Curation, Obsession, and Taking a Joke Too Far

9:25 AM 0 Comments

Ever had a joke get too real? One of the biggest, and most ridiculous, collections I've curated started off as a joke meant to annoy my friends. For some background, there's this little video game called Pokèmon. In that game, players collect and battle cute little creatures called, you guessed it, Pokèmon. One such creature is this little guy named Bidoof.

Bidoof is useless. That's the joke. He's not exactly adorable, he isn't really strong, and he is found in abundance in the wild. While searching the wild for useful and powerful Pokèmon, players will usually encounter waves upon waves of Bidoof. This spawned a subliminal hate of the creature. I latched on to that hate and embraced it.

It started simple: I made a team of entirely Bidoof to battle my friends. I got my ass handed to me every time, but the sheer annoyance my antics caused the person I was battling made it all worth it. Then things went farther. I started collecting images of Bidoof and sent them as responses to my friends in conversation. I pretended that the little confused brown beaver was God's gift to man and the best thing to ever happen to the world.

Somewhere along the line, I stopped pretending.

What started as a joke in High School now, five years later, spawned this weird little collection I keep at home. On my computer I have a folder of seventy-some pictures and of Bidoof; some offical, some fan made. Those pictures include phone and laptop background images I created myself. I started hiding small images of Bidoof in my profile images on Twitter. The only art hanging on my walls at home is a drawing a friend made for me of a Bidoof. For Christmas my sister got me a small Bidoof figurine. For my birthday I bought myself a large plush doll of Bidoof.

What started as a joke has turned into a somewhat weird, somewhat endearing collection that will no doubt continue growing as time goes on.