"Unintended"

Author's Notes and Commentary

Hello, and welcome to these Author's Notes. After a very long gap of writing fanfiction, I've recently returned to update my old stories and continue an unfinished one. I hope you have enjoyed this story and these notes will give you some insight into its writing process and history.

"Unintended" was one of my most involved short stories, and it required a lot more work and skill than previous works, so it holds a special place in my heart. It's the first one I wrote that relied heavily on an original character, and that alone meant it had two potential failings. First of all, it meant people might not read it, because people who read fanfiction typically do so to enjoy more of their favorite characters, not read about somebody they've never met. The second potential failing was that any OC runs the risk of becoming a Mary Stu/Marty Stu. That is, a character that is essentially the author.

I suppose for such a short story with an OC focus, "Unintended" was received and reviewed fairly well when I first published it in 2001, so I'm satisfied that it avoided the first failing. As for the second, I think Jin Takamura holds up as his own character, and he's a far cry from the type of person I am. The reviews have been generally receptive of the guy, so, again, I'm satisfied.

In these notes, I'd like to address a few different things, and perhaps the touchiest subject ought to get some attention first.

September 11, and Why This Story Isn't About It

When working on ideas for the plot in early 2001, I wanted to have a climactic battle high atop a tall building in New York. I also wanted there to be a genuinely horrifying threat looming to show just how far off the deep end Jin had gone. I was watching TV while coming up with ideas one night and they had a special about the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center… the one that happened in the nineties.

The show explained that the terrorist bombing at that time was intended to cause the building to collapse and fall into the other tower. The idea of such monolithic buildings toppling over and changing the New York City skyline was genuinely disturbing and sounded like one of the most grandiose gestures a madman could make. I settled on the twin towers as Jin's target, having no idea that 7 months after the story was published we would all see it for real.

On that terrible morning, I was as devastated as anyone else, and I had the odd feeling of somewhat predicting it. Lines like Mimi referring to the NYC skyline, Jin referring to knocking one of the towers down, and another line (which I have deleted because it was just too creepy) about terrorists always targeting the WTC (which was originally a reference to earlier attacks, not to 9/11) all sounded oddly prophetic. I felt disgusted and considered deleting the whole story.

So, why didn't I? Well, the aftermath of 9/11 was a time of reactionary politics and public censorship of anything involving New York and buildings and other things to the point where I just got sick of the whole mess. As horrible as the attack was, I didn't see why a story I wrote earlier and had invested so much time and energy into should get trashed because of a coincidence. I wasn't willing to bury things just because they made people a little uncomfortable in retrospect.

With very little alteration, the original dialogue and the entire WTC plot remains, even in this revised edition. Thus far, nobody has written an angry review, though I would understand if someone was upset enough to write one. There are numerous other works that have creepy coincidences similar to this story, and it does bother me that they've been swept under the rug. I would prefer to let the story remain unchanged over censoring myself, and I hope everyone understands that. If you are upset, however, feel free to leave a review explaining your feelings. I do read all my reviews.

Moving on, I'd like to talk about the story and writing process.

Inspiration

"Unintended" draws from several different sources. The first of those sources is actually other works of fanfiction here on . Fanfic author 7 of 11 wrote a story called "The Tsunonrimon Saga" (which is available in one package under his new account "Funkadelict") which actually got riffed (with his permission) in classic "Mystery Science Theater" style by my friend and fanfic author Aardwulf in a story called "A Most Unusual Form of Revenge." That story was about a new Digidestined named Jake Sunate, holder of the Crest of Nobility. (The original story's a good read. The MSTing is also hilarious. Really. One of the funniest fanfics I've ever read.)

According to that story, Jake was called on to be a Digidestined, but hadn't really done much fighting. However, he had been stranded in the Digital World for four years, with only a Rookie level partner to protect him. This was an interesting idea to me, but it never quite got realized as Jake shows no real survival skills, his digimon has never digivolved, and at one point he clumsily stumbles through a hole in a wall and nearly falls to his doom, "despite," as Aardwulf pointed out, "his senses honed from years living in the wild."

It made sense to me… a Digidestined living in the wild, no matter how high their digimon could evolve, would need to develop excellent survival skills, especially with villains like the Dark Masters wandering around. He'd be strong, fast, self-reliant, a complete badass and, probably, a bit mentally unstable. After all, people who suffer through such traumas often come out with very different points of view and don't always reintegrate with society very well. Look at shell-shocked war veterans, for example, who simply can't let their old battles go. They carry scars, both mentally and physically. (This is, incidentally, why Jin's digimon is named SCARmon: he reflects Jin's nature as someone who has been wounded deeply, and the effects of those wounds are still present.)

It sounded like an interesting idea, so then I had to think about what sort of person this battle-scarred survivalist would be.

At the time, the second season was airing. The first villain of the series, as I'm sure you all know, was Ken, another Digidestined… but as the Digimon Emperor, he didn't really use his abilities as a Digidestined to plague the protagonists. The idea of another Digidestined who opposed the heroes was what I had expected when the series was announced, but it was an idea that never got realized at that time. I decided that my character ought to really be a Digidestined, to have a digimon partner who could fight for him, and to be potentially hostile to the others.

If he was to be a Digidestined, he needed a trait that would define him, just as the original characters were defined. I was trying to think of something that was negative, and at first I thought about having a trait that was the opposite of the other crests. The problem was, a lot of the virtues have passive or stupid-sounding opposites: Courage = Cowardice? Bleh. Friendship = Animosity? Too general. Reliability = Unreliability? That makes him seem like a screw-up.

The only ones that sounded good were opposing Sora's crest (Love = Hatred? That's not bad!) or Kari's (Light = Darkness). The problem I found when I looked around at other OCs was that both of those had been done, for one thing, and then I hit another problem I wasn't expecting: those kinds of characters weren't likeable. I wanted something that was relatable, very human, and something that wouldn't necessarily make my character into a complete monster.

Oddly enough, I got a good dose of inspiration from another source at my local arcade from one of my favorite games of all time: Marvel vs Capcom. One of the characters is named Jin Saotome, a character from Capcom's "Cyberbots," who has a win quote that reads: "Machines can transform rage into power!"

"Rage?" I thought. Well, that's negative, but its aggressive, and the perfect trait for a hostile character. And if we're talking about a troubled kid trapped in the Digital World, he would no doubt be very very angry. While I was at it, since "Jin" was a fairly normal Japanese name, I picked it for my character. I'd like to say that the fact that it means "Benevolence" in Japanese is intended to be ironic and clever… but I didn't figure that out until after I named the lad. So, yeah, sorry, but he's named after a video game character. ("Takamura," meaning "High Village," was a name I heard among other Japanese surnames and just picked because I liked the ring of it. Sorry, but again, the name really doesn't mean anything for the character. He's just a normally named Japanese boy.)

Comic books provided some more inspiration. Reflecting his dual nature and the fact that Jin was to be a darker reflection of the "good" Digidestined, Scarmon's evolved forms are based on the Marvel comics character Venom, and by that token, Carnage. Hence, Venomon, SkullVenomon, and Carnagemon make up his Champion, Ultimate, and Mega forms respectively. Venom is (or at least was) a character with all of Spider-man's powers and greater strength (but less brains) but who is violent and obsessed with revenge. Definitely one of my favorite comic characters.

Also from comic books came some of the ideas about what sort of personality Jin should have. Coming off the 90s, antiheroic characters with non-traditional motives and methods were still popular, but we were also starting to see some backlash. A lot of characters were total badasses, but not really sympathetic and ultimately not worth sticking with. Again, the character I was going for had to be conflicted, violent, and aggressive, but not inhuman. Then I read back over the Batman storyline "Knightfall" from the 90s and hit on some commentary from comic writer Dennis O'Neil who wrote about the character Azrael, who would temporarily replace Bruce Wayne as Batman for about a year. The idea in that long storyline was that Azrael was an angelic-styled character who was co-opted for evil, while Batman was grim and devilish in appearance, but co-opted for good. There was some confusion in the comics industry about what really made a hero, so they had Azrael act as Batman for a time, but his new levels of depravity and sadism made him hated among the fanbase. Ultimately, they re-affirmed that a true hero is, well, heroic, and you can't just fight evil with evil, no matter how much you think you have it on a leash.

That gave me the idea: what if Jin was planned to be one of the original Digidestined as their muscle, as someone who could fight the Dark Masters and other villains with equal ferocity and brutality, untempered by notions like mercy or forgiveness? Surely someone would think it was a good idea, but most likely the idea would be shelved, leaving Jin out in the cold. If he came to the Digital World at all, it would be unintentional. The plot was starting to take form.

A last inspiration came from a film (based on a play) I saw called "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead." The story is about two characters from Shakespeare's "Hamlet" re-telling the story from their point of view. From time to time, they interact with the characters as part of the original story. I hit on the idea of having Jin be around during the events of the show while they were going on, but hidden in the background, his tale a secret that was not intended to be told.

The elements were all in place. Now I had to figure out my character's motivations and how to best tell his story.

Who is Jin Takamura?

As I've said, the idea was to make Jin Takamura hostile, but also human and relatable. The story about his journey and how he would ultimately come into conflict with the others had to start off by establishing him as mean-spirited and mischievous, but also capable of some feeling and with a backstory that would earn him some pity. I wanted him to have a realistic backstory, much like the characters in the show. Similar to the original characters, a lot of his problems and character traits are the results of his relationship with his family. Unlike some of the squeaky clean Digidestined, he has much more deep-rooted problems and we first see him as a streetwise societal dropout, a position that contrasts him significantly from the others. In this revised version, I've made a few things clear, though even in the original, several facts about his life were present and hinted at indirectly.

Jin's father was some kind of thug, and he irresponsibly abandons his wife and child when Jin is very young. It's implied, but I'll state this simply if it got by you: Jin was an accident, and his father didn't want to take care of him. This has several consequences that shape the way Jin grows up. For starters, it means he has to deal with not having a father in a country that still doesn't look very kindly on divorce and single parent households are nowhere near as common as they are in the U.S. This makes him feel somewhat ashamed, especially since other children bully him. Without a central male figure in his life and a mother who just can't be there all the time, he develops a complex and reacts with violence. He falls in with the wrong crowd, becoming a juvenile delinquent. This causes his overworked and underpaid mother to fret that he is turning into his father, whom she still harbors bad feelings for. As a consequence, she browbeats Jin and compares him to the man who abandoned him, which serves only to make him resentful and less likely to reform.

As much as Jin eventually comes to miss his mother, the woman was not perfect and made some mistakes in trying to help him become a better person. Perhaps the worst thing she did, however, was pass on her resentment towards Jin's father to her son. Telling your child that their father was scum and then comparing them to that father is a surefire way to traumatize them. It isn't that she didn't care or that Jin was beyond help; it is only that his problems were perhaps too difficult to handle on her own, that she had problems of her own with nobody to turn to, and the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

Jin starts off his career as a Digidestined like the others, without any clear focus or idea of what he's supposed to be doing. Then he gets tipped off that there are other humans around and goes after them only to be informed by Mr. X that he is not like them. The revelation that he is not really supposed to be there, that he isn't a real hero, that he is a "mistake" reflects back on his daddy issues. From his perspective, he is suffering needlessly in a world that regards him as a waste of time.

However, one of the central themes of this story is that we need the care of others to be better people, and Jin gets a companion who truly cares for him and likes him with no strings attached. Reviewers have commented on this part of the story, and I think it is what helps make Jin easier to sympathize with. His troubled past makes him pitiable, but the close and loving relationship he enjoys with Scarmon is what makes him likeable. They're both pretty low on empathy for others, they both love a good fight, and they both share mean-spirited glee when they defeat their foes, but they mean the world to each other. In the first two chapters, Jin displays concern and guilt about Scarmon when he is in danger, while Scarmon displays single-minded loyalty to Jin, a kind of absolute trust that has positive and negative results (which I'll get to).

The first two chapters are all about establishing Jin as a punk who approaches the Digital World with a harder edge than the original Digidestined, but nothing more serious than that. However, he slowly becomes more desperate and panicked about losing track of the Digidestined and never getting home. When his worst fears come true and he's marooned in the Digital World, his anger peaks and he simultaneously loses hope of returning home and gains unbelievable power as Scarmon attains his Mega form. Bringing that resentment to the forefront, he takes it out on any evildoer he can find and, due to the nature of his crest's power, is encouraged to act out of anger constantly. Like the original Digidestined, he wants to fight evil, but he takes on a twisted version of that quest that is far more violent and self-absorbed than the others in his quest.

There is a long period of time, five years in fact, that is left out. When we finally see Jin again, he is frayed and hunted by the Digimon Emperor, but without his digimon able to digivolve, we have no idea what he's become capable of. The remaining part of the story is all about how he confronts human society and ultimately makes a choice for himself about what sort of person he really wants to be.

The Story: Structure and Themes

One of the important things you learn about fiction and writing is that it's not only what you write that counts: it's also what you leave unsaid. This story contains several time skips and they serve a dual purpose: 1) they allow the story to skip over some boring or longwinded parts; 2) they keep the reader in the dark until the end of the story, making them wonder what's going on.

Paralleling the original story, Jin's time on File Island is all about learning what a Digidestined is and getting used to the oddities of the Digital World... but that's not very interesting if you've already seen the show, so it gets glossed over to where Jin gets his crest and learns to use it. Also paralleling the show, a few months are glossed over between when Tai vanishes and then returns to reunite the Digidestined in time to pursue Myotismon to Earth. Two months of wandering around trying to find the original Digidestined isn't that interesting, so again, glossing.

The next major time skip occurs between Jin's marooning and his eventual escape from the Digital World after finding Kari and Gatomon in Full Metal City (a location that seems to keep popping up in my stories). This was skipped over to hide Scarmon's Mega form, for one, and also because it conceals that Jin has been doing some pretty awful things and has had some awful things done to him, for another. He is going all over the Digital World, assassinating evil digimon and accepting bounties and rewards in some cases, basically looking for trouble to satisfy his "quest" and, to be blunt, his bloodlust. This is the sort of thing that is better mentioned after the fact rather than directly, or else he looks like a lunatic and people stop caring about him. I wanted readers to feel conflicted about whether Jin was an anti-hero or villain right up to the end without making a total judgment about him.

Since this is a good opportunity to explain some background events as bonuses, here is a good rundown of what was going on during Jin's five years in the Digital World:

For the first year, Jin is simply going after petty crooks. He is also learning more about the Digital World, picking up skills like the ability to read Digicode (the runic language of the Digital World) and advanced tracking, hunting, and trapping techniques. With a Mega level digimon, he doesn't need to worry much about self-defense until, in his second year of exile, the Dark Masters make their move and begin warping the Digital World. He survives this catastrophe and at first assumes that he is supposed to defeat them, but quickly finds himself outmatched. He turns to hiding from them, acting mostly by himself but sometimes with a few elements of the resistance movement. Still, he is unable to make a dent in their forces and only takes out some of their lower minions. He really develops his covert tactics and survival skills at this time, as well as suffering several injuries. When the Earth appears in the sky, he gains hope that he may yet get home, but after all is said and done, he is unable to find the Digidestined and misses his chance. When the Earth vanishes from the sky, he is crushed, again, and renews his fight against any "evil" digimon, no matter how petty their crimes.

The next two years are spent in a mixture of training, hunting, and surviving, but it only during the last year of exile that the Digimon Emperor arrives. He has no idea who this new human is, but it becomes clear that he isn't interested in helping Jin get home and is more interested in conquering the Digital World. Deprived of his partner's ability to digivolve, he becomes desperate, but also further hones his skills as a survivalist. He learns how to make homemade weapons and explosives and becomes more physically active in battles alongside Scarmon. This makes him much stronger, but he also receives some terrible injuries and he has some near-death experiences (one of which is referenced in "Ancient Enemy," which I will get to later). When Mimi sees Jin working out, the scars on his body are the evidence that shows how badly he was hurt and how close he really came to dying.

Finally, he escapes from the Digital World and one more time skip occurs between his time in Japan and his time in New York, when he meets Mimi. During this time, he looks for his house, only to find that someone else has moved in. Nobody recognizes him at first, but he asks about his mother, Fuyuko Takamura, only to be told that she has died. Not only that, he is informed that she died of an illness and seemingly lacked the will to fight it in her depression over her son's disappearance. Thus, he finds that he has returned to Earth with nothing and nobody waiting for him, and his absence may well have led to his mother's demise. Even though he never had a great relationship with his mother, he feels extreme guilt in addition to grief. This further twists his mind as he searches for some kind of meaning in the events of the last five years. He comes to the conclusion that he must make some sort of amends for his mother's death, that his time in the Digital World was meant to be a period of training, and the only way to truly be free of his role as a Digidestined and to atone for his mother is to do something grandiose and symbolic that would make her proud. He must eliminate "evil" on Earth.

To do this, he finds former colleagues, other juvenile delinquents now in gangs or training to join the yakuza (the Japanese mafia), and persuades them to give him some jobs to earn money for his master plan. He uses Scarmon in secret to pull of major jobs and earn respect and favors from increasingly higher level criminals. He settles on New York as a symbol of foreign, Western decay (and also because he believes that there are no Digidestined there to stop him, unlike Tokyo), and works on a series of heists and attacks to earn his way to New York. He learns how to use various human weapons like firearms, grenades, rocket launchers, etc., and also demonstrates his hidden talent for learning languages by studying English intensely, filling in the gaps on the mean streets of New York. Viewing it from the perspective of a haggard vagrant, living in the shadows, he becomes more convinced about New York being a wicked place. Still, he takes the time to act as a vigilante and stop petty criminals throughout the underworld, and that is where he finally meets Mimi.

Why Mimi?

Since Tokyo was out of the question (a decision Jin makes to avoid the other Digidestined, and one I made since it would probably mean getting his butt kicked before he had a chance to do much of anything), that left New York. That's the only other city where he could finally meet another one of the original Digidestined. And that person was Mimi Tachikawa.

Ultimately, it worked perfectly for the story. Mimi and Jin get along pretty much immediately and they also make perfect foils for each other. When he first saves Mimi from the thugs in Central Park, he earns her gratitude and she offers him something he really hasn't had in a very very long time: a human companion.

The problem with Scarmon isn't that he's a bad friend. Far from it: he's loyal to the point of absolute devotion. Scarmon's not evil, he's just simpleminded. As far as he's concerned, the sun rises and sets on Jin Takamura and he will follow his partner unquestioningly. Unlike the other partner digimon, he lacks a moral compass or a strong will. In developing ideas about Scarmon as a species, I thought of them as vicious nocturnal pack animals, especially hyenas or wolves (though I actually think of hyenas due to their toothy grins and the perception of them as "laughing" while still being vicious). Like all pack animals, they have a leader and follow that leader in all things without much questioning. Scarmon follows Jin not only as a friend, but because he instinctively sees himself as being in a pack of two with Jin as the leader. So, when Jin says "We're going to rain destruction on New York and probably kill a lot of people," Scarmon doesn't think much beyond "If you say so." Without meaning to, Scarmon has let Jin become even more depraved and psychopathic because he will not hold him in check.

Mimi, on the other hand, shows Jin kindness, but also provides a voice of dissent, and a new point of view. Again, the two are great foils for each other. Jin prefers action over talk; Mimi fights as a last resort. Jin is a loner; Mimi is very social. Jin is serious and grim; Mimi is fun-loving and bubbly. The list goes on, but it also means that the two of them fall into the old truism of "opposites attract." While nothing comes of it, I did mean for there to be some attraction between the two. Jin has never had any sort of romantic contact with girls, since he was only 11 when he went to the Digital World and was just getting over the "girls are icky" stage when he became marooned. Going through puberty in the Digital World has left him with a lot of unexplained feelings and urges. He doesn't quite know how to interpret his feelings about Mimi, but he does know that she's pretty and she's kind to him and that's good enough for him.

And of course, Jin is rugged and actually pretty good-looking. He really fits the classic "tall, dark stranger" description. He's strong, he's pained and misunderstood, and he needs someone to show him some kindness and compassion. I won't say that every girl finds that attractive, but it goes without saying that many girls do. Mimi certainly feels something for Jin and she probably understands it far better than he does.

But, in the end, it's not a story about romance. Rather, it's about love and compassion. Mimi empathizes with Jin, tries to understand his feelings, and uncovers details about his past and about his plans. Rather than approaching the problem with force, she tries to extend a helping hand to help him see the error of his ways. What Jin ultimately needs is not redemption or forgiveness; all he really needs is for someone to care about him and to show him that he doesn't have to be all on his own. When she is able to reach past his rage and discover his guilt and sorrow, he finally realizes that he needs to stop viewing the world as filled with evil and sees it as filled with people who have feelings, hearts, and minds just as he does.

Mimi doesn't worry about "destiny" or what she's "supposed" to be doing with her life. She carries the Crest of Sincerity because she is honest and direct in nearly everything that she does. She extends that point of view to Jin so he is able to understand that it doesn't matter if he was someone else's mistake, be it his father's, Mr. X's, or even the Digital World's. All that matters for Jin, and indeed for anyone, is that he lives his life as his own, and that he doesn't have to prove himself to anyone. Not to Mr. X, not to the Digital World, and not even to his dead mother.

The conflict on the top of the WTC is meant to represent a literal climax of the story with everyone teetering on the edge. Ultimately, when Jin falls from the tower, it represents his old personality falling away. When we see him again, he is in prison, without his digimon, and in a wheelchair. And yet, his attitude is upbeat because he has seized on the notion that he has control over his own life; despite being a prisoner and powerless physically, in his mind he has become free.

Conclusion and Continuation

I really enjoyed writing this story. Jin was/is a really fun character to write and I'm glad people connected with him and this story. (On my profile, you can see a glimpse of the artwork Aardwulf made of him and Scarmon that she gave me for Christmas. [The URL to the full-sized version is at the bottom of this page.])

There are changes in the updated version of this story, but mostly it consists of changes to the dialogue to make it more realistic. Also, some story elements like Jin's background and his trials and tribulations in the Digital World are made more plain and expanded upon. I also took out a few lines regarding the World Trade Center that I found just a little too creepy to be left in, even considering that the plot centering on it remains.

There are some things I am not quite satisfied with, but I left in anyway. For one, I disliked the scene in Chapter 3 with Jin and Scarmon where they discover an unconscious Kari and Gatomon. It's a cheap plot device that she's barely conscious when she tells Jin about the Digiport and thus does not remember him and that Jin immediately abandons her when she's the first human other than the Digimon Emperor that he's met in ages. I tried to rewrite that scene to make it darker and more ominous, and perhaps have him interrogate Gatomon while threatening to harm an unconscious Kari. The idea was it would paint Jin as having become paranoid, untrusting, and much darker and more violent than when we last saw him in Chapter 2. Gatomon would not reveal this to Kari to prevent her well-meaning partner from trying to find the psychotic boy. Ultimately, however, I was not happy with rewriting that scene. It made Jin seem too cruel to threaten someone like Kari unprovoked, and I didn't want to turn readers against him.

Another plot hole, pointed out by some readers, is that Jin probably couldn't survive such a long fall from the top of the tower, even if Carnagemon helped to break his fall to the point of only injuring his spine. To that, I say… yeah, you're probably right. However, I wanted there to be a fall and a contrast with his physical power being traded for real power: the power over his own future. So, yes, it is a little corny, but I've kept it as part of the story.

Ultimately, I left the story open-ended merely because I wanted it to be a story about hope. Jin's future could potentially be bright, and it belongs to him alone, even if it is unknown.

But by the time the story had reached its conclusion, I had become attached to the guy, and also to the interplay between him, Mimi, and Michael. Writing something that included all of them sounded fun, and I was interested in writing a longer story that spanned many locations that mimicked a real season of "Digimon."

Plus, while I was happy that Jin had decided to turn over a new leaf, he hadn't yet been given a chance to prove himself. I wanted to see him work with others as part of a team to try and make up for his past misdeeds and become a true hero. That, along with my desire to see the other characters develop, as well as the desire to create some new characters, spawned my most ambitious project: "Ancient Enemy: A Digimon FanNovel."

If you've enjoyed this story and want to see more adventures about Jin, Mimi, Michael, and a few others, please give "Ancient Enemy" a read. I've gone through and updated it and will be re-launching it with new updates very soon. I hate leaving things unfinished and even after all these years, I am looking forward to finally telling the rest of this character's story.

Thanks for reading! Please leave a review and let me know what you think or if you have any questions or comments. I make it a point to read and often respond to any reviews I get!

Want to get started reading "Ancient Enemy?" You can find it on my profile page here: fanfictionDOTnet/~thinker

Also, you can find the full sized picture of Jin and Scarmon enjoying some Christmas carnage at my DeviantArt page (done by the lovely and talented Aardwulf, for the record!): marurabaDOTdeviantartDOTcom/#/d4m2r0k

Replace the DOTs with actual dots like this - .