Yet Improving

Things end up going smoothly, and the animal is pretty cute! It looks like nothing Grace has ever seen before, and he's well aware it could obliterate his bones if it suddenly charged at him. But it's quite small, and it makes adorable noises.

All this is my excuse for Rocky to have his first experience hearing the absurd baby talk so many of us do with animals lol.

Grace's voice pitches up and down wildly, cooing and spouting incoherent words. He strokes the barrier between him and the creature, petting it as best he can, and for whatever reason, finds it necessary to say, "Who's a good little domesticated animal?? Yeeesss, it's you!"

Curious pebble (1/?)

It seems what's left of my human side is slowly changing in me

show: "This character is immortal. Watch as their entire destroyed body rebuilds itself via immortality." me when I have the chronic affliction: "Does immortality cure the chronic affliction? Do they come back together and the affliction is just fixed? Is that part of immortality healing?"

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."