Dot Monster Re:Volution (Part 4 - Worldbuilding)
Welcome back, everyone.
This will the Part 4 of the Dot Monster Re:Volution mini-review series, focusing specifically on the book’s worldbuilding. If you haven’t already, please see Part 1 of the series introduction, Part 2 for Plot, and Part 3 for Characters. 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 fourth 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. I will also need to provide heavy spoilers for the Mamoru Hosoda films Summer Wars and Belle.
DIGIMON ELEMENTS
I'm going to hold off on discussing any worldbuilding specific to the Dot Monsters for now. That falls into the domain of how this book functions as a love letter to the Digimon franchise. For now, I’ll just say that the worldbuilding of the Dot Monsters mostly holds up. It’s not perfect (and we will get to that), but it does make sense if we accept everything else about the world.
THE SECOND INTERNET (i2)
The new Internet created by the iCC is a heavily restricted and monetized network. It’s a system where absolutely everything is region-locked and where even regional activities are limited. The first Internet still exists (how, I’m not sure - wouldn't all the servers supporting it have been shut down after the 202X Cyber Attack was quarantined?) as a realm of information outside of i2’s firewalls.
In concept, all this is great. There's a lot of narrative potential here. Van does tap into some of this potential by telling a story of trying to break down the controls of i2 and restore a state similar to the first Internet.
However … it doesn’t take long for things to not make sense.
Nonsensical Economics
At first, the iCC’s stranglehold on i2 has a sense of internal logic to it. They want region-restricted networks because isolating sections of the network was pivotal to stopping the 202X Cyber Attack. While I have and will continue to criticize their characterization as slimy, greedy suits as demonization, most of their decisions as to what they charge for also make sense as means to achieve that objective. The privileges of leaving comments on social media, uploading videos, or communicating internationally are all things people will pay for, so monetizing it is an effective means of making money. The paywall also makes it easier to police the system by limiting the number of users engaged in various activities.
Then, early in the story, Aki and Haru’s actions provoke the iCC into completely severing the data links between Canada and Japan. Data can still be transferred between the countries by routing it through a third party, such as the United States network, but the two can’t communicate directly. This is rationalized by it being cheaper to cut off the direct link than it is to repair the damage Aki and Haru caused.
Bear in mind that the iCC is presented as the ONLY Internet provided in the world. There are no alternatives. Also, apparently all phone calls are done through the Internet now, because we’re supposed to feel bad for Aki because she can’t talk to her grandparents anymore. This means that, by doing this, the iCC has effectively disabled all commercial or diplomatic communication between Japan and Canada.
How are the iCC allowed to get away with this? Who gives them the power to do this? If they can’t be taken to court over this, wouldn’t the governments of Japan and Canada pay the fees to keep the links open and protect their own economic and diplomatic interests?
Where things really get wild, though, is when the story shifts to Britain’s network for a while. There, we learn that the iCC isn’t making any effort to maintain the Internet infrastructure there. Britain is apparently so poor in this future that they can’t pay the bills, so the i2 in that region is held together by volunteers … yet the i2 there is still controlled by the iCC.
So now we have to ask the question: why is no one setting up their own Internet? Are there really no competing data networks? No governments decided to set up their own local networks or to network with other countries to build a new international Internet? No entrepreneurs saw the money the iCC was making and decided to make their own network as a competing product?
And then things get really strange when the protagonists visit the i2’s massive cloud-based recycle bin and discover a universal translation program. Why did the iCC throw THAT out if they’re really interested in making money? This discovery of this program and the dissemination of it to the rest of i2 is presented as some great cultural victory over the iCC, but the economic value of such software is too glaringly obvious for this to ever be necessary. Why was this not already a monetized service? For that matter, why weren’t tech companies of this digital future offering to install this kind of software standard, the way so many computers these days offer Microsoft Office licenses with the purchase of a new machine?
The long and short of it is, if this is truly a world where control of the Internet is so lucrative, the iCC should not have a monopoly, nor should they be ignoring obvious sources of wealth. This should be a world that hosts countless independent Internets and plenty of people looking to make money be competing against the iCC.
An Even Worse Interface
Navigation
In our modern era, we navigate the World Wide web near-instantaneously via simple commands. You type in a web address, you run a Google search, you scan a QR code, you click a link, etc. I feel I can say with some confidence that all of you arrived here at this review through one of these simple methods. The most navigation one really has to do is either to move through a chain of links or else to scroll through search results.
In i2, everything is manually navigated by an avatar. If you want to, so, go shopping, you can’t just command your device to connect to Amazon. You need to log into i2 and have your avatar travel across the virtual distance to Amazon’s digital storefront. Regional networks are presented as virtual cities to be traversed. When I’ve referred to Aki traveling through a data tunnel, I mean that she had to open a literal tunnel through the international firewalls, steer her avatar through it, and then return home by the same method.
This is an awful user experience.
What Van was probably going for here was a homage to the Mamoru Hosoda’s various films involving the Internet:
The Digimon film Our War Game presents the Internet as a complex of tunnels and eerie chambers that Digimon can navigate. Bear in mind that, for most of humanity, their Internet experience is no different from our own. This form of navigation is merely how the Internet is perceived from the perspective of the Digimon (and any humans who joined them via a Digital Gate).
Summer Wars features the social network of Oz, where the interface is very similar to what we see in this book. It’s worth noting that we never see any travel times, and it’s not clear just how much of what we see in Oz is meant to be the literal versus an artistic impression, so a lot of the interactions we see between avatars may not be an actual part of the system.
Belle features the social network of U, taking the concept from Summer Wars and updating it with virtual reality. Here, travel times are shown. This is meant to be a fully virtual world, with all the sense of space that entails.
All three of these examples make some amount of sense. Our War Game isn’t using the actual human interface. As for the other two, they are products tailored for a specific user experience, not the totality of the Internet. To make this sort of the thing the standard interface makes accessing anything in the i2 as time-consuming and stressful as doing it all in person, without the benefits of physical exercise. Maybe this all would make more sense if i2 were a virtual reality, but we are explicitly told this is not the case. The most we get is VR goggles that function as a replacement for monitors. Everything else is handled with mouse and keyboard. This is ultimately an incredibly tedious interface.
Accounts and Data
The iCC won’t let people download data to offline devices. All files have to be kept in the personal cloud storage of individual user accounts. At the same time, they make it so that any data associated with an account is lost forever if anything happens to the account … and made it possible to destroy an account by damaging the avatar.
Who thought this was a good idea? Bear in mind that this world as online FPS games, and we are meant to think that the protagonists could lose everything if they die in this world’s equivalent of Fortnite. Why would the account system work this way if there are also games where over 90% of the players die in any given game?
Again, we’ve seen this sort of thing in other works, and it made a lot more sense.
The Eye of Minds didn’t have this system at all. If one’s avatar died, that was unfortunate, but you just respawned with all your data intact.
Epic was explicitly a repurposed MMORPG. Part of the point is that a game isn’t a great idea as the foundation of one’s real-world government and economy.
Now Summer Wars did feature something like this. A core driver of the plot is that Love Machine is hijacking people’s accounts by defeating their avatars on battle. However, this wasn’t how the Oz network system was designed to work. Love Machine had to hack the Oz operating system, reconfigure the network so that the rules of the Oz battle arena applied across the entire network, and then assimilate people’s accounts as a “prize” for defeating them in battle. The whole point was that this wasn’t supposed to happen.
ARE WE IN DANGER?
Now that this foundation is laid, we can get to the narrative problem with the i2 interface.
Whenever the human characters are interacting with each other or the Dot Monsters through the Internet, everything is described as if the humans are physically present, rather than sitting in the real world while their avatars interact. This isn’t an issue for big-picture things. Two avatars are chatting in a virtual room while their Dot Monsters stand guard at the doors or two avatars standing together for a digital selfie make sense. However, there’s also a lot of small-scale and visceral stuff that makes little or no sense for someone to do with an avatar being piloted from the other side of a computer screen, such as:
Stopping a person from deleting files - an action performed from a real-world computer, not the avatar - by grabbing the avatar’s wrist.
Being exhausted by running.
Reflexively draping oneself over an avatar’s shoulder before having a comical “when did you get here” reaction.
Smelling anything.
Being grossed out by touching organic matter that exists in the virtual world.
Remember, this is not a VR interface. One isn’t receiving stimuli normally or acting on muscle memory. Every thought and reaction needs to be filtered through the gap between the user and the computer.
This also spills into environments. I can understand a public forum having the bustle and overwhelming visuals of Akihabara, but why did the iCC bother to render places that users aren’t supposed to visit, like their digital headquarters, the programs that control their firewalls, or the inside of the cloud-based recycling bin?
This results in a Schrödinger's Cat dilemma. Our protagonists are simultaneously physically present in the scenes and sitting safely outside them, and whichever state takes precedence is the one Vans needs to move his story along.
This distorts the many scenes of action and peril in this book. We are told again and again that Aki or her friends are in danger when that simply isn’t the case. Even with the ridiculous rules involving the avatars and losing data (something they could easily get around by creating dummy accounts and their telling their sapient Dot Monsters to aid those dummy accounts) none of these characters are in the kind of danger that the narrative claims they are. Simply remembering that these are just avatars kills any sense of tension. It isn’t until the last quarter of the book that there’s any actual danger to any of the human characters, and by then, it’s hard to take the threats seriously, because the narrative glosses over the shift and treats things the same as in earlier moments of peril.
All of the Hosoda films had this same dilemma, but they managed the stakes so that there could be genuine tension.
For most of Our War Game, the humans weren’t in any danger from the battle inside the Internet. It was their Digimon who were in danger, and since anyone who watched Digimon Adventure was familiar with those Digimon, the tension was derived from whether the Digimon could survive the conflict. The stakes for the humans instead came from the havoc Diablomon was causing to real-world infrastructure by attacking networked systems. When the time came to up the ante for the climax, Diablomon hacked the Pentagon and fired an ICBM at Odaiba to kill the kids directly. Millions of people were going to die if their Digimon lost the battle at that point.
It was a similar situation in Summer Wars. The only added element of danger was Love Machine hijacking accounts (as discussed above). In the climax, the nuke was replaced by a falling space probe, with the stakes being a potential nuclear disaster if Love Machine successfully dropped the probe on a nuclear power plant.
In Belle, despite being a full VR experience, the stakes were dialed way down. The only real danger within the system was that certain users had the power to dox others. The highest the stakes ever got was finding and helping abused children in the real world.
What I think Van could have done to remediate this would have been to commit to one state or the other. If he wanted to have the humans be safe from digital violence, then he should have stopped trying to drum up peril for their avatars and either kept the focus on the safety of the Dot Monsters or else found a way to threaten the humans in the real world. If he wanted the digital world to be a threat, then he should have committed to a VR experience and introduced a mechanic by which harming the avatar could harm the user. Alternatively, since he was doing this as a love letter to Digimon, he could have played into the bond between humans and Dot Monsters. There could have been a mechanic by which harm to the sapient Dot Monster also harmed the human, thereby putting both parties in danger whenever there was combat.
SAVED BY THE EDIT
On November 2nd, we’ll be looking at both the prose and the themes of Dot Monster Re:Volution.
This book is exceedingly rough. I don’t think it saw an editor, not given how glaring many of the typos are. More importantly, though, there is a lack of subtlety that does severe damage to immersion.
On the topic of the themes, I do have some positive things to say. I don’t think the execution is all bad. However, because of information the audience is aware of, the shallow handling of these ideas ends up demonstrating the anti-theme instead.
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