Good to know we never stopped cranking out the one-off adult digimon with nowhere to go. This stretched-out, sickle-clawed, slobbering punk wolf is so damn cool that it's almost too cool for a digimon, and it's especially too cool for a digimon without any thematic evolutionary forms. It's said to have been born from the data of none other than the Little Red Riding Hood story, it can appropriately shape-shift to imitate the loved ones of its victims, and it's actually billed as the darker counterpart to Garurumon. That all sounds very much like it was intended at one time to be a bigger deal than it ultimately turned out to be, and possibly a teaser for a more fleshed-out evolution family that never happened.

Instead, the only canine evolutions for Fangmon are ones we've seen before, most notably Weregarurumon and Cerberumon. Other evolutions in the TCG bizarrely include Extyrannomon, Assaultmon, Jewelbeemon or Arukenimon. These are all interesting, you gotta give them that, and at least Arukenimon shares some similar enough aesthetic sensibilities with Fangmon even if they're from unrelated animal phyla, but every option was originally created with a very different evolution line in mind.

Can you even imagine how freaking radical a Werefangmon Perfect would have looked? Hell, even a Metalfangmon Ultimate, while likely not my cup of tea, would have surely been more menacing and memorable than Metalgarurumon. It'd totally just have to have a chainsaw for a muzzle, which could also kind of tie it into the heroic woodsman who went on to kill the original Big Bad Wolf, right? OR - OR! - it might be even more in line with Digimon's sensibilities for the final form to be a Red Riding Hood digimon. I know Digimon would probably make this a Rosemon-like fanservice device, but even that would be more fun than just slapping Fangmon with somebody else's evolutions. Ideally, however, we'd be talking some spooky little red-hooded figure, one of those mutant puppet digimon, with glowing beady eyes and a basket full of evil.

Fangmon just deserves so much better than to have just been forgotten like this.

RATING: