WOW! What we see here is like some eyeless, rotting whale, but even more terrifying than the literal eyeless, rotting whale we already had. I mean, this one has gigantic, blocky human-like teeth, and its flesh is peeling off into tentacles with even more mouths on them! It's also strikingly reminiscent of another relatively new friend, but there's yet to be a known evolutionary connection between the two.

So what IS Negamon?

This gigantic monster actually debuted as the final boss of the 2020 Digivice and the tie-in Digimon Adventure reboot, and its full design is almost nothing but that monstrous mouth, trailing into a tattered mass of flesh like a flying, decomposing slug with teeth. Gleaming through gaps in its skin are also hundreds of bright red LED lights in neat little rows, which never means anything but certainly looks ominous!

This design also has a pair of long tassels on top, and it's pretty foreboding that by being a simple blob with a big mouth and a pair of those rippling "antennae," the whole thing has similar anatomy to the first-ever baby Digimon.

Its anatomy also has a lovely secret feature!

Negamon can freely switch between having just a huge mouth for a face, and having a huge yellow eyeball for a face! I love eye/mouth combinations like this, and it fully sold me on Negamon as one of my overall new favorite Digimon designs, but this still isn't all there is to this Digimon...

RATING:

The "true" Negamon is a darling little freak fans were only calling "the squid" when it was first teased in silhouette. It really consists of a bunch of octopus-like tentacles with those same strange, red LED's where you would expect to see suckers, and these tentacles curl together into a smooth, spherical head with only a single eye and a single antenna.

This actually IS supposed to be a digimon in the second baby stage, or at least it used to be. It's what became of an unspecified baby digimon lost in the void of the digital realm's "negative data," corrupting into something that, quote, "lives quietly in jet-black darkness, constantly awaiting death." In all of its forms, it understands only annihilitation, and it only exists at all to drag everything it can into oblivion with it, even rumored to have already erased multiple digital worlds in other universes.

Its only attack, "Downer Eye," apparently "makes the enemy Digimon prey on themselves." It is not specified or shown what this is or looks like, only that victims "gradually lose their emotions, fall into darkness, and corrode from the inside out, becoming the seedbed for Negamon to regenerate."

This adorable little bloop morphs into that gigantic flying mouth-eye once it's forced to battle, but the distinction between the two is still murky. It's referred to by some sources as an evolution, but could very well just be some kind of "battle mode" or "overgrowth" of The Squid. If it is a distinct species, it still lacks its own profile, distinct abilities or a definite evolution level, but it does transform further into something with all the above...

RATING:

Negamon's larger form still feels PRETTY final to me, but it still has this distinct Ultimate stage evolution: a black sphere with a cartoonish, crescent smile, multiple purple tongues, and loads of ribbonlike black tentacles covered in both humanlike eyes and even more mouths. These are the same ribbonlike tentacles, eyes and mouths displayed by Pride from Fullmetal Alchemist, to the point that it's straying dangerously closer to "shameless ripoff" than "loving homage" territory...and I have to say the design just doesn't feel nearly as cool, charming or scary to me as either forms of Negamon. For better or for worse though, we're still not done!

RATING:

In the 2020 anime's final battle, we see that deep inside Abaddomon's main sphere is a menacing shape on the end of a long, thin stalk, and for a split second it even opens up dozens of eyes. It looks kind of like a humanoid figure wrapped up in a gothic cloak, threatening us with the possibility that Negamon was nothing but the build-up to another of the series countless Demon Vampire guys. So, is it?

Sort of, I guess. The REALLY real, true, final core form of this Digimon has a humanoid shape, and maybe that's kind of a letdown, but it's also a humanoid shape built primarily out of fleshy, tooth-lined or eye-lined petals. Its entire torso is just a strange, vertical mouth that peels open to reveal a head split in half by another vertical mouth. Its entire left side is also colored red and features even more mouths, while its right half is black and littered more with eyes. It also has antenna thingies, a tattered cape, and shoulders all made out of the same stuff as Abaddomon's tentacle ribbons, covered in still more of those same eyes and teeth, and the overall effect is of something nonhumanoid that has twirled and twined itself into a crudely humanoid shape just to defend itself.

For once, the way a Digimon looks in the anime is also a bit better than its official artwork: the head is pulled much deeper down into the torso-mouth for several scenes, and it calls much more attention to how that mouth really constitutes most of its design.

Overall, Abaddomon's true form is a lot more unique than its spherical "shell" and a lot weirder than the majority of humanoid Digimon villains, even if it's still a step down from either form of Negamon.

RATING:

...But what's REALLY interesting to me is what this Digimon has in common with a selection of other creatures, both new and old, that all appeared in the same anime series either as its actual minions or as peripheral antagonists. We're going to recap what these Digimon are, and their overlapping characteristics should become pretty obvious:

Algomon: a sentient "bug in an algorithm" known for its many eyeballs and parasitic tentacles. Given a full new evolution line that appears throughout this series as Negamon's followers.

Soundbirdmon: flying eyeball bats with a sound system motif, this series establishes that their sonic shrieks drive other Digimon mad and can also animate "junk data" to attack enemies.

Deathmon: a powerful demon Digimon whose face is only a huge eye. Rather than actively evil it fights for "neutrality" and represents oblivion. Soundbirdmon are revealed in this series to be the broken fragments of this Digimon.

Eyesmon: a "demon dragon" in a degenerated shadow form that seeks to rebuild itself. Completely covered in eyes identical to those of Abaddomon, with a matching purple tongue to boot.

Nidhoggmon: Eyesmon can evolve into a multi-headed snake and then into this Digimon, a catastrophically destructive serpent also covered in many eyes, even on its tongue.

Rareraremon: a Digimon whose evolution was so defective, it became an autonomous corpse that perpetually mutates and deforms as it attempts to regenerate. Also covered in the same eyes and teeth as Abaddomon, with those same tongues again. Appears in this series for the first time.

Parasimon: a Digimon iconic for its huge eyeball, actually a "degenerate" Ultimate stage that takes over other Digimon as a brain parasite. Appears as an antagonist for one episode of this series.

So all of these Digimon are born from some kind of malignancy, deterioration or abnormality, things that corrupted and fell apart in some way or were never meant to exist at all, and they all have a common theme of eyes, either a single huge eye or far too many. While they don't address it directly, there's a clear implication here that all of these Digimon manifest "negativity" and express aspects of Negamon to some degree or another, as though the closer they are to the Empty Nothingness the easier it is for Negamon to contaminate their data...or, perhaps, that something about "negative data" itself affects the eyes of Digimon first, and is possibly what made Negamon into an eyeball monster to begin with?

...And not to make this about my "flawed evolution" fixation again, but we've long established by now that if a Digimon even just has particularly big, grotesque or cartoonishly buggy eyes at all, it's often one of these broken "mutants." It's worth noting that Japan has an exceptionally strong cultural belief that something's "wrong" with someone the more white you can see around their iris. That was obviously chosen just to make these Digimon look a little sillier, but now, retroactively, the existence of Negamon kind of implies that these pitiful mistakes of diginature, as "negative" evolutions, are as buggy-eyed and zany as they are just because they're one little step closer to that all-consuming nothing. Certain symbols and design quirks are common among the "demon" digimon and others are distinct trends to the "angel" digimon, so I can't help but now interpret that the messed-up mutants, parasites and glitches of the digital world have all just been tied into a third realm, neither good nor evil, but an "oblivion" element marked first and foremost by mutations of the eyes. It even extends to some Digimon left out of the Adventure reboot!

With that, however, Digimon reviews are now going back to sleep. I've decided to only review the three main lines in Ghost Game later in the year, when it's believed we'll have seen their intended Ultimate stages, and by then, there just might be even more new monsters to review as well!