Mostly void, partially stars

"They say that when someone in this world truly understands you, then it feels like they are right beside you, even if you're as far apart as the end of the land and the top of the sky." -a pokemon game

[redraccoondog]

[redraccoondog]

uhh.. why are my tandem mice wearing a tiny Groudon suit??

[redraccoondog]

The equivalent passage of time once you're older constantly feels insane cause like, sure. I made this side blog when I was in grad school, which doesn't feel like that long ago. But 12 years before THAT literal 9/11 had just happened lmao

[redraccoondog]

[redraccoondog]

[bloobluebloo]

Always happy to lend a hand…or take it

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[kbluebirdart]

Did you drink any H2O today?

art by me, ofc. Just want to draw something silly😅

[redraccoondog]

half-baked 5 am pre-calamity fanfic concept: Zelda tells the goddess statue "aight sounds like a you problem then" and gathers up the squad to Just Leave and lay low in Yona's non-Hyrulean fish town for the rest of time. Cue 50+ chapters of slice of life shenanigans

[redraccoondog]

100% Nintendo verified canon: the entirety of Zelda's extensive emotional damage from Rhoam's shitty parenting was undone by this single extremely dad reaction from Rauru

[redraccoondog]

Happy belated father's day to Hyrule's #1 dad

[kbluebirdart]

Totk Happy 2 years

[kbluebirdart]

snap! snap!📸📸

[redraccoondog]

It's my 11 year anniversary on Tumblr 🥳

[pocketseizure]

It’s a common interpretation of King Rhoam that he was abusive toward Princess Zelda. In many ways, this makes sense. He’s openly cruel to her in one of the cutscenes, and it’s clear that he’s pressured her into undergoing physically demanding religious rituals that seem to have no efficacy.

Still, I don’t think Rhoam is a bad person. He’s remarkably kind during his encounters with Link on the Great Plateau, and the diary he keeps hidden in his study in the Hyrule Castle library reveals that he was deeply concerned about Zelda’s wellbeing. Link’s memories reveal that the king gave his daughter a surprising amount of breathing room, allowing her to spend as much time away from the castle as she wished as long as it didn’t interfere with her duties.

I feel that Rhoam was doing the best he could in an extremely difficult situation. In the cutscene in which he’s cruel to Zelda, he informs her that people have been calling her a failure. This isn’t unfair, as most people in the kingdom wouldn’t understand that Ganon is an immediate threat, and everyone would more than likely resent the expense of excavating and reactivating the Divine Beasts and Guardians.

Rhoam understands how serious the situation is, however, and he understands that the fight against Ganon won’t be an ordinary war. If you knew that almost every single person in your kingdom would die, wouldn’t you do everything you could to ensure that didn’t happen? And could you really say that the pressure of political turmoil in the face of looming disaster wouldn’t affect you emotionally?

I’m not saying that child abuse is okay, obviously. These are fictional characters in a fantastic situation. Rather, what I want to say is that I can’t help but feel sympathy for Rhoam, who clearly made mistakes but was doing the best he could to protect both his kingdom and his daughter’s happiness, and I don’t think he deserves the hate he gets.

[redraccoondog]

As someone who accidentally made a popular post about Rhoam's "shitty parenting" -- even though it was far moreso a lighthearted joke about Rauru being a straight-up dad -- I feel compelled to add-on here because Rhoam's situation in this story does represent two incredibly important real-life lessons:

1. You don't know what you don't know.

2. You have no way of fully knowing what you would actually do in a situation, until you are in said situation yourself.

Because of how easy it is to forget this, we will all be villianized unfairly at some point in our lives, by others or even ourselves. This more or less highlights the importance of giving people "the benefit of the doubt", and by extension, wasting less of your emotional energy reacting to the things you see/read at face value.

Here is the primary example from my own life:

More than a decade ago, I was helping pull DNA samples from unidentified human remains in a morgue whose jurisdiction included America's most violent city at the time. This task included full, partial and potential human remains, frozen and dating as far back as 1997. The keyword here being "potential".

One of the cases included a black trash bag that had been found in the middle of a street and reported/collected for potentially including a human torso. You would think that between myself (a baby professional), and two different types of best-of-the-best professionals, we would be able to tell one way or the other from sight alone if there was any portion of human remains in this bag. But we just could not. Any way we looked at it or considered the possibilities, the consensus of the group was just "maybe?"

As someone who is professionally trained in the field of identifying human remains, that situation sounds insane. As someone who was actually there, it was insane - but not because anyone in the room was incompetent or ignorant or mal-intentioned. It just was an insane situation, and as it turns out, insane situations are far more common and disorienting than you will ever want to accept, no matter how often you experience them first-hand.

All this to say - when in doubt, don't be a dick. To yourself or to others. There should never have been the potential for a body to be in that bag in the first place.

[redraccoondog]

A tale from prehistoric times:

To this day, my almost quarter-century old Game Boy Color fires up like new. The battery in the Gold Version game cartridge itself is dead, so instead of my 200+h save file (which was a LOT for the time), you eventually get this screen where Nintendo of America really rolled the dice on a significant portion of circa 2000 pokemon-playing kids being named (or at least wanting to go by) "Karl".

This was back when playing as a boy was typically the only option in games and as a girl you simply rolled with it. Pokemon Crystal was so iconic for letting you play as a female character that my brother actually chose to play as a girl. Sixth grade me was shocked.

[redraccoondog]

dad joke rAUru breaks the fourth wall

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@bloobluebloo still guilty as charged

[redraccoondog]

dad joke rAUru breaks the fourth wall

[redraccoondog]

[redraccoondog]

dad joke rAUru breaks the fourth wall

[redraccoondog]

Robin (who is of course my mother-in-law in Stardew Valley) was my secret gift giver for the Feast of the Winter Star this year and this absolute legend of a pixelated MIL gifted me 25 hardwood. I literally laughed out loud. Like how on-brand for her, she knows there isn't time to play. The two of us carry this town 😒