Lessons from cartoons and video games #2/?: Digimon

My brother and I watched a lot of cartoons and played a lot of video games as children...and that hasn't changed as we've grown up. We still watch cartoons and play video games, and every so often, I find something within a cartoon or video game which I think is insightful and should be written down somewhere. Thus, this series. This is the second post, and it's all about Digimon!

UPDATE: You can now read a slightly edited version of this on the Harvard Ichthus!!!! This is the link to that: http://harvardichthus.org/2015/04/christ-and-cartoons-how-a-digimon-imitated-jesus/. What you're reading below is the original version.
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Over winter break last year, my brother and I found the second season of Digimon on Netflix, and we decided to watch that season all the way through. Note: for those who haven't seen the second season of Digimon, this blogpost will have spoilers. So if you want to watch it without spoilers, go watch it on Netflix and then come back here. It was fun to relive those Saturday mornings when we would wake up early to watch shows like Digimon as kids, and it was fun to see how we reacted as adults to some of the stuff we watched thirteen (!!!) years ago.
One thing that didn't change much was of the six main characters, my favorite character was Ken. I couldn't really explain why when I was a kid, but as an adult I figured it out. In the first part of the season, Ken was the Digimon Emperor, an evil genius who took over the Digital World (the place where all the Digimon live) and ruled it with an iron fist. He was a very cruel Emperor, making the Digimon work for him as slaves, making them evil by taking over their minds with Dark Rings, and punishing those who didn't obey. For most of the first part of the season, the five other main characters were trying to stop Ken, and everyone knew he was a jerk...except his Digimon partner, Wormmon. (People who have never watched Digimon must be finding this very weird to read! I hope you all get this.)
Wormmon had been assigned to Ken as a Digimon partner before he became the Emperor, and he remembered that before Ken became the Emperor, he was a very kind boy. However, a series of events including his brother's death and being infected with a "dark spore" made Ken very spiteful and evil. Ken even treated Wormmon like a slave, and at one point, he rejected Wormmon as his Digimon partner and tried to create a new Digimon partner for himself, one that was bigger and stronger than Wormmon. This new partner was a monster, and he eventually went mad and started destroying everything. When Wormmon realized that Ken's new partner was going to destroy everything, he finally told Ken everything he thought about him, but despite Ken's treatment of him and all the other Digimon, Wormmon told Ken that he still remembered the kind boy that Ken used to be, and that he hoped that Ken would become that person again. He then gave all of his life energy to defeat the monster, saving Ken and the other main characters. That event made Ken realize the error of his ways, and he stopped being the Digimon Emperor after that. Eventually, he joined up with the other main characters to save the Digital World. It took time for the other main characters, but eventually they were able to see Ken like Wormmon saw him: as a kind and noble person, and a hero.
I just retold a major subplot of a kids' TV show from fifteen years ago, but there are themes in that subplot that are for people of all ages in real life now. Figuratively speaking, we have all met a Digimon Emperor. Perhaps that person doesn't go around killing people and controlling their minds, but the person does have fundamental flaws that end up hurting them and the people around them. And if I'm speaking that way, about people who have missed the mark and hurt other people and have flaws and scars that they can't handle very well, then I can say with certainty that we have all been the Digimon Emperor at some point.
But I can also say, daring to hope, that there's a Ken in all of us too, someone who is kind to other people, ingenuous and has something good to share with the world. Not everyone sees it, and it may be buried beneath all the flaws. But it is there, in all of us. And we need someone, kind of like Wormmon in this plot, to see that person and never stop believing that the good kid is there somewhere. We need someone who can deal with all of our flaws and help us find the inner kindness. We need someone to take on our burdens so that we can be helped. And if we can find that person--that exceedingly rare person--they will usually succeed in bringing the good out of us, not because we were good enough to find the good, but because we know how much it cost them and we want to repay them.
People like those are hard--nay, nearly impossible to find. There's no greater sacrifice for a person than to give his or her time, energy, and even his or her own life to see a friend gain life. I dare say that there's nothing that messes with your head or your heart more than realizing that someone believed in you so much that they were willing to give your life to see you find your dreams. That's why Christianity still continues to grow today, though people's actions throughout history have sullied its name--because in Christianity, Jesus is that person. If you find a person who believes in you so much that they can bet their life on it, it might take a while, but eventually, you start believing in yourself and wanting to do better for yourself, and you don't want to go back to the way you were, because if someone gave their life for you, then your life must be worth it.

Lessons from cartoons and video games #1/?: Sonic the Hedgehog (2006)

As I mentioned in a previous post, when my brother and I were young kids, we watched a lot of cartoons and we played a lot of video games. To be honest, this hasn't changed. We have more work now, but when my brother and I are free, we usually spend time watching cartoons and/or superhero movies and playing video games. Lame? Maybe. But it's pretty fun. And occasionally in those video games and cartoons I find bits of insight that I think is worth sharing. So I'm making these insights into an unofficial series, creatively called "lessons from cartoons and video games". I don't know how regularly these posts will appear, but I can pretty much assure you that there will be more than one.

This is the first of two that I have for now. Yes, I wrote it a long time ago...but I still think it's good enough to post again. I wrote it in 2011 about a game that every Sonic the Hedgehog fan will remember in infamy: Sonic the Hedgehog (2006). There was a litany of things that were wrong about that game, from the gameplay to some of the plot elements and much more, but in general we get more insight from our mistakes then we do from our prouder moments, and for Sega, it's no different...

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Before reading this, you must know...I am a geek. According to a facebook quiz, I am seven different types of geek. So you should not be surprised by what I refer to here.


I was watching some of the cutscenes from a recent Sonic the Hedgehog game which someone had compiled into a movie, and the end really made me think. To explain the situation, the main villain of the game and the final boss is a fire-type thing named Solaris who ends up devastating everyone in the game. Solaris was originally kept as a little flame in a castle belonging to the duke of Soleanna (where the whole game takes place). At the end of the game, Sonic (our main hero) and the duke's daughter Elise go back in time to find this flame so they can blow out Solaris and save the future.


They find the flame and Elise is supposed to blow it out. Elise realizes, however, that if she blows out the flame, she and Sonic will never have met. She almost refuses to blow out the flame because she doesn't want to lose her friendship with Sonic.


Watching this happen, it's pretty hard not to scold Elise for nearly choosing Sonic over the world. And yet sometimes, we do the same thing. We forsake the mission, the life that God has planned out for us, because of something that we love that we don't want to give up. We think that thing is big, but in relation to the plan God has to (basically) save the world, it really is not.


Sometimes we may think that what we have to give up is so big and too hard to give up. However, considering that God is in control, we should know that when we give up that habit, we are helping with the great commission, the plan to get as many souls saved as possible before the end of the world.

It's been a while...

And a lot of things have happened during my time here--a lot of things to learn from. I've changed...and yet at the same time I haven't. Some things about me have definitely changed; I've matured a bit, definitely. I've had some rough experiences and come out to tell the tale to people. But at the same time, I feel like the same old person I was when I was 15 and a half. It's very weird to think that I was a sophomore in high school five years ago. When I was a sophomore, it was easy to note the differences between 11-year-old me and 16-year-old me. I grew a couple of inches, I gained a figure, and I gained confidence and (some) maturity. But now, as I'm nearing the age of 21, I feel essentially the same as a person as I was when I was 16, but with less confidence (ha!). And I've been berating myself for a while now about that. Isn't college where I'm supposed to change, find new ideals and become a much more sophisticated person? Isn't it where I'm supposed to find my identity in some type of "-ist" and let the liberal in me come alive from the conservative prison I was raised in? Isn't that what's supposed to happen to me? A lot of people have had that experience in college, and for a long time I wondered why I didn't fit into that category. People would share their experiences of this and that and others would applaud them and I would wonder if I was wrong for not having any of those experiences to share. I wondered if I was wrong, or even deficient in something (yikes) because none of the new contemporary labels really fit me.
And then it hit me, slowly and then all at once (pop culture hehe): if I am a unique person, created by God with my own personality and experiences and other things, then why am I trying to let the world define me?
I realized that the world in all of its forms can try and put me in a couple of boxes, but none of them will completely fit me. I'm a sum of several parts. I have my own DNA, my own personality, and my own destiny. Some people really identified with the things we've heard and seen in college, and they made several changes, and that's awesome. I'm happy for them. But just because I haven't changed that much or made myself fit in the mold this new society has for me, doesn't mean I'm any less than any of them.
So here I am! I have a lot of new experiences and ideas to share. But to be honest, I'm basically the same as when I was 16. And I'm pretty okay with that.

Stuff that I have learned from the events this week

This week. THIS WEEK! I did not come to Cambridge expecting this week. I came into the week expecting to be stressed out by all the work I had to do...but not by the threat of terrorists. There were definitely moments where I was like, "God, YEESH! I could barely deal with my own little student problems. What is THIS?"

But I guess no one comes into this experience as a prepared person. It just happens and it scars you and your town for life. It doesn't make your town cease to exist, as I found out today. Even as there were people the next town over chasing the suspect, and Massachusetts law had put us all on lockdown for the first time in nearly 12 years, after a while, people did start going outside again. It was eerie for me to go out into the Yard and watch people play and eat at Au Bon Pain. This place is supposed to be deserted, I thought, but it isn't! There was playtime and laughter, but there was still this awkward fear looming over everything like a cloud. It was always possible to get over it by doing work or by distracting oneself from it, but a trigger would come and you'd be scared again.*

How incredibly relieving it is to have that blanket of fear lifted off of you.

Many people at my school made the great point this week that many people aren't getting the happiness and relief that I have now. They still have to live in that blanket of fear. For people in the war zones like in Syria, what we have just been freed from experiencing is life. My solution? Prayer. Keep praying for those warzones, applying the feelings that you felt this week to those prayers.

*That is, unless you were my friend Terrance. Thursday night when the MIT shooting occurred, I was in Lamont Library with a group of friends and this dude. We were all scared out of our minds and hunkered down to the basement...all except Terrance. Dude put some gospel music in his ears and kept on studying right next to the windows of Lamont Library. We all asked him why he wasn't fearing. He kept on saying, "God is with me. I don't have anything to fear!"
I knew that, but the difference between me and Terrance was that the guy had been meditating on it, so once a situation came around he just had his Psalm 91 handy, and he just chilled. I ought to get to that level of faith!

That snow day!

I grew up in a place where it is supposed to snow regularly between January and March, and sometimes even in April. I grew up making snowmen and snow angels in elementary school, and always hearing about snowball fights, even if I hadn't been in that many.

Last winter, while it was quite nice, was unexpected for me. There were warm days, cold days, and NOT ENOUGH SNOW. Winter to me is snow--so much snow that I get sick of it. Last winter, I could count not only the amount of times it had snowed, but also the amount of inches of snow we'd gotten, on my fingers. It was disgraceful.

This winter, it seemed like it was going to be more of the same...and then Nemo came along.

Nemo, of course, couldn't have been good for everyone, but for me, it was very good. It started with my classes getting cancelled for the day, and having the due date for a problem set pushed back. That alone made me quite content.

Then, I went out for some meetings that I still had, and I saw what I'd been missing for some time--the whole yard, roads and all, in a blanket of white. I slugged my feet through the snow and tried to avert my eyes from it as the wind blew the snow directly at my eyes, but even then, the six-year-old in me leaped around, and I was happy as a lark. Finally, some snow!

I went to my meetings, hung out with some people, and then went back to my dorm and worked for a while, assuming that we were to hunker down for the night much like we did when Hurricane Sandy came along. I resolved to do my work, but as I looked on Facebook and saw pictures of my friends playing in the snow already, my heart pined. Then, someone invited me to an event--a snowball fight at midnight. There was my goal--work until that snowball fight.

When the time came, I put on my rain boots, coat, gloves and hat and went outside. I was a bit early, and only a handful of people were in the yard playing football and stuff, so a couple of friends and I went over to the steps of our colossal library, which should be a government building instead of a library. This library happens to have a ton of steps, which combined with a good foot of snow, makes for great sledding. We came when most of the snow had been scraped off the stairs, so my first sledding experience was a very bumpy ride, and I fell off the tray I was using. After a bit of sledding, I headed to the yard, and the snowball fight had begun! People were running about having snowball battles with each other. Others ran past me chasing their friends, and there was even one guy with a crutch who joined the party. I saw quite a few friends...and threw snow at almost all of them.

At one point, a lot of people decided to assault a fort that had been made. Everyone advanced towards the fort, including a guy with a yellow flag, and charged at the people in the fort with snowballs. Unfortunately, that fort got reduced to smithereens.

I eventually went back to the library, where people were still sledding, despite the fact that some of the stairs were iced over. I marveled at the fact that the snow was still falling. It was as if the weather wanted to make up for all of those missed days in January. I accept its apology.

I eventually went in feeling extremely happy that everyone had come out for a snowball fight. It was definitely one of the best nights I've had in college so far. My college is pretty intense, and the stereotype goes that the college is full of prudes who spend all their time studying and overachieving. But this night reminded me why I was attracted to this college--Harvard--in the first place; because the people here are not prudes. We study and overachieve, yes, but it isn't beyond us to loosen up and be kids for a night.

I don't normally do recaps of events here, but I felt this deserved one. This is one of those "thank God it happened" days for me. Aaaah, so fabulous.

My friend Peter recorded part of it, so here's the link to his video; the charge is at 0:50!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDOeaicu7F8&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Top memories here so far...

Well, there goes a semester of college. That was a bit too fast for me. A lot of it is a blur, but I think I've got to do this, not in the least because of what I experienced tonight.

Let's go. A couple memories from the semester, in no particular order.

1. Walking past the Widener Library the first few weeks and feeling totally tiny every time I did.
2. Ending up in the third floor of said library after misinterpreting directions from my friend who I wanted to study with, and feeling totally scared until I realized she was on the second floor in a reading room.
3. Talking with one of my TA's on a bus. It just felt weird talking to one of...well, my teachers like that! Then again, it's different here in that my TA is probably part of my sister's generation, which makes her at the most 10 years older than me.
4. Having a professor casually ask me about my day and getting butterflies in my stomach.
5. Sitting next to three people from Georgia (the country), Burundi and Canada in the dining hall and feeling way too normal.
(If you noticed, a lot of things make me feel humble here.)
6. Eating a bunch of peanut butter oreos courtesy of my friend.
7. Studying in the even more intimidating law school library with my roommate and two of her friends.
8. Singing the VeggieTales theme song with one of my friends in the dining hall.
9. Literally spending the night sleeping in the not intimidating Lamont Library, waking up at 8 and realizing that all-nighters are probably not my thing.
10. Eating apple pie and hanging out with friends from a Christian fellowship.
11. When a band from YWAM came and we had a worship night, and I all of a sudden got a giant reminder of who I am! :)
12. Getting with a group of at least 15 students in a basement and praying for the Newtown tragedy, and really sensing the Holy Spirit. (This one happened today!)
13. The first intramural day when we all wore navy (cobalt?) blue shirts and played games, showed our Matthews pride, and did pretty well!
14. Eating a giant bowl of pho with a friend for the first time. That stuff is GOOD!
15. Dinner trains with the band.

This college experience has made me feel humble, small, anxious, happy, and very normal all at different times. And the biggest thing I've learned is that there is really no point being anxious.

Now to go through these 4 final days. Then, I'll be home for a month. Wow. Just wow.

How to be a good tourist

Let this be a testimony to how random I actually am. I could be thinking of science, or the football game I'm going to on Saturday, or the library I'm in...but no. After browsing a couple of photos, I've decided to write a blogpost on how to be (or at least look like) a good tourist. Anyway...

So whenever I've gone to foreign countries as a non-child, I have made a conscious attempt to not look like a tourist. That's what we should do, right? When in Rome, do as the Romans do. But sometimes I have seen these "how not to look like a tourist" things go a tiny bit too far.

http://www.wikihow.com/Avoid-Looking-Like-an-American-Tourist

It appears that in order to not look like an American, you can't pull your socks up too high, or wear athletic shoes, or wear certain accessories or colors since the locals aren't wearing them. What is this, a case of high school hierarchy?

Granted, some countries do require certain forms of dress, and I am not advocating breaking the law, or bashing other countries' ways of dress because they aren't our own. But I am advocating being our own selves for goodness' sake.

The thing is, even if you try as hard as you can to not dress up like a tourist, if you're going to another country to sightsee or go on a tour, you are a tourist! And if you're like me, you've probably been careful to try not to dress like a tourist not just because of stealing issues, but because you don't want to impose your American-ness on other people. Not wanting to impose on people is all well and good, but I don't think it's good to try sooooo hard to separate yourself from your own nationality, especially if you're only staying in the country for a week or something like that.

Granted, I do think that WikiHow article is good in some respects. So here are my own comments and advice.

How to straight up give yourself away as a tourist:

1. Hawaiian shirt, khaki shorts, white socks and gym shoes, with a fanny pack and a baseball cap.
2. (at least in France) Tank top that says "I <3 (something)", booty shorts, and flip flops.
3. Fanny packs in general.
4. Crocs.
5. Being really loud.
6. Insulting the local culture. (Golden Rule people!)
7. Being really loud in English in a country where English isn't normally spoken.
8. Not accepting the table manners and stuff like that.
9. Having a giant map out. This often can't be helped, though it can be avoided if you have a smartphone with a map.
10. Having a camera around your neck.

Stuff you should do if you are a tourist:

1. (if not in an English speaking country) Learn some of the local language.
2. Hit up some books or Internet resources about the culture/history/politics of the country you're going to. Again, I'm not advocating looking down on other countries and cultures--far from it! I'm just warning against trying too hard to fit in. In relation to that...
3. Try to dress like the locals, but again, don't try too hard!
4. Before you go to a foreign country, try and look up some cultural norms--for example, things about personal space, or chewing gum in public, or eating on the street, or (especially in Asia) cutlery norms and table manners.
5. Keep your money and valuables in a place where not everyone can see it and/or take it easily. I'd advise in the pockets or bags.
6. Use local currency. (Isn't this a given? Someone please enlighten me.)
7. Don't be mean to people who give you dirty looks and stuff.
8. Have fun and embrace the local culture!

Random post over!