Worth repeating - an emancipation & censorship tale

Sometimes I repeat myself on this blog. I scan a lot of drawings and there have been times where I posted the same illustration twice. Like my aging parents, there are certain stories that I tell over and over again, with a vague sense of "you might have heard this before" only halting me temporarily. Today's post is a prime example. I could have sworn that I mentioned this event previously on the blog but I can't recall when. Since it's a good story and I scanned (or maybe re-scanned) the visual to go with it, I hope you'll forgive me if I repeat myself.

My son loves the game Pikmin. He played it pretty badly the first time around because he didn't take the time to read the directions on the screen carefully. He has replayed it several times since then and done a lot better. One day he decided to make a "tribute poster" for everyone in the house to contribute to so we could all share the Pikmin love. I always thought that Captain Olimar was using the Pikmin a bit like slaves, making them do his work for him, sometimes sacrificing them to bigger enemies, even throwing them as projectile weapons. The statements I wrote on the poster reflected this position of mine. My son was not impressed.

A few days later, he approached me. I wish I could recall all the logical steps he took in the conversation. He talked about how we willingly do things for people we care about and since the Pikmin care about Olimar, it was not slavery and so my son was justified in erasing the heretical statement I had written on the poster insulting Olimar's relation with his little plant friends. Her erased the one in the upper left corner but missed one in the lower right. See if you can see it.