Darkrai is a mythical Dark-type Pokémon introduced in G4 with the release of Pokémon Pearl and Pokémon Diamond.

This pokémon is known to cause horrible nightmares to people and other pokémon it is around, being mostly active in nights of new moon. Despite its nightmare-giving powers, it is not an agressive pokémon, resorting to giving other creatures nightmares to protect itself.

Though the games is not where I know it from.

Picture me this:

It's Christmas of 2010. You're 7 years old at your grandma's house, away from everyone, watching whatever was playing on TV. The room is dark save for the bedside table light and the big clunky CRT she had in her bedroom. You're laying on top of the bed with a grilled cheese sandwich and a cup of chocolate milk.

As you're flipping through the channels, you find a new channel for cartoons that'd just been launched the year before. It wasn't baby cartoons though, it was the stuff for teens: Dragon Ball, Beyblade, Digimon, all these cool looking cartoon shows you'd never seen before. You decide to stay, lowering the TV volume since you know you shouldn't be watching these things, you're only 7. As you're watching, they announce that they'll be premearing a new Pokémon movie: "Pokémon - The Rise of Darkrai". The animation looks cool and so does the music, and with your family still gathered around the big living room TV watching a movie you couldn't care less about, you settle down to watch it.

An hour and a half later, you're walking into the living room in tears, scaring your family half-to-death. You're too embarrassed to admit you'd gotten really emotional over a movie about a monster defending a garden from the rage of two gods, a garden it'd been invited to stay in by the only human who'd ever showed it kindness.

Flash forward 16 years and I'm still writing about this. This movie was one of the big ones that got me into animation, into loving storytelling, and probably into the "little girl and the missunderstood monster she befriends" trope in media.

So imagine my surprise when most people online, who grew up with the video and card games, absolutely HATED this guy. Apparently he's banned in most card tournaments? That's so funny. Plus, it makes his cards less valuable to an extent so it leaves me to get them all hehe. I've only known him from this one movie - I never played the games besides PokéPark for the Wii, and even then I could never find him - so going online to see how everyone hated this guy was discouraging. I ended up finding some people online who were as obsessed about this movie as I was, so I'm happy for that.

Below is some of the merch I've managed to grab of this guy!