Written by Jonathan Wojcik with the aid of With the Will, Digimon Wiki and Wikimon


SHINMONZAEMON

So, one day quite unexpectedly, the world received the first dedicated Ultimate level evolution for Monzaemon. It only took more than twenty years for the famous teddy bear Digimon to get a teddy bear evolution, and it works equally well for the darker and freakier Warumonzaemon or the more sugary-sweet Monzaemon X. It's a more classic looking brown teddy bear with a furry surface, at least wherever it retains plush toy anatomy. Its left leg right hands, upper torso and upper arms as well as a pair of huge wings on its back are all made of a dark blue-purple jelly that sparkles like a starry nebula.

The head is only the top half of a teddy bear head, the right eye just a button, the left eye a glowing point of light within a dark, sewn-together tear, and the left ear is like a purple flame spurting from the same rift. Its mouth is a simple, open semicircle with big, triangular teeth, but this is in the "jelly" directly beneath the teddy bear "mask." Finally it has a gaping open zipper around its belly, large nail-like pins hammered into one shoulder, a healthy helping of digimon belts and bandages, and large hooked claws on its plush left paw.

It's the kind of spooky, stylized Hot Topic gothic monster bear I swear I've seen people once again come up with as their own original digimon, but it's wonderfully official, and I feel like it's exactly the kind of thing most fans of Monzaemon hoped for.

Shinmonzaemon looks a lot like a demonic virus type, but it's actually another of those dark-flavored vaccine Digimon we've seen just a little more often in recent years. It's actually said to have a childlike personality and an instinct to befriend or protect other child-like or "cute" things, while reacting to "mature" beings with revulsion and hostility. Its anatomy is officially just as it appears to be, an amorphous ooze simply wearing teddy bear parts, and it evolves this form when a Monzaemon takes in "nightmare-related analysis data." Since Monzaemon is also prone to protect children, this sounds like it's meant to be an "abyss staring back" scenario; that it's become a thing of darkness in its efforts to understand and better ward off darkness.

It's especially interesting to fit this creature into the traditional evolutionary course of a "neglected" child level Digimon becoming a lowly and pathetic Numemon, then a more powerful and lovable Monzaemon. We end up with a creature who was mistreated until it became something helpless and disliked, only to will itself into the polar opposite, stick up for others who are weak or forgotten, and in this case, go far enough to become a slightly insane monster, albeit one that's still a protector of the vulnerable.



If you do want a Digimon line of entirely spooky bears though, Shinmonzaemon would obviously also evolve from Warumonzaemon, who always made more sense to evolve from Porcupamon and Phascomon than the demon guys they originally evolved into.

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