An Evening In The Life Of A Daddy

I got home just a little ahead of everyone else last night, so I fired up a video game. I didn't use the PS3, because it still has Splatterhouse in it, and I learned my lesson after the Ninja Scroll Incident.[1] The PS2 had the Bakugan: Battle Brawlers video game in it, which is about as close as I ever want to come to playing Bakugan, but which would serve to pass the time admirably. (I've been playing it since Firstborn discovered it a few weeks ago, partly out of curiosity but mostly so I'd have some idea of how it works when Firstborn inevitably starts asking for help.)

As far as that goes, it worked just fine: I fought a couple of battles, bought a new card to enhance my Bakugans, and upgraded the weakest of the ones I'm using. (Geek note: I'm playing Darkus, naturally.) And Beautiful Wife came home, and both boys came looking for me, and I started saving my game... whereupon Firstborn demanded that I continue playing so he could watch.

::sigh:: It's so difficult being a parent. Especially when the boys demand such sacrifices from me.

So I plant myself back in front of the TV in the living room, and Firstborn perches on the couch. And I proceed to kick butt, owing to my Mad Bakugan Skills, and also to the fact that I've set the difficulty rating down to the "One-Armed Toddler" level.

Secondborn, meanwhile, is in the kitchen, watching a Sesame Street: Love The Earth video with his mother and eating cheese. This is presumably sufficient to occupy his attention.

After a while, the Beautiful Woman comes into the living room and asks if she can fall into a hot bath. I allow as how this sounds fine, since Firstborn is completely occupied watching me, and Secondborn is being similarly entertained by a little furry red monster.

A few minutes after the sound of running water has shut off, Secondborn comes into the living room on his scooter. In retrospect, I should have taken this as a warning. But he just wheeled himself up next to me, waved, and said, "Hi, Daddy."

I said, "Hi, Secondborn."

He scooted his scooter back around the corner and into the kitchen. I went back to playing the video game.

Now, in my brain, the exchange went something like this: Oh, cool, Secondborn has come to check on us. "Hi, Secondborn." And now he's going back to watch more Elmo. Also, someone has just attempted a Sphere Attack on my Bakugan, and I must show them the error of their ways.

Secondborn, apparently, was thinking something more like this: They're busy. Excellent. Now I can practice my art, free from their Philistine criticisms and Puritanical rules. I must seize this opportunity without hesitation! LET THERE BE ART!!!

At least, when the Beautiful Woman finally yelled to tell me that it was time for Secondborn to join her in the bathtub, I found that he'd been engaged in a game of his own. For those new to the topic: there is a genre of video games known as "Platformers" which focus on the characters leaping about in unlikely ways to reach improbable places under suicidal conditions. There is a sub-genre of Platformers in which the characters are also required to move objects about in order to gain access to otherwise-inaccessible locations.

This was what Roland had been doing. He'd pulled a chair over to the shelves, and used it to climb up so that he could get out a crayon. Then he'd climbed back down, and moved the chair over in front of the television set. There, he climbed back up and set about coloring on the screen, and indeed most of the front of the TV.

If, some fifteen years from now, he's arrested as a Tagger, I will not be surprised.

I have to say, Sesame Street looks very different through an uneven wall of green crayon. Fortunately, our TVs are the old-fashioned sort - the kind that are about two feet thick, and have actual glass screens. (I'm told there's some modern sort of television called a "flat screen," but I don't hold with such newfangled devices.) As it happens, my Luddite tendencies are sometimes advantageous: I'm pretty sure that if this had been a newer television, I'd have been buying a replacement instead of just cleaning it off.

If there's a moral to this story, it's this: no matter how annoying your kids are when they're being loud, you should really worry when they're quiet.

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[1] I was watching television while the Beautiful Wife was out with the kids. The DVD that was playing was an episode of Ninja Scroll: The Series, a particularly violent bit of Japanese animation. Apparently I didn't hear the garage door when they returned, because my first hint of their arrival was Firstborn walking into the living room and stopping to stare at the TV screen, where a bunch of ninjas were hacking each other into very bloody pieces - not exactly the sort of thing I was prepared to explain to a traumatized three-year-old. I didn't dare turn the television off, though, because then he'd really be curious. So I sat there, frozen with panic, while he stood and watched the gore and carnage.

Then, after a moment, he said: "Someday I will know how to use a sword." And he turned and walked off.

At which point I quickly stopped the show and shut off the TV, so I could have my heart attack in peace.

Somebody explain Bakugan to me?

Okay, I have a pop culture question: can somebody tell me what the deal is with Bakugan?

To be fair, I have only a limited interaction with the milieu. Firstborn owns a mess of the toys, mostly in the form of oddly-colored little golf balls that pop open into easily-broken robot/animals when placed against a ferrous metal. These toys came with cards, but we've mostly lost those. I presume, therefore, that it's basically a game, similar to Magic: The Gathering or Pokemon, but built around these toys. That's not what puzzles me.

No, what puzzles me is the cartoon.

By way of explaining, let me offer a bit of contrast. We own one Pokemon DVD, and one Bakugan DVD. Both feature kids who carry around tiny balls which, when opened, produce full-size monsters (or aliens, or something along those lines) who then do battle.

Now, coming into the Pokemon movie with no prior context - I think the one we have is Pokemon Heroes - it's pretty clear that the monsters exist in real life, and can be captured and trained. They can apparently be kept (for storage and transportation, I guess) in the little Pokemon balls, but they don't have to be. And when they battle, it takes place in the real world. The monsters have powers, and those powers can be used to affect real people and real things, so it's pretty obvious why people would want them.

Now, with Bakugan I'm getting a lot less of the complete story. We don't own a movie, we own four episodes of Bakugan Battle Brawlers. So I have, if anything, even less context than I do for Pokemon. But in Bakugan, the monsters only manifest their full-size forms during a battle - and the battles only start when the two opponents throw down "gate cards", which create a sort of temporary extra-dimensional battlefield. Beginning a Bakugan battle effectively takes the contestants out of the real world: they can't affect real-world things, and no time passes in the real world while they're battling. In the real world, the monsters are only ever in the form of little, mutant golf-balls. Some of them can talk to their owners, but that's about it. Unlike the Pokemon monsters, Bakugan monsters are apparently pretty useless.

But the cartoon keeps treating these Bakugan contests as if they were vitally important - not just a sort of extradimensional football game, where we want the right team to win, but something where the question of who wins could actually change someone's life. One of the taglines for the show is "One Goal, Two Worlds." And while that sounds all nice and dramatic, I admit I'm at a bit of a loss. What's the goal? Is there something about the Bakugan monsters that could possibly make some sort of difference to the larger world? As far as I can tell, if all the Bakugans disappeared, the worst that would happen is that some people would have to find new hobbies.

So what's the deal? Am I missing something? Or is there really just this huge disconnect in the way the show is set up?