AU where Pokemon anime is as good and talks about serious stuff like death, but Digimon have better games and is more popular.

Still quite vanilla compared to Digimon, though. A lot of the kids had some really depressing backstories. Matt's parents divorced for some reason and HE had to decide which son of the 2 brothers get to live with which parent, and was effectively separated from brother and mother, both of which he loved. Izzy's real parents died on a car accident and he was adopted, which he discovered by overhearing a talk, and this turned him into an introvert, and the burden was phychologically killing his adopted mother for years. Kari got a goddamn pneumonia at 5 that almost killed her because she tried to hide it and Tai took her outside, which put a sense of guilt on him that lasted for years. And then there is fucking Gatomon's story.

And ALL of this on an anime targeted at kids to sell toys and cards. All of this just from the first anime. And they did not do anything to sugar-coat any of this, instead explaning it all thorougly.