Originally posted by Nanashi
what's the story behind using kuchipatchi as your avatar and other imagery? it's been a while
kuchipatchi is a friend
kuchipatchi has always been part of my life, spanning back to my early childhood when i was collecting the tamagotchi bean toys
fig 1. a kuchipatchi bean toy found on an online listing
many people claim they have no favourites when it comes to toys, but in fact, kuchipatchi was maybe one of my favourite of them all. i would also draw a lot of comics about the adventures with him (calling him `Tamagachi') and his younger brother, a tamatchi named `Tamaguchi'.
ΒΉ these comics mostly rehashed punchlines from Garfield and Peanuts strips; if i were to compare them to
Undertale characters i guess the Tamaguchi would be like sans and Tamagachi would be more like papyrus..
i would also make little booklets using folded index cards and post-it notes with little stories for these characters. in one series, there was an evil shark who wanted to wreak havoc on their lives but would always fail in comical ways, much to Tamagachi's obliviousness. i also typed these stories up in Microsoft Wordβthey're on some old hard drive somewhere still, i believe.
tragically i lost Tamagachi after bringing him along with me in the car on the way to school. this was such a huge moment of loss for me as a child. i was devastated and spent months searching for it and crying, spending all my free time digging through old boxes in various corners of the house, even venturing into the dark parts that scared me. i had one photograph of him taken on film, seated next to his brother, the two of them on a green leather sofa. i framed the photograph and placed it on a bookshelf by my bed. i would look at it every day in melancholy.
fig 2. my adventures in trying to find a replacement would lead me to getting a VHS copy of Tamagotchi Video Adventures, a one-off cartoon about Tamagotchis visiting earth
then one day i found an eBay listing containing the bean toy. it was the first time i had ever bid on an auction on eBay. my mother was with me, and she told me not to tell my father that we were bidding on an online auction for this toy. there were some competing bids but in the end i won, and i was reunited with my favourite toy.
Β²
later on, i would start drawing comics exclusively in Swedish as a way to practise, and i would give them new names: the Tamatchi was now named Johan and the Kuchipatchi was named Kalle. i even composed a theme song for them, inspired by a lot of different 80s cartoon theme songs. in this new incarnation of the strip, the humour became a lot more metalinguistic, focused on bilingual puns and accompanied by deliberate mistranslations and surreal situations. there was even a parody of
Final Destination.
Β³
i have since been separated from the bean toy and no longer draw these comics, but that doesn't mean kuchipatchi has become less of a part of my life. i've gotten him a few times whenever i feel like replaying some version of the digital pet game, as if visiting me. but this history also has made me feel like he would be a suitable avatar for me. in a way, my relationship with this character continues today, through this forum.
fig 3. kuchipatchi sprite from the gb game
in short, kuchipatchi is indeed a friend and a life-long one at that.
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f ' ' 3 < `thank you for this question!'
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ΒΉ i had the entire collection and gave many of them names that simply changed the `go' vowel and altered the length of the `tch' sound. some exceptions were Maskuchi who was of course called `Maskedchi' and Ginjirotchi whom i dubbed `Captain'. i think it's because i thought he looked like the tamagotchi version of Spock from Star Trek, a show i never watched. Spock is not even the captain in the show β©
Β² the listing also came with a Ginjirotchi, one a bit more stuffed than the one i already had. β©
Β³ i never watched any entry from this film series, but i read all their plot summaries one day and decided to make this parody.β©
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