it’s a long journey! frankly, i don’t know how to write it out without getting very personal and oversharey. wobbuffet is my favourite pokemon but it’s a lot deeper than just i think he looks cool or cute or whatever. so if you want the real answer here it is.
i’ve been kin w/ jessie teamrocket literally as long as i can feasibly remember, i don’t remember a life without pokemon and i don’t remember a life where her and i weren’t one in the same. as a kid i didn’t really have the language to process kin stuff so i just kinda copied whatever she did in an attempt to feel a little less dysphoric in the body and the life i had now. jessie didn’t like her wobbuffet, so i didn’t like wobbuffet.
this was like, a very casual thing i would bring up every once in a while, until it wasn’t. at some point around 2006, a wobbuffet plushie manifested in my house. it was a small jakks pacific one. i did not buy it, and no one bought it for me because no one paid attention to the fact that i still liked pokemon long after it was ‘cool’ to do so. a wobbuffet just appeared in my house. this unnerved me. i resented the thing, and yet, i could not get rid of him.
in 2013 pokemon xy came out, and i ran into reflection cave to get to the next town, where my underleveled, half-dead team was assaulted by approximately ten thousand wild wobbuffet who made it their lifes mission to tank every hit and faint my entire team. this was my final straw. my hatred for the patient pokemon reached a fever pitch. no longer did i find myself mildly annoyed at the cadence of his screams. now he was my personal enemy.
to the people here who don’t follow my main, this might come as a shock–but i became a wobbuffet hate blog. just the most overexaggerated, raw, white-hot anger at these docile little things who never hurt anyone without first being hurt themselves. there was basis behind this hatred, yes, but more than anything it was… kind of a joke. i kinda did it because it was just funny to me to waste anger on something so pointless. my friends leaned into it–they’d buy me wobbuffet plush, text me wobbuffet pictures, one of my friends even made me a wobbuffet t-shirt to personally antagonize me. my MASSIVE, SPRAWLING WOBBUFFET COLLECTION, which contains about 30 individual wobbuffet, started as a joke. my best friend kept buying me plush to annoy me. so i just… kept going.
in what is probably the MOST emblematic of this period, my ex and i watched an episode of the anime featuring a whole village of wobbuffet, which i then recorded commentary over where i was frothing at the mouth and out for blood.
the most hilariously ironic line of this entire video, in retrospect, being: “This is propaganda. They’re trying to humanize these evil creatures.”
so, i did this for about 3 years. the entire time, quietly keeping it under wraps that in all this obsessive hatred, wobbuffet had kinda started to grow on me. hate isn’t really the opposite of love, apathy is. if you dedicate yourself to something, even negatively, you’re making space for it in your heart. i had made a lot of space for this pokemon.
it started early, if i’m being honest, but my pride kept me from admitting it. i was not allowed to CHANGE especially not on something so drastic. change means i’m wrong, and I AM NEVER WRONG, HOW DARE YOU IMPLY I AM!
but in the end it came down to a moment of reflection. when i was 11, a rough and tumble child with bruised fists and venom on my tongue, i fell in love and got my heart broken. the girl responsible inspired me to be a kinder human, so i sat down and had a conversation with my morals. that’s when i learned about the threefold law of karma, and that’s when i decided i would no longer be punching my problems and would instead become a calm pacifist who waited for the universe to punish evildoers and all who had hurt me. eventually, i became a doormat and decided to take my fire back–but a healthy amount. enough to keep me safe, to keep others safe, but still to allow karma her reigns upon my life.
i did not think this moral of mine was something people really associated with my character, until i was hanging out with an old enemy i was trying to make amends with. they mentioned it, and because of the way they said what they said, i realized that i had so easily instilled the fear of karmic retribution in them that they had likely spent the last few years of their life blaming every horrible thing they’d been through on the bad they did to me. that was who they saw me as at their core–patient. waiting. building up a counterstrike.
all things considered, my personality is probably the last person you’d expect to raise a wobbuffet. i have a preference for fire and poison types, i’m incredibly loud and controlling when it comes to my own life. i do NOT wait for my problems to get better, i value action over thought, i’m fiery and confident and self-preserving to a fault. but at the core of that is endurance, protection, and a genuine desire to be a kind person, to wait out the bad and know that things will get better, that i don’t always HAVE to fight.
i am a fighter and i am angry and i am not passive any longer and i am someone in charge of my own life. but if you were to take my core, what lies beneath everything, what governs all my peace with myself and allows me to know when to stop fighting… you could make it into a pokemon. and i love that pokemon with all i am.
