Our next Tamers partner starts off as a little blob with a tail and a "horn" formed from hardened slime. Not bad, but another baby digimon that feels rather pedestrian among its peers.

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A little improved. I always like babies with the skirt-like body, like a little cartoon ghost.

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But now, I must be brutally honest: this fairly beloved digimon is the exact moment a younger me became a digimon "genwunner." This is the digimon I took one look and and finally thought "digimon don't really feel like digimon anymore." Digimon's visual style had, up to then, felt immediately distinct from that of Pokemon and other competitors, but this rather generically cute, clean design could have been the token mascot critter for any anime ever made, and that really made me sad back in the day.

Even after all this time has passed, I still can't get interested at all in this thing. It still feels like it was drawn to be the safest, most broadly marketable anime mascot they could come up with. Only its personality in the anime stands out much, as I recall Terriermon being kind of a little jerk at times.

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Terriermon's marketable, conventional cuteness does at least set up a pretty funny twist, as its first evolution is practically the same little anime mascot scaled up to larger than a grown man, and now it has both pants and giant gatling guns for arms. This is really what most people, I think, actually remember and like Terriermon for; just that contrast of a little floofy pokemonesque dog suddenly riddling its opponent with bullets.

It also never came up in the anime itself, as far as I know, but Galgomon's profile informs us that "it is obsessed with its cherished "D-VI'S 503xx" jeans."

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Terriermon's Perfect is the expected cyborg, and as usual from this point onward, it doesn't have any of the tubes or hoses or scars or muscles that made digimon cyborgs so badass in the past.

It does, at least, have a very interesting silhouette, with a weirdly thin midsection and almost spherical abdomen. I'm inclined to think of this whole line as "rabbits," but they are apparently meant to be canine, and kind of like "poodles." This is the only one that even begins to look sort of poodle-esque, and that tiny little dog face is pretty amusing.

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The final form of the mean doggy does take this family to its logical extreme; a kaiju-sized military mecha armed with lasers, bullets, flamethrowers and multiple kinds of rocket, most notably the two gigantic missiles on its shoulders that seem to have their own little personalities.

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