I got a Mesprit Sitting Cuties plush recently and when I opened the parcel I lowkey regretted buying it, not for any normal reason, but because my OTHER Mesprit plush was a childhood favourite toy that I got when I was 8, long before I even started playing Pokémon.
And I loved her so much that I took her to primary school several times and took her on adventures in the playground and I invented so much lore about her. And I even made up my own joke where I would hold up a Pritt glue stick in one hand and Mesprit in the other and Isay "Don't Mess with Mess Pritt!" and it was so dumb but to me it was the funniest thing ever.
I was just so invested in researching her on the internet when I finally did get into Pokémon and I lost my shit when I played Pokémon Pearl for the first time and MESPRIT WAS THERE!!!! And I spent MONTHS unsuccessfully searching for her and my heart would skip a beat whenever I heard the opening notes of her battle theme whenever I was walking in the tall grass. She was like my Moby Dick. Finally caught her in White 2 where she's a static encounter instead of a roaming Pokémon and I was cackling because she couldn't run away this time.
And then Legends Arceus revealed that Lake Verity was a volcanic lake and it made me laugh my ass off because it reminded me of a childhood misconception that Mesprit was a "Fire Element Pokémon" because on the Pokémon Wiki there was a subheading that read "Mesprit in the Manga" that I misread as "Mesprit in the Magma."
All this to say, the evening of when I recieved the new Mesprit plush (and after a tin of strawberry daquiri) my brain flashed back to Lotso's backstory in Toy Story 3 where he became evil after his owner lost him and replaced him with another Lotso Bear and he thought she didn't love him anymore and I genuinely started crying because it felt like I was replacing Mesprit too.
Of course now that I'm not slightly tipsy I can understand that the two plushies can coexist and just because I got a new Mesprit, doesn't mean all those memories are erased.
I'm also realising how funny it is that the Being of Emotion is making me feel, well, emotional. GIRL, STOP. YOU DID THIS TO ME