This is going to be a long one, but there’s a point to it all that I haven’t ever really expressed here before. So please bare with me.
For all the times I’ve talked about my collection, I’ve never gone into deeper detail about why I was obsessed with Dragons or why it was Gyarados that continued to catch my eye. My first love of Pokemon were with Psychic and Bug types - Alakazam and Scyther being my all time favorites of the original 151 insofar as I was introduced to. This was mostly due to the anime and seeing Alakazam in person.
I eventually did see Gyarados in the anime during the Shipwreck episode but wasn’t impressed with his design. Still, as an impulsive kid, I really liked it’s destructiveness. XD My first rare though was Dragonair which I was excited about because I love Dragons - Wyverns and Chinese Dragons being my favorites from mythology. Up until my early 20’s, I also had a collection of Dragon related stuff -
My favorite book series was the Pit Dragon Chronicles by Jane Yolen:
My favorite action figure was Horrid the Dragon from the Spawn Series:
In the 2 year gap from collecting Pokemon where I was obsessed with Yugioh, I obviously loved both Blue Eyes & Red Eyes and maintained a collection of Dragon cards (even though Dark Paladin was my all time favorite but that was because of the story of how I obtained it) and still fight the want to collect Dragons from that TCG:
As you can see, there’s a general theme to liking destructive looking dragons or dragons that had an old or ancient look to them. Gyarados in the anime didn’t really thrill me up until I saw him use Hyper Beam in the Mewtwo movie - found him a bit too “bulbous” in his classic look. I wouldn’t even have a chance to play the game up until after I got my first Gyarados card - otherwise I think he would have been an insta-fave.
I never saw the card until that faithful day that got me my first ever Gary which I promptly traded my old favorite, Alakazam, for - Arita’s depiction just shouted “Badass” and after obtaining Sugimori’s even more badass looking Shining Gyarados a few years later - my obsession reached new levels.
In the several years I’ve been part of E4, I don’t think I’ve ever talked about this with exception to perhaps a private few or at least not into this much depth. And to make a long-long story short and to get more to the point of why I was obsessed with Dragons and Gyarados in particular -
I was an angry kid.
Without going into details, I went through a wicked rough trauma early in life which affected much of my childhood and teenage years. I was also into dance and theatre and was constantly a target for bullies for a number of years. My family was also very poor. Least to say, I was an extremely angry child. But I was always afraid of my anger because I had a tendency to lash out and scare friends and family around me when I did - I hated that feeling and tended to bottle it up for years out of fear I might hurt someone by accident which I’m thankful I never did - though my sister was the unfortunate exception during intense game matches (but we’re besties now).
Seeing “big scary angry dragons” was like a validation to an internal part of me that I connected with at a time I didn’t have a positive outlet for my anger. And over the years of collecting Gyarados, I’ve learned to love the big blue angry boy for his absolute ferocity - because sometimes I wished I could destroy cities myself when I was a child.
I talk about this now because I think it’s important to create a more open forum about things like this - mental health especially. If more people are willing to talk about it, I think more people will be able to seek and find help. We’ve seen a number of charities towards mental health come out of this hobby - I hope that side of the hobby continues. I’ve been a Social Worker for some years now and did the work I needed to get to this point - it’ll forever be a work in progress of course, but at least I did the therapy and self-reflection to get a handle on it. I wouldn’t be able to engage in the work I do with kids otherwise.
And in fact, it’s probably why I tend to work best with the angry and silent ones.
I know very well where the dragons hide.