In the world of Digimon, there are a number of established concepts and suggested theories that delve much deeper into how Digimon work, how they were created, what they are and how they can be told apart. You can find out here about the basics of the technical side to Digimon.

What is a Digimon?

The compound word Digimon is a hint in itself - it is short for digital monster. There are a number of differing accounts, but everyone agrees that digimon are creatures that are made up of data. All of their properties and attributes are stored in their digi-core, a physical sphere inside the digimon which acts much like a CPU or brain for the digimon. All digimon are created in the Digital World.

What is the Digital World?

The Digital World, sometimes shortened to Digiworld, is the world in which Digimon live. It is an alternate dimension to the real world, the world in which we live. It is intricately linked to our world through computers, electronics and digital communication, and it evolves and changes as computers, electronics and digital communication changes in our world.

There are many different continuities of the Digital World which all have different properties and are all usually completely seperate from each other, like the Digital Worlds from Adventure, Tamers, Frontier, Savers, the Wonderswan games, the Digimon World games, V-Tamer, Next and all of the other manga. It has been theorised that the historically accurate Digital World timeline from the video game Brave Tamer could be seen as the beginning of the Digital World.

From 1939-42, the ABC Computer (Atanasoff-Berry Computer), the very first computer, lays the foundations of the Digital World, then from 1943-46, the ENIAC computer (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) builds upon these foundations. From there, numerous iterations of the Digital World start to appear, each linked to different, parallel universes of Earth.

The Digital World that is focused on in the two series of Digimon Adventure runs closely parallel to two other worlds - a dream world where thoughts and dreams become reality, and a dark world that can make people's darkest thoughts reality. The Digital World itself draws some of the energy from the dream world to make thoughts reality, and at the same time the digital communication of the real world increases. The energy that the Digital World draws from the dream dimension starts to give form to the thoughts, dreams, beliefs and history of the population of our world, combining this with digital data, creates the very first Digimon.

Properties of a Digimon

Essentially, Digimon are simply data given physical form, therefore each digimon must have properties which distinguish themselves from each other.

Evolution

For information on evolution, digimon stages of development and types of evolution, click here.

Attributes

A theory states that several years ago, personal computers started spreading a mysterious computer virus spread into the network. The virus kept absorbing data, it continued to change quite like a creature, and one after another it kept multiplying. The virus passed for a while, and later artificial intelligence was invented. The virus being a "learning type" understood AI and spread great damage. After that someone hacked into the computer which the virus came from, and utilized the AI of the virus to develop a "vaccine" to oppose it (This seems like the origin of the present Vaccine kind Digimon). Moreover, people began sending and receiving e-mail (This seems like the origin of the present data kind Digimon), and thus Digimon with different attributes were born.

Vaccine, Data and Virus digimon all have a mutual relationship. The role of a Vaccine digimon is to prevent attacks from Virus digimon. These digimon usually have a strong sense of justice, but this doesn't apply to them all. Data digimon are used for sending and receiving e-mails. They take in Vaccine digimon and in turn are protected from Virus digimon. Virus digimon were made to destroy data. Many of them are brutal, but there are still exceptions. In general,

However, a certain amount of digimon don't have one of the three mutual attributes. Digimon with the Free attribute are descendents of digimon from Ancient times. This attribute doesn't have an advantage or disadvantage over any others. Hybrid digimon whose data has successed the Warrior 10 have the Variable attribute. They copy the attribute of their opponent.

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Data		Vaccine
Kyuubimon

The main three attributes, Vaccine, Data and Virus, affect the appearance of the digimon. For example, digimon that usually have the Vaccine attribute have been observed to have the Data attribute, and have a different appearance, like the Data and Vaccine versions of Kyuubimon, shown above. A digimon's attribute may change with influence. It is also thought that digimon at the Baby stages have no attribute.

Families

Families originated from the card game, where the different card backgrounds indicated the family that the digimon was associated with.

Contributors

Much information for this page came from the research of the people at Digimon V-Tamers Residence, was translated by SakuyamonX. Thank you! Information about the Digital World timeline came from the Digimon Encyclopedia, courtesy of Chris McFeely. Thank you!