#i'm that person who sends unprompted dissertations via text at 2 am

[piraticoctopus]

The other night I was thinking about pokemon that go from like a ball with feet or something to having an actual body with arms.  

Frogs are too dumb to appreciate the mind blowing experience it's gotta be to go from no limbs to four in like a week. But pokemon do that instantaneously. Just *poof* everything’s totally different now.

There's the obvious stuff like "can pick things up now" but I had the realization of how weird it would be to do things like touch your own face for the first time and how TRIPPY that would be.

Like that's just weird!! If you were just a little ball creature and couldn't touch your feet to your head, or had no limbs at all, you'd have no way to know what your own face feels like! What the fuck!

(The opposite experience, “evolve but lose appendages instead”, would suck ass, though. Sorry, Glalie.)

And all the changes that occur to the senses when an animal undergoes metamorphosis, again going back to frogs. Vision in water is different from vision on land. There are different light profiles, they search for different types of food, the predators are different, everything has to be reformatted for a new ecological role. And that’s only ONE sense.

Also the fact that we have verbs for the five senses but it's pretty much impossible to describe any additional senses humans don't have without referring to one of our five. Like "heat vision" in snakes. Is that really "vision"? You can't call it "smelling", can you? Or parietal eyes that can "see", but only to the extent of "there is light in this upward direction" and not actual image production. Or electroreception. And there are pokemon that can literally sense emotions and such, different from how we can infer them with our other senses.

It's like trying to imagine a color we can't see but WORSE. My tiny human mind is physically incapable of comprehending what it’s like to have senses I don’t have. Like we can try, but we’ll never truly be able to know what it’s like and that’s wild.

Add to endless list of reasons I fuckin love pokemon because it gets my brain GOING on shit like this. This is like the inverse of anthropomorphism. Not "how would a human describe this" but "wow bro how would this weird creature describe this with their weird creature brain".