About FALLDOWN MODE

Interested in learning more about our circle? Find individual bios and more information about the circle here!

Hi, I'm Sparrow, and I'm a freak!

In all seriousness, I'm an author with works very different from this published under my real name, including stories aimed at a younger audience. And while I take pride and joy in that writing, sometimes I just wanna hurt other people's fictional characters. I promise I love them very much and only wish for their happiness outside my dark and specific AU content, lol. Anyways, it's important to me I keep my professional identity separated, but if you're here and you, the adult person reading this, have an interest in found family, trauma processing, and dragons, feel free to ask privately via the Contact link!

I've been a Digimon fan since I was four years old, watching it air in the US for the first time. Honestly, my level of sometimes dormant, always recurrent special interest should've been a tip-off on the AuDHD.

Ken is my all time favorite character, and was also baby's first redemption arc. I used to be confused about why I related to him so deeply. While I did have a lot of academic expectations placed upon me at a young age, and I did often feel invisible unless I'd performed well, I hadn't done anything like the Digimon Kaiser.

(I realize now it's the deeply ingrained Catholic guilt. Surprise, bitch.)

Also let's be real all of us 02 fuckers have big feelings about the Dark Ocean. No need to explain. This is the first time I've written something as a co-author as opposed to a roleplay partner. I'm pretty damn pleased with how it turned out! Also, because I am That Guy, I ended up doing an entire follow-up series for everything that happens after the final chapter of our TakeKen saga. Check it out if you too would like to hurt your own feelings!

My name's Moro, and I love to see pretty boys cry.

I'm the reason FALLDOWN MODE exists in the form of a doujinshi circle in the first place! I'm an old-school weeb since around 2003, and I've been writing fanfic for about that long as well. My first fanfics were written by hand in a notebook which was then rotated between my friends until it was time for me to write the next part. I'm no professional like my partner, but I am very horny and so often the scenarios I wanted to read about simply hadn't been written. So in the grand tradition of many a fanfic writer, I had no option but to cook my own food, and that's continued to be the pattern ever since.

I only got into Digimon recently. I'm fairly sure Sparrow would've been fine with us being co-authors without any kind of formal organization, but I am nothing if not extra. It's Only You I Can't Escape exists entirely because of Sparrow's influence. She's the one who got me into Digimon in the first place, though I would say I'm really almost entirely here for Adventure 02 (and the occasional original characters).

It's Only You I Can't Escape came about from three factors all together: the theatrical release of Digimon Adventure 02: The Beginning film, Sparrow's frantic search for some very specific art, and one extremely unhinged evening of "yes, and-" that got way out of control.

She and I both attended a theatrical screening (subbed) on November 9th, 2023, and we loved it so much that it reactivated her ever-present 02 brainrot and awakened my 02 brainrot for the first time. Even though I'd watched the series with her, I never quite got the same level of investment as she had - until now, it seemed. I couldn't tell you what did it, but I really liked the movie and something just clicked into place in my brain in a way it hadn't before.

The very next day, a casual remark on my part set Sparrow down a rabbit hole of scrolling and searching her old Tumblr blogs for some very specific pictures of Takeru and Ken, a process which took her all day on the 10th and most of the day on the 11th! She spent cumulatively at least 10 hours trying to find it, and finally she DID!

And it was WORTH it, because the sketches she finally found were truly something sexy. We have preserved them here, as the original Tumblr post has been deleted along with the artist's crosspost. They can no longer be found online anywhere else. Click on any image to enlarge it.

Anyway, our imaginations were already primed... Fast-forward a week later, and, with the house to ourselves, we found ourselves still stuck on those images and ideas, on the irresistible appeal of Takeru/Ken as an awful relationship built upon fear and Takeru's righteous desire to punish Ken at all costs.

And then Sparrow said the magic words - "Let's watch episode 19 tonight."

Sparrow: Moro came up with the circle name because I taught her just enough lore to inflict psychic damage upon me.

Moro: The psychic damage is because it fits so well! In Digimon Adventure tri., when Hikari becomes depressed due to her brother's disappearance, her feelings are converted to data and this forces her partner Tailmon to evolve to the dark form of Ophanimon, Ophanimon: Falldown Mode. From Wikimon, "A form of Ofanimon [sp] that was so angry that it suppressed its own emotions and fell into madness. It swelled with anger at the world, where atrocious sins keep mounting no matter how many times they are purged[...]it hunts whichever opponents it has judged to have become a barrier to justice[...]"

I... don't like tri., but I couldn't help but think of Takeru in our work with such a description; someone who suppresses emotions inconvenient to them, who is subsequently pushed over the line and driven to madness by anger and acts irrationally and ruthlessly out of a desire to punish evil at all costs. (Patamon doesn't feature heavily in our AU for... obvious reasons, but it's worth noting that Seraphimon also has a theoretical Falldown Mode to match Ophanimon's.)

Initially, it definitely was just something for me to terrorize Sparrow with. But the more we thought about it, the more Sparrow and I liked the feel and sound, and since our story already had a title, when we got to discussing the idea of creating a doujinshi circle "FALLDOWN MODE" was ultimately what we selected for the name. I stylized it in all caps for impact and because Japanese doujinshi circles which use English words in their name sometimes do this.

It's true that the concrete reasons to create a doujinshi circle don't really exist in the West. We don't need it to post our works, we don't need it to register for an event (and indeed, if we did do sales, wouldn't need to wait for specific events to do so) and there's no real logistical necessity. But why not? Well, the most obvious answer is that we're high-level weebs! We like the ability to give ourselves a name to designate our collaborative works, and the unique and fun names appealed to us! Since AO3 doesn't have a means to do something like this (you can't, for instance, create a separate name to enclose multiple co writers that are on different accounts) we decided to do it outside that framework. This also means we aren't tied to anything in particular - this is our name because it's what we put on our works and what we "advertise" with, easy as that.

If you're interested in reading more about doujinshi generally, you can check out some of the essays on the Extras page!