There’s no crying in baseball, but there is in Smogoff

[phoopes]

This weekend I tried to read The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein aloud and I couldn’t make it through without bawling like a baby

Tell me/show silly reasons for why you’ve cried. After all, the only thing better than a good cry is a good laugh

I will leave you with another silly thing that I have cried over (seriously, this is pure poetry)

 

[sheepie]

my parents didn't have the exact brand of salami i wanted

 

[chimp]

I cried when my parents died. which is silly in a cosmic sense, for all death will come to us all, one day.

 

[Dabob95]

I sometimes cry a tiny bit when listening to song lyrics ranging from just normal ones to like ones where it doesn't make any sense.

 

[BestDatrix]

so
When i was. 4. 5. 6? somewhere around that age range. I used to watch a show called In the Night Garden...
I do need to set down some context for the non-australians (never has a british person ever admitted to me watching this show despite being british???) in the audience
In the Night Garden is a kids show with a bunch of, for lack of a better word, Teletubbies rejects. I am confident in saying this because it was co-created by one of the Teletubbie's creators.
There are multiple different characters but I'll focus on Iggle Piggle because he is why I am writing in this thread
Iggle Piggle is the closest thing the show has to a main protagonist, as every episode begins with him getting into the Night Garden. He's a seafarer, arriving by a boat in the palm of a child's hand.
Unfortunately, at the end of every episode, he is confronted by the narrator, where the entire garden has fallen asleep. There's only one left awake, Iggle Piggle. He's still jumping on stones and having fun, when the narrator notices he isn't in bed.
The narrator gently lets him know that he has to go. He has no place here for him to fall asleep, though all he has is in the Garden, his only possession the blanket he keeps on himself at all times. There should be nothing sad here. He accepts it, not even with a frown on his face, waving with a smile. He falls asleep on his boat, drifting into the night, leaving his friends behind.
I have shed more tears for this ending. Every fucking time. Than I have at actual funerals. It is geniunely awful for me. The thought of it is enough move me to tears. Writing out this post has had tears streaking down my face and snot pouring out of my nostrils. It's actually upsetting for me.
And, here's the kicker. I am the one man in the world who feels like this.

If you watched this right now, you would not cry like I would. I doubt you would find it even the least bit sad.
I'm the one man who will cry for Iggle Piggle. and maybe that's a little funny.

 

[TheMantyke]

I need to set this up because it's so deeply embarrassing presented without this context.

It is 2006. I have spent the last summer obsessed with Pokemon. Countless hours were spend grinding my Leaf Green team. Saturdays had me sneaking episodes of the Pokemon anime, even though my little sisters thought it was lame. Too many Holon Phantoms booster packs were cracked. Now I can't put Blue Rescue Team now.

My cousin showed me that you can use the internet for looking up things about Pokemon. He showed me this incredible website, called Psypokes, that had all the images of the shiny Pokemon online. At some point that leaks into Serebii. That's where I hear about the new games coming out for the Nintendo DS: Pokemon Diamond and Pearl.

IGN has details on the new Pokemon games. It's already out in Japan, with an unreal wait time of six months between now in October and April of the next year. That's when I load up the trailer on IGN's site, which for whatever reason was reuploaded to YouTube in like the mid 2010s, and catch my first glimpse of this game:

I'm stunned.

It's like nothing I've seen from Pokemon before. The preview stills never did it justice. It's something about that moment 20 seconds in where the music swells from the quiet, when you hear the new instruments, when it shows off that logo right before dropping their new 3D chops. It's chilling. It knows its grandeur. And I ate it up. I immediately dragged my very disinterested sister into the computer room to watch it. It's seared into my brain. I still remember that cold autumn Saturday night loading up that video to this very day, almost 20 years later.

It's mind blowing that Pokemon can look like this. I know then how good it is, and how many countless hours I'm going to spend in that game right then and there.

I don't know the magnitude of just how right I'll be.

Pokemon Pearl would end up becoming the most important video game I've played in my life. After conquering most of the lavish in game experience, I headed online. On June 9th 2007, I'd registered my first email address and joined my first internet forum. My internet home changes from Homestarrunner.com to Smogon, to trade and battle with anyone and everyone I can in Pokemon Pearl.

I was a sheltered child with zero knowledge of online etiquette on top of also being an 8th grader. It did not go well, at first. I spammed the Stark Mountain forum and the Wi-Fi section with over 3000 posts of my nearly 7000 in my first six months posting on the internet. The in game file time hit 999:59 just a bit before the new year. However, with time, I grew up. I found a wider world online that helped my skills grow as a person. Legitimately, my bad grades turned around. I cut my teeth trying to write guides for newbies for the experiences I've lived gaining a big collection of Pokemon in Pearl. It all helped build up who I was and how I wanted to give back to the world.

This game is part of the foundation to why I am the person I am now. If it hadn't come around, if it hadn't thrusted me into this massive multiplayer world and tossed me into a big boy portion of the internet, I come out of my teenage years an entirely different man. I come out more sheltered, less studied, and worse. But that didn't happen, and my fate was sealed the moment I watched that video and heard that music and started the long, agonizing wait for Pokemon Pearl.

As time goes on, the fever pitch of Pokémon's relevance in my life comes to a crawl. A major factor turns to something I do with old college buddies IRL once every two weeks; not even that when the pandemic hits. It's still a deep part of my life, but more passive, hiding itself like an impact crater turned into a lake. Smogon isn't my internet home anymore. Logging in as TheMantyke is less the never-ending adventure it once was and more like coming back to a save file after you teleported up all your favorite Pokemon to the newest generation. It's a nostalgic revist, usually driven by a new game coming out to get cozy, just for a little bit like before.

The quiet peace of my life in late 2021 continues. There's little reason not to peep what's going on with the upcoming remakes. After all this time, somehow I won the lottery for my childhood interest and Smogon's still around. I can nestle back in at any time and it's almost like I never left. So I do, and I look at the leaks to see what's in store for BDSP.

And then I hear it.

The embrace of the game that ran into my soul and decided I was meant to kiss a wider world returns. That autumn night as a child comes roaring back. I feel the gulf of the passage of time and know its importance leading to now, leading to who I am today, and my happy life.

And I cry.

Writing this post, I cried a little again.

Something about this intro always makes me shiver, or worse. It feels like the fork in the road to who I am. I can't ever listen to it without it drifting me back.

...And the worst parts is like, BDSP is far, FAR and away the most embarrassing game in the mainline series history. How can I ever succinctly convey to anyone that this rushed slobjob of a Pokemon game, even if it's just this one little bit of the soundtrack, made me cry!?

I had my fun with it, but much of that is the core Pokemon experience being very crunchy and hard to fuck up on a baseline. At least this game is so unreasonably hilarious on version 1.1.1 where you get the most incredible glitches in a modern Pokemon game. It was a fine enough time. It was not as earth shattering to my life as Pokemon Pearl was, nor did I ever expect it to be. It did, however, make me relive a very important moment.

As embarassing as it is to say Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl made me cry, damn, I can't help it. That little bit at 20 seconds in strikes at a nerve. Whenever I hear it, I'll always feel a sliver of that wide birth of time that defined who I am. What a song.

 

[Comett7778]

When I was young, I once dreamt Inspector Gadget hypnotized my entire family to start trying to kill me. I cried when I woke up. Haven't watched Inspector Gadget since...

 

[Jungle cruiser]

Off the top of my head:
- Feeling mocked because my friends didn't believe people in India ride elephants like horses.
- Po's mother's death in Kung Fu Panda 2
- Not being able to go to the zoo because it COULD rain
- Having to put a cute cat poster on our then shared room (by my sister's request) as opposed to a pig in a pool.
- The ending of Sky: Children of the Light
- My dentist at 8 years old.

There's probably more but these are the ones I remember

 

[BIG ASHLEY]

so
When i was. 4. 5. 6? somewhere around that age range. I used to watch a show called In the Night Garden...
I do need to set down some context for the non-australians (never has a british person ever admitted to me watching this show despite being british???) in the audience
In the Night Garden is a kids show with a bunch of, for lack of a better word, Teletubbies rejects. I am confident in saying this because it was co-created by one of the Teletubbie's creators.
There are multiple different characters but I'll focus on Iggle Piggle because he is why I am writing in this thread
Iggle Piggle is the closest thing the show has to a main protagonist, as every episode begins with him getting into the Night Garden. He's a seafarer, arriving by a boat in the palm of a child's hand.
Unfortunately, at the end of every episode, he is confronted by the narrator, where the entire garden has fallen asleep. There's only one left awake, Iggle Piggle. He's still jumping on stones and having fun, when the narrator notices he isn't in bed.
The narrator gently lets him know that he has to go. He has no place here for him to fall asleep, though all he has is in the Garden, his only possession the blanket he keeps on himself at all times. There should be nothing sad here. He accepts it, not even with a frown on his face, waving with a smile. He falls asleep on his boat, drifting into the night, leaving his friends behind.
I have shed more tears for this ending. Every fucking time. Than I have at actual funerals. It is geniunely awful for me. The thought of it is enough move me to tears. Writing out this post has had tears streaking down my face and snot pouring out of my nostrils. It's actually upsetting for me.
And, here's the kicker. I am the one man in the world who feels like this.

If you watched this right now, you would not cry like I would. I doubt you would find it even the least bit sad.
I'm the one man who will cry for Iggle Piggle. and maybe that's a little funny.

confirming as an inhabitant of These Wretched Isles that i have in fact seen this delightful programme and that i can understand how you feel about the outro (tho i have not personally cried at it yet, i understand why one might! there is something distinctly melancholy about iggle piggle's existence. now there's a sentence.).

my crying story is that once in music at school we were learning about leitmotifs and they put on "concerning hobbits" and i started bawling like a child. so there went my social cred eh. never before had said tune elicited this response from me, but ever since it has remained a near-guaranteed tearjerker.

 

[chroma_2903]

As embarassing as it is to say Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl made me cry

for what it's worth, that post is the single least embarrasing thing i have seen anyone say pertaining to bdsp on the internet ever

 

[doipy hooves]

I had crying spells often as a kid over getting overwhelmed over plenty of minute and minute-to-minute frustrations and misunderstandings, so much of which you could imagine occurring in school that trying to think back to them brings to mind the effects on my affect more vividly than the causes that had felt like the centre of the world at the time, and yet I can still relate that one of these arguments was about trying to convince my classmates that Adobe Shockwave Player was not a virus. Probably because that's a matter of fact that I can still feel comfortable affirming in the current day, and is also one of the things I associate with Shockwave specifically compared to Flash.

I feel that my past self would have liked to think that the journey towards attaining a stable peace of mind would be the result of the people around me getting more mature with age, but in hindsight I had a lot more to work on myself, and also I probably overestimated how much the rest of the world beyond my window had it all figured out for themselves. Sometimes I still cry to calm down, but much less frequently so or necessary with more perspective. I think crying it out is kind of like the process of vomiting, where it feels awful to both hold it in or let it out in the moment despite your body preparing for the latter, but you usually feel better afterwards when it's all out of your system. As I write this I find myself relating more to Whitney GSC than I'd like to admit, but I think there's even something to be respected about knowing when to stop and move on.

Also I'm probably dating myself here, but this was also right between the turn of the dark ages before you could pull out a smart phone or a 3DS and consult a reputable Internet source like Wikipedia or Yahoo Answers to settle such debates and mysteries of life at any moment, but also before the enshittification of AI slop infested the web, like a parasitoid wasp paralyzing a spider and laying their eggs inside them to brood and eventually be devoured from the inside. That all makes me a little bit sad too but I'm glad for what formative experiences I did have in those fleeting times.

I noticed by technicality that I have the first post in Smogoff that mentions crying. If you search for the word 'cry' or any of its other tenses within Smogoff and go to the very last page, then click "View older results" and go to the last page again, the very first result chronologically is my post from April 2020. I say by technicality because I believe the thread was originally in Congregation of the Masses and technically predates Smogoff as a forum, but it's probably still relevant to this current topic. There are parts of this post that are partially true and partially untrue, but I feel the need to expand on this account now.

Playing, grinding, and abandoning random nuzlockes, but importantly using a very 'good' Thick Fat azumarill in my first one in Emerald. I don't remember exactly what it did, but it was cute, tanky, and actually lived through. From then on I tried to use Azumarill ingame, and W2/X made it easy to do so. That experience is why Azumarill is my favourite mon. When Gen 6 first came out, I literally cried tears of joy in real life when I read that Azumarill got +10 to Special Attack. Happiest moment of my life.

Well, saying that Azumarill getting +10 to SpA in XY was the happiest moment of my life (at that point) is a severe exaggeration that I hope would be clear on its own, and one might think that it's completely irrelevant to its legacy. But I do have a fondness for tales of emergent gameplay, and it is a memory that has stuck with me, even before I was aware of the more relevant ramifications of other buffs like Belly Drum and Aqua Jet being legal on the same set or the Fairy type's fantastic coverage additions. For those who aren't aware, Azumarill has (or had) one of the easier base stat spreads to memorize, (100/50/80/50/80/50), and I made an effort to do so after typing /data enough times or whatever else. Maybe not as simple as Mew's 100x6, but they're all easy-to-remember multiples of 10 and kind of symmetrical, with only three distinct numbers and half of them alternating, with HP being the highest like how it ends up for most mons' actual stat values in practice. Honestly Azumarill having 60 SpA was pretty easy to slot in my mind as a difference, and it also hit 420 BST which might have been kind of funny around then. Even after having played White 2 properly with a Huge Power Azumarill with Return/Waterfall/Ice Punch/Superpower (@ Quick Claw to patch up its speed), I think I still ended up with some resigned respect for special Azumarill so much mainly because of that experience trained on playing Emerald and having to use Water Gun, BubbleBeam, and Surf as special water STABs over and over, and sometimes even being my Ice Beam user before fighting Winona. In the end I did end up using special Azumarill on at least two occasions since then that I can recall, once in an unserious inverse battle team with Focus Blast/Blizzard/Grass Knot/Hydro Pump and one built specifically for soloing the Unaware Dondozo 7-star raid in SV built around tera-Grass Grass Knot in Grassy Terrain and Mud-Slap/Charm/Fake Tears as support. Speaking of crying, Fake Tears is kind of an interesting move to mention on Azumarill because it used to be an exclusive Azurill egg move back when the incense babies were still a separate thing and had different egg moves, but then SWSH went and made it a TM and let Marill/Azumarill learn it but also removed it from Marill's native egg move list, much like many other destructive changes in Gen 8 learnsets.

This all comes back around for me to say that Azurill's Gen 5 sprite is notably distressing with how sad it looks (and also technically its official art released in 2001/HOME render modeled after it) when it's usually happy in its other showings:

Even while bouncing about, Azurill looks sadder than even Bonsly, the baby who is actually known for a crying habit in Pokedex entries. Yet Azurill isn't even crying in these depictions, but it has those sad raised cartoon eyebrows that are the opposite of angry and go like "/o_o\" (I don't know how better to describe this expression) with a distinctly frowning mouth. There's not really a reason to associate the Azurill line with crying when they're usually quite jolly, but for some reason I usually picture Azurill in my mind's eye as on the verge of tears. And I think that kind of development makes some kind of accidental sense as the kind of mon with a friendship evolution you have to put effort into, at least more so than Buneary and its 0 base happiness these days with no Frustration as a clue in.

(Also there's an anime episode specifically about dealing with a Marill that cries all the time, but it predates Azurill and also I wasn't aware of that one at the time.)

I suppose it also doesn't help that Azurill is the face of the Sad reaction on the official Smogon.com community forums... I'm not sure if this would be considered crying yet, though. Looking at it more closely, there are no tears streaming down, but they do seem to be welling up. Of the reacts, I do personally find the Wow react the most relatable at times as I usually don't feel like an agreeable fish or a poisonous balloon, but the sad Azurill does hit home to me as a more solemn or vulnerable react to consciously choose. Only 173 or ~1.6% of my reaction score is from Sad reacts, but even the act of receiving one in a way just feels like it carries more empathetic weight most other reactions of making someone else feel something and expressing the sentiment back through the Internet.

For comparison, the Sad reaction on Facebook does have a single teardrop running down its face, but the default Xenforo sad reaction has only a simple frown, though the Haha react is the one crying tears of joy... And I suppose the Haha's Koffing is able to cry freely, even as it laughs. This also reminds me that I dislike the crying laughing emoji and its use when there are other representations to choose from, but it doesn't really bother me with the forum Haha in this case. But if there were two options for the Haha react with one crying and one not, then I probably wouldn't go out of my way to choose the crying laughing one. I guess to me, the act of crying represents more so the loss of control from an involuntary reaction or extreme, more so than the mundanity of finding a post funny for whatever reason it may be. And I also just find the laughing crying emoji off-putting in and of itself but that's getting beyond the point. Well, I might be missing the point of the thread to laugh at, but there's been a respectable lack of Hahas anyway.

All that is to say is that I might personally relate more than I thought to a sad Azurill sprite than anything implied by its intended gameplay or character design, and I'm only just putting this all together on the fly now as I try to make words into post. And I don't even like Azurill that much anyway. Thanks for your reading.