I think one of the reasons I hyperfixate so much on Taichi and Koushirou’s relationship in specific even though I really love exploring all of them is just that for most of the kids and their friendships/potential romances there’s so much meta on them and so much discussion even if it’s like, “x character ate spaghetti so they clearly love y character,” and I think it’s all honestly fun and great but just
Taichi and Koushirou have this incredibly wonderful bond that only deepens throughout adventure and they remain two of the closest digidestined from 01 all the way into 02. It’s really not subtext and the two of them spend an incredible amount of time together. While Our War Game is a different director it still honestly showed their progression into being incredible friends and went out of it’s way to show they were two of the closest– neither of them even knew Yamato or Mimi were out of the city or even the country or what Jyou was doing that day, for instance. They always seem to be turning to each other for dire situations and they bring a different strength to the table that’s quintessential to the whole adventure because you really can’t have one without the other and their whole relationship is so incredibly natural, ups and downs and everything. No matter how you want to shape it, they just work well together and it’s so wholesome and amazing and there’s just so much of them to explore further.
But finding anything about them is so hard. If you find posts about Taichi they tend to completely forget Koushirou matters at all to him. Entire blogs will dissect every hair on his head, but you would never know he has a friend who isn’t Yamato and if you’re lucky maybe they’ll mention Sora. And if you’re lucky to find meta on Koushirou you might get a glimpse of Taichi here and there, but nothing about how much they really do encourage and help each other overall. In general there tends to be a complete imbalance that acts as if only Koushirou puts value into their relationship and Taichi just barely acknowledges him– but it’s wholly untrue. There’s plenty of other things, but just even when you think about Taichi’s most emotional arc the character who was there with him and for him was Koushirou– and he was chosen to be with Taichi twice. Taichi trusts him. Taichi asks him to watch Hikari as Taichi protects both of them. He actively cares for Koushirou, too. It’s really there throughout the show and them being best friends is not something that was invented by Digimon 2020.
But I just feel like overall we never really get past this wall of, “Hey wait, do you guys think they were friends?” to look at all the other deeper things between them and then even that’s riddled with meta on other characters and misconceptions and it’s like such few posts exist on some of the deeper level things because it just goes right back to talking about the other relationships and I’ve just been here too long
