Love of Pikmins; Love of Man

 

On January 5, 2026, a friend invited me to play the popular mobile idle game Pikmin Bloom. It is a game that is much like its spiritual predecessor, Pokemon Go, but much simpler. The player walks around different physical locations to collect seedlings, which can be planted and sprout into pikmins when the player walks enough steps. The player can then deploy the pikmins to activities like fruit expeditions, mushroom battles, and planting flowers.

The game was very fun. Everyday, I giggled in delight seeing them gulping up the nectar I fed them; I took longer routes to places and went on more walks so I could grow another pikmin, find a different seedling, plant one more flower. 

I loved my pikmins. I send them on little expeditions to pick up a fruit, or a new costume they can wear. I gave each of them unique names, and every night I show my boyfriend the new pikmins I planted, and we'd chuckle at the silly names I gave them. 

 

 

 

 

I found that what made the game enjoyable is the relationship I created with these creatures. It is that I increasingly come to see them as my children. I am of course not alone in this. In a popular tumblr post about pikmin bloom, some children discover in horror the blurring of the line between their mother's pikmins and themselves. They discover that their mother might love her pikmins the exact way she love them.

 

About two weeks ago, I sprouted my 200th pikmin. However, my interest in the game waned with the multiplication of my children. Part of this diminishing of interest is of course good old-fashioned getting-bored-of-a-thing; part of it still is the filling up of in game storage space and the game's subsequent nudge to micro-transactions. Though I can't help but feel that perhaps a factor of this lost of interest is the shift of my position from a father of a family to a commander of an army, a despot of a nation, a God among (Pik)men. 

Mindlessly I drafted my most powerful pikmins to battle a mushroom. I send 15 pikmins on expeditions. I couldn't get myself to care. 30 more pikmins are scuttling next to me, and once they are deployed, 30 more. I no longer know the names of pikmins by looking at them and before long, I stop naming them. The individuals melt into the mass; love and care turn into management. 

Freud touched on this difficulty of universal love in Civilization and its Discontents, 

If I am to love [my neighbour] (with this universal love) merely because he, too, is an inhabitant of this earth, like an insect, an earth-worm or a grass-snake, then I fear that only a small modicum of my love will fall to his share –– not by any possibility as much as, by the judgment of my reason, I am entitled to retain for myself.

Numbers are the enemy of love, and Jesus Christ the most misguided of lovers.

Implicit in the horror expressed in the tumblr post — the horror that their mother views them as an undifferentiated mass — is the suspicion that universal love is in reality no love at all. That despite the claims to the contrary from the theologians and the heralds of fascistic paternal despots, the familial aspiration of religious and national communities is in fact a lie. As lovers we understand the impossibility of indiscriminate loving; and as recipients of love we are dissatisfied with and view as worthless that unspecific love, spread thin to a point of meaninglessness. The father may well be a small despot in the patriarchal family, but the state, god, the dictator may never care and love the way the father does except in dreams and fantasies.