• 10 Dec, 2025 *

There’s a Pokemon called Delibird. It looks like this:

It came out in Gold and Silver, the second two Pokemon games. I did not have a Gameboy at the time, and I was not allowed to own a handheld console - my parents insisted any game played on a gaming-only device would "rot my brain." (PC games were, for some reason, OK.) Nevertheless, I was obsessed with Pokemon and would watch the show constantly. I tried to play it on my friends’ Gameboys whenever possible - I often offered to grind levels for them on field trips. I even purchased guidebooks for Gold and Silver and just read them for my own entertainment.

Because I was not playing these games very often, I had an unusual understanding of many Pokemon. I knew what they looked like in 2D art, and perhaps what they looked like on some Pokemon cards... but I did not know what they looked like when they animated in the game. I did not read their Pokedex descriptions, and I didn’t get to see NPCs talking about them. And because I wasn’t playing the games or collecting them all, if I thought a Pokemon was stupid, I would just never think about it at all.

I thought Delibird looked fucking stupid. I did not like Pokemon who were holding objects; I wanted the Pokedex to be a kind of naturalist’s resource, with images of the biological creatures only, so I didn’t like the fact that Delibird was holding a bag in its art.

The other thing is that I just assumed the bag was full of meat.

Delibird is an ice-type Pokemon, but it didn’t occur to me that it was a Santa bird, or that it was making deliveries of food in general. (Pokemon games insist that it is kind of a St Bernard animal that gives food to lost people, and that the bag is, like, made out of its tail feathers, or something.)

I just assumed that the "Deli" meant "delicatessen," and that the bird was ice type because it was keeping the meat cold. I assumed it would be throwing meat out of the bag at people. I imagined that it was full of pork chops. I also wondered whether the bag was a thick extension of its body - a grotesque appendage rather than an object. (In my defense, the bag is supposed to be part of its body, but not in the way I imagined.) I wondered if the bag itself was meat, and whether cutting it would be like cutting a slice off of Delibird itself.

For a very long time, I devoted absolutely no brain energy to Delibird. As I got older, however, it began to seem increasingly unlikely that Delibird was a meat-slinging bird.

I recognized that the meat-bird misunderstanding was a precious kind of falsehood that I should hold onto and cultivate as long as possible. I knew that if I looked Delibird up, I would get the truth, and it could only be disappointing. So I just refused to read about Delibird through my teens, and continued to cultivate the deliberate misunderstanding that its bag was full of meat.

I think I learned that Delibird did not sling meat in college. "Deli" means "delivery," which is fucking dumb. Delibird is a Santa Claus reference, and it delivers, like, berries or something. I think it sometimes delivers bug Pokemon as food (because it is a bird).

Sometimes I find myself forgetting that I ever knew Delibird delivers non-meat items. Ahh, Delibird, the meat bird. I think I preferred the misunderstanding.