Character · Digimon
Patamon
Orange, palm-sized, and flying on a pair of ears that have no business lifting anything.
In Otakana the clue reads: Small orange creature with ears for wings
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Digimon
- Letters
- 7 · Hard
Patamon belongs to the youngest of the eight children, which places him at the softest end of a show that is otherwise about children fighting for their lives in a machine. He flaps two oversized ears to hover, attacks by holding his breath and firing the air out again, and spends much of the first series being carried rather than doing any carrying.
The reversal is the reason people remember him. When his partner finally needs him, Patamon becomes Angemon, an armoured six-winged figure who is nothing at all like the creature that preceded it, and the cost of that fight is the moment the 1999 series stopped being a toy commercial for a lot of viewers. Digimon Adventure was noticeably willing to hurt its audience.
He also fills the ordinary comic role well: perching on a head, misunderstanding human food, panicking. Toei paired the least imposing partner with the smallest child on purpose, so that the two of them grow up in the same direction at the same speed across the series.
Spelling PATAMON
PATAMON is seven letters and ends in the franchise suffix MON. The front repeats a vowel, pa-ta, so an early A gives you two positions at once. There is no romanisation trap here at all: the Japanese name is written in katakana and comes into English letter for letter, which makes PATAMON one of the more honest answers in the set.