SPOILERS for a pair of children’s TV shows I cannot imagine any of you will ever watch

A lot of what I’ve been writing about is stuff that’s been percolating for years; Cowboy Bebop, No More Heroes, my various comments about Tarantino, my runthroughs of Neon Genesis Evangelion and Firefly, my upcoming essay on Metal Gear Solid that deserves another week’s worth of polishing, all things I’ve been thinking about long before I came here. So now I’m gonna reach all the way back and talk about two cartoons from my childhood: Pokémon and Digimon, two popular Japanese franchises that hit the Western world’s shores right about the same time – 1998 for the former, 1999 for the latter. Both are based on video games, sort of; the Pokémon games were released in 1996 in Japan, and the game, anime, and trading card game were all unleashed on the English speaking world at the same time in 1998, effectively making it one big semi-interconnected franchise to Western kids, while Digimon was based on a Tamigotchi-esque virtual pet that could connect to and fight other Digimon.

Digimon was and continues to be the redheaded stepchild of the two; I remember kids at the time (including myself at first) dismissing it as a Pokémon ripoff, which is understandable but ultimately incorrect. Tonally, the shows are very similar, what with being twenty minute toy commercials intended for children – wacky jokes, larger-than-life characters, Important Lessons, Heroism, and Friendship. But surprisingly, the actual premises and expectations are almost totally contradictory, and so they created totally different undertones. Literally the only plot point shared between the two is they take place in worlds that are populated by fantastic creatures that can evolve into badass monsters.

Pokémon is, was, and probably always will be the more financially and culturally successful of the two, being inescapable between at least 1998 and 2002 and continuing to enjoy an effective licence to print money today. The premise of the franchise is Pokémon training – that you can capture Pokémon, treat them as pets, and train them to fight other trainer’s Pokémon (yes, I know, it sounds like cockfighting, shut up); the premise of the anime in particular is that we follow one trainer in particular, eleven-year-old Ash Ketchum, as he receives his first Pokémon and sets out to earn eight badges from Pokémon gyms around Kanto that will let him enter the Pokémon League. Along the way, he picks up both travelling companions and a loyal team of Pokémon.

Digimon‘s premise is quite different. Seven children at summer camp end up sucked into an alternate world called the Digital World, a world populated by inexplicably English-speaking creatures called Digimon. The kids are told that they are the “DigiDestined”, and each is partnered with a particular Digimon that they use their “DigiDevice” to “DigiVolve” into more powerful Digimon (shut up, this was all totally cool when I was eight). What begins as a quest to get back to Earth turns into a quest to save both the Digital World and the real world as the kids discover one evil Digimon’s plot to destroy everything.

I assume just laying out those two premises makes the tonal differences clear; Pokémon works on a smaller plot scale than Digimon. Obviously, every story escalates into some big action setpiece in the third act that allows Ash to lead his Pokémon through trouble, but more often than not the problem of the episode is something ordinary and everyday that’s been complicated or spiced up by the existence of Pokémon – for example, there’s one episode I always liked where Ash and friends meet a glassblower who’s lost inspiration, and through his adventure with them he finds a rare shiny crystal Onyx that inspires the creative spark in him again. There is an Evil organisation with Pokémon, a terrorist organisation called Team Rocket that steals and abuses Pokémon and otherwise causes chaos, but they’re generally represented by a regular Three Stooges-esque trio of idiots whose Bond villain schemes are Evil enough to boo and hiss at but not enough to lose sympathy entirely.

The overall arc of the show is Ash’s development from impulsive, ill-informed idiot to a more mature trainer with a deeper knowledge base. The first episode begins on the day Ash is to be gifted his first Pokémon, and his entire characterisation – the entire show – flows from the fact that despite this being the day he’s waited for his entire life, he manages to sleep in, and so instead of getting a Squirtle, Charmander, or Bulbasaur like everyone else, he gets a leftover Pikachu nobody wanted because it was a temperamental little asshole. The first arc of the show is Ash and Pikachu coming together; Ash gets overconfident and tries to pick a fight with a wild Spearow, which only gets Pikachu hurt defending him, and Pikachu is so moved by Ash’s dedication and protectiveness that they develop a protective bond with one another.

While he often deals with the dangers of both Team Rocket and natural disasters, Ash also often just spends time learning about his world, and many episodes are about his relationships with his various Pokémon; capturing a Pokémon is just as often about forming a special bond with it as it is about beating it in a fight. The longest arc in the first series is Ash’s unruly, uncooperative Charizard, but one of my favourites is his attempt to figure out how to most effectively use his Krabby (which is especially hilarious and endearing because they’re useless in the games). When Ash successfully gets into the Pokémon League, the show becomes more specifically serialised, and takes on a more epic scope – I want to say despite the fact that the whole thing is only a gentleman’s game, but really it takes the basic stakes the story has always had and elevates them. Ash always wanted to be the very best; climbing the ladder of the League means every accomplishment is rewarded by a more difficult challenge, and the pressure and sense of personal pride grow and grow, making it all the more meaningful when Ash loses.

This is a story beat the show would eventually drive into the ground – to my knowledge, the only competition Ash has won in the two decades worth of series is the Orange Islands arc, which wasn’t actually based on any of the games – but blew my tiny mind when I was eight. When I was a kid, television stations played a new episode every weekday morning (in retrospect, that’s probably more responsible than anything for my generation of anime fans), which means I’d been following Ash and his adventures almost every day for a ninth of my life, and to see him try his best, fail, wish his opponent well, and pick himself up and move onto the next adventure gave me a lot to think about.

Digimon – more accurately, Digimon Adventure – has a story both more complicated and more conventional; I remember it positively, but struggle to remember as many of the beats and arcs in as much detail as I lay out for Pokémon. This is a half-hour show that effectively has fourteen protagonists – the creatures in Pokémon range in intelligence from purely animal instinct to Scooby Doo, and are generally treated as pets, while Digimon are treated as equal friends and partners – and having two-thirds the episodes of Pokémon only puts into perspective the loss of intensity, so what I remember in detail is the worldbuilding. Pokémon essentially worked by real-world rules with Pokémon in it; you had things like power stations that worked by real-world physics that were given a boost by creatures able to magically generate electricity.

Digimon‘s characters live in a world that operates by an invented set of rules, and then uses those rules to generate story. Initially, the kids’ Digimon friends are pretty much talking blobfish, and the kids’ power is to turn them into more dangerous and cooler looking creatures – e.g. Agumon is a dinosaur-looking thing, Biyomon is a pink bird, Tentomon resembles a ladybug. With a lot of work, the kids figure out how to evolve the Digimon further into gigantic, monstrous, totally fucking kickass creatures, and so story happens when, for example, the Digimon are unable to evolve and have to figure out another way around the problem. I don’t recall any specific fist-pumping moments, but I remember being regularly overjoyed when Agumon evolved into Greymon, and when the kids found evolutions beyond those. It being, all things considered, a silly kids’ show means it can’t push those rules to their dramatic limit, but the basic idea of creating a set of rules and sticking to them holds.

(The one scene from the show that always stuck with me was when the characters seemed to have lost, were cast into an empty white void by the villain, and ended up having a long heartfelt conversation about the friendship the group had developed and the growth they’d all gone through that energised them when they inevitably got out and went after the villain.

I feel a strange mixture of pride and shame at having written nearly fifteen hundred words on the subject of two Japanese children’s cartoons made to cash in on toys; putting down thoughts I’ve had since I was eight years old has made me realise how many fairly basic storytelling devices each show used. You don’t get to decide what people learn from you, you don’t get to decide what you learn from others, and you don’t get to know how or when something could be useful down the road.