#bash anime dedede for being 'ooc' (or anything of the like) in the replies and die by my sword

[applekitty]

‘game dedede’ is not a good person to ship escargoon with and here’s why

im glad my escargoon analysis resonated with lots of people. i saw some comments on it, which i feel the need to reply to because they’re on my post. a small few comments have been about the main focus of this whole multi paragraph crazed yammering; game dedede

(content warning: i talk about the horror comic killing stalking for four paragraphs. wow i bet this content warning doesn’t give mood whiplash at all)

now, game dedede isn’t much of anything. he’s a non-character, as he has no discernible personality in the games that isn’t really much of anything more than a catalyst for people to project a personality onto. as are all the game characters, because kirby isn’t focused so much on plot and indepth character development as it is about the gameplay. nintendo’s always been good at gameplay,  so they have basically stuck to what they’ve known and sprinkled small plot bits around places and entirely discarded anything other than hints personalities so that way they have an excuse for pure gameplay and fun to occur. it’s the same way with mario, and zelda, and usually basically all of their properties. yes, even pokemon, though usually when pokemon gets too plot heavy we get games like sun and moon, which are basically just cutscenes upon cutsc- 

what was i talking about? oh, right, game dedede.

game dedede is usually seen by the fandom as a variety of things, but the main one is nice. and by nice i mean he is usually portrayed as someone who is typically valorous and is doing the right thing, not someone who is necessarily pleasant, though some like to make him pleasant or jolly. if you know me or have even been on my blog even once on pc you’ll notice the cool deviantart stamp i got from one of my friends. i fully agree with the things it entails; dedede not being your typical uwu ‘do nothing wrong’ monarch that he’s often now plastered as because he did the whole ‘i help this cat’ in rtdl or because he wanted to keep nightmare from coming out of the fountain in nightmare in dreamland and.. whatever the name was of the game that it was a remake of.

people usually want to be able to root for the protagonist, and since dedede was a protagonist and / or in the right in a few occasions, we want to see him as a good guy doing good guy things. and there’s plenty of different ways to take that, as there’s both evidence for and against him being a morally light character. but that’s not really the point of what i’m talking about here. regardless of your own personal opinion on how ‘game dedede’ morally is, he is not a good person for escargoon to be with. there’s a reason why i said someone should be shipping him with an oc rather than game dedede, and it’s precisely because ‘game dedede’, even if he somehow zapped into the anime verse, would not be good to ship with him.

and it’s not based on chemistry or because game dedede is secretly or openly evil or something like that. it’s purely because escargoon is still a victim of abuse. and if you’re someone with a few braincells you want him to get out of that abuse and go find a new husband who’ll love and care for him. for escargoon to get game dedede seems to make sense at first because escargoon is so devoted to the anime one, but when you look at it, it’s not healthy at all.

this is essentially taking escargoon’s old abuser, wiping away all the ‘sins’ of his character just to make it so escargoon can date him. just so he can date an idealized version of his abuser. this person is quite literally just his abuser but with a mental coat of paint. 

allow me to draw comparison.

i’m going to go off here about a comic that i warned about at the top of the post. i’m not going to go too indepth about it due to the sheer nausea i might cause people if i do. it is a rather extreme example sheerly due to the content of said comic, but i can’t think of another better one off the top of my head. there’s a comic named killing stalking which was a big note for socio-political talk i think a few years back. it was a horror comic about a killer and a stalker wherein the murderer takes the stalker in, breaks his legs, and keeps in his house. the stalker, who already had sexual interest in his kidnapper, is abused due to various here and there reasons, and then after a while the comic begins the two’s sexual-romantic yet still abusive relationship. here’s the thing. the two of the characters are both men, so the relationship is gay.

many took to tumblr and various other medias smacking the comic for the display that it created (the comic chock is full of fairly nauseating things that are worth calling disgusting, but are expected of a shock horror comic) and the association it made between gay men and murderers, as well as making gay men look predatory and dangerous. normally said comic wouldn’t have been much of a problem or very noteworthy if it were about a straight pair, but it was about this Evil Gay Murderer Pair, so it was a source of controversy like shit is an attractor of flies.

despite the controversy that the comic had gotten, and the treatment in-canon it had of its characters being very clearly evil and in the wrong and clear deservance of being detracted, something strange happened. not in the comic, but in the people who decided to support said comic. people decided to support it for a number of reasons, one being that ‘oh it’s a horror comic i like horror despite what controversy or effects it may have on people’. i remember seeing it once, on my dashboard, i think. or back in the day when i was trying to figure out what the fuck was going on with this comic that everyone on my dash was just going to town on. people were shipping the two main, gay characters with eachother. and they weren’t doing it in a way that was ‘oh the murderer is so hot look at him in all this blood’ sort of way. it was in a much more.. ‘cozy’ position. it was fluffy. it was shown as cute. at first i thought it was because people were fucking weirdos, but i remember this one caption that has been recalled in perfect paraphrased clarity to me.

‘some people make aus to make their ships more angsty, but i’m out here making mine healthy lol’

people were taking the murderer, the main person who was causing the problems in the comic, and turning him into a loving husband for the stalker (who was shown as very mentally ill and in desperate need of love and attention). people were making the pairing that the comic itself showed as horrifying and awful to be fluffy and cute and devoid of any problems. so that way the victim was no longer hurt. it was an au. the murderer had a new personality, he was a changed man who never hurt anyone, so he was perfect for the stalker. that way, the ship could be had but there would be no issue whatsoever.

and to be quite honest, that’s what we have here. we have an offshoot of that. though obviously the source material is much less dangerous in our case, we still have a victim in desperate need of love in an abusive relationship with someone who hurts them. then, we have people shipping said victim with a new version of that abuser just to wipe the slate clean. just to keep the ship going without anyone objecting to it, because it can all be explained away as an au or what have you. though, i’m sure the ship in killing stalking was very much bashed by people (at least, i hope it was), while this one isn’t.

i can hear my strawman in the replies already going ‘well thanks for the tangent. but ching, game dedede’s a different person. he is legitimately a different canon than anime dedede, meanwhile this is people making things up that the canon doesn’t support. if you dated a twin you won’t apply the sins of the twin on the other one, would you?’ and if this were a real life situation, you’d be correct. 

it’d be wrong to place the sins of one twin onto another sheerly because one was an abusive asshole. but since is a real life scenario, putting a victim of abuse back with someone who looks exactly like their abuser would most certainly create extreme fear and panic in that victim. it wouldn’t matter if one of the twins hasn’t done anything, the potential relationship would forever be ruined and it’d be out of their control. and no one, no self respecting person, should ever have a victim date them if they look exactly like said victim’s old abuser. that’s just asking for mental troubles and constant panic attacks.

but that’s if this were real. it’s not real. this is video games and cartoons. it doesn’t come down to that, it comes down to us and what we decide to do, and what we decide to ship. these are not real people. we are putting them together for our own amusement because you’d think they’d get along. and doing this with a ship like this with game dedede says, to me, "I do not care if it is abusive in canon, I want to ship it anyways without any problems or people calling me out, so I’ll make it so people can’t do that by stripping the abuser of their abusive characteristics and make it so this abusive ship is all sunshine and rainbows". this is especially poignant if escargoon is stripped of all his abuse as well, allowing for him to be shipped more easily. it is quite literally going ‘nope’ when one is confronted with the very real trauma of a character and discarding it. don’t get me wrong, some things in canon should be discarded in some sources of entertainment, but a character’s abuse being discarded entirely for the sake of shipping just does not sit well with me.

of course, people who ship it are absolutely not thinking this maliciously when they ship discountdesuka, but that’s what it is irregardless of what they are thinking.

‘game’ dedede / escargoon is a ‘what could’ve been’ situation. 

it is an idealized version of dedesuka, one which throws a key aspect of escargoon’s out the door purely for the fluff and the cute gay moments that could’ve been. and sadly enough, it’s probably what escargoon dreams and hopes could happen (which is arguable because escargoon gets suspicious whenever dedede is nice to him), but it never does.

i understand why people do it. i know they don’t have some secret plan to be evil by creating secret abusive content that has hidden messages in it so everyone will ship abusive ships or something ridiculous like that, and if you thought that i thought that you’re very wrong. 

in some’s cases (as shown by the tags on my escargoon post), they want to reclaim a relationship which was blatantly homophobic in execution and turn it into something better. others just want a cute ship because their version of ‘game’ dedede is morally better than his anime counterpart, and wouldn’t hurt escargoon. they want to make wholesome content to drown out canon’s shows of abuse and negativity. which is understandable to want, but to show respect to the concepts the show puts out, isn’t something that should be embraced with ‘game’ dedede/escargoon. 

but there is no undoing what anime dedede/escargoon is in the show, and what it means to give escargoon over to ‘game’ dedede instead. ‘game’ dedede / escargoon is not abusive by any initial means, but it is still something that should not be shipped regardless.

it is disrespect to escargoon’s status as an abuse victim to  ship him with the same exact person who abused him and say it’s okay because ‘he has a different personality’. 

i am begging you. please ship escargoon with your oc or some other game character.

#shitpost #kirby #kirby right back at ya #hoshi no kaabi #analysis #it has a tl;dr at the end #bash anime dedede for being 'ooc' (or anything of the like) in the replies and die by my sword