awake her to the reality of her situation: that her experiences of political cabals and power’s underground operations have changed her, marked her, and made her unfit for civilian life. After Stacy’s sister’s friend Jenn dies under mysterious circumstances, Stacy begins to notice a black sedan all over town and another outsider, a woman named Natalie, who keeps appearing everywhere that Stacy does. She begins to suspect that the murders are connected, wondering naturally whether they have something to do with the downfall of Axion or the Citadel’s restructuring post-Osiris Initiative.

Everything seems to point, at least at first, toward a paranoid reading of more governmental rackets and international cabals. However, the twist comes out of left field and makes for a compelling and unexpected read reminding us that assassins and government agents are not the only arbiters of death, not the art of death’s sole practitioners.

I originally read this novel alongside other paranoid political thrillers like Jeff VanderMeer’s Hummingbird Salamander and Cormac McCarthy’s newest novels The Passenger and Stella Maris. While McGinnis’s work is more standard political action thriller fare that has less to say about ecology and ontology, it is nonetheless a production that mirrors concerns of major authors in our contemporary moment: principally in how the pursuit of truth queers our own positionality in regards to world. Like Jane Doe and Alicia Western in the aforementioned works, respectively, Stacy Martinez’s pursuit of the truth paints a target on her back and attunes her to the traces of violence and disorder that abound, even in a rural Kansas town like her sister’s.

While Stacy’s methods of evading the cabal whose money she has stolen mirror those of Llewelyn Moss in McCarthy’s earlier crime thriller cum border novel No Country for Old Men (Both are compromised by stealing from organizations more powerful than themselves, and both notably hide their duffel bags of cash in air vents), I detect shades of John Fowles’s The Collector, as well as a feminist undercurrent whereby the damsel in distress is replaced with powerful female figures who resist male attempts at capture or control.

A novelist’s first work often tends to be semi-autobiographical to some degree, and for male novelists this registers in coming of age stories where the protagonist undergoes a demystifiying operation or an existential quest to better comprehend their relation to the world and to their ideal and actual selves. For McGinnis, his outsider assassin Xavier is instead an older character who has already undergone these kinds of narrative shifts and is instead learning to reckon with his past. Stacy Martinez, too, is haunted by the loss of an old partner and suffering from the effects of PTSD. That McGinnis can write compelling, realistic characters like this is a testament to the maturation of his work. And if I’m really honest, the occasional wordiness or typos of that first novel are rapidly disappearing as well (as he’s transitioned to self-editing: a surprisingly great improvement). For a independent author without the institutional structure of editors and copy editors, this is no minor feat.

I hear also that his fourth novel is in the works and developing quite rapidly, so if you’ve enjoyed the Xavier Greene works so far, you can expect more very soon. I know I’m champing at the bit to find out how some of the plot lines McGinnis has laid down will resolve.

I’d like to end on a note on the photo I’ve chosen to place at the beginning of this short review essay: Caroline Schneeman’s “Eye Body #11.” Rather than re-purposing the female body as a destructive canvas ala our male Dada artists, McGinnis has headed off what amounts to a fait accompli in the works of many male writers. Hell, even McCarthy’s serial killer novel Child of God trades in female objectification and mutilation to attain its narrative kicks or sense of transgression. Furthermore, whereas Stacy has hitherto been pitted against the occasional female mastermind or feminine force of evil–even this newest novel sets up that possibility–and has typically been allied to male protagonists, The Delicate Art of Death‘s denoument charts new territory for McGinnis in the development of a homosocial bond that is enticing narratively just as it is progressive in that political domain we call the interpersonal.

Schneeman once advised that we “Be stubborn and persist, and trust yourself on what you love. You have to trust what you love.” As long as us readers continue to state our support and McGinnis continues to trust the development of his craft, I expect we’ll continue to be privy to the unfolding of his talent for years to come.

The Osiris Initiative: A Review

Osiris with Retainers Hieroglyph

Here at The Boron Heist, we have previously reviewed quite a few works by indie author Ryan McGinnis including his last novel Tears of the Dragon and his newest short story “The Musician’s Daughter.” Now, McGinnis has penned the second major installment of his Xavier Greene spy-assassin series: the upcoming novel The Osiris Initiative! At The Boron Heist, we’ve been chewing the fat for a couple days, reading through and ruminating on McGinnis’s newest effort. The novel is an improvement upon Tears and shows McGinnis constantly developing his ability to interweave complex plot threads from multiple narrators while hedging his subtext more deeply into the plot and spinning an electrifying yarn for his readers.

In The Osiris Initiative, the first five chapters are each told from a different perspective. While a few of these–Xavier, Logan, the mechanic from Tears–drive the plot, one is an innocent bystander, of sorts, caught in the crossfire of a mysterious organization’s war on the Citadel: Xavier’s employer. The shifting perspectives, each packed with their own action sequences and resultant carnage, engage the reader from the very beginning and make it difficult to put the book down for quite some time. We learn that Martinez has gone rogue since the events of Tears some months prior, that Logan has retired to a ranch in Montana, and that Xavier is almost fully healed from the havoc the Silver Wraith, Liliya Orloff, wreaked upon his body during the last mission. Now, Xavier has been tasked with killing the would-be assassin of a United Arab Emirates royal and Logan is being wooed by executives from the cryptic Axion corporation.

When Xavier’s mission goes south, an obvious double-cross by an outside party, Logan begins to question the motives of Axion, and Martinez finds a bounty on Xavier’s head advertised on the Dark Web, the three professionals’ destinies become intertwined once again in this rousing new political-action thriller.

Unlike Tears of the Dragon, the full nature and implications of the the Osiris Initiative at the core the novel’s plot are only traced in part. The group that put out the kill order on Xavier’s life and that is also targeting Citadel safehouses and stations has likewise created a code to link together all cameras on the planet, which are connected to the internet. Together with facial recognition software, they hope to be able to track any individual, anywhere, at nearly any time and to develop the world’s most sophisticated network against anyone they perceive as threatening their interests. While we live in a police state in America now, in the real world, and the NSA collects all our metadata into personnel files, the fear of a panopticon, of a universalized surveillance system, seems to be waning. However, The Osiris Initiative may serve to remind readers of the horrors of this system, as well as the fact that our political institutions are not run by idealistic, humanitarian sovereigns, but instead by power-hungry persons controlled by corporate powers. When every move you make is tracked, is it possible to truly act freely? Xavier’s foiled attempts to avoid the panoptic surveillance system aimed directly at registering his face and sending assassins his way foregrounds our own inability to operate from the shadows. And sometimes, operating from the shadows is the only way to combat dehumanizing bureaucratic forces.

Like those much-maligned (by me and Scorsese at least) superzero films whose preponderance signifies a lack of faith in our institutions and in our public defenders to provide our defense, Xavier Greene’s, Logan, and Martinez’s efforts in The Osiris Initiative provide readers with much-needed catharsis. The danger of marvel narratives is that only those endowed with superhuman power or grotesque economic advantage have the power to counter corrupt institutions. However, Logan and Martinez provide a counternarrative of the average person’s ability to do likewise and therefore, the novel avoids some of the major pitfalls of hero and action texts.

For all this talk of deeper meanings and implications, The Osiris Initiative is really anything but heady. The ideas are couched deeply enough into the text so as not to burden the plot, and instead function as interesting background to the modern world that makes up the foundation of McGinnis’s plot: our world. The relevance of that world to readers renders it real for them while the fight sequences, chase sequences, and bureaucratic intrigue drive the plot forward in this nail-biter of a novel. The Osiris Initiative is a thrilling read with plot twists and turns that keep the reader on the edge of their seat with a cliffhanger climax that promises many morsels of cinematic excess and enjoyable reading ahead.

The Osiris Initiative will be released on March 21st through Amazon books, so pre-order your copy today!

“The Musician’s Daughter”: The Emerging Mythos of an Assassin

Bucharest, Romania Skyline by Michael Tompsett

In one week (March 21st, 2022), Brownsville, Texas based Indie author Ryan McGinnis is releasing a new novel, The Osiris Initiative, in the Xavier Greene assassin-spy series. In the interim, he has made available a short work in the same universe entitled “The Musician’s Daughter: A Xavier Greene Thriller.” which delves deeper into the history of its titular character and ought to increase excitement for the new novel as well. The Boron Heist has previously reviewed a few of McGinnis’s short works (“Sketch” and “A Good Night’s Sleep”) as well as his first novel Tears of the Dragon, so you know we’re fans. His new story can be accessed for free by joining McGinnis’s email list here and if you read it to end, you’ll even find a nice blurb on Tears from yours truly.

In “The Musician’s Daughter,” the setting is Bucharest, Romania where Xavier Greene has been stationed to bring a politician, Andrei Luca, to justice for his backroom dealings with the Romanian Humanist Party, a political organization described as a thinly-veiled front for the proliferation of specialized radios called Music-Boxes. The purpose of the device is not discussed in full and one is compelled to call it a MacGuffin, or physical object that propels the narrative forward and provides it a visual center. While the place, and indeed the purpose of Xavier’s mission, are explained, the time is left open and the reader is therefore uncertain whether the events of the narrative unfold before or after those of Tears of the Dragon. What we do know is that Xavier mentions his rise to top-level assassin status in the Citadel, a secret organization that hires out spies and other professionals for high profile missions, possibly with nefarious intentions. By the end of McGinnis’s first novel, however, Xavier’s relationship to the Citadel is anything, if not tenuous, and therefore the reader might assume that this story is a prequel.

As in most good prequels and shorter works in a larger corpus or universe, this tale introduces more backstory to the protagonist. Namely, we learn that Xavier’s line of work is an attempt–perhaps unconsciously–to follow in the footsteps of his deceased father. Further, the reader learns that if Xavier is to follow his father’s example, that his work may inevitably lead to his death as well. The sins of the father… even the absent and long-dead father, eh?

Xavier’s mission to bring the politician to justice and to claim the Music-Box device for his employers starts off smoothly and in a way that demonstrates Xavier’s professional ethics. When the second half of the mission involves extracting the device from a nonchalant, professional spy, Mihail Vulpe, Xavier exceeds the boundaries of the job, rendering it a kill-order operation. As Mihail’s organization closes in on Xavier, will he be able to escape with his life, with the device in tow, and without killing an innocent bystander–Mihail’s orphaned daughter Ana? In “The Musician’s Daughter,” McGinnis has produced a kinetic piece of short, action writing with moments of deeper reflection on fate and the ways in which history recurs, in which our lives play out eternal conflicts that might, or might not, preclude our ability to choose our direction in this world.

Tears of the Dragon: A Review

Xavier Greene is a high-level assassin for a worldwide secret organization–The Citadel–that operates the levers of the power behind the scenes. Known as ‘The Silencer’ he is known for his ability to go undetected through even the biggest jobs: political coups, counterterrorism, assassinations. His face is in no personnel system, no facial recognition can place him: He’s a ghost drifting through the floating world of modern political play where transnational political actors create destructive encounters, Realpolitik games, with little regard for loss of life. Xavier has tired of his work, retired to a remote monastery, and takes jobs intermittently as he contemplates enlightenment alongside complete retirement.

Then, a new job appears. A terrorist organization known as The Brotherhood has recently received a strong, financial backer. With their help, The Brotherhood have developed a contagion called “Tears of the Dragon.” They plan to release it at a large event within the week and to wipe out most human life on the planet in the process to prompt a hard reset of the unjust systems of power of the world: to fight political injustice with apocalypse. The allure of The Brotherhood is immediately apparent to all dissidents who read Ryan McGinnis’s debut novel. You can’t fight power within the system because it has always already co-opted its members and will rapidly absorb destabilizing tendencies to prevent the system from toppling. The only option left is economic or real violence. Despite The Brotherhood’s subversive appeal, Xavier’s actions and the narrator’s handling of The Brotherhood seem to respond no to both options: working within the system and working to destroy the system. Rather than engaging in political angst, in Nietzschean ressentiment, Xavier remains a counterterrorist and thwarts a factional uprising within The Citadel to restore this latter organization to its proper institutional spirit and to save the world.

“Tears of the Dragon,” the contagion, is derived from the venom of the vampire bat: a substance touted for the past few years for its medicinal properties and potential usage in the development of drugs to combat diseases. However, with each new development there are negative externalities, downsides that the developers of the tech could not have foreseen. In Tears of the Dragon, The Brotherhood has developed a kind of blood coagulant that can be spread quickly and effectively worldwide with just one vial. Writing often mirrors life in unexpected ways and the parallel between the development of an apocalyptic pathogen with the apparently accidental mutation of a world-upsetting virus that led to our own pandemic is not lost on this reader.

Finally, as in all of McGinnis’s writing hitherto, dreams play an important role throughout the novel. At many crucial points in the text, Xavier dreams, day dreams, or hallucinates visions of the dragon. At times he tries to contain its power and it burns him, at others he seems to have a strong emotional connection and is warming up to the dragon. It is both his nemesis and a very attractive mystical object, which could bring him untold riches or power if he chose to keep it. All told, the novel is reflective but mostly active. The reader gets good doses of spy intrigue, political machinations, helicopter chases, firefights, and even a very compelling duel to the death between two of The Citadel’s most legendary assassins. Tears of the Dragon is a fun, riveting, on the edge of your seat kind of novel and a good first novel that bodes well for McGinnis’s future work.

To learn more about Tears of the Dragon or to purchase a copy follow the link here. To read about McGinnis’s short fiction follow these rabbit holes: Sketch and A Good Night’s Sleep.

“A Good Night’s Sleep” is Hard to Find

(See my previous review of Ryan McGinnis’s fiction here)

Sam and Kevin Woodworth are a well-adjusted, suburban couple in the final stages of the adoption process. Their domestic life includes an altruistic relationship with an elderly widower, Agnes, in their neighborhood; a good work-life balance; and a loving-lovable terrier Max who keeps them company. Domestic bliss seems inevitable with the arrival of their new daughter Lily. However, Max seems afraid of the little girl no matter how long she chases him around and vies for his affection. And in a small case, she keeps a set of dolls–one male, one female–whose appearance echoes her biological parents that disappeared under mysterious circumstances. When Sam and Kevin begin having night terrors, sleep paralysis, and experiencing other unsettling nighttime events, they begin to suspect that something is amiss in their would-be domestic tableau.

As with much good horror fiction, the fears and anxieties at the core of “A Good Night’s Sleep” (eBook available for free by joining the Ryan McGinnis mailing list here) are contemporary while simultaneously hearkening back to older, more primal notions of the self. There is first, the classic fear of the adopted child whose genes and past history are alien to the foster parents: the child who appears with a kind of psychic baggage it is the perceived job of the foster parents to absolve, to correct, to fix, or to come to terms with. What happened to the child’s parents? What trauma did the child experience through their loss? Can we really help the child? These kinds of anxieties can lead to self-doubt and fears of failure in parenting that are amplified for foster parents. In “A Good Night’s Sleep,” Sam and Kevin’s fears are internalized and received subconsciously through dream visions of a man who stands at the edge of the room or right outside the window: a man who beckons to follow. Or they are externalized by visions of Lily’s midnight wandering through the house or constricting nightmares of suffocation.

The Self is at its most peaceful when its surface, the conscious person, hides or abjects those things that pull at and create tension within the self. The dream of a domestic space of peace and tranquility and simplicity is aided by a self-formation that is limited, that does not reflect openly on the darker aspects of the self. Here, the fears of failure and of the dark past of the orphaned child bring to surface the multiplicity of the self with its abyssal, fragmentary, and self-destructive capabilities. A large change in life calls for a requisite and equal change of Self, which is self-dislocating, anxiety-producing, and terrifying, though necessary. In “A Good Night’s Sleep,” McGinnis reflects these fears in a narrative where the worst of them is actualized and the self is destroyed in the process of change and the foster parent becomes little more than a doll in a child’s scheme for their own self-formation: essentialized, always present, and nothing more than an object of the child’s will. In horror, our deepest fears are made real and that is definitely the case in McGinnis’s short story.

Read my review of McGinnis’s novel Tears of the Dragon next.

Ruminations on a “Sketch”

In “Sketch” (published online at Mandatory Midnight), North Carolina native and Brownsville, Texas denizen Ryan McGinnis crafts a sinister, Lovecraftian vision of cerebral horror befitting a New Weird moniker. In an introductory blurb we learn that Sarah, an aspiring sketch artist of landscapes and gothic architecture, has recently suffered from a hard breakup. Her friend Tracy attempts to help her by managing and staging an art exhibit of Sarah’s work on gothic castles from her travels in Europe. Sarah takes to the work well, at first, as she drafts image after image with her expressionist style of deep shadows and chiaroscuro contrast with attendant surrealist motifs and unsettling smudge-work. However, when an image of a man appears and then disappears of its own volition within her frames, Sarah experiences abject fear and her friends believe she is going insane. Half-horror, half-edge-of-your-seat-fugue-state, this tale draws parallels to the texts of Junji Ito. It’s gothic fixations remind one of the imaginative power of Mervyn Peake or Jorge Luis Borges.

As a sketch, “Sketch” is the beginnings of a larger body of work: One in development and one I will be reviewing for the next few weeks here. The narrative style is simple and unadorned third-person narration from a relatively invisible narrator with direct access to the interiority of Sarah’s mind. The writing is straightforward, which aids the reader in clipping along quickly and building the sense of tension. Its central idea of note is the question of how our creative works can absorb us as artists? In Sarah’s case, she is offered the vertiginous possibility of her creative work bringing new life into the world and through her fears and anxieties she is unable to do so. Instead, Sarah stifles her greatest creative achievement (freeing the spectre of the gothic castle) and is, in a sense, consumed by her inaction.

The idea here is that creative endeavor is voidal, abyssal, aporetic by its very nature. That in the process of writing, the writer changes, evolves, and becomes a more complex entity. The attendant fear of psychological disintegration is so strong that it may block the writer from ever truly engaging a project or putting it out into the world through submission or private publishing. Yet, by not letting the creative work live and emerge into the real world, the writer risks a far more pernicious spectre’s birth: Regret, a beast much more able to consume the artist totally in the final analysis. In “Sketch,” the anxieties of a beginning writer are veiled through an engaging piece of horror short fiction that is harrowing, both metaphysically and on the gut level.

For more information about Ryan McGinnis and to receive a free ebook and access to his writings, please peruse his personal website here. (Check out my review of “A Good Night’s Sleep” next)

O Brother, Who Art Thou? (Digimon Frontier: Episode 30)

(Check out my previous review HERE. To go back to the beginning of this review series click HERE)

Again with the titles. We all know the reference of this one to a wildly popular Coen Production with all its attendant black humor and southern gothic references. And we know that Koji and Koichi share some relationship as near-identical persons, which means they are almost definitely brothers. So the name is a fun pun on the situation in the anime, but has little to do with the film it references thematically or narratively, and therefore, I’d have to certify this title rotten just like so many other lame puns I’ve commented on in this series in particular hitherto.

As BeoWolfmon continues to search for Duskmon in the shadows of the Dark Continent, his Digidestined friends track him down to help him defeat Duskmon if need be: a prospect that is highly likely now that both Koji and Takuya can Fusion Evolve. But Cherubimon is fed up with his minions being defeated so handily and he intervenes to prevent the Digidestined’s forward progress by caging them in a circle of black javelins with a large covering of darkness above. Patamon is an intuitive little Digimon luckily and uses his brains to suggest they dig their way out of the place when the rest find the black javelins impenetrable to all attacks. When they escape, Patamon- as the Rookie-level form of the Digimon protector Seraphimon- can sense the light emanating from Koji/BeoWolfmon and is able to get the crew back on track toward finding him.

The rest of the episode is pretty paint by numbers stuff that had previously already happened. Duskmon and BeoWolfmon duke it out. As the animation quality of Digimon has rarely been on the level of a Gainax or a Studio Trigger, the action sequences aren’t really fulfilling enough to warrant half an episode of jumping around and breaking stuff just to result in another draw, but that’s what they do anyway. They both see their human forms during the battle again and again they react in a confused manner to these images. They question each other in the hopes of getting to the bottom of the mystery between them, but instead of discussing the matter like two individuals who both stand to gain from a rational encounter, they continue to battle on and eventually one becomes the victor: BeoWolfmon.

Because Cherubimon is a god-like Digimon in terms of power, his apparition appears from out of the blue, out of the veritable machine to bestow upon Duskmon a new power. But first he alerts him to some of his past and allows Duskmon to realize that he is really a human boy named Koichi who searched after Koji and ended up in the Digital world because they are brothers. Koichi remembers his grandmother on her deathbed confessing to him that his father and brother are still alive and well (though we do not learn anything about why he was abandoned to live with her instead of with them). He sought out Koji and managed to find himself alone within the Digital World instead where his fear and self-loathing got the better of him.

There, darkness overwhelmed his spirit, which called toward Cherubimon like a magnet. Cherubimon offered to be his friend and to bestow upon him the power of the Legendary Warrior of Darkness, which would help him to survive in this hostile, new world. But the power came at a cost as Koichi became less and less human and forgot his identity and his past. He even forgot his main objective for coming to this world in the first place: to find his twin brother Koji. And now, after remembering all of this information and falling into a deeper state of depression, Cherubimon unlocks Koichi’s Beast Spirit of Darkness, which allows him to become Velgemon. From the vantage point of this stronger form, Koichi is able to overcome BeoWolfmon once again, though he is still emotionally grappling with his current knowledge and therefore, manages to fly off before the darkness consumes him totally and he destroys his brother Koji.

During this entire encounter, Koji knows only that whoever Koichi is, he looks awfully like himself. He seemingly has no knowledge of having a twin brother or a sibling whatsoever in the real world, and therefore probably thinks that Duskmon’s inner human image is something like a head game meant to throw Koji off while they battle. And that makes sense from his perspective as it would also be hard to believe that a human child who came to the Digital World from the real world would even be able to be corrupted by someone like Cherubimon. We know, because of Ken in Digimon Adventure 02, that human children can become corrupted when they enter the Digital World. However, Koji is a relative newcomer and the rules of the game might not be so apparent to him here.

Nevertheless, the battle is over for now as the Digidestined reunite and continue their long sojourn through the Dark Continent toward the ever elusive Rose Morning Star.

 

Ciao for now,

The Digidestined Cody

Phantasmagoric Sakkakumon (Digimon Frontier: episode 29)

(Check out my previous review HERE. Or to go back to the beginning click HERE)

If you’ve watched this series before, you’ll know how weird this episode is in context. If not, in the previous episode of Digimon Frontier, one of the main protagonists, Takuya, went into the domain of one of their biggest enemies: Mercurymon. He was almost defeated by Mercurymon before getting some sort of deux ex machina power from a legendary DigiEgg the Digidestined team is holding onto. The power manifests as a light that gives Takuya the ability to fuse his Legendary Warrior Spirits and thereby Fusion Evolve into his strongest form yet: Aldamon. Through this new Digivolution he is able to defeat Mercurymon, destroy the final two areas within Sakkakumon’s interior matrix, and seemingly finally destroy this enemy for good.

However, we did not actually see Aldamon absorb the Beast Spirit of Steel, which is Mercurymon’s strongest form. Furthermore, Sakkakumon’s deadened husk remained floating in the sky above the party after their ‘defeat’ of this enemy. None of this really bodes well for the team, but one can be forgiven for thinking the battle is over at this point as the entire episode leads one to believe this outcome really happened. So when episode 29 begins and we find out that Sakkakumon is not dead and defeated, but very much alive, just without a Mercurymon form any longer, it’s quite an annoying prospect. We’ve just seen the Digidestined dispense with this guy for five episodes (or 10% of the entire series’ runtime) and now have to watch an entirely new episode where they battle with his residual energy once more. The senses reel and just when the series was getting good, it begins to drag once more, to pull the veritable rug out beneath us just as the Digidestined were closing in on the Duskmon mystery and finally moving toward the Rose Morning Star to find out what that whole place is really about. Bleh.

But as it were, Sakkakumon descends once more from the lofty heavens of the Dark Continent to rain down destruction, terror and mayhem on our Digidestined pals. But he has learned something from all of the Legendary Warriors of Light’s travails within his interior: namely, he has learned how to harness and use all of their attacks. Furthermore, he can reflect back their attacks when doled out toward him. As Takuya Fusion Evolves into Aldamon and tries pointlessly to break through Sakkakumon’s defenses, J.P. asks Patamon if he still has the power to give the rest of them Fusion Evolutions like Koji and Takuya. However, the little dude, once hatched, now has no such powers and therefore, as in my prediction hitherto, no one else will ever be able to gain this rare ability. Instead, J.P., Tommy, and Zoe all Spirit Evolve into their H Spirit forms as Beetlemon, Kumamon, and Kazemon, respectively. And again, the question of why they would not just rocket up to their highest levels as Beast Spirits first is beyond me, and beyond all rational calculation. Maybe they just really dig their H Spirit digs, you dig?

Whenever anyone launches an attack, Sakkakumon just reflects it back at twice its original power and douses his foes in a taste of their own medicine. Even when the lesser Digidestined get mad and Slide Evolve into their Beast Spirit forms, they are match. Hell, even when they attack all at once, Sakkakumon is so quick that he just oscillates and absorbs each attack patters before reflecting it back at his enemies. The guy is such a tank that J.P., typically high-spirited and strong-willed, advises the team to run away, to retreat from battle just this once so they can regroup and formulate a new plan. Even Takuya agrees and so the group runs away into a nearby chasm wherein they find a tunnel that leads them straight into a large cavern with only one way in or out. A pitch black cavern at that. Dumb dumb dumb.

Sakkakumon gives chase and traps the Digidestined in this cavern before turning off his bio-luminescence to take advantage of the darkness. And then the mind games begin as Sakkakumon uses what he learned of each Digidestined kid’s emotional traumas, failings, and fears while they labored away battling his minions within his internal matrix of elemental arenas. All the kids, except for Takuya who has truly learned to master his emotions and inner demons, start freaking out about how scared they are of the darkness. Fear and doubt enters their fragile pre-teen psyches and they even begin to distrust one another for a few moments as J.P. and Tommy take umbrage with Takuya always being so level-headed and telling them what to do as if he were their leader (and as the Digidestined of Fire, he kinda is their leader by default). Sakkakumon has sown the seeds of discord for a short time, but Takuya truly is a natural leader, and as such he tells his friends to close their eyes and to realize they are now part-Digimon living within their own Digital World.

Their senses are heightened as Digimon and through this power of focus, they can hear Sakkakumon’s breathing and movements. So they refocus their energies and head back into the fray against their opponent. Further, Takuya finds Sakkakumon’s weakness in his central orb/node that never emits an attack nor tries to defend against one. This is his power core. Also, by fusing attacks with each other, they can confuse Sakkakumon’s sensors into taking the full brunt of attacks, which are unlike pure elemental waves of energy. By distracting him with such potent new attacks, they are able to momentarily expose Sakkakumon’s core orb to attack, which Aldamon doles out in abrupt fashion to finally defeat the Legendary Warrior of Steel, absorb all of his Fractal Code, and his Beast Spirit.

At the end of this encounter, Cherubimon’s spirit appears momentarily (but only visibly to the viewers) to express his distaste at losing his final Legendary Warrior (he must already sense that Duskmon is a lost cause) and to alert us that he is releasing some sort of seal. The Digidestined endeavor to search for BeoWolfmon and Koji qua BeoWolfmon continues to search for Duskmon in the interminable darkness at the edges of the Dark Continent.

 

Ciao for now,

The Digidestined Cody

[Continued HERE]

Darkness Before the Dawn (Digimon Frontier: Episode 28)

(Catch my previous Digimon Frontier episode review out HERE)

As Koji runs off chasing Duskmon who knows where, Takuya continues to search through Sakkakumon to find the final chamber and escape. He almost immediately lucks into an area of the internal matrix littered with highly polished metal mirrors wherein Mercurymon has been waiting for the final confrontation between himself and the Digidestined. However, Mercurymon has a few tricks up his sleeve in this domain. He can use any mirror or polished surface as a transfer area with which to teleport around the room. The large number of mirrors also allows him to manipulate the visuals of this domain and to throw projections of himself about the room, which Takuya qua Agunimon tries in vain to destroy.

If all of this weren’t enough, Mercurymon talks some mad shit and slays with his Elizabethan oratory at every turn making Agunimon more enraged and less in control of his rational functions. He forces the Legendary Warrior to fight on the offensive like a raging bull with a blindfold and a dead leg. And when Agunimon does land a fire attack on the correct Mercurymon apparition, he just lifts his mirror shield, absorbs the energy, and reflects it back through his Dark Reflection powers. Hitherto the Digidestined have mostly made their way about brute forcing encounters with enemies, but Mercurymon is one who suffers no fools. One with a tactical game far outpacing that of the pre-teen Digidestined team.

A portal opens in the sky, which leads to the final Area within Sakkakumon: the Light Area. The entire place is a large chapel with stained glass windows looking heavenward and a massive organ at the back of the room. Here, Mercurymon verbally prods Agunimon once again before revealing the apparition of Seraphimon bound by thorny vines: the entire sequence is littered with Christian iconography that one might think worth interpreting further, but the parallels are pretty apparent. Seraphimon is a savior/protector figure of the Digital World who has defeated and bound in ‘death’ by his own people: the Legendary Warrior of Steel and the Legendary Warriors of Darkness generally who have decided to follow the evil Dark Lord Cherubimon instead. The crown of thorns and the thorny vines. The fact that it takes place within a chapel. But here I’ll digress as it could all merely be a ploy to use interesting imagery in a vague manner like director Hideaki Anno did in his acclaimed show Neon Genesis Evangelion, which he has later stated he only used because it looked cool.

Takuya is taken aback by the image, as are his friends outside in the Dark Continent, and demands that Mercurymon free Seraphimon immediately. The request is, of course, absurd as Takuya-Agunimon cannot currently defeat Mercurymon and thereby has no way to force him to free Seraphimon. And anyway Mercurymon explains that this is merely the spectre of Seraphimon, something of a shadow, ghost, or Fractal Code copy from the data Mercurymon received when he defeated him. Mercurymon then absorbs this data and transforms into ShadowSeraphimon whose power level is beyond that of a mere Mega-level Digimon. Agunimon attacks, but finds his strength wanting, so he transitions through a Slide Evolution into BurningGreymon to hopefully match power level with a Mega-level Digimon form.

Unfortunately, he miscalculates and realizes only too late that he is no match for ShadowSeraphimon given his current Digivolution options. He is defeated and reverts back to Takuya as Mercurymon cradles his head in his hand and threatens to snuff out the kid’s life at any moment. J.P., Tommy, and Zoe Spirit Evolve and once again try to enter Sakkakumon by force, but find his defenses to be much too strong. Bokomon calls out to the DigiEgg of Seraphimon to help out his friend Takuya and the egg rises once more into the air above, releasing a stream of light energy that makes its way through Sakkakumon’s barrier without a pause. The light enters Takuya’s D-Tector and allows him to Fusion Evolve using both his H spirit and his B Spirit into the more powerful hybrid Digimon Aldamon.

Somehow this new form surpasses even a ShadowSeraphimon (a Super-Mega-level if you will) and merely shrugs off the best his enemy can throw at him before going in for the kill, taking Mercurymon’s Beast Spirit of Steel and trouncing the Light Area in the process. Mercurymon recovers just long enough to realize that his entire plan and the all work he has done in developing his strengths has failed. Aldamon crushes him totally and takes the remainder of his Fractal Code, his H Spirit of Steel, and returns him to a DigiEgg. Another result is the release of Seraphimon’s Fractal Code, which immediately exits Sakkakumon and enters the Seraphimon DigiEgg, which hatches into a Patamon with a waste-band like its ‘mother’ Bokomon who kept it warm and safe until this moment.

What’s weird is that even after Mercurymon has been defeated and all ten areas of Sakkakumon have been dealt with likewise, the giant darkened Sakkakumon edifice remains in the sky above as if some giant memorial to the battle that just took place. Also, a little theory here, but it was the power of Seraphimon’s DigiEgg that allowed Takuya and Koji to both Fusion Evolve and now that the DigiEgg has hatched, this power may no longer be attainable by any of the other Digidestined. Bummer. But hey, the series is almost 2/3 over by this episode, so it’s best they don’t spend a ton of that time grinding to gain their new abilities from episode to episode.

Finally, we learn nothing new of Koji’s situation in this episode focused solely on Takuya’s fight with Mercurymon. But we do know that there is only one more Legendary Warrior of Darkness left in THE Legendary Warrior of Darkness Duskmon. We also know that the darkness feeding on his emotions has allowed him to become as powerful as a Super-Mega in just his H Spirit form. So even if Koji catches up to him in his new Fusion Form as BeoWolfmon, Duskmon might still Slide Evolve into his more powerful, unrestrained Beast Spirit form and dominate. It will take both Koji and Takuya’s newfound powers, and maybe some teamwork with the other three Digidestined, to finally defeat this foe and figure out his deal. Namely, what exactly his relationship is to Koji.

 

Ciao for now,

The Digidestined Cody

[Continued HERE]