Greymon hates Charizard, no one actually hates Bad Bunny, but we all do actually hate each other
I’d like you to close your eyes and enter a memory with me, just for a second. You’re 7 years old, on a 15-hour Greyhound bus from Chicago to Toronto, by way of a 3-hour car ride from Osh-Kosh, Wisconsin, by way of an 11-hour plane ride from the tiny Island of St. Thomas. You look out the window, and all you see are fast-moving cars, road signs for attractions you can’t stop at, and fast food places you’ve never heard of. You’re some 10+ hours deep into a 20+ hours pilgrimage to see family, far-flung. You’re bored out of your skull.
With you is your 8-year-old brother, who, since the day he was born, finds an unimaginable amount of joy in getting under people’s skin and didn’t learn the skill of entertaining himself until he was well into his teen years, which means, to him, your current state of boredom wafts off of you the way the scent of blood finds a hungry shark, and this shark, dear reader, I cannot stress to you is starved.
Sitting beside him is your mother, a literal angel sent from heaven to shepherd you through life with the wisdom of a majestic centuries-old elephant. She, in her infinite wisdom, has a trick up her sleeve, a secret she knows can only be effective if pulled out at the exact right time.
7 hours into your sojourn north, your master of torture, having used every weapon in his arsenal to pick your dead husk clean, is now at his wits’ end, which signals to your overseer, now. Just then, as you’re about to blow a F!@#$%^=G gasket in front of a bus full of strangers, she pulls out two wrapped boxes not much bigger than her palm, and two boxes smaller by about half, to go with them. PRESENTS! Your guardian angel had the foresight to bring with her PRESENTS! Your mood changes instantly, and you both tear open the boxes like little rodents, and just like that, sitting in your hand is a red Game Boy Pocket and a cartridge of the original Pokémon Red (in his, a black Game Boy Pocket and Pokémon Blue). For the next 8 hours, road signs, attractions, fast food - anything outside of that tiny little red rectangle doesn’t register. All that matters is catching them all.
Okay, open your eyes now. This is one of my fondest memories. To this day, my family talks about “the trip to Canada when we played Pokémon until the batteries died”. To this day, my brother and I can tell you the Pokémon we chose as starters (Me, Charmander, him, Squirtle) and the first Pokémon we caught (Me Weddle, him Pidgey). What he and I talk about most frequently, however, is how much fun we had and how cool it was to have that seminal experience together.
In a nutshell, this is Pokémon - a shared experience. If you were in a room with 20 people and you asked them what their favorite Pokémon is, 15 of them would have an answer for you, complete with a story involving a friend or sibling by their side. It’s an instant piece of connective tissue, and I love that shit.
My brother and I have been out of the game (pun intended) for a few generations, but this past Christmas, in the year of our lord 2025, I felt a bit nostalgic for the magic of our youth. My brother and I had loosely talked about picking up the newly released Nintendo Switch 2 for funsies, and I had the bright idea to surprise him with the newly released game Pokémon Legends: Z-A. I was curious to see how the games have changed since our youth. Unbeknownst to me, however, he had the same idea. So, on the morning of December 25th, 2025, two men, ages 35-teen, and 36-teen, open the same present in different wrapping paper. We laughed out loud; my mother laughed, then rolled her eyes, and my dad had no clue what was going on, but in that moment, we were 7 and 8 again, sitting on that Greyhound bus, and it was magical.
What I forgot about Pokémon games is that there is a fair bit of head-scratching puzzle-esque challenges you have to navigate. During the Game Boy days, you bought game guides that helped you through them. These were handy bibles, but they were also extensions of the game. In them were original art from the creators, small snippets of interviews, and sometimes, rare collectible cards. Those things don’t exist now. What happens now is you Google “How to beat Mega [insert Pokémon name]” and a Reddit thread pops up with a bunch of strategies. It’s inelegant, but it is effective. These threads, however, touch a parasitic part of the internet that I have come to hate. I call them the “what about me” idiots. These are the people who find ways to take offense at other people liking things. When other parts of culture that dont resonate with them have a moment, these are the people who find, often irrational, ways to hate, to make themselves feel better. In this instance, what I found interesting was the faction of people doing the hating—Digimon fans.
Have you ever asked yourself, what would it look like if a werewolf and a biker active in the BDSM scene merged and then soul-bonded with a child in an effort to do large-scale battle? That’s Digimon. Or, what about, I wonder what it would look like if you took a sad cactus, put boxing gloves the size of semitrucks on it, and then made it the size of a skyscraper? That’s Digimon. Or, what would happen if an anthropomorphic cat, or a hamster-like marshmallow with bat wings for ears, evolved into sexy angels? Yeah, that’s Digimon. Freaked out shit. Where Pokémon is smooth, Digimon is rough. And for that, I loved it as a kid. For that, most of us loved it as kids. The ven diagram of Pokémon and Digimon fans, at least in my youth, had heavy, heavy overlap. They were two sides of the same coin. Two factions of nerds coexisting in the same room.
This silly example of nerd discourse is a perfect illustration of a strange cultural erosion that is affecting us all—beefing with something, often against your own self-interest. The thing about this beef, and by extension most beefs, is that only one side has beef. In this case, Digimon fans have beef with Pokémon fans, and Pokémon fans don’t even think about Digimon fans. Like at all. Ain’t that a bitch?
Not to get political (he says as he gets political, because literally everything is political), but this also illustrates the core issue in the recent discourse about the Bad Bunny (pronounced BAH BONII) Super Bowl halftime show. If you’re unfamiliar with the Super Bowl, it’s the championship game of American Football. If you’re not familiar with the halftime show, it’s the players’ intermission. They go inside and grab their juice boxes and orange slices, at which point a mega-popular artist performs a medley of their biggest hits, behind a crazy, well-produced, millions-dollar set paid for by themselves, in hopes that it will, in this day and age, drive clicks to their music on streaming services. It is also a celebration of something that is uniquely American: violence, unhealthy competition, and capitalism. The whole thing is essentially a celebration of American bloodsport.
If you didn’t watch the halftime show, it was fantastic. It was all in Spanish, deeply Puerto Rican, and unapologetic about it. It paid homage to America as a whole, not just the continental United States. The faction of people who put effort into discrediting his artistry posited ideas like, “It being in Spanish makes it inaccessible to the American people (read: lazy white people),” or, “It being in Spanish doesn’t pay homage to American Football, a uniquely American sport (read: a sport rooted in racism and bleeds American Capitalism).” Translate all of that to: For the next 13 minutes, what is being said is foreign to me, which makes me uncomfortable; therefore, he can’t do it. The entire thought process is wack and rooted in a misplaced fear, but that makes too much sense, so it goes unprocessed. It’s the height of what-about-me-ism, which I find so odd, because this halftime show was so, so, so fun, truthfully American, and made specifically for you to enjoy it, and isn’t that what you’re most interested in?
It points to a deeper issue, really. A macro issue that I don’t think one individual can fix. This kind of performative hate and selfishness feels more like a function of our time than anything. It shows itself by wringing any and everything made for our enjoyment through the negativity machine before we’re allowed to like it. It’s like a fun tax. It’s weird. It’s like we’ve taken the fun out of fun, and it feels like we’re doing it at this point for sport.
My problem with the negativity machine is two-fold. First and foremost, it normalizes negativity, and that’s starting to seep into our media. Look across the TV landscape, and you’ll find a hit show centered around a main character who is insufferable. I, for one, know more people than I care to admit who think Don Draper from Mad Men is a good person. It has created what feels like a community out of being a piece of shit, and those things dont go together.
Secondly, and most importantly, most hate spun through the negativity machine isn’t actually about the thing you’re being negative about; it’s about something that rests with you. To my initial example - the Digimon - Pokémon discourse - the real issue Digimon fans have is that the creators of Digimon seemingly dont care about them, whereas the creators of Pokémon care deeply about theirs and serve them regularly. Digimon fans feel like that’s being thrown in their face, and they feel their only recourse is to hate openly until someone listens to them. The vocal, wealthy Bad Bunny opposition staged their own “halftime show” with acts no one cared about, and streamed it on an online platform no one watched. As you might have guessed, they will not shut up about how much of a “success” and how “uplifting to Americans” it was. “I don’t like your thing, so I’m going to make my own thing, and it’s going to be so much better than yours!” I dont know about you, but that sounds like textbook jealousy to me.
Digimon Time Stranger, a new entry into the Digimon gaming catalogue, came out around the same time as Pokémon Legends: Z-A, and based on everything I’ve seen and read, fans seem to enjoy it. It seems like a fun game; there’s a pretty decent community of fans talking about it, creating content around it, and sharing tips, tricks, and strategies on its many challenges and puzzles, which is a beautiful example of true community. It might not be as big as the Pokémon community, but the two communities are more alike than different, meaning they absolutely can coexist. A community based around shared love for something, not a one-sided hate for something else, isn’t that exactly what we all want?