Darren Endymion's Blog, page 17

M = Megalodon, A to Z Blog Challenge

So, this should have been posted yesterday, but I was actually doing something (drinking with a friend) and I’m certain that, whatever the quality of this entry, nobody would have liked it more last night. Since it’s the weekend, I think nobody will read this anyway, but I still want to write it, so here we go.

Great white sharks are amazing, beautiful, dangerous animals which are considered the second most dangerous sharks in the ocean (behind the testosterone-riddled, fresh and salt water travelling bull shark). I regret (almost) any life lost by shark or any animal, but one thing I think people need to remember is that the ocean is the wilderness where wild animals roam.

But is that why we are here tonight? Hell no.

We are here to talk about the ancestor of the great white shark, the megalodon. The name megalodon means “big tooth”, and the fossils of said teeth are supposed to be an average of around 8 inches long or up to 13 inches and were likely serrated like their little brothers’. These amazing animals were reported to have lived 16 to 2.6 million years ago, and could be up to 60 feet long. The largest great white on record is just over 20.

Terrifying, isn’t it?

These things were in our oceans. Some people think that they could still be around, though that has largely been debunked. But what if? Can you imagine what these things would be like in today’s seas? A shark bigger than most boats could be lurking around under you…it would certainly make those shark finning assholes think twice.

There’s even a meme about it.

Sure, that one is terrifying, but what about this one?

Sweet mother of god.

They apparently died out for several reasons. Sea level dropped, and these horrid beasts needed a lot of it to swim and eat in. The ocean also cooled, which apparently really pissed them off. Also, there were fewer sources of food. Think of a giant fat man with a broken car where all the McDonald’s in the area shut down. Where will he get his food? Walk? Yeah, the megalodon needed a LOT of food, and if there wasn’t enough to eat in the shallow, cold, cold seas, there’s no way they could survive. This killed them off after time.

Which is probably best. Consider going swimming with these in the ocean.

It would get a pissy, shitty meal.

The ecological ramifications of them being around would be insane. And, even direr, how would we get our sushi?! Breathe people. This is all conjecture, but it has gotten many a book and movie off the ground, and I think it’s what kept the SyFy channel in business for some time. Shark Week had a bad moment with a fake documentary about the megalodon that rather pissed people off.

There are plenty of B movies made about them, and some good and not so good novels. If you want to start with the good, you can try any of Steve Alten’s Meg novels. However, be warned that he randomly switches to present tense and tends to WAY over-explain the associated technology needed to see, capture, and contain these animals. To the point where one wants to skip over the pages and pages of dissertation and just take him at face value to get on with the goddamned story. There is Big-Ass Shark by Briar Lee Mitchell, which I have not read yet but sounds not only amusing but ecologically responsible. I read Extinct by Charles Wilson some time ago and the characters are more likable than most of the others mentioned here

Alternate letter considerations: Maleficent, Mikado, The (comedic operetta)

L = Lead Sprinkler, A to Z Blog Challenge

When I would go to church, I used to have inappropriate thoughts. My mother’s side of the family was Crazy Christian, about one tent revival away from being snake handlers, or total Earth religion pagans. My dad’s side of the family is Catholic. One time I was in church with my aunt and the priest was going around with the aspergillum (holy water sprinkler) blessing people…and I cracked up, almost having to leave. See, I randomly thought, “What if the priest filled the aspergillum with hot chocolate?”

I pictured row after row of parishioners recoiling, singed, thinking that the holy water not only burned them but stained their clothes. They would think that they were so evil that it practically burned holes in their clothes, and the line of fretting religious types would line up for confession and the priest would cackle and immediately be transferred.

The only thing is that my hilarious thought was not at all original, and the people who had it originally were assholes.

Meet the innocuous looking lead sprinkler.

For people that the law or the Church did not like and wished to inflict pain upon or get answers out of, there was no shortage of devices used to torture. If you are feeling like being Wednesday Addams, look up the Judas cradle, the pear, and the Spanish donkey. It will horrify you and give you street cred with your morbid friends. (I read about all these things in an article with very little independent research, so I won’t be stingy and will share the link: http://www.historyrundown.com/10-most-cruel-torture-devices-of-all-time/)

The lead sprinkler was a device rather like an aspergillum which would be filled with boiling oil, boiling water, pitch, tar, or molten metal, often lead. The bulb on top had two halves and the top half could be removed to put the torture liquid inside (my grandma’s goulash? *cackle*). The torture victim would be strapped down and be forced to endure this sprinkling of searingly hot liquid.

 

Most people have burned themselves with oil or had something splatter on them while cooking. Your first reaction is to recoil, possibly throwing what you have in your hands (such as the pan you were stirring…or am I alone there?). Think of the burning. The pain. You wipe that off right away and run cool water on it.

 

Now, imagine not being able to get away. Imagine having that entire skillet full of oil poured on you. Or molten lead which would then dry. And sit there. How long would it take lead to cool? And it would then be stuck to your skin. These torturers knew what they were doing. They would aim for the sensitive spots. If you pissed them off enough, they would go for the eyes.

Don’t imagine that pain. It’s horrible. Just be thankful that we no longer live in the time where shit like this is acceptable.

Alternate letter considerations: Lust, Loch Ness monster (I planned to do this, wanted to do it, but the research bogged down and my computer refused to turn on, so I went with plan B and am still posting this at almost 11pm. Hopefully you aren’t as disappointed as I am.)

K = Ketchup, A to Z Blog Challenge

I know what you may be thinking. “Ketchup? Seriously? This bastard has run out of ideas.” But I am in my head far too often, and I think about stuff in the strangest ways possible, and in a way, ketchup is a symbol of change, horror, and accomplishment for me. Plus, I wanted to take it easy tonight. Let me to ‘splain you. *giggle*

When I was a kid, I was one of those annoying brats who like NOTHING on his anything. McDonald’s cheeseburger? If there was so much as a speck of ketchup on that bun, I would pick it apart like a vicious, disgusted crow. Mustard was the devil. I could handle a tiny bit of ketchup if forced, but mustard would ruin any food it came into contact with. Onions could fuck right off.

This went for anything. My maternal grandmother was horrified. “You’re going to eat that sandwich DRY?!” Seriously, you would think I had agreed to swallow live eels stuffed with razorblades. I think part of it is that my mother was a terrible cook, and she learned everything she knew from her mother. My maternal grandmother’s goulash could be used as a nuclear deterrent. Sauces were dangerous in that family. My mother’s meatloaf had gray bits of mush that might have started life as oats, but ended life as gastrointestinal distress.

My sister loved ketchup and absolutely smothered the soggy meat-mass our mother erroneously claimed was meatloaf in it. Ketchup was her way of choking down my mother’s barely edible meals, allowing the horrors from the kitchen to slither down her throat in a river of processed tomato. I wanted nothing obscured. The unknown was more frightening than biting into something possibly undiscovered by man. Bless that woman, she tried, she really did. But she stood no chance.

To give you an indication of where things went wrong, I must say that my grandmother preferred powdered milk. Yes, you read that right. She preferred it. Anyone who has had powdered milk knows the struggle and the pain. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that her goulash was a potent weapon against her grandchildren. She couldn’t taste anything wrong with it. My sister suffered as the rest of the grandchildren did. Ketchup did nothing. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the broth was MADE from water and ketchup. OLD ketchup. With rocks in it. And shards of glass.

Thankfully, I learned nothing from my mother’s side of the family. My great grandmother on my dad’s side was one of the most amazing cooks whose food I have ever had the privilege of tasting. My paternal grandmother inherited that skill, but was lamentably lazy. My father’s first attempt at ever making an entire turkey or ham came out amazing (though the talent seemed to have skipped his sister entirely). I learned to cook shamefully late in life, and I’m actually pretty good. I have a tendency to over season things, afraid that I have the curse of my mother. When I pull it back and go for moderation, I’m actually pretty proud of myself. I think I have escaped the horror.

I love ketchup now. Mustard, too. Onions are amazing…grilled, stir fried, on a taco, in spaghetti, whatever. I can’t get enough. I don’t have to be afraid anymore. I don’t have to be brave to use these things. So, in its odd, ephemeral, “no, you’re seriously too into your own pretentious head” sort of way, ketchup is a symbol of change to me. Unless it’s on McDonald’s fries. Then it’s just a travesty.

Alternate letter considerations: Knights, Kaiju, ka, kick box, koi

J = John Wayne Gacy, A to Z Blog Challenge

I told you that we would be a little darker this week. Now we are going to be a LOT darker. I do want to say from the outset that this post won’t be anywhere near complete and that, if you have the stomach for it, there are resources out there that will horrify and teach you.

John Wayne Gacy was a serial killer active in Chicago, Illinois from 1972 to 1978. In that sort span of time, he killed 33 or 34 young men and boys, often raping them. When his spree was done, he was eventually charged with 1 count of sodomy, 1 count of sexual assault, 1 count of indecent liberties with a child, and 33 counts of murder. His favorite prey was young, attractive men, and he seemed to have a particular affinity for young athletic types.

One of Gacy’s mugshots. Yes, his smile disturbs me, too.

Like other serial killers, Gacy was actually an upstanding citizen, a respected community leader, and was married twice. There are aspects of his killings which are both terrifying and intriguing (in a clinical sort of way. On a conscious level, he was a deranged psychopath, of course).

One of the most intriguing aspects to me personally is the ignorance — feigned, willful, truthful, or determined — of his wives. You see, Gacy would kill these men and bury their bodies in the crawlspace under his house. Here you have to consider the gruesome aspects of body disposal. These men weren’t embalmed, buried far underground, or prepared in any way we do in the modern world. Consequently, the decomposing victims began to smell. Gacy told his wives that it was bad plumbing and that he was fixing it.

The house in question.

He would often lure men with promise of work in his company, cheap labor, or, as he called it, go cruising, bringing home runaways, boys walking home from school, male prostitutes, and essentially anyone who could go missing without a trace for a little while. After his eventual divorce and before his capture, Gacy’s cruising became more frequent and his behavior more erratic. Neighbors reported occasionally hearing muffled screams coming from his house in this time, and one has to wonder why nobody called the police in those instances. Was it the Kitty Genovese syndrome, a woman who was murdered in a crowded apartment complex, screaming for her life, and nobody did anything because they didn’t want to get involved? Was it this infamous bystander effect? Who can say?

Fortunately, Gacy was eventually caught after offering a job to a 15 year old boy name Robert Jerome Piest. When Piest went missing, Gacy was questioned, which led to an in depth look at his record, which led to his arrest, and the subsequent grisly finds under his house. He was arrested on December 21, 1978. At this time, Gacy was running out of room to bury the bodies. Think about that for a moment. He killed so many young men that he ran out of room.

To further terrify you, Gacy was an upstanding citizen on the outside. He would dress up as a clown for birthday parties, saying later that the costume allowed him to become a kid again. For those who don’t like clowns, here is another reason.

Pogo the Clown, also known as John Wayne Gacy, the murderer of at least 33 young men and boys.

Gacy was a sick, sick man. However, to dismiss him as crazy is to miss the only point of importance he can bring to this world. Study of reprehensible people like this can help us, through education, to spot the next serial killer and the next. Knowledge is power here. One of the scariest parts of all this is that, aside from the scary clown, there were only subtle indications that this man was a monster inside (if you did not visit his house, that is), so studying men like him may help society to identify these people and possibly prevent further atrocities, or, realistically speaking, limit their abilities to hurt the innocent. John Wayne Gacy died on May 10th, 1994 by lethal injection, roughly 15 years after his arrest.

For more detailed information, see his Wikipedia page here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wayne_Gacy. It’s as good a starting point as any.

Alternate letter considerations: Jedi, jaundice, Jezebel, Judas cradle.

I = Isopod, A to Z Blog Challenge

So, tonight we are on to monsters. Monsters are generally defines as a strange or horrible imaginary creature. The only problem is that these ones are real. An alternate definition is something that is extremely or unusually large. That definitely describes the giant isopod, which is as ugly as it is alien looking.

I warned you.

 

If these things were a little bigger, they would be real life Kaiju. They are related to shrimp and crabs and are abundant in cold, deep waters, specifically in the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic oceans. They are related to the common land pill bugs, but much more terrifying. There is no commercial use for them, since they live so deep and are usually all beat up and eaten by the time they are drawn to the surface. They are also scarce.

There are normal ones, about 2 inches in size, but are an example of a horrible, terrifying concept — deep-sea gigantism. It sounds like something out of a SyFy original, right? Problem is, it’s a real thing. It’s a tendency for deep sea creatures to be able to reach huge sizes. Some other animals that can do this are equally terrifying when you think about them in giant form: spider crabs, seven arm octopus, oarfish, stingray, and the worst of all — giant squid.

They will live in the mouths of fishes, apparently.

The huge ones can be up to 30 inches. Or larger. Imagine taking a dip in the ocean and having over two feet of these things coming at you.

Lucky for us, they aren’t blood-thirsty denizens of the deep just waiting for us to slip up so they can eat our flesh and use our organs as egg sacs. They are scavengers but are generally carnivorous and exist mainly on dead whales, fish, and squid. Sometimes they will go after slow-moving creatures, like sea-cucumbers, sponges, nematodes…basically, they are the worst enemies of almost every character on SpongeBob. And they are old. Like back in the days of Pangea, and has changed very little in that time.

 

But this one is coming for you at night.

 

There was a movie concerning them, and it was a really good one. It’s another of those tiresome, annoying found footage movies. However, coming from someone who will usually turn off a movie if it’s found footage, I stuck through this one, and it was definitely worth it. The Bay. It was on Netflix and may be again, but it’s worth a viewing if you still have the disc plan. Just don’t get it before me. I want to watch the movie again and it’s next in my queue. Stay away…for now.

Alternate letter considerations: Immortality, Iceman, idolatry, Impress (Pern)

H = Hanged, Drawn, and Quartered, A to Z Blog Challenge

This week will be a little more gruesome than previous weeks. Seeing as the only likes I have had during this experiment so far has been for my time talking about cannibalism, maybe everyone’s feeling a little dark these days. So, let’s get to it, shall we?

Being hanged, drawn, and quartered was an absolutely horrible way to die. It was used from the 13th century in England as a punishment for high treason. To use the information from Wikipedia, convicts were fastened to a wooden panel and drawn by a horse to the place of execution. From there, the unfortunate person was hanged almost to death. As if that wasn’t enough, he was then castrated and disemboweled. What’s even worse about this is that you can live through this experience. The men would see their own castration and be able to look down and see their emasculation and see their intestines being cut out of them and exposed. Finally, the accused would be beheaded, finally ending the pain and horror. However, as a further indignity (as if there weren’t enough already), the person’s body would be chopped into four pieces.

Even a drawing of it is terrible.

Since the royalty were considered divinely appointed, and the king (and sometimes queen) was the head of the country and the end-all, be-all, crimes against the crown were essentially crimes against God (which was a big deal in that time) and the country. That being said, even then some rulers would essentially cringe at the thought of this horrible, heinous, torturous death and commute the sentence to beheading or some other form of execution.

Another ghastly drawing.

For instance, Henry VIII’s fifth wife, Catherine Howard, cheated on him with a cocky dickbag named Thomas Culpeper (who was also earlier pardoned by King Henry VIII for raping a farm woman and killing her husband). Since Catherine was the queen, it could be seen as Culpepper trying to insert (heh.) his lineage into the royal line by getting her pregnant. However, Henry adored Culpepper and Catherine the queen was being beheaded anyway (queens were rarely executed and women rarely tortured in this manner), so I guess Henry figured he might as well just have Culpepper’s head chopped off and spare him the comparative agony. There was another of her former lovers who was not spared, though.

Being hanged, drawn, and quartered was purposefully one of the most horrible deaths in England for a very long time, saved for the vilest offenders against the royalty. It was used to deter those who might plot against the crown. Now, however, it is nothing but a distant, unpleasant memory. In fact, there is an English pub named after it:

With a rather colorful quote out front.

It makes light of a terrible thing which would send Amnesty International into a tizzy now — and rightfully so. However, I think we are lucky to live in a time where most civilized countries decide that, if capital punishment must be dished out (and I’m not here to make a case for or against), we generally try to do it in the most, uh, humane way possible. Because this particular torture and execution would generally end with your head on a spike, stuck out on a bridge for everyone to see so that they could mock you, vow to never be you, and otherwise terrify the population. We don’t need that in our lives. There’s enough pain and horror out there already.

Alternate letter considerations: He-Man, hypochondriac.

G = Golden Girls, A to Z Blog Challenge

Ah, Florida, the Crazy State. They have given us zombie attacks, terrible politicians, scary drugs, verdicts which fly in the face of all reason and sense, and general pandemonium. The best things from there are theme parks and the setting for the best TV show of the late 80s and early 90s.

I want you all to know that I was watching episodes of The Golden Girls when I started this blog entry. I sort of got lost and ended up waking out of my daze an hour later with nothing more than a single paragraph written. Reluctantly, I turned the episodes off, but will return to them shortly.

For those who don’t know (though why those poor, soulless people would be reading this is beyond me), The Golden Girls is about four older women in Miami, Florida, living, loving, laughing, dating, caring, and enjoying, as the title suggests, their golden years together. Oh, and eating lots of cheesecake, which got them through innumerable discussions (usually about sex) and crises.

It’s hard to pinpoint the best thing about this comedy. Was it the laughs? The costumes? The antics of the girls? Sophia and Dorothy dressed as Sonny and Cher?

Was it the way that Sophia would tell you to picture something?

Was it Rose’s St. Olaf stories and quotes?

[image error]Was it Blanche’s vanity?

Or was it Dorothy’s sarcastic response to everything?

It was all of these things, but it was also the love between the women, their friendship, the way they stuck by each other through everything. Their friendship was inspirational, as was their zest for life — a love for living that so few of us have at any age, but which was all the more remarkable for their age. The girls gave us laughs, made us cry (I challenge one of you to watch Rose’s flashback monologue when she was talking to Charlie a year after his death, or Sophia at the end of the episode when Phil dies, or — god forbid — the last episode when Dorothy doesn’t come back, and not cry or come close), and they made us love with them.

In short, they touched us.

The cast is mostly gone, though they live on in our hearts. Yet there is one line, uttered by the ageless and fabulous Betty White, which tugs at the heartstrings all the more, as she is our one remaining Golden Girl.

[image error]It still touches us, still makes us happy, and can still make us laugh. And, for a show that is 30 years old, that’s an achievement.

Alternate letter considerations: geeekdom, garrote, guillotine, Gauntlet (Dark Legacy, a video game for the PS2. I always played the Yellow Sorceress because she was cool).

F = Fairy Tales, A to Z Blog Challenge

The original fairy tales were scary, gruesome, bloody tales of sorrow and loss and occasional happiness, but usually at a cost. They were often cautionary tales, rather like the current day urban legends involving babysitters, calls coming from upstairs, and the one which scared me the most, that of the escaped lunatic killing a girl’s dog and giving her reassuring licks from under her bed as though he were the dog.

Take, for instance, the beautiful Disney movie of Cinderella. The original version involves the stepmother cutting off one daughter’s big toe and the other one’s heel so that their feet might fit into the glass slipper, using the logic that when they are princesses and queens, they will not have to walk anywhere. The glass shoe fills up with blood, alerting the Prince, who returns the damaged goods to their mother. He finds Cinderella, who has the awesome power to summon and communicate with birds, and does so on her wedding day, causing the birds to peck out the eyes of her stepsisters.

Wanted for vicarious maiming through ornithological means.

But it wasn’t all the Brothers Grimm who were sick bastards. I was discussing The Little Mermaid with a friend and inadvertently traumatized her with Anderson’s original, unaltered ending. My friend had no idea that in the original involved quite a different deal with the sea witch. There was no three day time limit on the mermaid’s transformation, but every step she took as a human was like being stabbed in the feet with knives, like murderous Plantar fasciitis. Oh, and her tongue was cut out. Let’s not forget that. She would remain a human until the Prince got married, and if it was to her, she would live with him forever. However, Princes are betrothed for the good of the kingdom. He eventually married his betrothed. His dear friend, the little mermaid, danced with him on his wedding day, despite the pain and knowing how it would end. When the Prince was married, the little mermaid threw herself off the bow of the ship and died, becoming sea foam which drifted away on the wind.

No, it really is that sad. Anderson eventually updated it to have a cheerier ending, but she never did get the Prince. She got to watch over his happiness as a spirit of the air.

The Disney version of Snow White was pretty accurate, gruesome, and sick, much like the original. Sleeping Beauty, though, was a bit different. Depending on what version you read (Grimm or Perrault), there were either 7 or 13 fairies. One was slighted by not having a golden plate to eat off of and decided to curse the girl child and everyone in the castle. The princess would sleep for 100 years in a castle of thorns and would then wake up, as though nothing had happened. Princes from all over came to claim her and were killed, impaled by the thorns. One Prince with superb timing heard the legend and showed up just as the spell was ending. Wading through bodies of the other Princes, he found a recently wakened Sleeping Beauty and married her. There was no effort, he didn’t know her, there was no kiss, and there was no fairy battle or drama. He just walked up at the right time and claimed the bride. Probably a good thing. Disney’s Prince Philip was pretty gay (and pretty beautiful in Maleficent as played by Brenton Thwaits, who at least butched the character up).

Watch the movie. Aside from this fabulous riding gear, even Philip’s father was shocked that he had fallen in love with a girl.

Read on. Get the Grimm’s fairy tales and even the Anderson ones. They are dark. If you want good princess fun based off the gruesome tales, try reading Jim C. Hines’ Princess Novels, which has been described as Disney meets Charlie’s Angels.

Alternate letter considerations: fear, faun, fissure

E = Enabler, A to Z Blog Challenge

I’ve been watching old episodes of Hoarders and, from deep within the recesses of my DVR, Half Ton Dad, and it makes me think about the people who, usually through the best of intentions, help these people get that way.

Hoarding is a terror for me. I lived with a mild hoarder of a grandmother growing up and I loved her to absolute death, but the cardboard! Jesus! Now, I don’t know that she had an enabler as much as a prolapsed goat vagina of a daughter who took advantage of it. However, the daughter (my aunt, obviously) decided not only to bring some of her stuff over to store, but decided to sell Avon out of my grandmother’s house where I was living.

Imagine having this in your living room for years, knowing not a box of it was yours.

My aunt doesn’t have the ambition the gods gave a 300 pound armless sloth with half its head missing, so the Avon never got sold and it never moved. It wasn’t until my grandmother passed that my uncle told his sister that she needed to get that old shit out or it would be thrown away within the two weeks it would take her to find her fat fucking feet and get over there to move it.

In that way, the brother and sister showed a duality. One took advantage, yes, but she enabled my grandmother who was given occasional free Avon as a storage fee. Like a bottle of shampoo every two months made up for having next to no living room. To that extent, though, my grandmother enabled my aunt’s hoarding but housing the problem so that my aunt didn’t have to face it. After the passing of my beloved grandmother, my aunt’s hoarding got out of control. My uncle, however, was having none of it. He got rid of that shit at the absolute first chance he had and didn’t do it before because it wasn’t a battle he would win. (Watch an episode of Extreme Hoarders and see what happens when someone comes in to try to tell a hoarder to clean shit up).

This brings us to Half Ton Dad. I saw this show a long time ago and was struck by the mechanics of it all. This man (pictured below) was a very nice, caring, kind man with an obvious problem. However, as you can see in the picture, he was literally in no shape to move around. He was house bound for years and years, and when he finally decided to do something about it and try to get help and have surgery, they had to knock down walls to get him out.

Half Ton Dad

So, you know someone was feeding him, and feeding him a great deal. It turns out, this person was a close loved one who would frequently raid the McDonald’s dollar menu and other fast food places to satisfy this man’s eating habits. She thought she was caring for him and showing him love in the only way she could, but she was hurting him more than anything. She directly contributed to his weight. Granted, he had a problem or he wouldn’t have been that big, whether it was a need for food comfort, filling an internal void, or whatever. I’d just like to hope, as someone who has admittedly never been in that situation, that I would feed him healthy food. What’s he going to do? Get up and go to McDonald’s himself? Make his own food? Not eat at all? Good! He needed to get himself under control, and when he has no choice, his care (or destruction) was 100% in the hands of someone else.

I was in a supermarket once about 5 years ago and I saw this little fat kid, between one and two years old, sitting in the front part of a shopping cart as his chunky (but not obese) mother and father pushed him around. He was at least 50 pounds, probably closer to 70. His fat little legs barely fit through the holes in the cart.

Something like this.

They had two other hugely obese children, but none were as striking as the baby. That was completely, totally, utterly the parent’s fault. Unless there was a thyroidal or glandular problem in the whole family, those parents were enablers to their fat children. They caused it, and those kids will likely have to struggle their entire lives with weight because the parents couldn’t say no.

Yet, I feel for these enablers. They usually think this is a way of showing love, and when you are in the situation, you probably don’t realize how bad it has become because it’s a gradual thing. Their love is almost twisted, you might say. Yet there is love.

Except my aunt. She was just a bitch. *cackle!*

Alternate letter considerations: Earthbound (video game), Evil Dead, epidemic, esper (Final Fantasy VI).

D = Dragon Quest, A to Z Blog Challenge

After the gruesome subject of yesterday’s blog choice and the research I did (much of which did not make it into the blog post), I have decided to make the rest of the week a little lighter.

So, today we have video games!

The first role playing game I ever played was Dragon Warrior on the NES at my aunt and uncle’s house. I was always reading fantasy, so they thought I would like the game. Very young and primarily used to Mario games, when I first played, I had no idea what to do. I remember saying, “Hey! That slime hit me! How to do I dodge?!” I was indignant when they told me that I couldn’t. Dodges were random and I couldn’t control them. I almost stopped playing right there. “You mean I have to let them HIT me?”

When I got over that, I was hooked. It’s strange for people raised in the PlayStation era or beyond to understand how we could have played something that looked like this:

 

This was the world you traveled over. Don’t judge.

 

I played the second one and was thrilled that you could have three party members. THREE! And the box cover was awesome (and still is, to an extent).

Dragon Warrior II box art

The party members were assigned random names. Of course, there are hacks we know of now to change the names, but we didn’t know them then. It sucked when you had a female sorceress named Peta. For an entire game. It sounds like weak flatulence followed by a distasteful surprise. Yet this one is probably the one I have the fondest memories of, just because it seemed SO much bigger and so vast compared to the last one, and it was easy to get lost in. (I know. Now we have Skyrim and Dragon Age. But you can’t compare. Times were different, kids!)

The chibi characters have more charm than the dramatic box art, but I love them both.

I fell out of Dragon Warrior for years, largely thanks to Final Fantasy. Honestly, I think the next one I owned was for the GameBoy Color and was Dragon Warrior III. The menus were clunky and I could see the potential there, and it was mighty and good, but I couldn’t get into that version. I skipped it. I have since been told that this is a sin. I got Dragon Quest VII (by this time, the true name of Dragon Quest replaced the Americanized name of Dragon Warrior).

The translation for this game cracked me up. I was cackling the entire way through. Then the other games started coming out for the Nintendo DS, so I snatched every last one of those up. I think after the second one, I loved IV the most. The cast, the way the separate stories were stitched together, the fact that you had a fortune teller character, the little witch-looking girl who was actually a brawler, the randomness of the merchant. It was in all ways awesome.

The lovely cast of Dragon Quest IV, drawn by Mr. Akira Toriyama, of Dragon Ball Z and Chrono Trigger fame.

The series is wildly popular in Japan, to the point where Enix (as it was)/SquareEnix (as it is) cannot release a Dragon Quest game on a school day. Several have been released in Japan for the DS, and now for the Wii U we are up to something like Dragon Quest X. However, I want to leave you with one thing. Graphics have never been the strong suit of Dragon Quest — gameplay, charm, and design rule. Yet it has upgraded, so I leave you with a comparison between the battle screens for Dragon Quest I and Dragon Quest VIII. Progress doesn’t mean that you have to leave behind charm.

Dragon Quest I battle screen.

Dragon Quest VIII battle screen.

Alternate letter considerations: Deadites, deadlines, demonologist, Dune.