#Aki you are truly beloved by the people who can truly understand you and they love you for who you are and what you are you are so beloved.

[d34dbr4in]

🥀. You know you're better than this.

[lalunanymph]

❝𝐛𝐚𝐛𝐲'𝐬 𝐟𝐢𝐫𝐬𝐭 𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐛𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐤❞

# bonten daddies finding out about their child’s first heartbreak

-> sfw, mentions of guns in sanzu’s part, bonten daddies being papa bears, slightly suggestive in rindou’s part, allusions to violence cause duh it’s bonten

# s. mikey, h. ran, h. rindou, s. haruchiyo, h. kakucho, k. hajime

# MIKEY

quiet sniffles from his daughter’s bedroom draw his attention when he returns from work. it’s close to 3 in the morning and the platinum-haired man frowns, gently knocking on the door. “sweetheart?” the sniffling stops and the door slowly swings open. puffy red eyes from the small blonde girl in front of him set off warning alarms, especially when she tries to fake a smile.

“tou-san, w-what’s up?” 

“why’re you crying?” mikey doesn’t mince his words, going straight to the heart of the matter. at the mention of her woes, his daughter’s lips pucker and fresh tears glisten in those onyx eyes she inherited from him. 

“n-nothing.” with his daughter's penchant to hide her true emotions just like him, he definitely doesn’t believe her.

“can i come in?” she lets him into her bedroom and sits on the edge of her paisley-covered bed. 

“i... don’t get mad at me tou-san... but i broke up with someone.” it was the fact that she was hesitant to share her problems with him while still begging him not to scold her that did mikey’s heart in. looping his arm around the teenager, he says, “i can never be mad at you. especially when you’re already this heartbroken. your mama will also understand.” heck, i was the one making her cry the most before you were born, my sweet girl. he looked back on his past mistakes ruefully. 

at his words, emma breaks down and sniffles, telling how this boy at school that she was going out with had dumped her for some other girl in his science class over text.

mikey reassures her, letting his precious little girl flood his shirt with her salty tears. when she’s all cried out and asleep, he tucks her in and smoothes a kiss on her forehead. once the door closes on her exhausted form, he whips out his phone and dials a familiar number.

“sanzu. yeah, i know it’s late. but i have a job for you.”

# RAN

everyone knows not to mess with a haitani. from their fearsome reputation as the iron-fist rulers of roppongi to their affiliation as executives at the most dangerous crime organization in japan, only the truly gullible and suicidal would dare lay a finger on the people they love. which is what ran thinks when he sees the tear tracks on his beloved daughter’s face.

“what happened?”

you’re on the bed together with reika, rubbing her back. flashing him a helpless look, you shake your head. “she won’t tell me.” your six-year-old daughter gives another loud wail and the both of you cringe.

ran sighed and carded his fingers through his salt-and-pepper streak hair. the combination of his age and parental responsibilities had given the older haitani a fine smattering of white hairs and a few wrinkles on his face. but by no means did it downplay his good looks. his daughter who also inherited his chiseled features and lilac eyes refused to look at him when he took over, leaving you to shuffle out of the room.

reika has always been a daddy’s girl and if she couldn’t open up to you, your next best bet would be ran. “sweetheart, why’re you crying?” the young girl sniffed and pouted.

“aki t-told me he didn’t want to marry me.” ran was dumbfounded. 

“aki as in… that five-year-old in your class?”

 she nodded and sniffed loudly. “he went around the playground s-saying i have c-cooties!”

ran gaped, his mind flashing to how badly he had once treated other women. that was before he found himself saddled as a father to the most headstrong young girl out there. call it karma, but ran haitani would be damned if he let a boy treat his daughter the same way how he used to treat those girls before you came along. soothing her as best as he could, ran slips out of the room once she quietens and dials the first number that comes to mind. 

“rin? yeah, is riku-chan still in the same class as reika? good. good. how fast is he at spreading a rumor—?” 

he did not notice how you were standing behind him, arms crossed over your chest and shaking your head lightly; completely amused at how ran haitani did not play fair especially when it concerns his loved ones. 

# RINDOU

similar to ran, rindou can be overprotective especially if it concerns family. when he came back home from work to find you fretting in the kitchen by yourself, he pauses when the first thing you tell him to do is, “go and talk to your son.” 

the now older executive sighs and sets his briefcase down, loosening his tie. he lingers long enough in the kitchen to give you a peck on your lips before trudging to his son’s room. he finds the smaller, blonde version of him on his computer, firing away mindlessly at a game. clearing his throat, rindou drags a chair closer to him and tilts his head to the side. 

“are you winning?” 

riku gives him a non-committal shrug. 

“can we talk?” 

his son stops the game and fixes his father with those same sleepy lilac eyes. 

“what’s going on?” 

got dumped, riku mutters and rindou immediately sighs.

“bud, you’re still so young. there will be plenty of girls to work through when you get close to my age.” leaning forward as if he were conspiring with his mini-me, rindou whispered, “and don’t tell your mama, but i’ll be helping you out. you’ve got your old man in your corner. these tricks work—it got your mama to go out with me.”

riku smiles for the first time since he entered the room. you clear your throat and rindou looks up, sheepishly grinning when he catches your mock glare. 

“i hope you’ve been teaching our son the gentlemanly way of dealing with a breakup.”

“scouts honor,” rindou nods solemnly, not missing the way how his son smirks at him in the same bastard manner as his father once your back was turned. 

# KAKUCHO

your tired sigh catches his attention during dinner. while he’s helping you clean the dishes, kakucho looks over and frowns. “everything alright, love?”

you stiffen, and that minute action is enough for him to set the plate down with a sharp click. “love?” 

“kaoruko hasn’t left her room for the whole evening.”

that alarms him. “why didn’t you tell me about it?” 

you reassure him that you will check it out and when you do go up to her room, kakucho can’t fight back his curiosity when he follows you, hanging by the banister to catch snippets of the conversation. “... i don’t think i will ever find love again...” 

his daughter’s soft voice absolutely breaks his heart. 

“oh, don’t say that, sweetie. let me tell you something that no teenager wants to hear, ‘ruko. but you will find love again. you will fall in love more than once and it’ll be as beautiful and magical as the first time.”

“but i don’t want to do it all over again,” she whines, reminding him of your ways. “i want—what you and papa have is beautiful and i want that.”

“your papa and i took years to get to where we are now. you weren’t there to see the fights we had. a love like that is not handed on a silver platter, but it’s built from the ground up.” 

“she’s right.”

his daughter’s dark eyes widen with surprise when her father appears and sits down on the bed next to you. he takes her other hand and squeezes it gently. “you will find love again and you will find the right person you want to build everything up with. it may take years but it’s all worth it.” 

he smiles at you and you return his fond look. kaoruko sniffs and manages a small upturn quirk of her lips. that minute expression itself was enough to tell you both that your little girl would be on the right track to recovery.

# SANZU

“aites. who do i have to kill?”

“haru—”

“a knife to the gut? a bullet to the head?” 

“haru, he is only 16—”

“he hurt my little girl!” he nearly bellows, ice blue eyes flashing wildly. “and no one hurts our baby.”

you wince at his ardor and nod. “i know. i know, but we have to solve this civilly—”

“papa?”

harumi blinks at the comical sight of her father waving his hands over his head while you tried to calm him down by fluttering yours.  

“baby!” sanzu coos, switching from manic anger to dripping sympathy, and brings her into his arms. “mama told me everything that happened. here—” your eyes widen when he sets a small gun in her hands. “the safety is off but if you want to—”

before he can speak, you smack him up over the head and wrench the gun from your daughter’s hand, tossing it onto the bed like it was a loaded bomb. haruchiyo swears and rubs his neck, glaring at you. 

“really haru? really? teaching our barely legal daughter how to use a firearm? are you cra—” 

“i’ve forgiven him,” harumi whispers and you both whip your head around to look at her. she shrugs. “he’s really immature and i could never date someone like that.” 

all was silent. and then sanzu breaks the quiet with a cackle. “thank goodness you never got your mama’s taste in men.”

he nearly avoids your next smack to the back of his head. 

# KOKONOI 

you have to pray that hajime doesn’t see the mess your daughter left while on a rampage. her room looks like a tornado has swept through it and you curse the infamous kokonoi temper tantrum when you wade through piles of discarded books right towards the eye of the storm where a small girl with dark hair is sobbing.

“baby—” 

she shirks your touch on her shoulder. 

“what the hell happened?” 

you both looked up to find hajime’s pinched expression taking in the mess in the room with disbelieving eyes.

“sorry tou-san, ka-san,” hiname hiccups. “i-i’ll clean it up.”

knowing that something was wrong, koko joins you in between the tossed books, papers, and sheets to sit next to his daughter who was red-eyed and exhausted from crying.

“bad day?” he surmises. she nods. “the worst.”

“wanna talk about it?”

you’re relegated to the side as the apple of hajime’s eye starts to blubber and tell her father about her breakup. but all was forgiven when she sought your embrace and you held onto her as hajime wrapped his arms around the two most precious people in his life. 

“i’ll kill him,” hajime whispers to you.

“not now, baby,” you chastise quietly as your daughter starts to sob again. “and hiname was seeing a girl.”

kokonoi pauses. “oh. wow. okay. guess i’ll leave the killing to you, then.” 

you don’t miss his smirk. blood will be shed alright, but not by the feared bonten executive. his usually genial and easygoing wife will see to it that retribution will be paid. if there was one thing he could count on, it would be that you would complement him wherever he fell short.

i’m so lucky, he thinks and buries a fond smile in favor of patting his daughter’s head. we make a great team. 

*reika (ran’s daughter) got her first heartbreak at 6 while riku (rindou’s son) had his later on when he was about 15. ever competitive with each other, the haitani brothers tried to see which one of them could get their wives pregnant first. riku and reika were born just a week apart.

© all works belong to lalunanymph. do not copy, repost or claim as your own. 

[windsweptlassie]

On Love

So as you know I made this uquiz with an open-ended question at the end, tell me something about love, and I’ve gotten the most wonderful responses! They range from descriptions of wonderful partners: 

Lauren: oh, how long I went without being myself until I met him and he showed me who I truly was and that my worth was higher than I ever thought was possible

Levi: I love who we are with each other. I love who I am with you. In your company I am me. In your company I am the best of me. The best with the best, I've told you. I wouldn't give you up for anything

Daniel: i fell in love for the first time when i was 17... at the time, i didn’t realize it was the first time, i thought i’d been in love before, a couple times actually, but falling in love at 17 was such a fulfilling experience, it felt so forceful yet so right. it’s when i first truly understood what love was. never before had i felt so understood and so cared for as i did when i was in love with her, and she was in love with me. it’s been nearly 4 years since then, and nearly 3 years since we broke up and stopped talking, and still, i think about her almost every day. i’ve never known anyone like her; to me, she was love itself.

El: oh i’m in love with everyone that i know op!!! especially my girlfriend, of course ,but also my friends and my family and random people on the street and uh

Grace: i’ve met my soulmate and we plan on getting an apartment and marrying after college

A: I’m going to ask the woman I love to marry me and I just wanted to tell someone because I am so excited

Jeremy: you ever have that feeling where basically after years of denying that someone couldnt understand you in a way or love you and then the next thing you know you happen to find that person and its just great from then on out? idk how to explain it anyways I love my boyfriend so much he means the world to me

Lucy: i am so happy i have found the one i love

to descriptions of best friends and favorite people:

Nightbyrd: Love is a hug from an alzheimer's patient who hasn't the foggiest idea who you are, but they know you're worth hugging.

H: I have been doing so much yoga with my roommate recently!! It's a great way to center my mind for an hour

Riv: [platonic] i’ve literally never met anyone who understands me in the way that my best friends do. they’re literally the best people in the whole world and i genuinely don’t know what i’d do without them. i love them with my whole heart

Cillian: when i talk about how much i love my best friend i get so teary eyed because i cant believe that such a genuinely wonderful person wants to speak to me every day - i care for her more than anyone else on this planet

O: my two besties are my sources of happiness and they’re so pretty i would die for them :D

to beautiful quotes:

Kai: "you have bewitched me, body and soul, and I love, I love, I love you. I never wish to be parted from you from this day on." DARCYYYY PLS MY HEART CANT HANDLW THIS PAIN

Dorian: When the plane went down in San Francisco, I thought of my friend M. He’s obsessed with plane crashes. He memorizes the wrecked metal details, ____the clear cool skies cut by black scars of smoke. Once, while driving, he told me about all the crashes: The one in blue Kentucky, in yellow Iowa. How people go on, and how people don’t. It was almost a year before I learned that his brother was a pilot. I can’t help it, I love the way men love. (accident report in the tall, tall weeds- ada limon, bright dead things)

Adam: every day I think about lemony snicket I will love you if I never see you again I will love you if I see you every Tuesday or however it goes. and it KILLS ME. love only fits in small things

Hero: “Your heart beats in my ribs and mine in yours, and both in God’s… The divine magnet is in you, and my magnet responds.” - Herman Melville to Nathaniel Hawthorne

Mary: "Love is watching someone die."

Alex: "meet me at blue diner, i'll take coffee and talk about nothing baby"

Sparrow: "How dare you love me like you've never known fear?" and "For you, the world," and "Darling, I was born to press my head between your shoulder blades," and "Will you start where I end?"

V: " You want to die for love. You always have. " and "someone will remember us, I say, even in another time" are living rent free in my mind 24/7 and I'm shaking. When will I finally be not the only one falling ?

Sahar K: To love another person is to see the face of god!!!

Miriam: all the love in the world is useless when there is total lack of understanding- kafka

Juls: Don’t you think they are maybe the same? Love and attention

to practices of love:

Leo; i love feeling happy bc somebody that i love is happy and comfortable....like its not about me i just love seeing you smile. we are safe together...idk i just feel it bro

A: I like to think love is leaning on each other during the light or dark days. Its a personal mission of mine to find out who I am and what I want. Yet I never seem to find my place in this world and as I look and look , I realise the only place I can be myself even with or without the efforts to find myself was done on that day or not, I am always tired so shall I lean on you? And you can lean on me as well. I shall be your fig tree and you shall be my favourite willow tree.

L: It's too late at night to be soul searching, but it's a journey we all seem to find ourselves on these days.

Anthi: feeling safe and at home, I guess (also I love frogs)

Julia: ive found that loving someone is like becoming your own thesaurus. you have to find or come up with infinite ways to say, you’re beautiful, or, i love you. it’s a gift

Galexies: ive been writing letters to the person i'd love one day since i was 14. i write them in a little journal usually, but i've been digitizing them into emails and sending them to one account that i'll give to them someday. i'd like to put pictures, but i haven't been outside much recently so theres that. i wonder if they'd like the sunsets i have on file, or if they'd find my cat cute in a bowtie.

Caeles: Love is sharing fruit slices and making someone tea at random

Dundy: Love is sending your friends cursed shit and watching them react in horror

to crushes and potential loves: 

Jess: I have a crush on my roommate. It sucks, but it's also wonderful. I get to be around him all the time when we're at school. we share a life together; it's rather domestic. I think a lot about marrying him and being domestic with him forever. It won't happen, and I'll move on eventually, but I'll be happy with him for as long as I can. I hope you feel loved tonight, because you are. Sleep well.

Aki: I so desperately want to believe that love is fake because I’ve seen what happens when loved ones leave but whenever I start to convince myself that I’ll never love anyone my best friend messages me telling me she loves me. She’s the only person I’ve ever pictured having a future with but love scares me and I don’t really know what to do but I think as long as she’s with me in some way, I’ll be fine

Hi: her her i keep thinking abt her.... gonna see her in 8 days or so i really miss her. its ok if shes never gonna love me like i want her to really being her friend spending time with her makes me the happiest girl on earth.... outsold antidepressants

Kit: this guy i have a crush on has hypnotically dark brown eyes and he's wonderful and shows me kindness like no one else

Juno: my crush has all the stars in his eyes

Mads: When I have the courage to meet my eyes with hers, the world stands still

Be Nice To Me: Look bro I never do these but I am yearning to hold them SO badly right now and someone needs to know it besides me

to the trials of love: 

Pppppp: I just wanna love like from the movies and what I read about.. but everyone tells me that that’s fictional and rare to find in the real world and it sucks bc it seems like all the guys I’ve met are terrible and the norms of society are all about not respecting women and uthdjdjdk

Manny: I have been in love before and I will be again but I’m not now and I miss it

Ok: I don't think I've ever been in love, though I love many people. I am waiting for the day I look at someone and can say, YES. IT'S YOU.

Chloe: idk rn i'm like okay with my love and i'm happy so we'll see i'm just a little cautious rn bc my last partner told me i didn't know how to love

L: love is so fucking complicated I don't even know where to start

Corrin: He’s not real and it worried me that I will never allow myself to live or be loved because I will always be waiting for him

Sean: Good luck it dont exist

Serena: i want 2 b in love :(( </3

13: I don’t know anymore

M: I just really don’t like dealing with it lol

to beloved characters: 

Janaya: I’m madly in love with my comfort and kin character and I hope maybe in the afterlife I can relive a life with him in some sort of dimension

Jhgjdf: when i was a kid i had a crush on ash ketchum from pokemon and id always daydream about being a female pkmn trainer and meeting him and we fall in love

to advice and prose: 

Mikolai: Love is earth, gentle and soft at first flight but upon being broken, drowns you in the dry choking wastes of its consequences...

Thex: Your hands will not go cold without someone to hold them. I am here. I will be here.

Kat: it is the nearest proof to god that i find myself surrounded by people who love in a way that complements so wonderfully the way i love

H: believe in love out of spite believe in love to prove everyone wrong believe in love because you were told not to and we will not do what we’re told anymore believe in love because it’s the strongest act of teenage rebellion we have left believe in love because it’s easier not to and when is easy worth doing? believe in love because everything says otherwise but you are untouchable, you are your own, you are not made by their design believe in love because, perhaps, you are love

Ali: I used to want a kind of love that feels like coming home and now I want nothing more than to be away from home on many different adventures

Em: you dont need to love yourself to accept it from others

to the small, the simple, and the sweet:

Ireal: Poems

O: Flowers

Fay: ah im sorry that i’m feeling unmotivated but you are very kind.

Ad: we love LOVE

A: <3

Isak: small things

H: intense

Hey: Listening to a clock ticking away

S: her

E: <3

Hania: Amorous, I adore that word ^^

Catboy: wholesome

J: i love love so much it hurts

Emmy: hi i love the song darkest of discos!! try and give it a listen!! <3

Nora: Love is painful, but most of the time love is great

Ariel: i like the comfort it can bring

M: i love love

to food!

Cool Whip: Matzoh ball soup!!

Woop: I love sausages.... I hope that's ok with you?

and animals too <3

Nee: hmm i have pet geckos and i love them very much!

96: raccoons ????

DJ Big Penis: cats

:3: I Love frogs,,, love is stored in the frog,,,

I hope that this serves as a sweet compilation of what love means! Love to all of you, it warms my heart so much to hear about your people and your geckos and your characters and soup and all the songs and quotes you love. <3 Strength to all of you who are figuring out to do about your feelings for your crush, and congratulations to you who are proposing or moving in with your person! Your words are a source of light to me, truly.

[shirlleycoyle]

The Tamagotchi Cemetery

This article was originally published on Burials and Beyond. You can subscribe to the Burials and Beyond Patreon here.

“I thought it would be better for him here because I didn’t really want to reset him because it would be like a different thing and I was really close to him. I know that sounds stupid, but I was. But you can bury your pets and if you love something else, you can bury them as well.”

So said young mourner Danielle Perren in 1997.

Interring her pet into the beautiful farmland of Pontsmill, Cornwall, Danielle’s beloved friend was placed into a tiny wooden coffin and buried in a small square grave, there to rest in peace. Danielle’s grief was very real, but her pet? Not so much. That was a Tamagotchi.

In 1996, Japanese toy designers Aki Maita and Yokoi Akihiro debuted the first ever Tamagotchi. The tiny plastic case held the world’s first virtual pet, which, despite being a simple arrangement of pixels, required constant care and attention, lest the creature perish. Released by Bandai, the egg-shaped toy was one of the biggest fads of the 90s, maintaining a surprising popularity over the decades, with over 82 million units sold as of 2017.

The name itself is a portmanteau of two Japanese words; ‘tamago’, meaning ‘egg’ and ‘uotchi’, meaning watch. Considering the product is an egg shaped toy, the size of a watch…it seems to be pretty solid marketing.

���Image: ​​​Mathieu Polak/Sygma/ Sygma via Getty Images​

Those of us who were at school in the 90s will vividly recall a classroom of incessant bleeps and cries of ‘I’ve gotta feed ‘im’, before the eggs were promptly and unsurprisingly banned from schoolyards. From this grew a strange, rarely remembered, sideline in individuals who would take your Tamagotchi into daycare, feeding and washing them (via tiny button clicks) until you could return from school or work. As bizarre as it sounds, after recently discovering a pair of 25-year old Tamagotchi survivors, I believe nothing to be impossible.

The Tamagotchi interface is incredibly simple, with most utilising three buttons, which correspond to care functions of the creature. The pet, should it live that long, is designed to go through a basic life cycle of Baby, Child, Teenager and Adult (with later versions adding a hopeful Senior option). However, the majority of Tamagotchis had brief, fleeting lives before succumbing to death through a child’s negligence.

While many parents bought their offspring Tamagotchis as toys, others thought that a child taking responsibility for a digital creature would be an ideal pre-pet investment, to see if they were mature enough to understand the needs of another living thing. While this is an ideal moralistic exercise, what occurred in reality was a pocket of brief generational trauma where young children woke up to find that, after sleeping though muted midi cries of hunger at 3am, their new toy had perished overnight. You killed your first pet.

​Image: ​​​Mathieu Polak/Sygma/ Sygma via Getty Images​

This culpability for death is one of the strangest qualities in toy history; even the death of shoals of Sea Monkeys failed to elicit such a primal reaction of grief and blame from the very young. In the new world of portable digital pets, they were expected to entertain, but not truly die. This element of blame, guilt and finality was truly amped up in the early Japanese models where a ghost and headstone would meet the neglectful owner. In more recent English-language variants, this cemetery scene was substituted for an angel of death, or a cheery little UFO, popping in to take the Tamagotchi back to its home planet. Once you’ve inadvertently murdered your new pal, the game can be reset and you’re trusted with a strange egg baby once more.

The Tamagotchi in its many forms has never shied away from death, addressing the finality of existence in its cheery little game, but also in its genuinely bizarre cartoon.

In the ninth episode of the original tie-in anime, titled ‘The First Death’, several little creatures gather and weep inconsolably at the bedside of a dying Tamagotchi (Ginjirotchi),after a small yellow doctor with mouse ears (Mametchi) confirms death. Quickly, the soul of the deceased is surrounded by tiny little angels, who guide it to the pearly gates and Tamagotchi heaven, which is mainly pink clouds and sweets. Suddenly, the sweets disappear in a cruel trap and the Tamagotchi is tormented by little bat creatures with forks (Deviltchi), before being rescued once more and taken back into hyper-cute heaven where everyone sits down and has pudding together. The whole affair lasts a matter of minutes and is as brilliant as it is disconcerting.

I never owned a Tamagotchi in my 90s heyday, as my mother couldn’t afford the indulgence. Instead, I had a knock-off variant, a Giga Pet called ‘Compu Kitty’ from Woolworths, with which I was utterly chuffed. (I still have it to this day, unable to part with the luminous yellow crap plastic atrocity.)

I vividly remember crying when I woke up for school one morning and the pixelated cat had breathed its last. But one reset later, those tears dried, and after another six hours came another death. After that, the circle of life seemed rather less majestic and a more predictable cycle of button pushing and bleeps.

In 1996, a pet cemetery in Pontsmill, Cornwall was the first to diversify their interments and fence off a dedicated section for the burial of electronic pets. When CNN reported in 1997, they equated this very modern mourning with the established love that British people have of their traditional, breathing pets.

On January 17th 1997, two teenage girls were in Cornwall to bury their Tamagotchis, named Sid and Arty, two consoles never to be reset.

My first thought was very outdated parental shock, as Tamagotchi’s weren’t terribly cheap when they came out and to bury a brand new toy seems awfully wasteful. Taking another expensive trip to Argos wouldn’t have gone down too well in my household.

However, 14-year-old Danielle was strong in her resolve and placed the little plastic contraption into the earth. She was not alone in her beliefs either, as cemetery owner Terry Squires revealed that many international burials had been carried out in his Cornish field. Tamagotchis from as far afield as Switzerland, Germany, France, Canada and America had all been laid to rest in his pet cemetery, with many more on the way.

However, looking at Pontsmill today, there are no mentions to be found of deceased cyberpets, with the business promoting itself solely as a pet cemetery and green burial site for traditional human interments. I would be curious to know if the rudimentary headstones remain, or if the Tamagotchis and their mournful batteries were turned over or forgotten as many other crazes came and went.

For those who wanted to memorialise their Tamagotchis, but didn’t fancy burying the case in the garden, there were several online cemeteries and memorial sites for dead digital pets, where eulogies, ages and causes of death could be recorded in one enormous late 90s census.

Today, there are a handful of online Tamagotchi cemeteries still functioning, if long-abandoned. However, records of their digital death and memorials remain in sites such as Tama Talk’s Memorial page. These old GeoCities or Angelfire websites are framed in pixelated gifs and solemn MIDI music where you must adjust your eyes to decipher the spidery text against questionable repeated wallpaper. In these simple databases, names and brief epitaphs are recorded; some sincere, some dismissive and some simply odd:

Banjo – Cause of Death: Died taking the biggest crap you’ve ever seen.

Joe the Dinosaur – Cause of Death: Accidental Resetting.

‘My poor Joe. The first born. He had a good life and was taken care of very well It was unfortunate that his life had to come to such an abrupt end, whilst living in a jeans pocket. We shall all miss him very dearly.’

These eulogies and epitaphs are time capsules of young people’s first interactions with death and loss, where an essay can prove as impactful as an unplanned tumble into a bathtub. There’s a certain importance of a digital emotional connection in childhood that deserves to remain memorialised, and not lost to the ether.

The levels of emotional investment that we have with digital media, and computers in particular, has been tracked by researchers since the 1980s. Alan Turing said in his 1950 paper ‘Can Machines Think?’ that we can judge the intelligence of a computer by its performance in conversation with man. Namely, if the computer is able to convince the human subject that they are talking to a fellow human and not a machine, then human-equivalent intelligence can be determined. This test became known as the ‘Turing Test’ and is still studied and implemented today in experiments of navigating artificial technology, or the ability of ‘bots’ to mimic human interaction.

In the intervening decades, it has been noted that people attribute an increased level of personhood to a computer, not least in terms of pre-programmed gameplay. Therefore, if a Tamagotchi was able to incite very real joy and grief from its user or owner, it could be seen as the first great wave of artificial intelligence in the western world.

In more extreme contemporary circumstances, man’s relationship with digital games has snowballed. While in terms of toys, other digital pets like the Furby, Poo-Chi (which I did own briefly, but was swiftly broken by my portly, recently-divorced father screaming into its microphone on Christmas day. I’m over it. It’s fine.) or even NeoPets virtual pet community have not brought about the same primal love and devotion as the humble Tamagotchi. Perhaps it was the inevitability of death that separated our love for the Tama from its immortal digital counterparts.

However, interactions with digital gameplay appear to have moved in two separate directions; ambivalence and devotion.

Today, electronic games and pets are commonplace, providing no new emotional experiences for children who have grown up within the digital age, where entertainment can be accessed at the click of a button and nothing is finite.

On the other hand, there are instances of individuals such as a 27-year old Japanese man named Sal 9000 (the only name he would provide to the press), who was so emotionally invested in the DS Game ‘Love Plus’, decided to marry the main avatar in a lavish, if highly controversial ceremony in 2009. When questioned as to whether he could truly love a digital, pre-programmed woman, he explained that “I love this character, not a machine.” Going on to say that “I understand 100 percent that this is a game. I understand very well that I cannot marry her physically or legally.”

However, his preference for the digital, predictable and placid provoked far more discussion. Explaining that Nene Anegasakiwas better than a ‘real’ girlfriend, he listed her perks, stating that, “She doesn’t get angry if I’m late in replying to her. Well, she gets angry, but she forgives me quickly.”[1]

Sal is not alone in his preference and several others have followed in his stead, marrying digital characters in ceremonies across the world. In 2018, Japan hit the headlines again as 35-year-old school administrator Akihiko Kondo married the hologram of video game character, Hatsune Miku. Whether these marriages will last when the bride’s updates are discontinued is another matter, but our changing relationship with life, love, and death in the digital age is undeniable.

On which note, I’ll thank you for taking this strange journey with me and take my leave. My Compu Kitty needs feeding.

The Tamagotchi Cemetery syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/