• fae/faer or they/them

fae otherkin in the streets, anthro red chocobo in the sheets


is that when I was a kid we went to a burger joint a lot. Fuddrucker's, specifically. If you are not familiar: This was a chain, they're very nearly extinct now (if not fully extinct), but they were very cool for a period. If you were a child your meal came with a big yellow coin you could take to the bakery counter and exchange for a cookie, there was a lotta vibrant and retro shit on the walls, they had old-fashioned "test your strength by pressing on this plate real hard or squeezing the hand of this terrifying Uncle Sam" arcade machines. They had arcade games, which used to be everywhere. If you are a younger person, this might sound wild, honestly, but I swear to you this is a real thing-in lieu of cell phones you'd occasionally go to a restaurant and there'd just be a Strikers 19XX machine in the corner. We went to a McDonalds once in Tennessee, near Knoxville, and they just had the Konami X-Men machine.

the one in my city had, for a very brief period, like a week tops, this game called "Darkstalkers." this would've been around the time it came out, I was seven or eight years old at the time. it was in an unmarked cabinet, lodged between two pinball machines-I adore pinball but I'd have no chance at recalling which ones they were at this point, because at that moment I was captivated.

but, the unmarked cabinet led to a bit of mystery in its own right, because there was no immediately presentable information as to what the fuck I was looking at, just a highly-stylized title screen font (which, in the attract screens, spends more time as a white-on-white background, the letters only defined by shadows-it's cool looking but does not do a primary school trying to rapidly discern the name of the game any favors). the attract on that game was wild, though. sure, I'd seen SF2, thought it was fun, owned Turbo on my SNES, game's great, and it had beautiful sprite work. MK was gruesome and looked unique and cool in its own right. Fatal Fury turned me onto the genre overall and is still one of my favorite franchises. But this? this beautifully animated game of cartoon monsters? shit was unlike anything I'd ever seen. honestly, nothing like anything games were like in 1994.

it vanished, quickly-the next time I went there, eager to play again, it was gone. I have no evidence for this, but I've always kinda suspected someone complained about Morrigan and Felicia in the opening animations. this mysterious game entered my life for long enough for me to lose seventy-five cents trying to learn Felicia and Anakaris, and then vanished. I wouldn't see it for a couple years after that when the PSX version was released (even then the rental store didn't have it actually in-stock all that often, and I wouldn't own it for years after THAT, when it saw a rerelease under the Fighter's Edge branding-y'all remember that?). The damage was done, though.

there is a version of me on some timeline that never saw that arcade game. some alternative-seven-year old that never saw their opportunity to be a catgirl in a video game for the first time, who never got the lifelong obsession with the genre (and, let's be real, who maybe had the first little inklings of Gender). that version might have taken a different road entirely. that version's a bitch and I think they suck.


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