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Entry tags:
CAPE & COWL: application
[PLAYER INFO]
NAME: Zero
AGE: yep
JOURNAL: again
IM: you sick of this yet
PLURK: i sure hope not
E-MAIL: i'm like a recurring disease
RETURNING: a recurring venereal disease
[CHARACTER INFO]
CHARACTER NAME: Beelzemon.
SERIES: Digimon Tamers.
CHRONOLOGY: Eisode 35: Give a Little Bit, right before Gallantmon kicks his sorry ass.
CLASS: Real-ass villain.
BACKGROUND:
Everyone remembers Digimon from when they were ten, right? That show where a bunch of kids get sucked into the 'Digital World' and get monster partners that they work with to defeat evil? It didn't make a whole lot of sense but we loved it anyway?
Well, so did everybody in Digimon Tamers. The third season of the Digimon franchaise and frequently meta as fuck, Tamers builds on the world of Adventure in an unexpected way: previous seasons actually exist within the universe, as children's cartoons based on popular video games. There's even a trading card game! Which actually matters in the plot!
But the video game is what's important here, because that's where Digimon actually come from. Created some fifteen-odd years ago by a group of young programmers called the Monster Makers, the project aiming to create A.I. was seized by the company funding them, and turned into a very profitable virtual game. The Monster Makers disbanded: including a member codenamed Shibumi, who disappeared; and codename Tao, who went about his life as usual, getting married and having several children. Meanwhile, the artificial life forms that they had created evolved on their own, though no one knew to what extent.
Until they started bioemerging.
These bundles of data were reaching a point where they weren't simply self-aware, but could move between their virtual world and the real world. Given that they were designed and programmed to fight each other for our amusement, it's not terribly surprising that once they started manifesting in reality they would continue to follow their instincts. These "wild ones" were dangerous, and so an agency called Hypnos was created to deal with their appearances. Think of a kind of mix between a local dogcatcher and those dudes from Fringe. Nominally led bySteven Blum Yamaki, Hypnos worked tirelessly to find, and then destroy, bioemerging digimon.
Some of them slip through their defenses, though. This is the case for Impmon, a caustic rookie level digimon that wriggled his way into the real world, and then proceeded to be terrible at everything. It was also the case for Calumon, a baffling rookie level who accidentally flew into the real world, and then proceeded to try and be friends with absolutely everything he encountered -- including Impmon.
Calumon also made a number of human friends, including Takato Matsuki. Takato is our actual protagonist: a fan of the games, and imaginative future gogglehead, he designed his own digimon partner (and honestly, who hasn't?). Through mysterious happenings, his original monster actually came to life, and he earned both a partner and friend in Guilmon. He also made friends with the cold and competitive Rika and her taciturn partner Renamon, as well as the collected and insightful Henry and his wisecracking Terriermon. The trio (six...io?) fought bioermerging wild ones -- and often each other -- while trying to keep their neighbourhood of Shinjuku safe. Despite being like 13 or something absolutely prenatal like that, they actually managed to hold their own! And it was during these absolutely riveting monster of the week adventures that they met Impmon, who appeared out of the blue, jonesing for a fight and talking in rhyme.
That... sums up his involvement in the plot pretty well, honestly. For a while, anyway. Most of his time was spent appearing to berate the partner digimon for taking orders from humans, shoot fireballs at people, play childish pranks, call Renamon hot, and steal food. As something of a minor (VERY minor) villain, he wasn't terribly effective. More a nuisance than anything, really. And that was when he was trying to be the bad guy. On more than one occasion he straight up forgot that he supposedly hated humans, and hung around playing with them and their partners -- gosh, almost like he wanted to be their friend or something.
As time went by, things started to get a little more serious, with stronger and stronger digimon appearing in the real world. It came to light that Impmon isn't the only monster with a disdain for working with humans: a group of twelve very, very mythologically confused digimon called the Devas wanted to take it a step further. They started bioemerging to wreak havoc, spouting rhetoric about destroying the human world to be free of its influence -- as ordered by their master, the digimon sovereign. The Devas all being ultimate level meant that these were fights to take seriously, and the tamers and their partners had to work hard to discover their new digivolutions.
Which is something that remained out of reach for Impmon, for a good time. It eventually becomes clear that Impmon did, in fact, have a human partner after he came to the real world. Ai and her brother Mako were a pair of bickering siblings that took care of him after bioemerging, and whom he ran away from some time afterwards. Although it takes him a long time to admit it, he did love them, but he was sick of being used as just another bargaining chip in their competitive squabbles. He was generally treated like a toy, or a pet, and it's fairly obvious that this is where his disdain for partnerships comes from.
Unfortunately, without a proper tamer, it's incredibly difficult for a digimon to level up, so to speak. The two general methods of digivolution are through hard work and winning battles to absorb the strength of a defeated enemy (this kills them forever, by the way), or having a human partner that believes in you. Because of the power of friendship, or something. And Impmon was not actually any good whatsoever at that fighting thing.
This meant that when Indramon, one of the more powerful Devas, pushed his buttons too hard about being a weak little rookie, Impmon took him on one-on-one. And, predictably, got the shit kicked out of him. Beaten, bruised, and having proven his own self painfully wrong, he crawled off to lick his wounds and wallow in self-loathing, while team friendship went about fighting more Devas and finding more partners. Takato's friend and classmate Jeri even gains a partner in Leomon, who bioemerges and saves her from a rampaging Deva. At this point, Calumon is actually kidnapped out of Jeri's arms by the Deva Makuramon, who steals him back to the digital world to bring him to the sovereign. Takato, Rika, Henry, Jeri, all of their respective digimon, and their partnerless friends Kenta and Kazu pledge to mount a rescue mission and bring him back. The group finds a passage into the digital world, and begins their 'antics in the digital desert' arc, all of which Impmon is oblivious to.
Which would be because right around now is when the Deva Catsuramon appeared to him, pointing out that he wouldn't be so worthless if only he had the ability to digivolve. He offers to gift Impmon with this power, if only he'll do a favour in exchange for the Devas... and by extension, the Sovereign. He shows Impmon a vision of Ai and Mako having replaced him wholesale, with a puppy of all things, and reminds him just how little humans have ever done for him -- and wouldn't it be better if the ones who'd trespassed into the digital world were, uh, taken care of?
Desperate and self-pitying, Impmon accepts. Catsuramon transports him back to the digital world, and after some overblown Faustian dialogue he gives him the strength to warp digivolve to mega level. Now Beelzemon, he found himself a possessed motorcycle (the digital world is bizarre) and went on something of a rampage. This was more power than he'd ever even witnessed, and he wanted to test it. Apparently, killing dozens of rookie digimon with a single attack was cathartic in some way.
His killing spree was interrupted when Catsuramon chewed him out for getting distracted, and reminded him of the debt he now owed the Sovereign: destroying the human intruders in the digital world. While he'd been riding around looking like a bad 80s metal CD cover, the human tamers had been wandering the digital world with their partners and generally getting up to antics, finding new partners and learning profound things about themselves, etc etc.
Beelzemon put a stop to that, showing up to chew digigum and kick ass (and he was all out of digigum). He put the smackdown on the main trio's partners; and when Leomon stepped in to try and stop him, he got shot through the heart, and Beelzemon was to blame. Remember how in the Digimon show, there's a funky reincarnation dealie so that no one ever dies for real? Not in Tamers, bitch. Leomon was gone for good, and Beelzemon just loaded his data like it ain't no thang. This, understandably, made Takato snap and try to force Guilmon to digivolve to mega level and destroy him -- mutating him into a virus. There's some crying, and some friendship speeching, and Takato and Guilmon discover that to reach the true mega form, they have to believe in each other and be in sync. DNA digivolving to Gallantmon and putting Beelzemon in his place, Leomon is at least somewhat avenged, and the group continues their search for Calumon.
Meanwhile, Beelzemon realised the full weight of what he'd done, and the crushing regret of hindsight hit him full force. He moped around in the digital desert for a while hating himself, and when a pack of rookie digimon whose flock he'd decimated earlier came back to attack him he didn't fight back. The damage from his fight with Gallantmon and now the wounds from this new scrap had him reverted to his rookie form, and Impmon mostly just flopped around in the dirt waiting to die.
Back with Team Friendship, lots of much more exciting things were happening. The sovereign was revealed to be not one but four ancient, mega level digimon, Calumon was recovered, and the reason for their kidnapping of him was unveiled: while they may be the most powerful digimon, they are not the most powerful creatures in the digital world. That was a little program called the D-Reaper, an algorithm created years ago to 'clean up' virtual reality, by deleting any program that was too big. Apparently, this including digimon themselves, who had evolved to be too big for their britches. For fear of deletion, the sovereigns needed to retrieve the Spirit of Digivolution, which Azulongmon -- which the sovereign of the East -- had sent to the real world for its own safety. In a shocking twist that no one would have expected unless they paid attention during any scene involving a character digivolving, this Spirit turns out to have been turned into a digimon: our very own Calumon. At the sovereign's request, unleashed a massive wave of digivolution energy, and he wished with all his heart (bear with me, it's a shounen, okay?), and weaker digimon throughout the digital world were granted the power to become mega levels. This rendered Calumon useless, and the sovereigns set him free to live as a normal digimon, before insisting that the humans and their partners return to the real world where they would be safe from the D-Reaper.
While they'd been in the digital world, Yamaki and his allies at Hypnos had gotten in touch with all the former Monster Makers, and been hard at work to find a way to bring their children back. They created an ark, a digital vessel that could bring the kids back to the real world. Before boarding, Renamon snatched a red bandana from the wind, and gave Rika a Meaningful Look. The two split off to find the battered Impmon, grab him and rush back to the rendez-vous. Nobody really appreciated this, since Beelzemon had been basically the worst ever, and once they arrived at home Impmon crawled off amidst the warm welcomes.
Unfortunately, the loss of her partner had been the last straw for Jeri. A deep sorrow took hold of her heart, and she is probably the only children's cartoon character to suffer from depression. The D-Reaper had also taken hold of her heart, and rode back to the real world as a stowaway inside her. She became incredibly creepy, and the D-Reaper began to take over the downtown area, destroying entire blocks with manic pink goo that would put Ghostbusters 2 to shame. All the while, Jeri was trapped in the eye of the storm, being held captive by the D-Reaper to fuel its destruction with her gloom, self-hatred and apathy. Takato, Rika, and Henry fought the D-Reaper in vain, but without knowing her location there was little they could do.
Meanwhile, Impmon had been trying to track down his old human friends. After some illiteracy shenanigans, he found Ai and Mako staying with a relative in a nearby suburb, and there were some tearful reunions all up in this bitch. They begged his forgiveness for having treated him like a pet, and he begged theirs for having left. Things were awkward, but things seemed to be going alright, and soon everything would be back to normal. Except for that whole D-Reaper eating downtown issue, which Impmon saw on the news and wigged out about. He apologised to the siblings and determined to go back to the city, to at least try and help in whatever way a loser rookie could. He knew that he probably wasn't going to come back, but Mako gave him a toy gun and told him to beat the bad guys for him. This apparently constitutes an upgrade in the rules of the power of friendship, and Impmon found that he could warp digivolve to Beelzemon Blast Mode. It comes with wings.
Now that he could digivolve, Beelzemon saved the other tamer's bacon, and soon ran into Calumon, who told him where Jeri was being held. The two rushed off to try and rescue her, Beelzemon being hellbent on making up for his past wrongs. He tried in vain to smash his way into the D-Reaper, only to have himself knocked out andthe both of them captured along with her. When he woke up and tried to get Jeri to snap out of her gloom and want to escape, the D-Reaper expelled him violently. Once outside, he tries to break his way back in, calling on Leomon’s memory to give him the strength to save her. Somehow this enables him to fire off the Fist of the Beast King, the late Leomon’s signature attack, in a scene that is never really properly explained but shut up it’s touching. This blasts a large enough hole in the D-Reaper for him to pull Jeri out, but she is too startled by her dead partner’s attack to take his hand, and he reverts to Impmon as he crashes to the ground.
Ai and Mako show up to take him home, comforting him and at this point becoming his actual tamers: a digivice appears above Ai's head, and she officially becomes his partner (technically they both do, because... dubs are weird).
Finally, team friendship vanquishes the D-Reaper not just from the real world, but from existence, and both worlds are saved. Impmon takes his tamers to meet the others, saying that he wanted to introduce his partners to his friends. He also asks Jeri if she could ever forgive him, and she confirms that she already has. At this point, it comes to light that in order to banish the D-Reaper, all digital lifeforms had to be expelled from the real world, and all the kid's partners are reverted to baby form and sucked back into the digital world -- Impmon included.
There's a movie which seems to imply that the partner digimon return later, but its canonisation is shaky and all he does in that is go to a party, so we won't discuss it.
PERSONALITY:
"You're right, I'm a bad influence -- but I'm just so good at it!"
Impmon isn't really a nice guy. His idea of a joke is startling pedestrians with a near-miss fireball to the face. He thinks that fear and pain are hilarious, but only as long as they don't happen to him. There's no basis for his boasting, but he does it anyway. And he probably knows this, given how quick he is to turn tail when somebody fights back. He's a bully, and even tells Guilmon point blank that "I'm not gonna fight you if you're gonna fight back!"
A lot of this stems from insecurity. Most of his interactions with others are governed by enough inferiority complex to choke a horse, and a nonstop desire to prove himself. In the beginning, he's convinced that the only potential way to do that is to fight, be more powerful, and digivolve -- eventually, he realises that being kind is worth more.
His own experience with his tamers clearly soured him on humans in general, and being a cynic, he genuinely believes that all of them are just as bad. It's almost like a defense mechanism, and it's almost endearing. Mostly to the people who get fireballs to the face, it's just irritating.
When you get down to it, he's childish. Which is understandable, given that he's essentially a child. While aging is a funny thing with virtual life, and we have no idea how long he's been alive, he displays the average intelligence of preteen (and I'm being fairly generous here). While this improves somewhat when he's in Beelzemon form, immaturity is still one of his defining traits. He's raucous and irritable and churlish, he just has the power and malice to actually back it up. Even now, though, his unfriendliness is just a front. He's just gotten more... aggressive about it.
But, despite that, there's potential for goodness in him. As Beelzemon, he insists that he doesn't have friends, because friends are for weaker people. Finally having gotten all the power he craved, he's convinced that he doesn't need anyone else, but he realises how wrong he was after violently alientating anyone he might potentially have considered a friend. This is a huge turning point for him, when he drops the walls and becomes far more genuine. He still has difficulty admitting it, but he is able to tell his partners that he loves them, and can show that he wants to be accepted too. He may have had to descend into being a truly effective villain to realize it, but Impmon doesn’t want to be a bad guy. He’s desperate not just for the acceptance of his tamers, but of his friends as well -- and it wasn't power that he'd wanted all along, but respect.
Finally, he has an inexplicable accent despite living in Japan, because... dubs are weird.
POWER:
Beelzemon's power set will simply be an upgraded version of his old one, to match his new mega form:
Despite being turned into a human, Impmon will still be able to use the shout-my-attack-name monster attacks that every veteran of youth-targeted Japanese series should be familiar with. His available attacks in this form are Double Impact, Corona Blaster, and Corona Destroyer, all of the above making use of a big 'ole gun. Actually, all of these of these attacks use very large guns, which are part of his digital form and can be manifested as such.
Additionally, under very particular circumstances, he will have the ability to dedigivolve. This is more of a downside than anything, since all it does is revert him to a weaker form. Since Beelzemon is his base level now, when he takes really really large and sustained amounts of damage, he'll turn back into Impmon. Or rather, the human version of Impmon. This is probably not actually going to happen at all since even canon's approach to this makes very little sense, but I thought I'd note it.
[CHARACTER SAMPLES]
COMMUNITY POST (VOICE) SAMPLE:
( network history )
LOGS POST (PROSE) SAMPLE:
( logs history )
FINAL NOTES:
did u gais miss me mwah
NAME: Zero
AGE: yep
JOURNAL: again
IM: you sick of this yet
PLURK: i sure hope not
E-MAIL: i'm like a recurring disease
RETURNING: a recurring venereal disease
[CHARACTER INFO]
CHARACTER NAME: Beelzemon.
SERIES: Digimon Tamers.
CHRONOLOGY: Eisode 35: Give a Little Bit, right before Gallantmon kicks his sorry ass.
CLASS: Real-ass villain.
BACKGROUND:
Everyone remembers Digimon from when they were ten, right? That show where a bunch of kids get sucked into the 'Digital World' and get monster partners that they work with to defeat evil? It didn't make a whole lot of sense but we loved it anyway?
Well, so did everybody in Digimon Tamers. The third season of the Digimon franchaise and frequently meta as fuck, Tamers builds on the world of Adventure in an unexpected way: previous seasons actually exist within the universe, as children's cartoons based on popular video games. There's even a trading card game! Which actually matters in the plot!
But the video game is what's important here, because that's where Digimon actually come from. Created some fifteen-odd years ago by a group of young programmers called the Monster Makers, the project aiming to create A.I. was seized by the company funding them, and turned into a very profitable virtual game. The Monster Makers disbanded: including a member codenamed Shibumi, who disappeared; and codename Tao, who went about his life as usual, getting married and having several children. Meanwhile, the artificial life forms that they had created evolved on their own, though no one knew to what extent.
Until they started bioemerging.
These bundles of data were reaching a point where they weren't simply self-aware, but could move between their virtual world and the real world. Given that they were designed and programmed to fight each other for our amusement, it's not terribly surprising that once they started manifesting in reality they would continue to follow their instincts. These "wild ones" were dangerous, and so an agency called Hypnos was created to deal with their appearances. Think of a kind of mix between a local dogcatcher and those dudes from Fringe. Nominally led by
Some of them slip through their defenses, though. This is the case for Impmon, a caustic rookie level digimon that wriggled his way into the real world, and then proceeded to be terrible at everything. It was also the case for Calumon, a baffling rookie level who accidentally flew into the real world, and then proceeded to try and be friends with absolutely everything he encountered -- including Impmon.
Calumon also made a number of human friends, including Takato Matsuki. Takato is our actual protagonist: a fan of the games, and imaginative future gogglehead, he designed his own digimon partner (and honestly, who hasn't?). Through mysterious happenings, his original monster actually came to life, and he earned both a partner and friend in Guilmon. He also made friends with the cold and competitive Rika and her taciturn partner Renamon, as well as the collected and insightful Henry and his wisecracking Terriermon. The trio (six...io?) fought bioermerging wild ones -- and often each other -- while trying to keep their neighbourhood of Shinjuku safe. Despite being like 13 or something absolutely prenatal like that, they actually managed to hold their own! And it was during these absolutely riveting monster of the week adventures that they met Impmon, who appeared out of the blue, jonesing for a fight and talking in rhyme.
That... sums up his involvement in the plot pretty well, honestly. For a while, anyway. Most of his time was spent appearing to berate the partner digimon for taking orders from humans, shoot fireballs at people, play childish pranks, call Renamon hot, and steal food. As something of a minor (VERY minor) villain, he wasn't terribly effective. More a nuisance than anything, really. And that was when he was trying to be the bad guy. On more than one occasion he straight up forgot that he supposedly hated humans, and hung around playing with them and their partners -- gosh, almost like he wanted to be their friend or something.
As time went by, things started to get a little more serious, with stronger and stronger digimon appearing in the real world. It came to light that Impmon isn't the only monster with a disdain for working with humans: a group of twelve very, very mythologically confused digimon called the Devas wanted to take it a step further. They started bioemerging to wreak havoc, spouting rhetoric about destroying the human world to be free of its influence -- as ordered by their master, the digimon sovereign. The Devas all being ultimate level meant that these were fights to take seriously, and the tamers and their partners had to work hard to discover their new digivolutions.
Which is something that remained out of reach for Impmon, for a good time. It eventually becomes clear that Impmon did, in fact, have a human partner after he came to the real world. Ai and her brother Mako were a pair of bickering siblings that took care of him after bioemerging, and whom he ran away from some time afterwards. Although it takes him a long time to admit it, he did love them, but he was sick of being used as just another bargaining chip in their competitive squabbles. He was generally treated like a toy, or a pet, and it's fairly obvious that this is where his disdain for partnerships comes from.
Unfortunately, without a proper tamer, it's incredibly difficult for a digimon to level up, so to speak. The two general methods of digivolution are through hard work and winning battles to absorb the strength of a defeated enemy (this kills them forever, by the way), or having a human partner that believes in you. Because of the power of friendship, or something. And Impmon was not actually any good whatsoever at that fighting thing.
This meant that when Indramon, one of the more powerful Devas, pushed his buttons too hard about being a weak little rookie, Impmon took him on one-on-one. And, predictably, got the shit kicked out of him. Beaten, bruised, and having proven his own self painfully wrong, he crawled off to lick his wounds and wallow in self-loathing, while team friendship went about fighting more Devas and finding more partners. Takato's friend and classmate Jeri even gains a partner in Leomon, who bioemerges and saves her from a rampaging Deva. At this point, Calumon is actually kidnapped out of Jeri's arms by the Deva Makuramon, who steals him back to the digital world to bring him to the sovereign. Takato, Rika, Henry, Jeri, all of their respective digimon, and their partnerless friends Kenta and Kazu pledge to mount a rescue mission and bring him back. The group finds a passage into the digital world, and begins their 'antics in the digital desert' arc, all of which Impmon is oblivious to.
Which would be because right around now is when the Deva Catsuramon appeared to him, pointing out that he wouldn't be so worthless if only he had the ability to digivolve. He offers to gift Impmon with this power, if only he'll do a favour in exchange for the Devas... and by extension, the Sovereign. He shows Impmon a vision of Ai and Mako having replaced him wholesale, with a puppy of all things, and reminds him just how little humans have ever done for him -- and wouldn't it be better if the ones who'd trespassed into the digital world were, uh, taken care of?
Desperate and self-pitying, Impmon accepts. Catsuramon transports him back to the digital world, and after some overblown Faustian dialogue he gives him the strength to warp digivolve to mega level. Now Beelzemon, he found himself a possessed motorcycle (the digital world is bizarre) and went on something of a rampage. This was more power than he'd ever even witnessed, and he wanted to test it. Apparently, killing dozens of rookie digimon with a single attack was cathartic in some way.
His killing spree was interrupted when Catsuramon chewed him out for getting distracted, and reminded him of the debt he now owed the Sovereign: destroying the human intruders in the digital world. While he'd been riding around looking like a bad 80s metal CD cover, the human tamers had been wandering the digital world with their partners and generally getting up to antics, finding new partners and learning profound things about themselves, etc etc.
Beelzemon put a stop to that, showing up to chew digigum and kick ass (and he was all out of digigum). He put the smackdown on the main trio's partners; and when Leomon stepped in to try and stop him, he got shot through the heart, and Beelzemon was to blame. Remember how in the Digimon show, there's a funky reincarnation dealie so that no one ever dies for real? Not in Tamers, bitch. Leomon was gone for good, and Beelzemon just loaded his data like it ain't no thang. This, understandably, made Takato snap and try to force Guilmon to digivolve to mega level and destroy him -- mutating him into a virus. There's some crying, and some friendship speeching, and Takato and Guilmon discover that to reach the true mega form, they have to believe in each other and be in sync. DNA digivolving to Gallantmon and putting Beelzemon in his place, Leomon is at least somewhat avenged, and the group continues their search for Calumon.
Meanwhile, Beelzemon realised the full weight of what he'd done, and the crushing regret of hindsight hit him full force. He moped around in the digital desert for a while hating himself, and when a pack of rookie digimon whose flock he'd decimated earlier came back to attack him he didn't fight back. The damage from his fight with Gallantmon and now the wounds from this new scrap had him reverted to his rookie form, and Impmon mostly just flopped around in the dirt waiting to die.
Back with Team Friendship, lots of much more exciting things were happening. The sovereign was revealed to be not one but four ancient, mega level digimon, Calumon was recovered, and the reason for their kidnapping of him was unveiled: while they may be the most powerful digimon, they are not the most powerful creatures in the digital world. That was a little program called the D-Reaper, an algorithm created years ago to 'clean up' virtual reality, by deleting any program that was too big. Apparently, this including digimon themselves, who had evolved to be too big for their britches. For fear of deletion, the sovereigns needed to retrieve the Spirit of Digivolution, which Azulongmon -- which the sovereign of the East -- had sent to the real world for its own safety. In a shocking twist that no one would have expected unless they paid attention during any scene involving a character digivolving, this Spirit turns out to have been turned into a digimon: our very own Calumon. At the sovereign's request, unleashed a massive wave of digivolution energy, and he wished with all his heart (bear with me, it's a shounen, okay?), and weaker digimon throughout the digital world were granted the power to become mega levels. This rendered Calumon useless, and the sovereigns set him free to live as a normal digimon, before insisting that the humans and their partners return to the real world where they would be safe from the D-Reaper.
While they'd been in the digital world, Yamaki and his allies at Hypnos had gotten in touch with all the former Monster Makers, and been hard at work to find a way to bring their children back. They created an ark, a digital vessel that could bring the kids back to the real world. Before boarding, Renamon snatched a red bandana from the wind, and gave Rika a Meaningful Look. The two split off to find the battered Impmon, grab him and rush back to the rendez-vous. Nobody really appreciated this, since Beelzemon had been basically the worst ever, and once they arrived at home Impmon crawled off amidst the warm welcomes.
Unfortunately, the loss of her partner had been the last straw for Jeri. A deep sorrow took hold of her heart, and she is probably the only children's cartoon character to suffer from depression. The D-Reaper had also taken hold of her heart, and rode back to the real world as a stowaway inside her. She became incredibly creepy, and the D-Reaper began to take over the downtown area, destroying entire blocks with manic pink goo that would put Ghostbusters 2 to shame. All the while, Jeri was trapped in the eye of the storm, being held captive by the D-Reaper to fuel its destruction with her gloom, self-hatred and apathy. Takato, Rika, and Henry fought the D-Reaper in vain, but without knowing her location there was little they could do.
Meanwhile, Impmon had been trying to track down his old human friends. After some illiteracy shenanigans, he found Ai and Mako staying with a relative in a nearby suburb, and there were some tearful reunions all up in this bitch. They begged his forgiveness for having treated him like a pet, and he begged theirs for having left. Things were awkward, but things seemed to be going alright, and soon everything would be back to normal. Except for that whole D-Reaper eating downtown issue, which Impmon saw on the news and wigged out about. He apologised to the siblings and determined to go back to the city, to at least try and help in whatever way a loser rookie could. He knew that he probably wasn't going to come back, but Mako gave him a toy gun and told him to beat the bad guys for him. This apparently constitutes an upgrade in the rules of the power of friendship, and Impmon found that he could warp digivolve to Beelzemon Blast Mode. It comes with wings.
Now that he could digivolve, Beelzemon saved the other tamer's bacon, and soon ran into Calumon, who told him where Jeri was being held. The two rushed off to try and rescue her, Beelzemon being hellbent on making up for his past wrongs. He tried in vain to smash his way into the D-Reaper, only to have himself knocked out andthe both of them captured along with her. When he woke up and tried to get Jeri to snap out of her gloom and want to escape, the D-Reaper expelled him violently. Once outside, he tries to break his way back in, calling on Leomon’s memory to give him the strength to save her. Somehow this enables him to fire off the Fist of the Beast King, the late Leomon’s signature attack, in a scene that is never really properly explained but shut up it’s touching. This blasts a large enough hole in the D-Reaper for him to pull Jeri out, but she is too startled by her dead partner’s attack to take his hand, and he reverts to Impmon as he crashes to the ground.
Ai and Mako show up to take him home, comforting him and at this point becoming his actual tamers: a digivice appears above Ai's head, and she officially becomes his partner (technically they both do, because... dubs are weird).
Finally, team friendship vanquishes the D-Reaper not just from the real world, but from existence, and both worlds are saved. Impmon takes his tamers to meet the others, saying that he wanted to introduce his partners to his friends. He also asks Jeri if she could ever forgive him, and she confirms that she already has. At this point, it comes to light that in order to banish the D-Reaper, all digital lifeforms had to be expelled from the real world, and all the kid's partners are reverted to baby form and sucked back into the digital world -- Impmon included.
There's a movie which seems to imply that the partner digimon return later, but its canonisation is shaky and all he does in that is go to a party, so we won't discuss it.
PERSONALITY:
"You're right, I'm a bad influence -- but I'm just so good at it!"
Impmon isn't really a nice guy. His idea of a joke is startling pedestrians with a near-miss fireball to the face. He thinks that fear and pain are hilarious, but only as long as they don't happen to him. There's no basis for his boasting, but he does it anyway. And he probably knows this, given how quick he is to turn tail when somebody fights back. He's a bully, and even tells Guilmon point blank that "I'm not gonna fight you if you're gonna fight back!"
A lot of this stems from insecurity. Most of his interactions with others are governed by enough inferiority complex to choke a horse, and a nonstop desire to prove himself. In the beginning, he's convinced that the only potential way to do that is to fight, be more powerful, and digivolve -- eventually, he realises that being kind is worth more.
His own experience with his tamers clearly soured him on humans in general, and being a cynic, he genuinely believes that all of them are just as bad. It's almost like a defense mechanism, and it's almost endearing. Mostly to the people who get fireballs to the face, it's just irritating.
When you get down to it, he's childish. Which is understandable, given that he's essentially a child. While aging is a funny thing with virtual life, and we have no idea how long he's been alive, he displays the average intelligence of preteen (and I'm being fairly generous here). While this improves somewhat when he's in Beelzemon form, immaturity is still one of his defining traits. He's raucous and irritable and churlish, he just has the power and malice to actually back it up. Even now, though, his unfriendliness is just a front. He's just gotten more... aggressive about it.
But, despite that, there's potential for goodness in him. As Beelzemon, he insists that he doesn't have friends, because friends are for weaker people. Finally having gotten all the power he craved, he's convinced that he doesn't need anyone else, but he realises how wrong he was after violently alientating anyone he might potentially have considered a friend. This is a huge turning point for him, when he drops the walls and becomes far more genuine. He still has difficulty admitting it, but he is able to tell his partners that he loves them, and can show that he wants to be accepted too. He may have had to descend into being a truly effective villain to realize it, but Impmon doesn’t want to be a bad guy. He’s desperate not just for the acceptance of his tamers, but of his friends as well -- and it wasn't power that he'd wanted all along, but respect.
Finally, he has an inexplicable accent despite living in Japan, because... dubs are weird.
POWER:
Beelzemon's power set will simply be an upgraded version of his old one, to match his new mega form:
Despite being turned into a human, Impmon will still be able to use the shout-my-attack-name monster attacks that every veteran of youth-targeted Japanese series should be familiar with. His available attacks in this form are Double Impact, Corona Blaster, and Corona Destroyer, all of the above making use of a big 'ole gun. Actually, all of these of these attacks use very large guns, which are part of his digital form and can be manifested as such.
Additionally, under very particular circumstances, he will have the ability to dedigivolve. This is more of a downside than anything, since all it does is revert him to a weaker form. Since Beelzemon is his base level now, when he takes really really large and sustained amounts of damage, he'll turn back into Impmon. Or rather, the human version of Impmon. This is probably not actually going to happen at all since even canon's approach to this makes very little sense, but I thought I'd note it.
[CHARACTER SAMPLES]
COMMUNITY POST (VOICE) SAMPLE:
( network history )
LOGS POST (PROSE) SAMPLE:
( logs history )
FINAL NOTES:
did u gais miss me mwah