More:

Especially if you’re willing to commit to letting your female characters get a little roughed up and scarred.

Beautiful.

Now he starts every phone call with a Pokemon update. He gets all the names wrong and asks me what a Dragonite is called every time he brings up the “fat fighting orange dragon”

“I have a cool pineapple head now!”

“I was down to my last stripey ball trying to catch the blue dragon snake. I told him if he ran away I was gonna be so mad.”

“And the gym had one of those big fat orange dragons!” (he still can’t remember what a Dragonite is called)

BUT THEN. but then. he’s also like, OUTRAGEOUSLY into it now? He’s level 27 and talks about how “the gym wars are brutal, babe,” and how long it takes to take down a level 10 gym? (LEVEL T E N)

And a couple weeks ago he called me to talk about the merits of the old-style Gyrados (which he pronounces guy-rad-os sorry I can’t stop him) that has the dragon breath move, versus the new ones that don’t because Niantic made a change. And he has like 6 Gyrados because his work is by a Magikarp nest or something? HOW MANY fucking magikarp do you catch for 6 gyrados? He’s about to evolve two more. H E L P.

and he says shit like, “Learning about individualized values really radicalized my thinking.” and he means it. Before he evolves ANY pokemon he googles CP estimates and has a pokemon calculator??

This morning he called me because he finally has enough Dratini candy to evolve a fat fighting dragon and wanted to talk about which Dragonair he should evolve. (One with high CP but bad IVs, one with medium-high CP, but okay IVs, and one with the lowest CP of the 3, but A+ IVs) And at this point he’s so far beyond my skill with the game (he’s been higher-leveled than me for months now) that I don’t even know what to tell him. I literally can’t advise him.

Team Instinct. I told him I was Team Valor when I first told him about the game and he was like, “Okay I’ll join your team babe!”

And then idk he forgot?? And when his account crashed after a week he did a Pikachu restart (that should have tipped me off about the impending obession tbh) and he picked Instinct again.

I ain’t even mad bruh. He so clearly belongs in Instinct. He’s happy there. It’s his natural habitat. Before work he goes and meets up with some other Instinct people to take the Georgetown Cupcake gym in DC. It’s super cute.

Then he goes to work and keeps the game open so he can grab Magikarp every couple minutes. Apparently his work is like ON a friggin nest.

He keeps his Pokemon Go habit a secret at work. Nobody knows. On his lunch break, he says, “hey I’m gonna go for a walk” and goes on a 12-pokestop loop. He makes sure to hit up the local Dratini and Pikachu nests (the presence of which is UNFAIR AF). He also take a few minutes to reinforce ‘his’ gym, by which point has been under attack a few times.

At work, he keeps his phone on data instead of wifi (he has unlimited data. For some godforsaken reason he went through 30GB/mo BEFORE Pokemon Go.) because that means his avatar jumps around a bit more?? He says he opens and closes the app a few times to reset it and get the GPS connection to reset and nab him a few pokemon.

He has 114 Pikachu candy. I hate him. Apparently he’s watching the anime almost every night. He’s on season 2. I think he’s just gonna go through and watch it A L L which is a prospect so terrifying it needs no explanation.

Out of the 6 Gyrados he’s evolved, he’s kept the top 3. He sent me some screencaps the other day of his current top-contender Magikarp and the pokedex entry, where you can see he’s caught 585 of them.

Five hundred eighty five. Who tf has TIME for that??

Apparently he still hasn’t decided which Magikarp to evolve.