I accidentally re-named the NC Dinos mascot ‘Swole Daddy,’ and I have no regrets

A week ago I saw an image. A glorious, muscle-bound dinosaur wearing a necklace that not only embodied everything a mascot should, but sport itself. Sseri the brontosaurus, mascot for KBO League team the NC Dinos, stole my heart.

I gave him a pet name on this very website: “Swole Daddy,” and sent it into the internet. Like pushing a baby bird from a nest — and I watched it soar. The morning after the Dinos’ first game weird things happened. Google picked up our article, and though bizarre algorithmic kismet decided Sseri’s name was “Swole Daddy.”

Naturally people saw this, and fell in love with Swole Daddy the same way I did. For better or worse it became his name, with the only “worse” being poor die-hard Korean baseball fans desperately trying to tell a western audience barreling towards them like a Swole Daddy-shaped freight train that this wasn’t the mascot’s name.

Wikipedia, to its credit, stopped short of directly calling Sseri “Swole Daddy” instead informing the internet this was all my fault.

Beauty is not created by the artist for themselves. They create for themselves in the hopes others can find meaning in their works. I may have coined “Swole Daddy,” but it does not belong to me. It belongs to all of us. Swole Daddy is our mascot, because we love him, his muscles and the fact he is, in fact, a Swole Daddy. At a time of uncertainty and fear his biceps are our rock, his ample pec-bound chest a bosom, to nurture us all.

When ESPN referred to Sseri as Swole Daddy my heart grew three sizes, like a proud father watching their sexy, cold-blooded dino son finally get noticed for his talents.

When the NC Dinos themselves started to embrace the nickname my heart erupted from my chest, like a baby alien killing its host before roaming a Weyland-Yutani mining ship in the hopes of finding more humans to feast on.

The fact the team is now bizarrely repping North Carolina, the state where I live, is really just a bizarre upside to wholly unbelievable week. It’s the perfect end to a bizarre situation, and I love it so much more than I can put into words.

I may have created “Swole Daddy,” but he belongs to each and every one of us. Every person who has yearned to have a Swole Daddy in their life. Sseri was a Swole Daddy before I ever called him that, he just needed to world to appreciate how much of a Swole Daddy he was. I have no regrets for naming him by accident, and wish nothing but the best for my necklace-clad, dino progeny.

I love you, Swole Daddy.

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