The Most Impossible Art Style Ever Created

[00:00:00]Hey, Bsauce Michael here. Have you ever loved something to the point of creation? Love like that is something that seems so rare and something many of us strive to find in the short life that we have. For most, it's probably a significant other or partner. For some, maybe a family member, like a mother or sibling. But for me, it's Digimon. Hell yeah, baby. I freaking love these little guys. But I know you, my viewer, are probably not a Digimon fan and are thinking about clicking off this video right now. But let me pitch you on exactly why you should watch this video as you're eating your dinner. Yeah, I see you, Rachel. Spaghetti and meatballs again. That's the fourth time this week.

[00:00:28]Can you imagine if I get one of these calls right one day and there's actually a girl named Rachel watching this?

[00:00:33]Number one, you're an intelligent and creative person who loves hearing people talk about character design in an elevated way. My goal today is to do a deep dive into a sector of character design philosophy that no one really talks about. Yes, I will be using Digimon to talk about it, but you don't have to know anything about the franchise to understand this video. I'll break everything you need to know down simply as we come across it. Number two, I specifically engineered this video to open your dopamine floodgates as wide as possible. So, just think of it as any other cocaine you'd already be snorting.

[00:00:58]a nice little side dish to go with your spaghetti. And number three, you're about to watch a guy speak for 30 minutes on that something so rare, something I love to the point of creation. I love this something so much I made a brand new Miriam Webster verified word to describe its design philosophy. When was the last time you saw someone make a new word that wasn't skitty or girl dinner, which I I found out are actually words in the dictionary now. What the [ __ ] But to find out what that word is, you'll have to watch until the end. I play viewer retention trap face down and end my turn. Oh, and just kidding. I haven't gotten this word into the dictionary yet, but mark my words.

[00:01:28]When this video eventually blows up in 10 years and I break 100 subscribers, hits going in there. No, but why am I making this video? There are only like three Digimon fans out there, present party included. Why spend weeks editing a video I know for a fact is going to bomb and have wasted days of my time that could have been spent increasing shareholder value. Well, because I wasn't kidding about one thing. I really am a Digimon super fan and I really do love it to the point of creation. If you don't believe me, I don't blame you.

[00:01:51]Finding a Digimon fan in the wild is harder than finding Pokémon product that hasn't been scalped to oblivion. This one gets kind of wild though. One of the more brutal fights I've seen over Pokemon cards. Stop.

[00:02:02]>> But here are just some of my credentials and my favorite cards, too. This alternate art omnimon and this Lithmon card I got from Japan that I keep safe in a jar for protection. Not for any other strange reason. But I didn't always love Digimon. In fact, for the majority of my life, I hated Digimon and thought the designs were so tacky and ugly. I was a more minimalist kid and preferred franchises like Pokémon and especially early Pokémon designs like Charmander or Voltob. Yeah. Yeah, get your laughter out now. I'm also the world's only Voltob fan. But they were easy on the eyes, being just different and cool enough to draw intrigue, yet simple enough that I could draw them and describe them to my friends. I mean, Charmander is literally just fire lizard, and Voltob is what if Pokeball but alive. Digimon, on the other hand, is not so easy to describe.

[00:02:42]>> Okay, so this little guy is Yukimi Bottom.

[00:02:44]>> Oh, okay, cool. So, he's like a little snow bear or something. That's kind of cute.

[00:02:47]>> And Yukimi Bottom evolves into Neuromon.

[00:02:49]>> Wait, what? Now he's kind of like an electric disembodied catad or something?

[00:02:52]How did that evolve from the first guy?

[00:02:54]Yuramon can evolve into Selomon.

[00:02:55]>> Wait, wasn't it just a cat and a bear thing? Now it's a puppy.

[00:02:58]>> And Selomon can evolve into Gatoman.

[00:03:00]>> Now it's a cat again. So it was a bear, then a cat head, then a dog, and then a cat.

[00:03:05]>> And Gatoman can evolve into an woman.

[00:03:07]>> Stop the presses, professor. How did we get here? That's a sexy adult woman angel person. You're telling me that cat evolved into that?

[00:03:14]>> Put your boner down, Anthony. I will not have you sailing at full mask in my classroom.

[00:03:18]>> Actually, I'm only at half masked. But and Anjuan can evolve into Magna Drammon, the heroic king of the sky.

[00:03:24]>> Okay, I'm out of here. Yeah, that whole skit pretty much represented mine and I imagine many others confusion upon encountering Digimon for the first time.

[00:03:30]I had it so simple with Pokémon. I mean, Charmander evolves into Charmeleon, which evolves into Charizard. Fire Lizard turns into Fire Dragon. You don't even really need to explain anything to anyone. It just makes sense. But Digimon often feels like it requires a college course to explain all the inner workings of what's actually going on. Add that to the fact that most Digimon designs, especially as you get higher up the evolution chain, are incredibly complex and not easy to comprehend at all. This is Shamon X7F superior mode.

[00:03:56]>> Final Fusion.

[00:04:07]>> I'LL TELL YOU WHY. BECAUSE I AM the future Disney. [screaming] It's a knight, a dragon, an angel, a robot and aircraft, a weapons platform, and an amalgamation of quite literally hundreds of thousands of other Digimon that represented in its wings and rings of aura surrounding it. It's like if Joy from Everything Everywhere All at Once used a Digimon to try and end the world instead of a bagel. I had to give this guy a spotlight. I mean, Shouton and Mikey literally saved the world. Real ball knowowers know. And some Digimon are just straight up ugly. This is Numon, a disgusting slimy poop slug that arises out of your own failure to raise your Digimon correctly. And one of his signature moves is I [ __ ] you not unchiag or poop throw. But guess what? I love this guy, too. I have his platinum evolved version as a card as well. I didn't touch Digimon until last year.

[00:05:16]And how I got into it was maybe a little unorthodox. I never really watched the shows or played the games, and I still really just didn't like how Digimon looked. But one day, I was scrolling through Steam and saw Digimon Story: Time Stranger. I scrolled right past it and went on to play some different game.

[00:05:29]But as the days went on, I just kept seeing it pop up on the recommended tab.

[00:05:32]And so I gave it a peek. And then I proceeded to spend the next 160 hours or nearly 7 days in a row playing through it without any breaks. Yes, I got so addicted to this game that I locked myself in my room for an entire week and basically didn't leave my chair except to eat and poop. I guess I became quite the Nimon as well. Except I haven't thrown my poop at anyone yet. Maybe I'm missing out on something that it knows about. I fell in love with the world of Digimon and came to appreciate it in a way that made me feel like my palette was actually maturing from when I was a kid to now. Like when I was a kid, easy and simple were all I wanted to engage with. But now Digimon has me diving into the complex makeup of its creature designs like an underpaid art historian in a CT or museum. But before we get into the meat of the design philosophy, we first have to start with what Digimon actually are because they're not what you might think. And when I say they're not what you might think, I mean that Digimon are not really animals in the same sense that Pokémon are. They're digital monsters, life forms composed of data that inhabit the digital world, an [music] entire other universe born from and shaped by the information flowing through humanity's digital networks.

[00:06:28][music] So when you look at something like Auman and see a little dinosaur guy, you're not necessarily looking at the digital equivalent of an animal species that reproduces, grows up, and inevitably becomes one particular bigger dinosaur. What you're looking at is data that has for the moment taken the shape of a dinosaur. And data can be copied.

[00:06:44]It can be deleted. It can absorb other data, be influenced by its environment, rewritten, corrupted, recombined, and reorganized into something completely different. A Digimon's body is less like a permanent biological anatomy and more like a temporary configuration of information. Which means asking why a puppy can evolve into a cat, which can evolve into a human woman, which can evolve into a dragon. It's kind of like asking why a computer that was running Minecraft yesterday can run Doom today.

[00:07:09]It's the information they're made up themselves that is changing. And this is where we arrive at the single most important thing you need to understand about Digimon evolution. Where Pokémon has something more like a family tree, Digimon is more like a possibility space. Pokémon has conditioned a lot of us to think of monster evolution as a linear process. Like I said earlier, Charmander becomes Charmeleon.

[00:07:26]Charmeleon becomes Charizard. And barring some regional form or mega evolution shenanigans, that is simply what a Charmander is going to become.

[00:07:33]But Digimon evolution was born from a completely different set of fundamentals. Digimon began as virtual pets following the Tamagotchi craze, and the creature you ended up with depended on how you raised it. Train it one way, it might become one Digimon, but neglect it, and it might become pneumon. meet a different set of conditions and the exact same certain creature might become something else entirely. Digimon evolution is basically asking given everything that has happened to this individual Digimon, what can it become now? This is why trying to draw a complete Digimon evolution chart is like trying to map the Los Angeles freeway system after taking too much viveance.

[00:08:04]One Digimon can evolve into 10 completely different Digimon and those 10 Digimon can each evolve into 10 more.

[00:08:09]And some of those paths can loop back around and converge on the same creature from completely unrelated starting points. The iconic evolution lines you might recognize from the anime or just by seeing them around like Auguman to Greymon to metal Greymon to war Greymon are not necessarily immutable biological lineages. Their paths, particular outcomes that became iconic because those particular characters repeatedly followed them somewhere else under different circumstances and Aguman might become something completely different.

[00:08:34]And because Digimon aren't locked into a rigid biological taxonomy, the next form doesn't always need to preserve the last one's anatomy. Evolution in Digimon prioritizes possibility over continuity.

[00:08:44]And once you understand that, the insanity starts making a little bit more sense. A Digimon doesn't always evolve into something because it looks like the thing that came before it. It can evolve because of how it was raised or what data it absorbed or what environment it inhabited or what attributes it developed or simply because the particular game or pet toy or universe you're in right now establishes a connection between those forms. So, digiv evolution can follow biological logic. But it can also follow mechanical logic, thematic logic, symbolic logic, or just throw logic out the window. A dinosaur can become a cyborg because it acquired machine data or a failed creature can become a literal pile of sludge because its form now expresses the conditions under which it was raised. And then that sludge can then become a giant teddy bear. I [ __ ] you not, this is one of the possible evolutions from Numon. And somehow none of these transformations contradict what the Digimon really is because there may have never been one permanent essential thing underneath all those forms to begin with. Digimon are rarely the immature version of some predetermined final creature. Digimon are at any given moment just one temporary answer to the question of what this collection of data could become. Isn't that so [ __ ] fascinating? I told y'all to lock in with this video. Trust me, it only gets more interesting from here. And so, where did all this madness start? How did the designs of Digimon originally come about?

[00:09:56]>> Digimon, prepare to Digimon, the original Digital Monster. How well you train him determines the monster you get. Yeah.

[00:10:06]>> Train into shadow box to battle them.

[00:10:09]>> And when you've TAUGHT HIM ENOUGH, >> PREPARE TWO DIGIMON.

[00:10:13]>> CHALLENGE ANOTHER DIGIMON. And if you've taught your monster, well, you'll be victorious. Are you prepared a Digimon?

[00:10:21]>> Let's go back to 1997 and to one of the people most responsible for defining what a Digimon was even supposed to look like in the first place, legendary designer Kenji Watsanab. The original digital monster was conceived as something more like a boy oriented counterpart to the virtual pet craze of things like Tamagotchi. But according to Watonab, the earliest character designs ran into a problem. They were considered too cute. And the exact society that the solution to them being too cute was to give Watsab pretty much complete creative freedom to change them. But he was under a severe time crunch. So he did what any responsible professional would do and in his own words essentially started drawing whatever the [ __ ] he wanted to. Watabe was a fan of American comics, specifically citing inspirations like Spawn and artists Simon Bizley and Mike Magnala, which I mean clearly that inspiration is noted, and that influence entered Digimon almost immediately. Harder shadows, more aggressive forms, heavier musculature, claws, teeth, monsters that looked like they could actually beat the [ __ ] out of each other. He later reflected that the resulting designs were unlike what you normally saw in characters made for children at the time. Digimon, as he put it, was basically very out there from the beginning. But there was another constraint shaping these creatures that I think is just as important. Before a Digimon could become a beautiful illustration on a card or in an anime, it had to exist as a tiny pile of pixels. On the original virtual pet, these monsters had to remain recognizable on an extremely limited LCD screen. Watanabe has explained that during the development of the first version, designs could be translated into pixel art and then revised again around how they actually worked in that format. From the second version onward, the team often began with the pixel art itself. So even while the illustrations became monstrous and very expressive, the underlying creatures still needed strong recognizable forms. Watanab has specifically said that he tried not to make the silhouettes too complicated.

[00:12:00]That Edigimon should still be identifiable even if you completely filled in its shape with black while also remaining simple enough for other illustrators and even children to reproduce, at least the baby versions.

[00:12:09]And this created a really interesting tension at the heart of Digimon. The original monsters had to be simple enough to survive as tiny pixel sprites, but evocative enough that a child looking at those pixels could imagine an actual monster fighting inside their head. Watsabi has said that the team thought it'd be exciting for children to raise their own monsters and dinosaurs carry them around and battle them against each other. They then deliberately moved away from creatures that were too cute because watching adorable little animals beat the [ __ ] out of each other just felt kind of sad.

[00:12:33]So, the design started to become more fearsome. Dinosaurs and monsters became natural foundations. Not because Digimon needed to construct some rigorously coherent biological taxonomy, per se, but because a few pixels could suggest a horn, a jaw, a claw, and suddenly your little keychain contains a T-Rex. But this still doesn't fully explain how we eventually get from little pixel dinosaur to the Second Amendment. And this is where Watsanab's understanding of what a Digimon is becomes very important. Years later, when Watanabe was asked about the enormous range of influences appearing in Digimon designs, he explained that he initially wondered whether it was okay for the creatures to resemble things that already existed.

[00:13:06]But then he arrived at a wonderfully simple justification. Digimon are information from the internet that have been turned into monsters. So why wouldn't they be influenced by the things that exist on the internet? And I think that idea gave Digimon one of the most powerful creative premises in the history of monster design because what's on the internet? Everything. Dinosaurs are on the internet. Guns are on the internet. Angels, demons, tanks, Egyptian gods, Japanese folklore, medieval knights, pornography. Not that I wouldn't know. Computers, insects, fashion, mythology, toys, machines, religious iconography, pop culture. All of human culture is sitting there as information. And if Digimon themselves are creatures born from information, then virtually anything can become part of a Digimon. Suddenly, our monsters don't have to belong to one symbolic category. A dinosaur can absorb machinery, or a machine can become a dragon. A demon can wear bondage gear, carry firearms, reference Christian mythology, and look like it was designed by someone who grew up with unrestricted access to deviant art in the early 2000s. I love Bearmont. And thus, the earliest Digimon designs plant the seed for everything the franchise would eventually become. Wasabave and the other designers were building a world where culture itself could become anatomy. Okay. Well, Moose, you Rachel say to me, Moose, that's all well and good, but where does the title of your video come in? What do you mean by how do we define the absurd? What I actually wanted to figure out was how do we describe the Digimon design philosophy?

[00:14:17]Despite more than 25 years of Digimon being around now, there is no official or widely agreed upon term that adequately describes exactly what's going on there. Let's take a look at greatestmon or Gmon. Yes, that's her name. greatest Qanon like Shiamon X7F from earlier is not a straightup evolution, but a Digi cross fusion of about seven Digimon. This design is absolutely wild and it's not only not even close to something you'd ever see in Pokémon, but it's not really something you'd see well anywhere but Digimon. And how would you describe Greatest Cummon's design? No, like if you had to categorize it neatly under a design philosophy, could you do it? I think the closest three concepts I had before I started writing this video were as follows. Maximalism, surrealism, and rule of cool. Let's start with maximalism. Maximalism is in the simplest possible terms the philosophy of more. More color, more ornamentation, more texture, more objects, more detail.

[00:15:05]If minimalism tells you that less is more, maximalism is when more is more.

[00:15:09]Think of the impossibly dense paintings of Hyonous Bosch, where every inch of the canvas seems to contain another person, animal, monster, building, or tiny guy being tortured by a musical instrument. Think of a baroque church covered in gold, marble angels, columns, paintings, and enough ornamentation to give a Scandinavian interior designer a heart attack. or in modern popular culture, think of the visual excess of Warhammer 40k. Gigantic men wearing gigantic armor covered in skulls and purity seals and religious iconography and weapons and tubes and spikes and then probably another smaller skull attached to the first skull. Just in case you didn't understand, this was a serious situation. Maximalism rejects restraint and it creates impact through abundance. And yeah, Digimon is obviously maximalist. There is an unquestionable moroness in Digimon design. Metal Greymon could be a distant cousin of the Warhammer inhabitants, but maximalism alone doesn't explain what kind of Moore we're looking at. A Gothic cathedral can be maximalist while still remaining entirely Gothic. A space marine can be covered in 10,000 details, but all reinforce the same identity. But Digimon's excess often does something far stranger. It's accumulating a lot of detail, yes, but it's also accumulating categories of being. If greatest could be explained away with just maximalism, then we could confidently say that despite her appearance, she's a rabbit warrior. But that's not the complete picture. Greatest Cuban is made up of a rabbit, a sentient drum, a knight, a chest piece, a sexy leopard lady, a Koopa Troopa, and an old wizard man. So calling her a rabbit warrior doesn't seem to satisfy the integral [music] pieces in the hole. Maximalism can tell us why her design feels excessive, but it cannot by itself tell us why an old man and turtle are inside a rabbit.

[00:16:40]Whoa, whoa, whoa. Not inside the rabbit.

[00:16:42]I I'll move on then. What about surrealism? Surrealism is also fascinated by combinations that should not logically exist. Renee Mcgreet, paints a man with an apple floating in front of his face. Salvador Dolli gives us melting clocks draped over a barren landscape. And Mayor Oppenheim takes an ordinary teacup, saucer, and spoon and covers them in fur. The surrealists love forcing familiar things into unfamiliar relationships, breaking the logic of ordinary reality to access dreams, the unconscious, irrationality, desire, anxiety, all that good [ __ ] hiding underneath the floorboards of your brain. And if you showed someone a little dinosaur that becomes a cyborg or a cat that becomes an angel that becomes a dragon without any context whatsoever, surreal would probably be a perfectly reasonable word for it. But Digimon isn't quite surrealism either. A fur covered teacup is powerful partly because the combination feels wrong. It feels like an uncomfortable dream object that couldn't possibly exist in reality.

[00:17:33]The object violates our understanding of what a teacup is supposed to be. And that tension is the point. But when Digimon loads missiles into that dinosaur, it usually isn't trying to destabilize your perception of reality or excavate your subconscious. It's saying, "Holy [ __ ] imagine if this dinosaur had missiles." The bizarre combination is not necessarily presented as a rupture in reality. Within Digimon, it is reality. I mean, one of the universes they come from is kind of just made of the computer data originating on Earth's networks. The surrealism comparison identifies the unexpected juxaposition and maybe some of the hyperreal qualities, but not the peculiar sincerity with which Digimon accepts that juxosition as a perfectly valid identity. But that's when we arrive at perhaps the simplest explanation of all, the rule of cool.

[00:18:13]The rule of cool is the idea that something doesn't need to be realistic, practical, or even completely logical if the result is sufficiently [ __ ] awesome. Why does Cloud Strife carry a sword approximately the size of a Honda Civic? Because a normalsized sword would be less cool. Why do Power Rangers combine their individual dinosaur robots into one Enora's humanoid robot instead of using seven separate machines that could surround the enemy and attack from multiple directions? Because then you wouldn't get the Megazord. Why does Warhammer 40k have soldiers charging into futuristic warfare with chains?

[00:18:42]Because chainsaw sword is a phrase that ends the argument before it begins. The rule of cool grants creators permission to ignore restraint whenever restraint would make something less exciting. And if any franchise has lived under the rule of cool, it's Digimon. Be Sarman is a demon, a gunslinger, a leatherclad fem fatal, and a 19th century American outlaw because cool. So, the rule of cool gets closer than almost anything else because it explains the freedom underlying Digimon designs, and it explains why a designer might look at a dragon and feel absolutely no obligation to stop at dragon. But even this, even the rule of cool still isn't a design philosophy in the way that I'm looking for. It's the permission slit. It tells us why a creator might disregard realism or coherence, but it still doesn't describe what happens to the resulting design. It doesn't give us a name for the strange new thing that exists after those ideas have been combined. And this is the problem I kept running into.

[00:19:33]Maximalism describes the abundance.

[00:19:35]Surrealism describes the impossible juosition and hyperrealistic qualities.

[00:19:40]And the rule of cool describes the permission to be sick as [ __ ] But none of them individually and concisely describe what I think Digimon is actually doing. It allows multiple identities. sometimes identities that should be completely incompatible to envelop the same creature and remain there while also leaving fluid room for that creature to simultaneously be anything and everything else. The dragon does not stop being a dragon when it becomes a machine. But that new dragon machine is probably also a Simeon priestess at the same time and will eventually just be a 12 tier sentient red velvet cake with wings for some reason. None of those meanings necessarily defeats the other, but they're also not explicitly demanding coexistence or harmony. Each individual Digimon design functions in a way that exude a multiplicity of different modes of being with uncountable different meanings that could be drawn from any of those modes. They can clash within themselves and they often contain design elements that horrendously contradict one another all while refusing to align themselves along a singular definition or path. And I realized that if I wanted to describe that, not the complexity, not the weirdness, not even the coolness by itself, but the act of creating an identity that becomes more itself by refusing to become only one thing, I needed a word that as far as I could find didn't exist yet. And now it's time to activate the trap card.

[00:20:52]>> YOU TRIGGERED MY TRAP CARD.

[00:20:56]>> Here's the concept I came up with.

[00:20:58]Syncretic hyper mythopois. Well, that's the elongated version of the concept.

[00:21:02]The actual word I came up with was aporeopoicesis or aporeopotic design.

[00:21:06]Let me explain. Synretism is the blending of diverse beliefs, cultures or philosophies, often ones that differ or directly conflict into a new unique system. And syncratic design in and of itself already exists in things like mudahar architecture, a system where Christian structural engineering was merged with Islamic decorative arts in medieval Spain. Mythopois is literally just the process of myth making. And so hyper mythophobicis I imagine to mean the process of making multiple myths at once or in our situation more aptly creating and inhabiting multiple concepts at once. Aporeia is a word that represents an impassible puzzle or a logical contradiction. And I kind of squashed all that together into aporeo pois which I am defining as a design philosophy in which multiple often incompatible symbolic systems are accumulated without hierarchical resolution producing entities whose identities remain intentionally irreducible and whose contradictions become a continuous source of meaning rather than a problem to be solved. When this word came to me it was like all my itches finally were satisfied. I think Aporeois perfectly captures the beautiful complexity that is Digimon.

[00:22:06]And it can even be utilized further in other works under different umbrellas to better describe some designs that even if they fit under the umbrellas of maximalism or surrealism could be more narrowly specified like Shyo from Eda Dream Barbecue who could probably even be a Digimon himself. Leave a comment if you're an EA fan. I know you're out there. Maybe the word isn't perfect.

[00:22:23]Maybe I can improve it in some way. I'm not a wordssmith by trade. So anyone who can better consolidate my ramblings, please let me know. Or maybe a word similar to this already exists out there. There's probably one that describes a really obscure art form that I just couldn't find in my research for this video. But I'm pretty confident in that the specific nuance of this concept in the context of character design is just not out there. If there is, leave a comment for that, too. I'd love to know as well. But there you have it, folks.

[00:22:46]Probably my favorite video so far on a topic that I truly love more than most things in the world. Man, I love making these videos. I haven't been on YouTube for too long, but this is just so fun. I am truly a moose in this for the love of the game. I simply have to talk about my passions before I leave this world someday and go to that big Digimon farm in the sky.