Dougcario

The original Dougcario

**Dougcario**, **!doug**, or **Doug Lucario**, is a running gag in Linneus's streams originated from Mark's Pokémon Omicron playthrough.

## Origin

#### The Omicron Stream

On March 15th, 2019, Mark streamed Pokémon Omicron, part of a long-running series of his. An important aspect of the stream was allowing viewers to ask for Pokémon to be named after, which Mark would go and catch for them.

Mark, however, vetoed certain Pokémon that almost seemed too enticing or coveted, none more than Lucario, who he didn't want any arguments over. However, the idea of "what if they paid you?" came up and, well, one viewer in particular, a friend of FurryFury11 who went by "Paws" took him up on that.

It almost immediately proved to be a hassle, though, as Lucario itself was not available in the game and Mark would first have to acquire and then evolve a Riolu. However, two conditions needed to be met, the first of which being that Riolu needed to have a high friendship value (typically considered to be very slow to grind), and Mark wanted to have this taken care of quickly. A long time was spent leveling Riolu, walking around with it, and finding all the ways to get it to its needed value.

When Mark was ready to get the evolution, he learned of the second condition: That Riolu only evolves during the day. The long stream that already started late, as was common for Mark, meant that he had already passed the time that Riolu would evolve. Because Mark was just ready to be done, he then searched on how to change his own computer's system time just so that he could set the game's real time clock to be earlier in the day so the evolution could be done and Mark's obligation would be fulfilled.

#### Linneus's Art Stream

After the stream, Mark raided Linneus, and at the end of every one of Linneus's streams, he draws something to be the sidebar for the next stream. For a period of seven months, all of these art segments would be dedicated to depicting the viewers who had requested Pokémon in Mark's streams. Mark told the story to Linn, and Linn decided to wrap up the entire ordeal that night and just draw Paws' Lucario that night so they'd never have to speak of it again.

As Linn was setting up, he shared a story of how every time he draws Lucario, he has to draw a round nose on a head that makes him look very strange, and Mark responded with "doug-ass character", in reference to the Nickelodeon series *Doug*. Linn admitted that he *also* thinks of Doug and had this thought of taking an actual picture of Doug at some point, erasing all the details, and then drawing Lucario on top of him. At that point, he stopped and decided that he could do that on stream, at the moment, and immediately dragged a picture of Doug into ArtRage Studio and did just that.

It was primarily a form of de-stressing, turning a frustrating stream into a very silly reduction of the event. As an extension, even though Linn *did* draw the Lucario, as promised, all of the Omicron Pokémon had been posted on Discord in both Mark's and Linn's servers, and rather than post that actual art, Linn chose to only post the Doug version as a prank.

As one final extension, two commands were added to Linn's bot, Wonderful\_Bot\_L\_Star: `!doug` and `lucario`. If any messages in chat started with either of those statements, a link to the image would be posted automatically, with the former being for those who were looking for it deliberately, and the latter being for those who just offhandedly mentioned Lucario and were then surprised with the strange image.

## Further References

The joke continued in Linn's streams, eventually turning into a requested thing that would come up from time to time as people said to turn other Pokémon into Doug, such as Combee, Amaura, and even having it return in the final Omicron drawing.

On April 16th, 2019, Linn edited his uptime command for Wonderful\_Bot\_L\_Star, and wanted to test it out. When streams are not online, the bot's uptime parameter always returns the phrase "OFFLINE", and L-Star's phrases do not make sense without the actual time (e.g. "Stream has been on for 3 hours, 36 minutes, and 51 seconds!" vs. "Stream has been on for OFFLINE!"

So Linn turned on his stream and decided he would actually just stream for five minutes or so, and so loaded up ArtRage Studio and drew a couple things while letting stream run for a bit, and the things he drew were Magnemite as Doug, and then decided to reprise the "erase Doug and make him Lucario" concept, but much cleaner.

After May 24th, 2019, when the final Omicron drawing was completed, the Dougcario faded into obscurity for a while, and was not brought back in any big way until July 6th, 2021 when Linn finished a Pokémon X Randomizer with psychoDon525 and zoeyplays0w0 and the Dougcario came up during stream as he described a number of references from Mark's streams over the years. When Linn reached the end of the game, the final boss's last Pokémon wound up being a Lucario, and he drew that as Stream Art.