Dot Monster Re:Volution (Part 5 - Prose & Theme)
Hello, all. Welcome back.
This is Part 5 of the Dot Monster Re:Volution review. The previous parts covered the Introduction, Plot, Characters, and Worldbuilding. If you haven’t read those already, I encourage you to double back and do so. 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 fifth 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.
PROSE
3rd Person Omniscient POV
Disclaimer
Full disclosure - I really don’t like 3rd Person Omniscient POV. I feel it’s important to pick a single POV character for each scene and stick with that character. It provides a clear frame of reference to understand the information being provided to the audience. Even if the POV is biased, at least that can be handled consistently, and if said POV character has been clearly characterized for the audience, we can account for that bias in our understanding of the events taking place.
With that being said, 3rd Person Omniscient POV remains a valid way to tell stories. Dot Monster Re:Volution is written in this manner, and that decision does not make the book worse.
I feel it’s important to establish this up-front because one of the major issues with this book is linked to how 3rd Person Omniscient POV is mishandled. This isn’t a problem that is inherent to the POV. Vans could have corrected the issues without shifting into 3rd Person Limited or 1st Person POV. I may not like this POV, but I’m not going to pretend like changing the POV would magically erase the underlying issue.
Voices in Their Heads (Heavy Spoilers)
The handling of emotions in this book is extremely unsubtle and unearned. Character’s mindsets and motivations are routinely spelled out to the audience. Often, Vans actually managed to create a scenario where these emotions were conveyed through context, only to strip away the subtlety by telling us anyway.
The mishandling of the POV comes into play here. There are moments where Van will head-hop between characters just to spell out what different characters are feeling. The most egregious example of this is during the arc where Aki gets her account phished. During the showdown with the man who stole her account, there’s this rather bizarre moment where the narrative hops into this antagonist’s head to spell out things that are already evidence from his dialogue. (I’ll provide some context, then highlight the passage in question in bold.)
“Mamoru, it’s me!”
Nothing from the all-black knight.
“DotMon are obedient to one person,” the Imposter yelled. “The account operator! They don’t care who used to run the account. DotMon and i2 accounts are linked by a non-negotiable, undeniable chain of code. It’s cold hard numbers, kid! It doesn’t know or care who you are.”
“That’s not true! Mamoru and I are partners!”
The Imposter only laughed, amused at Aki personifying what he believed was nothing more than a computer program.
“Your little ‘Mamoru’ is one piece of this account’s inventory. And now I run the account. Understand yet? Ex_Mamoru.mon, help make it clear for her!
Did we really need to hop into this guy’s head to be Told that he thinks it funny that Aki is getting emotional over a program? His dialogue spells everything out already.
The lack of subtlety in this book results in the same problem that we’ve seen elsewhere: a lack of immersion and a lack of investment. Telling the audience what the emotions and motivations are in the moment is not as impactful as demonstrating and earning those emotions. It’s not just this one scene that’s affected by it. The whole book is affected by this problem to some degree.
Editing
The prose in this book was incredibly rough. It’s not just the odd repeated word or misspelling, either. There are a lot of noticeable punctuation errors.
This sort of editing doesn’t affect story quality directly, of course. It’s just that it makes the story feel unfinished. I’m sure Vans put a lot of time and effort into this book, but because it is so unpolished, I would have no trouble believing that this was actually a first draft.
I know there’s been discussion lately about whether indie authors need to hire editors. Perhaps I should take the time to write an interlude on that subject. For now, I’ll just say that this book is a strong argument in favor of at least hiring a copy editor to do a final check before putting out a product that people are supposed to pay for.
THEME
There’s good and bad with the themes of this book. The bad is, unfortunately, the reason I pushed this book’s rating down to a 2/10 instead of making it a 3/10 or a 4/10. Still, the good is worth acknowledging.
Simplistic Themes Can Be Okay
Most of the ideas in this book are very simple stuff that wouldn’t be out of place in a Digimon anime. The Power of Friendship is a really important one, both at the interpersonal scale and in the global sense of uniting against existential problems. The handling of the idea of Internet freedom is also handled with a very saccharine binary, with long paragraphs sunk into celebrating the Renaissance sweeping through the Internet as Aki and her friends dismantle the various controls on i2.
Normally, I’m not a fan of simplistic themes, but that’s primarily because I see authors trying to crunch incredibly complex and nuanced topics into simplistic binaries without putting in the necessary legwork to justify that decision. In Iron Flame, the binary used for the immigration / refugee theme worked fine as a means to translate the existential threat of the venin into something easier to understand; it wasn’t until Onyx Storm, when Yarros went through the motions of responding to counterpoints, that it fell apart. The same could be said here. Van’s isn’t pretending like the ideas he’s presenting are deep or nuanced. These are themes in their most essential form, used to explain character motivations and worldbuilding mechanics.
This is also where I’m going to cut Vans a bit of slack on account of this being a love letter to Digimon. While there are many anime franchises with very deep and nuanced themes - and indeed, certain arcs and subplots in Digimon achieve this very thing - the average Digimon story doesn’t dive too deep into the weeds. Ideas are explored enough to lend context to the characters, and that’s usually enough.
Anti-Theme (Heavy Spoilers)
Where the book stumbles is in tying the theme into the plot.
Remember how I mentioned back in the Plot analysis that seeing the prologue about the 202X Cyber Attack undermines the idea that the iCC are the villains? This same issue damages the themes, only with added problems.
You see, from a thematic angle, the story fails to address that the cultural Renaissance the heroes are unleashing comes with a dark side. It does acknowledge that this dark side exists. The villain speech we get near the climax spells these issues out, and the cyber bullying arc is only possible because people are given the power to anonymously say mean things in comments sections. (I’m going to give Van the benefit of the doubt and not include the phishing scam here, as with how it’s presented, that guy was stealing people’s account info long before the protagonists started dismantling the system controls.) However, the issues in the speech are never explored, and the mean comments are written off as a matter of not obsessing about the negative things in life. That could still work, provided that the narrative made some statement about the benefits of total Internet freedom being other the risks, but that doesn’t happen. The problems are simply raised and then never addressed.
Where things really get messed up, though, is the third act.
Everything bad that happens in the finale - including a narrowly avoided real-world apocalypse - only happens because Aki and her friends dismantled the i2 controls. Sure, the evil they unleashed had orchestrated the i2 controls in the first place, but the fact remains that said evil had no quarrel with Earth. it just wanted the Dot Monsters exiled to the Internet. It only tried to destroy the world because Aki and friends disrupted its plans and then, for good measure, when into its home and killed its servants.
While we can’t hold Aki and the others responsible for retaliation by an entity they didn’t even know existed, they did have the necessary knowledge the understand that bad things lurked in the first Internet and that the iCC served an important role in preserving the digital landscape of humanity. They courted the apocalypse. They really don’t have any right to feign innocence when they trigger a different apocalypse than the one they should have expected - except that’s exactly what Aki does as the world is falling apart.
“The internet going free to use, the end of region locks,” Aisha said. “That was you?”
“Yep … well, me and my friends.”
“And what about all of this?” Adam gestured to the monsters destroying the city. “That green one … did you do that, too?”
“No, no!” Aki insisted. “This is different. We would never - we’re trying to stop this!”
No, Aki. You knew about the 202X Cyber Attack. You knew about the Reapers. You should have been able to realize the wanton dismantling of the i2’s security measures would unleash something. You don’t get to pretend you’re the hero when your actions provoked the thing behind the Reapers into trying to destroy the world.
What particularly annoys me about this is that the final message of the story is that the iCC should have just let the Internet be free and only intervened when necessary. That’s what the iCC was doing. They had no solution to the Reapers, so they were ensuring that any future Reaper attack could be swiftly quarantined and neutralized.
What Vans should have done if the message was supposed to be Intervention Not Regulation would be to put the narrative focus on dealing with the Reaper problem first. Have Aki and the others work with the Dot Monsters to trying to eliminate the need for the iCC, then transition the iCC into being the main villains when they no longer have a reason to maintain such a tight grip.
Doing things backwards, the way it was done here, just proves the anti-theme. The crusade to liberate the Internet nearly unleashed a disaster more horrific than the original 202X Cyber Attack. When Plot Armor and contrivance are the only things saving the world from the protagonists’ self-righteousness, then the villains maintaining control for the Greater Good end up being the ones who actually have a point.
HONOR IS SATISFIED
On the whole, Dot Monster Re:Volution is a bad book that needlessly self-sabotages itself on every level. The concept was good. The execution was terrible.
With all that being said, there is one aspect of this narrative where this book truly shines. It’s not something that changes the objective quality of the work. However, it’s something that makes me genuinely want to see more work from Van in the future, especially if he improves his craft.
Next Sunday, November 9th, we will be evaluating this book as a love letter to the Digimon franchise. I hope you’ll all join me as I say many nice things.
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