Mathemagician

The toddling daughter's demands for her princess clothes and her dragon were met with fondness by the people aboard the small passenger ship. Her demands for her daddy, and her older brother's persistent air of shocked stillness, were a cause for sympathy. Here was a new widow traveling with her children to family in the colonies, some whispered.

The ship docked to resupply on Kyoshi. The woman and her children disembarked, to the surprise of everyone going on to the next port in safe, respectable Fire Nation territory.

Ursa was not very knowledgeable about politics and geography outside of her country's reach, but she had once heard the war ministers complaining of the impertinence of Kyoshi's continued neutrality, so she took a chance.

It was a bad chance to take, with pale skin and gold eyes and a daughter whose tantrum on the docks (this isn't Ember Island, you said this was a vacation, don't want this stupid fish-smelly place want DAD) threw firefly sparks into the air. Then there were angry villagers and the Kyoshi warriors and the usual talk of the Unagi, and who may or may not be thrown to them.

The Unagi itself, to whom a dockside commotion was like shaking a treat box, came to investigate.

It looked down at the new-maybe-food with wiggly hopefulness in all its great coils.

One of the maybe-foods glared back at it.

The first sound Zuko had made since they'd fled was a hiss. No one really noticed over the general yelling, except the Unagi.

The Unagi was also the first to notice the small boy hurl himself into the water, and it gleefully snapped its jaws downward at this self-gifting morsel even as its mother screamed.

Everyone went abruptly quiet at the Unagi's startled yelp. And then it started shaking its snout, but the tiny terror was not so easily dislodged.

Azula would be so proud of her dragon. He bit a bigger dragon and lived.

"My dragon beat your dragon," says the toddler, "This island is mine now."

"That's not how it works," they say.

This represents a fundamental misunderstanding of Mario's central plot structure. Mario always gets his ass beat in his initial encounter with an outside context problem, then spends the bulk of the game going around gathering allies and kicking the legs out from under the outside context problem's support structure.

"I don't think Kirby gets paid for this."

"That's-a not what I said."

(Our brains are so good at categorising experiences, that normally, as soon as we experience something, it’s absorbed, and no longer surprising; how delightful to find that we can be surprised by animals again!)

But it also helps you to pick out what’s REALLY inherent to the animal, what pieces of gesture and motion (obscured by colour, pattern or our own familiarity) are actually integral to the understanding of the true Beast….

🌿🌱

I've gone. Not one for goodbyes, I thought it best to slip out quietly. Love to you all, Giles.

"It's easy to say "violence is never the answer" if you've never had to fight for your life"

But Pokopia fully does not do that. The world is lonely without humans and lesser for humanity's absence. So much of the game is about how Pokemon miss humans and are struggling to make sense of a world without us, how the ecosystem is just as hurt by our absence as any other species, and how the things we left behind, even in ruins and burned shells, are often beautiful and strange and helpful to the Pokemon who find them.

Pokemon have always been this allegory for the natural world- back to the original idea of the games inspired by children who caught bugs and kept ant farms- and thus the relationship between Pokemon and humans becomes this allegory for the relationship between nature and humans. And Pokopia looks you dead in the eye and says "the world would be poorer without humans, and if we all vanished tomorrow the echoes of who we are and the things we did would still ring out for eons uncountable. We would be missed and mourned and searched for and the wound of our absence would be deeply felt on this earth for the rest of its turning. The actions of a few greedy short sighted humans will never change that."