Oct 19

Oct 19 Dot Monster Re:Volution (Part 3 - Characters)

Welcome back, everyone.

This is Part 3 of the Dot Monster Re:Volution review, and it will focus solely on characters. Please see Part 1 for the introduction and Part 2 for the analysis of the plot. Otherwise, let’s dive right in.

STATS

Title: Dot Monster Re:Volution

Series: N/A

Author(s): CJ Van

Genre: Science Fiction

First Printing: December 2024

Publisher: Self-published through Amazon

Rating: 2/10

SPOILER WARNING

Mild spoilers for Dot Monster Re:Volution will be included throughout this review, through I will keep the first paragraph of each section as spoiler-free as possible. Heavy spoilers will be confined to clearly labelled sections.

Additionally, it will be necessary to discuss the Digimon franchise at multiple points throughout this review. You can expect heavy, unmarked spoilers for any Digimon media released prior to October 2025. Regarding Digimon Beatbreak (which released its third episode today), I will not be providing any spoilers from the anime itself, though I may provide mild spoilers based upon information that is available in promotional materials.

CAST

Humans

The core cast of protagonists in this book consists of the following characters:

Aki: Japanese girl who moved to Toronto with her mother. A perfectionist.
Haru: Aki’s friend in Tokyo. Social media influencer.
Rena: Dot Monster fighting champion.
Darwin: British hacker who joins forces with the team.

There are a handful of secondary and tertiary characters. The iCC is represented by Bridger, who is a sleezy and incompetent executive, and Ray, who is … in charge? It's a little hard to gauge his position, as at one point while reflecting on the 202X Cyber Attack, it sounds as if Bridger is Ray's superior, rather than the other way around.

Outside of the previously mentioned issue of the iCC being moustache-twirlint villains, I don't have any issue with any of these characters in isolation. They are very flat characters that are little more than archetypes, but this is functional as starting points for their arcs.

Dot Monsters

Dot Monsters begin the story as AI assistants. While not every Internet user has one, most do. We never see any character (or at least, any user account) with more than one Dot Monster, which is slightly curious given how specialized they are, but at least that rule is consistent.

When a Dot Monster is exposed to the first Internet, they become sapient and grow far more powerful. This is presented as the start of a progression back to their true, original forms. This setting's analog to Digivolution represents further steps back towards their true selves. Also like Digivolution, this changes the Dot Monster’s name.

The following are the Dot Monsters associated with our protagonists. For the ease of your reading experience, I am dropping the “.dom” suffix at the end of all their names.

Mamoru: Aki’s Dot Monster, an anti-virus monster described as a cross between the old Twitter bird and a Farfetch’d
Seo: Haru’s Dot Monster, a social media assistant described as a small imp
Ikou: Rena’s Dot Monster, designed for fighting in Dot Monster battles, resembling a small, blue wolf-man
Finch: Darwin's Dot Monster. The description and purpose of this monster are vague, outside of it being a bird and being able to help Darwin with hacking and data analysis.

The Dot Monsters have very little characterization outside of that. They don’t really have distinct personalities, just extrapolations from their appearances and functions. Their dialogue is mostly interchangeable. In all honesty, the only reason I would say they have more characterization than Andarna, Tairn, or Sgaeyl is that you can read a lot more into monsters that look like Blue Farfetch’d or Instagram Imp than you can from pallette swap dragons.

Now, the Digimon partners in the original Digimon Adventure were also pretty flat. Outside of Tailmon, they were accessories to the human characters, and Tailmon only got that extra characterization because of her backstory as Vandemon’s minion. The reason this didn’t bog down the anime was that it was a TV show, with visual storytelling and much more time to flesh out the Digimon. The monsters being bland wasn't a huge issue because there was plenty of time to gently massage in character traits.

Still, this flat characterization wouldn’t be an issue if it wasn’t essential to anything else in the narrative …

… which it is.

Dynamics

At the start of the story, Dot Monsters are tools of their human owners. Once they are reawakened, we are told they are now friends.

But why, though?

Nothing actually demonstrates that they are friends. There is also not enough characterization to sell this idea. It’s the same problem as the Pair the Spares romances in The Empyrean. When one party is barely a character and the other isn't one at all, any relationship that we’re Told exists has no emotional substance to it.

Now, Digimon Adventure got around this the same way they got around the issue of bland monster characters: time and visual storytelling. We didn’t need to see strong bonding moments or get clear explanations as to why these characters were friends when the dynamic was subtly fleshed out over time.

Van really didn’t have that kind of time in a novel, not when he had multiple human-monster duos to flesh out. What he could have leveraged to get aorund this was focus. Aki is framed as the main character, and Mamoru is presented as the strongest of the monsters. A few added or retooled scenes to make their dynamic believable would have been enough to compensate for Telling about the others’.

That’s particularly important because of …

THE SCAM ARC (Heavy Spoilers)

As Aki and her friends work to dismantle the iCC’s systems, they call public attention to themselves. People notice that something different is going on with their Dot Monsters.

Midway through the story, a man contacts the protagonisds, claiming to have inside information on the iCC. After stringing the group on, he tricks Aki into giving him her login credentials, allowing him to hijack her user account and thus steal Mamoru (since the Dot Monsters serve the account, not the user). This leads to two character beats:

Aki needs to rescue Mamoru through the Power of Friendship
Haru is embarrassed by people laughing about the incident online and considers deleting her social media accounts.

The second point is okay. It’s not a particularly deep character beat, but the situation is understandable and relatable enough to empathize with Haru regardless. The issue is that first point.

For this Power of Friendship moment to work, there needs to be a developed, believable friendship. We don't get that here. We are expected to believe that Mamoru will go against his current account holder and save Aki despite the fact that, at the end of the day, the only established connection between them was that Aki was his original account holder. As a result, what should have been a satisfying moment just felt flat and predictable.

INTERNET MISMANAGEMENT

On October 26th, we will discuss the worldbuilding of Dot Monster Re:Volution.

A lot of the worldbuilding in this book is derived from repeating elements of the Digimon franchise. I’ll hold discussion on those until Part 6. For now, there’s plenty to discuss regarding the bizarre new Internet creating by the iCC. There is also the glaring issue of how the human interface to this Internet muddles the stakes and undermines tension in scenes that are supposed to be perilous.

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