A Digimon’s ability to digivolve is intrinsic to their existence, but for something that happens so naturally, the act of actually attaining those upgraded forms was incredibly dark.

All Digimon begin their life cycles as Digi-Eggs before naturally digivolving into a higher-level life form. The main stages of digivolution are: Fresh, In-Training, Rookie, Champion, Ultimate, and Mega. In the Digimon Adventure anime, fans are probably most familiar with the Digimon in their Rookie stage, like Augumon or Gabumon. Their Rookie forms are seemingly their base for the majority of the anime. Even after the Digimon digivolve into a stronger version of themselves–like Augumon becoming Greymon and Gabumon becoming Garuruom–those digivolutions are only temporary, and the Digimon quickly go back to their Rookie state. However, the temporary nature of their digivolutions isn’t even close to as interesting as the initial Champion digivolutions themselves, as they require a significant stresser in order to activate.

Digimon Require their Partners be In Danger to Digivolve

In Digimon Adventure episode 3 (written by Satoru Nishizono, directed by Hiroyuki Kakudo), Tai and the gang are reeling after surviving two separate encounters with wild, powerful Digimon. Thankfully, after they arrived in this strange new world, they were greeted by their own personal Digimon, who were all immediately anxious to help them. When the group faced their first feral Digimon threat, the Digimon partners digivolved into their Rookie forms and fought off the crab-like Kuwagamon. When that wasn’t enough, Augumon digivolved into Greymon and stopped Kuwagamon once and for all. The very next episode, however, the team is attacked by another wild Digimon, Seadramon. This time, it was Gabumon who saved the day after he digivolved into Garurumon and defeated the deadly beast.

Aside from the obvious, these two battles had one very important thing in common: two of the kids had to be in mortal danger before their Digimon were able to digivolve. The added stress of seeing the people they cared for almost murdered in front of them pushed Augumon and Gabumon over the edge, and gave them the boost they needed to temporarily become Champions. This wasn’t lost on the characters within the Digimon anime either, as they sat down and dissected those instances before coming to the conclusion that the Digimon only responded to their partners being in danger before they could make their powerful transformations–which is honestly pretty dark. Sure, it can be viewed as courageous on the part of the Digimon, but there’s another possibility that comes to mind as well, one that’s much more malevolent.

Not only is it incredibly dark that Digimon have to nearly witness the death of their friends in order to digivolve, but it also calls into question the true allegiances of those Digimon. Could they be using their humans to attain newfound levels of power? And if so, wouldn’t they benefit from those humans being put in danger to digivolve? While that clearly isn’t the case in the anime, it does give fans pause to wonder, and that alone is pretty heavy for an anime that is geared towards people of all ages–proving that Digimon’s original secret to digivolving was incredibly dark (for more reasons than one).