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kafus · 1 month ago

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i'm going to finally talk about The Buizel that i keep mentioning but then neglecting to elaborate on. just for the sake of personal documentation honestly. because she means everything to me

warning for discussion of SA! (nothing graphic but it's relevant to the story of this buizel)

this is Hope. she's a buizel. she looks unassuming with nothing particularly special about her other than being a pretty high level for an unevolved buizel. but she is one of the most important pokemon i own, if not the most important.

i've been into pokemon games since i was a really little kid, starting in 2004. my first game was leafgreen, but the sinnoh games have a very important and special place in my heart. by the time DP came out in 2007 in the US, i was a little bit older, 7 years old to be precise, and was able to enjoy the games on a deeper level than before due to an increase in reading comprehension and pokemon knowledge. when i think of "my childhood generation", it is definitely gen 4. when i think of 2007, i think of my excitement for diamond and pearl, begging my parents to get it for me for my birthday/christmas that year, watching the anime on the TV in eager anticipation for hopefully getting the games as a gift.

unfortunately when i think of 2007, i also think of an extreme traumatic event that happened that year. i was being sexually abused by my grandfather from a young age and this was ongoing in that year. in a fit of rage or god knows what, his level of violence increased all of a sudden in the summer, while i was left alone at my grandparents' house for multiple weeks at a time without my parents. i was brutally injured and could have died - my grandfather nearly killed me. i promise this is relevant to the story of this buizel so bear with me.

by the time i was home, my injuries had healed enough that despite coming extremely close to being examined by a doctor, ultimately no one ever found out, and i never told because of memory loss/repression. suffice to say we kept visiting my grandparents for the holidays. in particular, we took the small roadtrip to their house again for thanksgiving, and unexpectedly my grandma wanted me to open her birthday gift for me early since i was there in person, and i excitedly tore open the package to find pokemon pearl inside.

i did eventually get other pokemon games, gens 3, 4, and 5, but this pearl file remains the only childhood file i have that i didn't overwrite or lose the cartridge for. it's been very lightly played since childhood but it mostly remains in the same state it was whenever i last picked it up as a kid, including the over 200 hours of gameplay. considering i spent similar amounts of time in diamond which i got for christmas that year, suffice to say i played a lot as a kid! thanksgiving in 2007 was on november 22nd so the "adventure started" date lines up perfectly with the trip i was on to my grandparents' house.

i've peeked around this file multiple times and was happy to have some remnants of my childhood, but was also disappointed to find that most of the pokemon i was attached to and used had mysteriously vanished from the save file. my best guess is that i traded them to my copy of diamond which i was using in tandem with pokemon battle revolution on the wii, of which i unfortunately lost at some point along the line.

for instance, i peeked into my hall of fame data - i had beaten the league 9 times on this file and my first hall of fame entry, AKA when i beat the game for the first time, was from january 26th 2008 and had my original team, consisting of lucario, palkia, torterra, staraptor, and amusingly, an unevolved pikachu and an unevolved buizel, both at stupidly high levels for being unevolved pokemon. i was humored seeing this a couple years ago when i first looked through this file because it was so like me to have unevolved pokemon on my team, and in particular i was obsessed with pikachu and buizel at the time, so like... of course.

at first, i looked through the PC (and the daycare!) for any traces of any of these guys... nothing. they were all gone. after checking out other stuff like my underground base or whatever else, i shelved my copy of pearl again, only taking it back out of my box of DS games when i occasionally needed it for version exclusives or multiplayer battle tower shenanigans.

you may see where this is going.

this year i booted up pearl again because i wanted to ribbon master a pokemon from my childhood with my actual OT on it, AKA get all the ribbons possible on a pokemon. if you aren't familiar with the "ribbon master" challenge, don't worry about it, it's just a (very time consuming) hobby i have and i like doing it with pokemon that are meaningful to me.

in the pictures in this post so far, i've blacked out the trainer name on everything because i actually named myself after my legal name back then. i don't identify with that name anymore at all, but i really wanted to honor my childhood self because... sinnoh meant so much to her. this file, this cartridge in particular, was a light in a year that contained unthinkable violence and trauma towards me. a year when i could have died. i first played with this game cart in the building where just some months prior i had been bleeding profusely in the basement at the hands of my relative, a house that has since been sold off and i can no longer return to - this pearl cartridge remains one of the only remnants of that time and place, and it is deeply, deeply important to me. i didn't want 7 year old me's pokemon to rot away forever.

little did i know that apparently when i looked through the PC a couple years prior, i somehow completely missed that one pokemon from that hall of fame entry still existed on the file. just the one. miraculously. and it was the buizel.

genuinely nothing could have prepared me for finding her, i didn't expect it at all. i just started crying. i couldn't believe it.

her met date was november 26th 2007, just a day after i started this save file. i could not believe it either when i tabbed over to the ribbons page and saw the sinnoh champion ribbon, three contest ribbons, a ribbon for talking to the sunyshore NPC on a wednesday, and the footprint ribbon which is received for max friendship from a guy to the east of pastoria. she was by far the most well-loved pokemon still on the file, and maybe the one i wanted to see the most, if i could have any of those 6 pokemon from that hall of fame back.

i haven't mentioned it until now, but that aforementioned extremely violent event is the traumatic memory i have come to un-repress in the most detail out of any of my trauma by far. i still remember what i was thinking at the time to survive it, staring at the ceiling and escaping into my mind to pretend it wasn't happening. first i thought about the usual, my mom, my bedroom back at home, but thinking about those things ended up just making me feel their absence, and so my mind drifted to pokemon diamond and pearl. i didn't even own the games yet, but i played out what i thought they might be like based on that gamestop demo kiosk and commercials and the anime in my mind, and in that daydream, because of the buizel from the diamond & pearl anime, buizel was one of my pokemon, my main pokemon, a pokemon that i could not have yet but that i thought very fondly of and really wanted. and unsurprisingly it ended up as a member of my team once i finally got the games months later.

suffice to say, buizel is a pokemon that meant a lot to me and held a lot of weight and emotion for that 7 year old girl that was me. and so to find my first childhood buizel after all this time after i thought for sure she was gone and to see how much i loved her, i could not stop crying for a good while. and i'm tearing up again just writing all this out frankly

and so i traded her to my platinum and soulsilver saves to play with her, and start getting more ribbons on her like i had set out to do. (for the record, she had been fed horrendous poffins when i was a kid, and the contest ribbons were extremely & excessively difficult to get as a result, but i digress, i'll save talking about that for some other time). but one thing was still bothering me after all of this...

as a kid, i was spotty with naming my pokemon. i kind of had a whole thing where often times their species... felt like their name? so it felt weird to overwrite their species name sometimes. but despite wanting to honor my childhood self's wishes, the one thing i couldn't get past was this buizel lacking a name. i wanted to name her after all this time. but how on earth was i supposed to name a pokemon so meaningful to me after over a decade since she was first caught?

there were so many deepcut references to my childhood i could have made, so many thoughtful names... but i ended up just going with Hope. a simple name for a simple joy in a really complicated time of my life, something i probably would have named a pokemon at that age, and straightforwardly emblematic as to what she represents to me. because she is hope. i survived to catch her for real, not in my dying daydreams, and if i survived that then hope surely exists and i can survive anything.

and so i traded her to pearl one last time to give her her new name.

and this is hope now, in my platinum version:

i hadn't shared her nature until now. i think "brave" is really fitting. and as you can see i've been working really hard on her ribbons. eventually when i have all of them (just a few battle tower ones left to go!) i'll be transferring her up to see other pokemon regions and get all the ribbons she can, but i'll definitely be keeping a copy of her in gen 4 forever as a time capsule.

if you read this far thanks for reading this really overly personal and emotional account about this random buizel i just so happen to have. pokemon continues to surprise me with how much a cluster of 1s and 0s and some pixel art can mean, despite me getting attached to, and sentimental over them, time after time again. though out of all of them, hope has to be one of the most irreplaceable. i'm really, really glad i never traded her to diamond, and i'm glad i still have her around. i want to cherish her for a very long time & as i continue working on the ribboning process i'll post updates about her. just uh. don't expect that to be fast because i am ribboning a lot of pokemon right now lol

#buizel #pokemon platinum #pokemon diamond and pearl #pokemon #sa tw #csa tw #incest tw #(again nothing graphic in the post but heavy implications)#kiki plays games #kiki was here #kiki.txt #platinum #pearl #ribbon mastering #long post #pokemon dppt #dppt #hope posting

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