June 26th - Digimon

Today is Digimon’s birthday. Back on the 00's school playground, everyone said Digimon was just a ripoff of Pokemon, but they were wrong. Digimon was actually an in-house rip off of Tamagotchi. Ok so what happened was despite being fairly rooted in the ungendered concept of pet ownership, it was deemed too girly or something, and Bandai wanted a masculine version. Being a toy company, the most masculine thing they could think of was violence apparently, and Digimon was born. That's also why digimon have the longer evolution chains compared to pokemon, those were Tamagotchi life phases. To be honest, the Tamagotchi connection explains a lot about Digimon as a franchise. But the actual Digimon toy’s existence wasn't common knowledge by the time I caught the anime in reruns on Jetix, which I think contributed to people calling it a rip-off.