#god i wanted to titledrop DLDP3 in here so bad but it's gonna be such an 'ohhhhh NOOOOOOOOO' moment. i have to save it.

[woodswolf]

Not sure how to phrase this in a complimentary way but I am really glad Captain Olimar isn't a real person with real feelings because I think your righteously vicious takedowns of his character would fucking kill him. Very very good. Extremely good.

(undoubtedly re: these tags)

oh listen anon. listen. listen listen listen listen listen:

did i ever say i wasn't going to say them to his face?

this is literally four sequels down the line (at least by the order im writing them) but the reckoning is coming. this guy is going to be forced to choose between his unwillingness to change in any way that matters and his journey and struggle meaning anything at all. he has never cared about the gun to his own head, but if he doesn't start he's never going to be happy. it takes a push with him, an impulse: something stronger than the friction holding him in his grating routines and comfortable, familiar miseries; something strong enough to overpower his every sense of shame.

dogs leading dogs as it is now is about knowledge and the learning of it and what that knowledge can help its adherents achieve. it's about two very flawed people who come together to mutually recognize the other's personhood, as unconventional as it may seem from their own perspective, and how that knowledge of personhood obtained during that quest can save them. how they can both use that knowledge to alter their perspectives, and how they can learn from each other as they do so: the pikmin learning independence, and olimar learning to accept change.

the problem is that olimar doesn't learn that. olimar learns just about the opposite of that, in fact. and it's going to take all of DLD2, and all of DLD3, and a good amount of DLD4 before anyone will have the will to scream at him with a gun to something he actually cares about, because god forbid would it ever be himself.

this guy is going to get skinned alive by something that knows him better than he knows himself. and he can either sit there and take it, or he can fight back. so it's a shame that he never fights under improbable odds, only the impossible or the certain. maybe if someone drove that like a railroad spike through his stupid stubborn skull he'd actually have a chance.

(on a less literarized note, id just like to say that pikmin 3 is a god tier character study for olimar because it takes a really special kind of person to get that fucked over by their own individual hubris, and an even more special kind of person for Olimar's Comeback to happen at all. (but that's for DLDP3, and by the time DLDP3 rolls around our single most important canon divergence has grown into such a canyon that Olimar's Comeback won't even happen at all. but you didn't hear that from me))

(and on a comedic yet entirely unexaggerated note, this guy's got 99 problems and the various methods by which he lies to himself to maintain a facade of normalcy and self-satisfaction and generally his inability to level with himself that everything wrong in his life is not fine is about 98 of them.)