"the Underdark"

NOTE: This essay contains spoilers for Date Everything, specifically Luna/Connie’s route and lore pertaining to the objects’ sentience. 

When I was a kid, I had a habit of anthropomorphizing everything around me. I didn’t want my stuffed animals to feel left out whenever I went to school, so I’d sneak them in my backpack sometimes. In order to help myself get better with math, I personified numbers. I’d tell myself that 2 was friends with 4,6, 8, and 10, and 1 was friends with 3, 5, 7, and 9 as a way of remembering even and odd numbers. Part of me was convinced that I could talk to those numbers in my head, too. These little friend groups were my work-around for where I lacked in mathematics, but they didn’t last long as thoughtforms. There was even a time where my books invited me to color inside them, because they were so bored of having nothing but words to show. I was an interesting kid, that’s for sure.

However, what stuck with me the most was my first handheld console. For my birthday, I got a Nintendo DS. I was pretty young; I want to say I was about 8 or 9, but my memory fails me. I admired it so much. Its design captivated me: white, compact, and an extra slot for backwards compatibility. I learned what the latter was when my cousin gave me his copy of Pokémon Emerald since I never had a GBA of my own. Once I started getting my own games, I grew attached to the device. Like other objects in my room, I anthropomorphized it in my mind and treated it as a friend. I didn’t have a name for them, but I did personify them through the characters I liked or played as in my video games. I often visualized her as Hilda, the female avatar for Pokémon Black & White. Maybe my avatar in MySims one day, or a Nintendog the next, but usually Hilda. Hilda was someone familiar and cool, but this thoughtform wasn’t Hilda as she’s known among Pokémon fans. She took her appearance because I wanted her to, and whatever I wanted changed often, so she didn’t always appear as Hilda.

She was an imaginary friend at first. I never mentioned her to my parents, and I kept it that way. Our friendship was a secret between the two of us, and it felt so fun and stealthy. It was like having a power no one else knew about, except it wasn’t much of a power and more of an act of my imagination with some brainweird things at play. Admittedly, creating a person around my DS, and every other DS I had after that, made me feel less alone at home. I needed to be distracted, especially when parents did as parents do (i.e. fight each other). She was there to distract me, to do whatever they could for a neurodiverse child who didn’t know what to do in times like that. Later in life, I stopped hearing them. I thought nothing of it. Kids create imaginary friends all the time. Mine happened to a bit unorthodox, but that’s what I chalked her up to be as a teenager. 

Now, imagine my surprise when she came back in my adulthood.