The side page was created on May 18.

May Posts (May 18^th specific)

Follow up to a post from the beetmint page.

Most initially Oran Posts are follow ups to posts from my main and therefore you’ll need to switch pages a bit.

As a child I never actually noticed the artist style switch during the GSC arc from Mato to Yamamoto but a reread made it much clearer in real time. (Lance images for comparison and the HGSS one.) He used to have little fangs.

Playing through yellow legacy and some of the alternate names for characters that are never brought into account are pretty goofy in terms of them being entirely normal. Like, this is the story of two kids named John and Amanda befriending super powered animal creatures.

I found another image of her, plus the one fic I wrote that I actually published. I’m working on a follow up fic that’s based on three save runs I’m doing, one of False Red, another of Water Blue, and another Fire Red copy but I haven’t gotten very far in that one yet.

DW Alt. https://beetmint.dreamwidth.org/989.html

Follow up to the baby pokemon post

Thinking about it, it’s kinda crazy how spaceworld leaked twice in different forms plus we got the Diamond and Pearl beta leaks and then there was supposed to be a translation of the first SW demo and then total radio silence. I haven’t checked on team spaceworld in a while so that projects probably dead.

Note to self: I need to get back into doing these 500*500 drawings again. I used to do it on Tayasui sketches but I’ve switched over to ibis Paint X. And I still do traditional drawing, of course. I just am terrible with photos.

In regards to Bubbles and Hime

These two are actually from that one “16 years later” emerald fic I was talking about. They were pretty much the major players (not as gijinkas though) and that’s the Azumarill that shot up to being my favorite Pokémon because of being the sole survivor in my disastrous Flannery fight. Unfortunately I immediately wiped my party in the desert area after so I just uh. Played regularly instead of a nuzlocke.

In regards to Steven

This is one of those conversations that I kind of think of in my head sometimes whenever I see Steven Stone now. I’ve kinda hit a layer of Pokémon content that has become greatly disconnected with the rest of the normal Pokémon community at large.

In regards to a set of gifs:

After a few months I finally managed to solve the mystery on this one. It’s a hack called polka aqua and it was based on having a lot of live action tv show references that flew over my head since I don’t watch a lot of those.

I wish I did remember my dreams with more clarity but most of them are nonexistent because of my borderline insomniac habits so it’s kinda hard to have a dream and then also draw said dream.

In regards to my missingno Playthrough

Missingno has to be one of the most fascinating gen 1 things where it’s like “how did any of that happen” and you learn that there’s somehow more behind the scenes than just an handling error or being the missing gen 1 cut Pokémon or whatever else. Like yesterday I learned that if the sprites of some of the glitch Pokémon are rearranged it has like cobbled bits of bulbasaur and magnemite in there. Neat!

In regards to the sprite edits

I need to continue making edits of this kind of thing.
Possible candidates are a Blue Green/ Leaf Sprite, a silver gold and gold silver, and maybe like a grey variant of the B2 protags.

In regards to Legends ZA Announcement

After going through X and sitting at the postgame thing where I should continue, I’m kinda like, well, it was the first gamefreak 3D Pokémon experience and it shows in some areas. I still need to do my Y nuzlocke to get the definitive experience. It would be funny if Lumiose legends referenced the blackout or the save bug, that’d be funny.

The Cloak Thing

He’s very cool.

In regards to observations:

Battles feel like the kind of thing where they should be either flying or flashy or maybe like puzzle solving but the action of turning an RPG battle into a shonen fight and then thinking about mechanics psychs my brain out. Which is why I’m probably going to make a story centric on fighting so I can force myself to learn efficiently.

Writing dialogue is easy as hell when all your characters sound like weirdoes saying whacky stuff. It’s just the overuse of the word “said” that makes me want to pull my hair out because I default use it and have to keep coming up with new things but also making sure the characters are doing things instead of just standing or sitting around— pain. It’s a pain.

Rival’s Eevee:

They were all Nameless fics, yes. I’m taking notes on the behavior of Eevee in said fics for my eventual foray into writing like. Two fics on them currently.

In regards to Galar Sports

I completely forgot about pokeathalon when writing this but the point still stands that a sports centric look at the Pokémon world would be pretty fascinating, huh. The consideration of the meta for the various sports, like, would vitamins be considered cheating or not, an evil sports team, another team of super fans like Yell, what do you do when the eventual child with a legendary or mythic shows up…

After my origins rewatch months ago I’ve ended up thinking about potential sequel ideas in fic format. First one was centered on Green (rival) doing the Sevii islands quest since that’s a piece of content that was entirely skipped over and the second was a Johto take on Origins. Haven’t really worked on that one as much though, I like writing stories by generation.

This is still a pretty solid chart of the Gen 1 stuff but I’m probably still missing some though. The red hat thing is fascinating to me because I found a piece of concept art for the anime which featured Ash wearing one of Red’s hats with the leaf badge attached. I think they’re supposed to be representative of which game was picked, or it’s that Red just has multiple hats with the same exact decoration thing slightly altered on each one.
Source on the artwork:
https://pokeamice.com/index.php/2023/03/24/gen1_anime_setting_book/

In regards to XY anime:

I still haven’t gotten past episode 23. This is the one part of the XY project that still hasn’t gotten anywhere. Maybe it’s like a slow burn like how I’ve been watching through Naruto…

In regards to the essay: This idea would be following the basic plot of a game and just finding a bunch of citations based on things that happened, probably interviews and various other pieces of media to follow up on.
So far the imagined version in my mind would start off with explaining the Pokémon journey, possibly the structure of the league as a whole, then moving onto teams and why they keep getting created and then onto legendaries as a whole. Then maybe a lean on the fourth wall with the author going “why is most of this centered on like one particular child in these events. Are you guys noticing this or what”. That seems decent enough.

My issue is that sandwiched between legitimate playthroughs sometimes I pick up random fangames and rom hacks and then never follow up on them and forget my place. It’s fine with less plot centric games and hacks but then the ones that require more attention are harder for me to recall. I need to keep a journal or something. Picture of dark rising unrelated.

May 18^th: Picking up Pokemon: Bill

Here’s the reporting article structure thing I wanted to work on before. Today’s feature is on Bill, featuring reposted bits from my twitter thread on Yellow Legacy plus extra info I recalled.

Link to Actual Journal on Neocities: The images can stay!

Me explaining to a user in a comment: I think a lot of my Bill enjoyment comes from his extended role in Pokespe as a supporting character for various arcs.

The guy with the jigglypuff is another character from How I became a Pokémon Card/Pokewake since every chapter features a new card and story but problem is a lot of the chapters haven’t been translated and it’s a bit difficult to find raw scans of the manga online due to it being obscure. The Bill chapter is floating out there online likely because it’s the first one but I’ll also link the scans for Pokewake that I found on the wayback machine.

https://web.archive.org/web/20180611085851if_/http://jb2448.info/index.php?/category/2202

In regards to Charizard and powerscaling:

I’m not saying that certain charizards would be completely obliterated by stealth rock and stone edge, but it is somewhat funny to imagine the limitations of the gen 1-2 guys of this certain subset trying to deal with the immense power creep later gens present.

In regards to “Guess I’m fic posting now”:

Fic ideas have spiraled rapidly out of control beyond this list. I need to make a schedule or something to nail down the WIPs. No priorities on WIPs, just vibes. Whatever gets done first gets done first!

In regards to “A guy with terrible mentors”

Midori’s gotta be the greatest case of this because the guy’s a roleswap and mentor swap of Pokespe Green (rival) where his mentors are the characters he was most antagonized by, and inexplicably his actual rival role was shoved onto Daisy who also has a different name.

Thinking on one of my WIPs centered on Isekai and Pokémon. It’s not really a self insert power fantasy as much as “every single Isekai person here is a complete weirdo and Cynthia is baffled at how much chaos they’re causing.”

I don’t like writing for things I might get inaccurate because of my inability to access it, which is why I steer away from most of the switch games and a lot of the Pokémon anime outside of a few light references to what I’ve seen or can find online. Writing a game fic without having ever played it and only having info secondhand through a stream feels kind of… weird for me.

In regards to: “Pokemon is an everyone franchise!”

See, it’s the inherent uniqueness of the franchise that makes me enjoy it because really, you can pick any Pokémon and it’ll be someone’s favorite or they’ll have some kind of story attached to it. There’s so much you can do with Pokémon and it’s various pieces of material in all aspects so it really can potentially be a franchise for everyone in like. The creative aspect way. Not like. The existential capitalist dread way. That’s still there though.

Foony learns the legal system

Having the ability to type out anything I want is both a blessing and a curse because what in the world was I going to use this note for. Some kind of court case, presumably…

I’m following this up with more questions. How in the world does the legal system in Pokémon work in a sustainable way? Like the first thing I immediately thought of was the mass breeding and releasing done in previous generations for either shinies or a good competitive nature. Certainly that sort of thing must be illegal, right? A lot of commonplace game mechanics must be under some amount of scrunity like shiny collectors. A few supplementary works do mention that carrying 6 Pokémon is recommended and automatically transfer other mons out but how did that work before the PC system? Would Giovanni be a tax dodger if taxes exist in the world?

In regards to “what fictional world would you live in?”

It actually became a discussion on living in the Pokémon world because that was my example of a place I wouldn’t want to live in. Anyways, there’s a lot of problems infrastructure wise and also the amount of Pokémon that I would consider to be unpleasant to actually deal with in an IRL case. Also, they were unaware that team rocket was actually a criminal mafia mostly because their only exposure for years was the anime. Then someone brought up Pokémon edibility and uhhh… the conversation died out very quickly.

Gifs I saved from tumblr that weren’t made by me. I have no clue where these are from, whether they’re hacks or maybe like one of those YouTube videos. If I find them I’ll try to source them.

May Posts (Finally made it past May 18^th!)

Me seeing a headline on trivia on kanto: “ooh; maybe there’s something I won’t know!”

Then disappointment. They didn’t even mention that cycling bridge is an actual drawbridge and that’s how the SS Anne gets out.

My foray into other “mon” franchises and RPGs has been going pretty well, minus the gacha games I download and then delete after months because gacha makes my brain impulsive on rolls and my F2P status puts me in a personal Sisyphean hell. Pokemasters is fine because I don’t recognize some characters which prevents this problem and feel no need for daily logins but it’s on thin ice.

I’ve been playing Yokai Watch 2 in sporadic periods. Incredibly charming game with slice of life vibes more than the massive expanding adventures Pokemon usually gives out, but maybe that’s because I’m still in the early game.

Since I edited my main’s about page, I’m reposting a bit of info that was on it in regards to Pokémon. My favorite generations are 1 and 2, I enjoy playing Rom Hacks, my favorite pokemon is Azumarill. It's stuck out to me ever since I failed a nuzlocke in Emerald and it was the sole survivor.

Favorite Pokemon and 2^nd Favorites:

Repost from tumblr. Favorites mostly range from cool and cute to mons that saved me during playthroughs. The Cincinno one are the 1st ranked faves and toucannon’s 2nd ranked.

I just saw a screenshot of what appears to be ash in a coma and tesla from Megaman battle network 5 both on the promo page of this rom hack. I might need to move this one further up the backlog for investigative purposes.

Geodudes.jpg

This is a real screenshot from the mod and I’m losing it. Yeah, of course this form is just Geodudes. Maybe me quitting this early years ago because of the dated references was a missed opportunity.

Raining

Another thing that I need to make awareness of is that most of the time I’m genuinely sincere about enjoying hacks and concepts I should be more critical towards. Like, I know I should make fun of certain things for not being good or question them for being convoluted plot wise or just plain “too dark” for the standards in question of being a “good pokemon game”, which is likely the category of the game I was just checking out . But I’m also a kusoge enjoyer and chuuni at heart that understands some of the things I play outside of the “so good it could be official” standouts are either A. Developed by people who don’t get hacking and balancing or B. Made years ago before CRFU and HexManiac and Disassembly changed the way hacks worked or C. Written by someone who watched a lot of anime and really wanted to write an fanfic for pokemon and wanted to make it playable. I’d rather take something that plays it completely straight and expects you to go along with it rather than something that constantly goes and winks and says “hey, this is really silly, haha!” There’s no fun in that to me. No comment on the RPGMaker/Essentials game scene because I still haven’t played any at this point.

Pokemon Manga Piece

Go look at the pokemon thought journal post.

Mewtwo Launched Mimikyu.jpg

Unfortunately no noteworthy dreams today but I did remember this absurd dream I shared once in a discord chat. I need to find a way to combine these two stories somehow with this slightly creepy red and this definitely creepy mimikyu. The sheer absurdity of the OOCness in this dream caused me to wake up with the thought of “he would not do that.”

Super charming old artwork from Mato's old personal website of the RGBY cast in school uniforms. It's a bit harder to find so I'm posting it to keep around.

It’s the one that’s on my find me page.

Sometimes I make photo edits with GIMP because I saw this image of Red in the group shot and said to myself "he looks like he's checking out a fish tank" so uh. This happened. Now I can make this panel from Pokespe a reaction image whenever I want to.

Today in "I don't know what you were expecting and you probably should've given up hours ago", I download PSDK because I want to check out a sprite to redraw it because I finally tried out one of the games and it turns out that file encryption is too large for me to comprehend on a level of "no, googling it for hours will not let you know what the mystery file is." I guess it's like sprite comics where people really don't want you to use their custom stuff.

Man, if I knew it was that easy to import from Dreamwidth to Ao3 I would've been using that one as the spot where I dropped my fics first...

Finally uploaded my stuff from PF again to DW. I need to do that more often. I think since that's it, tonight I'll go to sleep at a reasonable time! Progress.

I’m thinking I should make more weird looking collages with reference photos so I can have a better reference for my WIPs in my mind. I know I said I was prioritizing the Villainswap Spe one but I started thinking of my one high school AU story and I need characters for it since it’s also a slice of life… at least. I want it to be? I feel like I need to work a bit more on being descriptive first… my writing style was script based because I wanted to make sprite comics and I feel like I only have posted the bare minimum for patchworks, so next time I write something I want it to not feel like a piece of bread.

Picking Up Early Kanto

Refer to the Poke Journal Page.

In terms of the pokespe panel that didn’t make it:

This is the one place on earth where pokemon aren’t threatened by pollution! A palette is the blank surface an artist mixes paint on! Pallet town was pristine… until they came!

I've picked up Hex Maniac Advance as a side thing to try out various fangame making tools (also why I picked up essentials and PSDK). I was excited to find out there's a sprite ripping feature but the first thing I got was something that's already in the official games.

"Huh, why are all the ruby-sapphire sprites in the FR rom anyways by default?"

TIL that FRLG were built on top of them like OG persona 4 with persona 3. Neat.

So instead of actually continuing to play rom hacks I've now decided to continue doing random sprite rippings.

I'm not sure if it's that HexManic is weird or just the way some of these hacks were made that makes them finicky to work with. See, then add in the factor that I have zero idea what I'm doing and then something like figuring out why this overworld sprite doesn't render properly might as well be trying to figure out how people make all their crazy buildings in minecraft. Then again, I suppose I could always use google and see if someone else has already ripped the sprite or something.

Okay, so I just found a tool through a YouTube playlist which led me to a GitHub spot which I will check out after I wake up because I’m trying to go back to having a normal sleep schedule (and failing for the most part.)

This journey through pokemon rom hack filing information has taught me more about python programming than my entire career in college which was an IT school (to be fair, I failed the programming classes). Every single thing I need to learn is for the sake of learning that programmers essentially work with some kind of math magic. I just want to look at pokemon sprites.

Progress is all over the place with certain rom hacks. For the most part, I've managed to satiate my own curiosity with finding various sprites through HMA (minus some exceptions). My logic was if it has to be called by the game to be displayed, then it needs to be somewhere in the code, right?

Where did the pokespe Red sprite come from? Where was it originally? The fact is, I found the adventures Red sprite within The Last Fire Red.

Titled under things that are making me feel weird tonight: Pokemon Ruby Destiny the series is almost 20 years old and Light Platinum is a decade old now.

Okay so within the span of a day I learned that not only is the light platinum creator still around but yesterday he apparently released a game that was immediately taken down because it was full of stolen assets. What in the world?

You know, there's a lot of sprites I've seen on this journey that I know for a fact were definitely just pulled off some artist's page without crediting them. I think if I see those, I'm gonna try finding the sources for them.

Note: In terms of this saga, none of it’s making it onto the page.

Refer to the journal.

Rare candies are a contentious beast.

Rosa Think

Gotta say, it’s really useful for me to have retained some knowledge from High School with the one language they pushed us into learning but I need to work on actually retaining it and I have no clue where I’d start aside from my brain saying “just play games in different languages and write down translations for everything” and the other part of my brain saying “well, what if you lose the notes, then what?” Suppose this is one of those things I just need to throw myself into doing on an impulse like what I’m doing with the rom hack tutorials.

Today in my quest to make a reference chart for all the designs of the Kanto trio: this piece of artwork from Ken Sugimori featuring Red and Blastoise. At this rate I might need to make a separate chart just for the amount of hat variants I’ve seen on Red.

Image Source (but I have no clue where this poster found this drawing): https://x.com/El_Aleph87/status/1715404746717012247

*[reference chart]

[Look at the trio page.]

Despite my main musings and anectodes being somewhat kanto focused sometimes, that’s just the area of pokemon I’m fixated on for the moment since I have a lot of Kanto WIPs in mind fanfic wise and I’m replaying mostly Kanto games at the moment.

I’m not a genwunner in the slightest in spite of what I say my favorite gen is, it just happens to be that a lot of my early pokemon life was based on gen 1 stuff because that’s all we had in our house minus whatever came on the TV and the copies of GBA/ DS games I had (literally I had gen 3-5, everything but Johto).

My love for johto is a different story that I’ll get into much later. My sibling was the one who had experienced some of the Pokemania and most of the stuff I had was hand me downs from them— VHS tapes of the Indigo League, the First Movie which I rewinded and replayed and changed the color hues until the tape spat out, some Orange island tapes… Then I discovered the first emulators on my iPhone back when GBA4Ios wasn’t called delta and I really got sucked into a rabbit hole. Like I’m talking about using emuparadise and coolroms to play games I haven’t seen in years now. I also had a best of yellow copy I’d always check out from my school library and then I eventually started saving up money to either buy copies from the book fair or just read the copies there for free (which is where my gen 2 adoration started between the GSC arc and the movies of that generation). Feels like the only Kanto thing I haven’t really revisited in a while is Indigo league and that’s because I know if I start watching it while I’m still trying to watch XY I’m just gonna drop XY and never get to Z. The vibes are basically two different shows.

So, Pokémon masters was a nice gacha distraction (I say, not having used either of my accounts in months.) Unfortunately for me all my thoughts in regards to a Pokémon gacha game are just “I need the weirdest picks and deep cuts possible, I want to see Green (rival) with his stadium picks where he has stuff like Dodrio and Milktank on him. I want them to put in rangers characters and Hayley from my Pokémon ranch and the magikarp jump kid. Put in the battle revolution guys and people from the mangas.” And I know none of that is possible because it would be the world’s largest copyright trainwreck.

Cal.png

Speaking of stadium, it’s pretty interesting how there’s a bunch of artwork that’s been found in other media with full quality scans like the trainer VS cards with the gym leaders but then there are unique pieces of artwork that might be stadium exclusive? Like I don’t think Pokémon trainer Cal from the trainer house in GSC/HGSS has a full piece of artwork, he might just be the mugshots.

Poly

I needed to post my own screenshot of this moment. Pokemon Adventure Red Chapter is a lot more bearable to me if I just avoid talking to the NPCs (it's weird, I'm quite pedantic about this hack's dialogue in particular and I don't know why.)

Giving Poliwhirl Ice Beam this early in the game has effectively turned this into a poliwhirl solo run because I keep going “I’m gonna freeze this guy” and then I do. I should really train my other mons.

Unreasonable thoughts: I sincerely wish that someone at TPCi just decides one day to allow for official subs for pokemon animation related products, it’s kind of crazy a 20+ year old anime and it’s follow ups don’t have a legitimate way to simulcast. I’d be more fine with the dubs if they didn’t replace the route scores with their own music and I hoped Horizons wouldn’t do that but no, it did.

The HGSS fandom era of Pokemon is an era I wasn’t in but based on the remnants of what I’ve found in spots like deviantart and crawling old fics on FF.net there is a good chance that there was an overlap between the existence of FRLG Red as a separate iteration from Red, pixiv red, and various creepypastas in that time frame for the English fandom (because Lost Silver was created only a few months after English HGSS released) , which is fascinating to me now because pokemon is a decade away from that context and those kind of creations will never exist in that kind of overlapping vacuum again due to how the world has grown.

That being said, it’s really kind of telling in the power of popularity of FNF mods that something happened on the creepypasta wiki where they completely locked down the submission of any new pokemon related creepypasta and I still see fanartists posting with Steven in other languages.

Okay, last Pokepasta related post for today: there’s a lot of ones related to playable games that fall under “haunted cartridge territory” but are there more that have been made into actual playable games? I know that Easter egg and lost silver both had a few playable ones, same with Creepy Black (and that one’s incredibly accurate), one of the devs who made a combo Easter egg/lost silver game is developing a strangled red game but it’s been a while I checked on that. I think that’s all the ones I know that are playable aside from the abandoned loneliness one. That was a FRLG hack and I think it’s lost media now? (Tagging in case there’s one I missed.)

Additional modified game I just recalled: wrath of the Titan, which I’m pretty sure got moved to the trollpasta wiki does have camera shots of a modified HGSS and Platinum game but it is an outlier and only recalled because I listened to it on SomeOrdinaryGamers.

Forgot about False Red, which still has a playable version uploaded onto one of the wikis.

Stupid dream… taunting me with things I will never be able to obtain… (officially translated manga.) That might’ve been the first dream I actively woke up with thinking “wait, volume 11 of that manga doesn’t even exist” and seeing a bunch of them sitting on a store shelf was fascinating. Maybe it was like a lucid dream.

Pokémon stuff I wonder about sometimes: The mystery builds of Battle Revolution with the FRLG models and the one used in VGC 2009 with the updated platinum models. I can think the first trailer was maybe just them porting the models over from XD but the VGC one has never been released or used anywhere outside of this one event. Dawn (Pearl) is just there as a comparison. Also a candidate of my weird Master picks (why I labeled the Pokémon by trainer.)

Prerelease trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzpwF7oZZKU

VGC footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZ5H-SFtZKc

Post on camerupt.

Everytime I see this mon I think of that botched emerald nuzlocke I did where this mon didn’t make it to the elite 4. I should try using the Camerupt family again in a playthrough.

Wallpaper post.

Was looking at a bunch of Pokemon artwork by TCG artist Keiko Fukuyama. Everyone is quite cute in this style, I used to use some of these for my desktop wallpapers.

Source:
https://seiry-pkmn.tumblr.com/

I try very hard to not think about the 200+ Hacks and fangames I downloaded once in a haze during a mental breakdown in a zoom meeting during my college semester but they’re still on my computer haunting me. Least they don’t take up too much space, but I should probably get to like, systematically removing them by beating them or something.

Thinking about Pokemon contests for a moment since I'm reading through RS. The system's surprisingly in depth when considering the berry gardening, the pokeblock and poffin cooking system, the accessorizing aspect for a pokemon, the moves and audience appeals, plus all the different ranks... Outside of the anime which made it a focus for some of the companions it would be neat to see a spinoff or fangame focused just on contests, I think it would be interesting.

Fina and the Trainer Trenchcoat Phenomena

Things I've been learning while trying to sort through my notes and focus more on writing fight scenes instead of just human oriented Pokemon stories: Every single trainer is actually 7 different characters in a trainer shaped trenchcoat depending on how the pokemon are written. Maybe even more if they rotate out the party members.

Using one of my characters who I happened to make a pokecharms card for in an attempt to explain this phenomena: it's between the human character who already gets to be easier to describe through dialogue and body behavior but also needing to describe the pokemon as individuals with their own distinct personalities through their behaviors which would be more animalistic and their interactions with each other in the party (unless you just make them talk). Plus add in the dynamic of pokemon training and preferences, living capabilities (how would all the water pokemon be in a land situation or a battle against magma since she's an aqua member), accounting for dex entry info, and I have reached the conclusion of "the pokemon trainer character shaped trenchcoat."

Doing research for the dex entries on these mons were enlightening because basically the entire team is hostile to each other because all of them are on different levels of the food chain so now this trainer needs to ensure that they don’t all eat each other.

The rival of my aqua OC from a few posts ago.

Unlike aqua sticking with water, I’ve decided to diversify by giving out more rock and ground types since those are also a part of land. You know what, I could make up some sort of plant equivalent but I guess team grass or flower isn’t as intimidating.

Trying to sort through my files in a reasonable way and if I had a dollar for every single pokemon hack that features the orange islands I'd have quite a few bucks.

I’ve finally put everything in a somewhat reasonable way but the total number is 70 GB so I can’t make an idiotic joke that I definitely would’ve made otherwise.

Seagull Image

This is what Wingull are like. To me.

Nefarious anglerfish

"How is writing going?"
Whenever I need to do anything work related is when my ideas come to me, otherwise it's shitpost central.

Sprite Edits Concluded:

This is one of those things where now that I've finished everything but one I'm here like "why did I do this again?" I struggled with Leaf a bit, I wanted to find a way to incorporate either Pikachu or Jigglypuff into the recolor somehow and the best I did was give Leaf pink hair in another version I didn't post.

It’s kind of messed up thinking that the gen 3 games are still recent only to realize that the reason is because people still use them for rom hacks and that the base games are 20 years old at this point. My memories of leafgreen as a child might as well have been supplanted by every hack I’ve played at this point and the fact we’re on gen 9 is something that does not register in my brain. It’s basically the same thing that happened to me when I saw fanart of the XY cast with the rest of the protagonists only to see the release date of that artwork was a decade ago.

(By the way, the 20th anniversary for Emerald just passed a few days ago in September. I’m old!)

The investigation of fic hunts begins

A writing exercise I’ve been up to (I.e procrastinating on making my WIPs readable) is taking my old unpublished writing from my middle-high school years and giving a pokemon spin on them. It’s kinda fun pairing up my old OCs with pokemon with their powers and what not. Too bad that I have them all physically instead of digitally, rewriting things like that is a pain.

I am going to attempt to perform digital necromancy to find these old files on my computer. Surely they must be somewhere in the depths, maybe on an email chain or something because I printed them out, so chances are that something still has them hosted. Nothing on the internet is truly ever lost after all…

Patchworks: Meaning of Rocket

Late night upload on dreamwidth of the one-shot format I use when I have a scene in mind but not enough for a full fic. I have never understood this acronym from pokespe and I have no clue what the Chaung Yi translation was. Like it’s clearly meant to mean something in universe but it’s basically word salad to me.

https://beetmint.dreamwidth.org/6203.html

Pulseman Post

Gamefreak’s got a few earlier works that it likes to reference in pokemon sometimes like Pulseman's Neo Tokyo Theme being referenced in Barry's theme and the SS Anne being named after the computer Pulseman was born on (there's a lot more Pulseman references like Rotom but I want to look into the game and see if I can find them before checking wikis). The Mario and Wario game that's in copycat's house is a game that GF developed. In the Gen 3 prototypes there's a sprite of a character from Mendel Palace/Quinty in the data. There's also a potential mother/earthbound connection in the fact that Ape Inc eventually became creatures Inc that developed pokemon. It's neat spotting some of these or learning about them afterwards. Harmoknight is talked about in a pokemon center in XY. Maybe the next game will reference Drill Dozer or Pocket Card Jockey?

Town Musings/Game Abstractions

Reupload from PF that I don’t think I ever posted on my main?
it’s fun writing out the scope of a Pokémon world because most people won't go with the assumption of game areas which look like that.

But instead, their own thing, or the anime, which goes and makes places look like that above, I guess you could say more spread out?

Which isn’t really that bad, that’s what Oldale town looks like for Chio, my character from my emerald future fic.

But then Petalburg city looks like that above. It’s huge!

The original hall of fame posts in regards to cartridge clears.

Refer to Hall of Fame Page

I’m thinking that instead of stressing about uploading everything at once to my ao3 I’ll upload to DW first. That way when I finish chapters I can just put them down there and crosspost instead of putting down a bunch of WIPs down (I like completing my fics before uploading them which is why I tend to either write one shots or nothing at all. My brain’s too sporadic to write out a full detail oriented epic.)

TCG card art style variations are very good in my mind because we get stuff like “hey check out this sick 3D graphic” and “Steven stone’s photorealistic house”

Note: I didn’t know this at the time, but steven’s stock image was found.

Refer to Bill Post on Obsidian

I'm considering doing what I did with my old non pokemon stories and just writing out big summaries of everything because this whole writing ideas as they come is not working, it's just a big messy pile. Also this is outdated because I switched writing programs again. I miss the AI free Notion.

The Fake Card Saga

I was inspired by my last TCG post. Messing around with pokemon card generators and stock image pairing is actually pretty fun, not gonna lie.

I've been goofing around and playing a translated copy of Pokemon Green and it's kind of fascinating how much I just assume was in the OG was actually an FRLG addition. What do you mean, Mankey's not in an early route?

Anyways, it's kinda accidentally turned into a Squirtle Solo Route because I just start mashing A whenever it's not a pokemon I want. I'm trying to do a "catch em all" thing. Not "train em all."

If I had the brain cell capacity and attention span and time I could be here writing out entire essays worth on thoughts I have that are Pokemon centered but I do not so I can only work with snippets of concepts and put them together in a fanfic package even if it takes forever.

Before I sleep and my words become incoherent, I also want to say: I love you unfinished rom hacks, I love you unfinished fanfiction, I love you fanart of scrapped Pokémon, I love you fan regions and fakemon, I love you unfinished nuzlocke comics, I love that people had enough love for the concept to make their own take on the franchise.

Post on the pokemon timeline, who cares.

It’s on the world map.

Still re-editing the hell out of that Pokémon hall of fame post as I search through my dead tumblr and alive pillowfort for possible dates that I missed. Wait, I’m dumb, I could just find the physical games again and just look at when the clear dates were if I still have the saves on them. Oops. I’ll get to that when I can, hopefully soon.

Update: the Pokémon Diamond cartridge is uh. Freezing my 3DS. I don’t think I’ll be able to verify it at all outside of my memory.

Update 2: Why doesn’t alola let you see the exact date of when you cleared the game? I had to go to this random old guy who didn’t help and only said the clear party and the ribbons aren’t dated so I had to check when I caught Tapu Koko because that’s when the credits rolled. Also, I beat AS in like almost a week, must’ve been playing like a fiend when it came out….

Pictured: Me browsing through many many websites for nice templates to use for my neocities site. I’m glad people have made it so that people like me with zero decent coding skills can make nice looking websites.

I like how incredibly convinient it is for various pieces of technology to take photos of stuff and background remove it. This is a bootleg leafeon plush I bought once at a fair. It’s charming, right?

Recreating everything through Neocities is going to require that I go back onto tumblr so I can start image hunting again, this was a terrible idea! Well, might as well use up the full 2 GB. I'll toss in I guess my article posts, my Halls of Fame, whatever else I can think of... maybe a gallery for creative projects?

Edit: it’s only 1 GB? I thought it was two…

Gonna have a lot of fun once I properly format my pokemon centric stuff, I feel. I've already gathered the links of stuff that I need to format but I'm still on the hunt for images of the Halls of Fame. I'll make this a weekend project.

I post some of my games collection. Go look at the merch page.

I’ve played a lot of gacha games before genshin/star rail basically took up my brain space for gacha and something I can’t stand about them is when their servers shut down there’s just no way to replay them. Brave frontier, chain chronicle, dragalia lost, phantom of the brave, cookie wars, sinoalice, Dissidia opera omina, KHUX, Priconne, Magia Record, Wibble wobble, Megaman X dive, Pokémon duel, Rumble Rush, Shuffle, tales of link… I spent time on them (but no IRL money) and once they died that was it. I’m not as concerned about Pokémon masters because most Nintendo/TPCi gachas and games outside of dragalia are still running even if they haven’t been updated in years (Magikarp Jump), but it’s pretty weird how there’s no industry standard to have an offline version like X Dive did. Plus the amount of money made by Pokémon go is probably enough to keep every single game afloat due to the hardcore players (I haven’t played Go in a long time.)

I go back to looking at magikarp jump!

In my downtime when I’m not working on personal projects or in between long playthroughs and research, occasionally I’ll open up the Delta emulator app that was trending for a bit to play through a few games I have on hand. Playing through Cubic Crystal which is one of those improvement hacks. Johto as a whole is a game that encourages taking your time, like I did today where I mostly spent time getting back to new bark because I wanted to see what was bought with the money I sent to the PC’s mom. The games new clock mechanic and having daily events also adds to this thought in my mind since dark cave’s lapras only spawns in on Friday and the roster of Pokémon is different on time of day, not to mention all the rematches you’d get from phone calls from trainers depending on playing time. I play this one at my own pace versus the other games I normally attempt to finish in multiple sittings of just that one game.

I’m actually getting way more invested into Magikarp Jump than I expected after my last post on it. I’ve managed to beat the luxury league and hit rank 45, plus I’m 2 leagues away from the finale. Which sounds like a good number, but the later magikarp opponents have been having large power jump increases. If I keep up playing daily, maybe I’ll finish this by the end of either July or August?

Don’t really play GO anymore, but here’s the shinies I caught that were mostly random. Most of them were from when I used to live on campus since it was a well populated area, the hoppip is named that because I caught it with my last pokeball I had, and a few I caught out of country. I live in a more rural area these days so there’s no pokestops for a long while so it’s a lot more difficult to keep up, plus I try to stay off my phone a lot more these days unless it’s to check my emails or phone calls.

Refer to Hall of Fame.

Emerald Rogue 2.0 came out yesterday and within a few minutes it already feels like an entirely new game based on all the extra features and customization stuff, which is neat. But I'm terrible with roguelikes, so I've never managed to beat a single run on older saves...

The turtwig.

Another photo edit scan of random pokemon merchandise I have…. I have NO clue where this thing came from.

Fake Red idea.

For all the fics I’ve seen involving Red, I’m surprised there’s never been one centered on like, the concept of a “Fake Red.” Not in like the false perception sense of people thinking reds personality is different than what it is. Also not in the creepypasta sense (considering False Red) but along the lines of a guy who just dresses up like you and causes shit.

There probably have been people who would legitimately dress up as Red and not all of them would be nice about it because that’s what people do too, they just dress up as celebrities and try to smear their reputation and people would definitely try to profit off of Red in any way possible including his clothes and entire fit. There’s probably a bunch of people who caught Pikachu and wanted a kanto starter just to be like Red.

Like petrel/lambda in HGSS is a master of disguise, the super nerd in the Pokespe yellow chapter did it which is where the thought came from (I’m procrastinating on the emerald chapter), apparently there was a Pokémon masters event centered on ditto too, so there’s a case for something like this to be feasible, but probably not to the level I’m imagining it, since gamefreak doesn’t really explicitly go into detail of that 3 year gap period of red after winning the league.

Heal league is down in magikarp jump. I’m glad clearing leagues gives out extra motivation bonus outside of the standard 10% you’d get from normal retirement of magikarp. Now I’ve got to figure out if I want to give the extra support boost to litten or piplup. Training is RNG based but usually has events happen, so I’m leaning more towards piplup.

I rarely talk about my artwork on here but I think the two or three pokemon artists I’d want to draw the most like for pokemon centered fanart would have to be a juggle between early Ken Sugimori, MATO’s pokespe art, and Hitoshi Ariga (who I know more for his work on the Megaman Megamix and Gigamix series of manga.). There’s other artists too like Kagemaru Himeno (TCG artist and How I became a pokemon card), Keiko Fukuyama (I posted some art a bit before ), and probably more I’d like if I ever got into the TCG but I probably won’t. I’m juggling quite a bit already between other projects.

The worst boy ever is revealed

I’ve given some thought to this guy as a concept since I already had a similar post on dreamwidth in regards to what if glitches were like actual in universe powers. This is Ketsuban! He’s like representative of Missingno and a lot of other RGBY glitches but despite his weird somewhat off putting sprites he’s an decent guy. Just a bit buggy. Definitely not grudge holding, or actively hating non glitch trainers, or anything else. (I’m being completely sarcastic on this. ) He’s a little guy, come on, ignore the weird faces, he’s harmless.

Mild detail that isn’t on this concept sprite sheet that I will draw on him— he has the fossil Aerodactyl horns on top of his head.

I've been thinking of ways to give Red a unique outfit outside of his regular gen 1 attire or gen 3 attire and I was thinking "oh, he'd look really good with a scarf!" only to remember that quote cave story fulfills that exact same outfit premise.

You guys ever just have like crossover friendships where it's like "I had an interest in all three of these things at one point so I can imagine them being friends and hanging out?" Judai/Jaden's the one carrying most of the conversations at that point though.

So I was working with an older build of emerald rogue (pre 2.0) and the gym leader AI does in fact cheat. Why? I happened to reload a save before fighting one and I switched which Pokémon I had in the lead and the gym leader’s entire strategy and team changed! No wonder I’d get teams tailor made to beat me every time.

Looks like I missed a Leaf for my gen 1 design chart project, drawn by Ken Sugimori (2nd pic for comparison since it’s already on the chart). I think there’s other winter postcards with Dawn or Lucas during new year’s but I haven’t had a good time finding them.

Doing some research on Howlongtobeat.com because I still have my VC games I need to start and put into bank before shutdown. Most games in the main story are around 25ish hours in length but DPP is almost 42 hours…? Kinda a big leap.

Ultra league is down! With that, all initial 8 leagues in magikarp jump are complete. But I’m nowhere near done yet, because now it’s time to take on the elite four league.

Occasionally I like listening to City Pop and JPOP music while I work because it's a pretty good genre (I could ramble on about how my music tastes have been all over the place and I'm always finding new things to listen to but today's not that day). Lately I've been listening to Taeko Ohnuki due to the song 4:00 AM (likely to be recognized from some AMVs or City Pop/Future Funk playlist mixes) and I've been listening to albums outside of Mignonne and...
I just need you to listen to the intro of this one from A Slice of Life. Doesn't it sound almost identical to the noise before some wild pokemon themes? This could also just be me overthinking.

https://youtu.be/MxobKpKJHc0?si=liJJBSH7D28jlX20

Gen 1 glitches and onwards are absolutely fascinating in pokemon from what I've done in my playtime and all the videos I've ever watched for them. So how could they work in universe?

I've already had a few like concepts for glitch related things within the pokemon world but most of them so far have just ended up being powerscaling glitches as if pokemon trainers were glitch users with powers instead of any kind of coherently written or elaborate thing yet minusthe sprite concept I just posted about a revamped glitch user Red with visual glitch effects. In universe glitch hunters and glitch users are considered as like rumor hunters on a level less than mythicals because there's at least some evidence those pokemon exist, glitches are a bunch of elaborate things to do just like they are in the games.

Sometimes my brain does a thing for ideas where it just takes a concept from another franchise entirely so I'll end up being like "yeah, cinnabar island's waters work like the dark ocean in digimon 02 from what little i remember about it, that's why there's so many weird things in just that, missingno is clearly some kind of entity within the ocean and the various trainers that are possible to activate and fight (professor oak and rival ultimus) are just ways it's attempting to communicate with the player/Red by using familiar things or they in themselves are entities. Glitch City is further within the waters somehow. Missingno itself is a collection of all the scrapped and corrupted pokemon that have ever existed and ever will exist in a single entity. "

And I'll nod along with my thoughts being like "Yeah that makes sense. How would that account for the exploding level 153 bulbasaurs that are possible with the ZZAZZ glitch?"

The answer to that is "idk."

The Rogue Clear

So I bumped Emerald Rogue 2.0 down to Easy mode because normal was kinda kicking my ass whenever I got to the midpoint... and I beat this one on the first run. I'll probably have to bump it back to normal but for now I'm gonna stick with this because even on Easy I had some moments where my heart started racing. (Mostly Sabrina and the Elite Four.)

Had a very emotional sort of day today and ended up spending a bit of money on Pokémon stuff impulsively. I was considering buying the entire collectors edition of Pokespe books but stopped because I already have copies of the yellow and GSC arc somewhere in the house. Sword was bought because I have a switch mini lying around the house somewhere and I might as well try out at least one Pokémon game there before the prices get absurdly jacked up again. I would’ve bought let’s go or Arceus but this was the only copy of a Pokémon game they had at the store. And some TCG cards but I don’t think I’m going to become a collector, I just needed a storage binder for the scattered cards in the house and I didn’t realize there was another pack within the thing itself… oops.

Kinda fascinatingly weird to play a game a few generations behind where a lot of methods and tricks were semi online reliant and most tips were either word of mouth and the rest are now buried in online forums. That being said, I’m not sure a gamefaqs guide will make me understand how to navigate lumiose, I’m thinking that’s a lost cause for this Pokémon X postgame experience.

Looking through some old artwork from Stadium and 2 and noted this. I was always wondering why Pokespe Red had a pokeball insignia on the back of his jacket, didn’t realize it came from game Red. Wonder if FRLG Red has the same thing too…? It’d be a bit hard to tell though, the backpack’s in the way.

I feel like confessing some random facts about myself so here, even years later, I don’t think I’ve had a single impression on Cynthia from Pokemon? Like I know all the memes and the theme but like when I see it I don’t have a single thought. In fact, even now, if I read Cynthia I just think about the Rugrats one first before going “they probably meant the Pokemon one.” This has gotta be the randomest thing I’ve ever posted for this site.

Red chart

The Gen 1 Trio thing keeps getting random updates on Neocities because I keep finding more weird things to pick out instead of working on any other part of the site like I should. Example: I just spent yesterday color picking Red's hair. Why? Because I could, so I did. It's kind of weirdly grayish versus the brown or black I was expecting. (Also, the one weird sprite in FRLG where his eyes are... blue. What.)

Two Choices

Anyone here ever play a Pokémon game in a different language? I’m feeling kind of impulsive and want to try playing a game in another language so I can force myself to translate and learn better. I’ve also heard that sometimes the dialogue reference wise is vastly different between games (like in RGB the TV’s in French play DBZ instead of Stand by Me.) On the one hand, it sounds fun, but on the other hand, I still have a large backlog, so I’ve got two opposing choices in my head.

I’ve been considering either doing a game in Spanish (I learned it in school) or French (I want to learn it.)

Scavenger Hunt Update:

Update: I think I found everything I was looking for by accident, I was looking through some flash drives I had and found a lot of files from high school. Hoo boy. Now if only I could find a nice writing template on neocities, I probably still wouldn’t have much to post because knowing me my writing’s nothing but bullet points, no prose, no descriptors at all.

Recently finished up Pokémon X’s e4 rematch and the looker bureau quest. I’d probably play a whole game based on that detective kind of stuff, it was quite compelling. I uh… tried to catch legendaries too but my Pokémon Amie bonus killed them. I guess that’s it for X. Now to fix up my site and hall of fame post for them.

Recently learned that all the badges in Kanto were named after colors in Japanese and were renamed for localization (image from TCRF in regards to stadium releases and edits.)

This one really took off on the site proper.

Coming up with some more outfits for my non-ultra moon save. Coming off of XY, the fashion items in alola certainly do feel a bit more limited. There’s no photo feature for base SUMO so I had to make do with what I had.

recently cleared X postgame. I have mixed feelings on the full package, it’s an ambitious game for it’s time, but every other game after it kinda does better on the things that were brand new for it (minus the clothes selection as noted in my previous post.)

A month ago I was 4 gyms into Magikarp jump casually and decided to start playing it a bit more serious to see the ending. Now, I’ve done so, and the Masters League is done. The real magikarp jump were the fish that I caught along the way, all 148 generations of them.

Hat Chart is complete for the jump.

Think my favorite minor detail of the elite four league was the fact that each player member had a differently designed hat in comparison to the usual recolor of the player character.

Playing Sword after not playing a game past gen 7 is fascinating because sometimes the presentation is incredible in places like the gym stadiums having like dynamic camera effects and music changes based on fainting and it outright hyped me up and then I get to the wild area and can feel my switch fighting for it’s life heat wise and seeing a bunch of pop in and chunky lag spikes whenever I have the Wi-Fi on. Maybe my connection is bad.

Check the Manuals Page.

Doing this thing where instead of sleeping I was looking combing through old pokemon instruction manuals. I kind of miss these sorts of things where they'd put all sorts of spins for earlier manuals but it makes sense that these faded out when virtual manuals exist now.

Part 2 of the manual thing. I pretty much went with the ones I could find, interestingly enough the one of the official Nintendo websites still had nearly all the manuals up but they were in French. So I guess it must’ve been the European Nintendo.

Last part of this manual thing. It’s kinda funny how the first edition for G/S is nearly the same as the Crystal one but now the Crystal one is like “there’s a girl!” And thats the only major difference.

Turns out I missed a page. There’s a strange bit in the Yellow manual where it says that apparently the protag didn’t know that the rival was oak’s grandson, but I guess it might’ve been mistranslated.

The eevee quiz result on the quiz page.

Found yet another piece of Pokémon’s near consistent placement of assigning me normal type. Maybe I should just run a normal monotype run and see how far I can get with one of every single quiz I’ve done also nets me normal.

You know, there’s a lot of stuff that’s pretty normalized like, gameplay mechanic and lore wise in the Pokémon world that I’ve never bothered questioning until I tried plotting out a story. Today’s example: fossils. (it could also be me overthinking what’s probably just a Jurassic park reference.) It’s kinda crazy how the Pokémon world just has a scientific way to almost resurrect ancient prehistoric Pokémon or in Galar’s case literally Frankenstein together new Pokémon out of fossils.

Getting photos from my current sword playthrough. It’s really nice that the switch has a way for me to get photos a lot faster than I could with my 3DS.

Refer to Sword Journal.

Current Team. I want alcremie to have a different topping than it strawberry so it’s taking me a while to evolve it because I haven’t bought the DLC and the thing hasn’t dropped.

I had save data from Pokémon quest so I just ended up using that for my card and I never bothered pose switching. I like how you can see my steady progress based on how many stars I have and which town I likely bought the items from.

Oh I was busy with the sword stuff uploads and I almost forgot that it’s Pokespe Red’s birthday (8/8)! Happy birthday, dude!

Masters Supercut Begins

Note: These ones can mostly be found within the Masters Log.

Today’s new project endeavor: a personal Pokémon masters lore supercut to fill out the magikarp jump space. Going to be posting these as they’re made, which will probably be as often as I play the game… so probably very rarely in itself.

Today’s post: Whitney and her milktank. I never really gave much thought to NPC trainers and their pokemon, so it’s interesting that masters chose that as a focus for certain hangout episodes. I’ll probably post these as I crop and complete them? There was a blank space spot so I put official artwork there.

Secondary addition for Pokemas dialogue posts. Sometimes my app I use to combine dialogue bubbles leaves a blank space or screws up the order of dialogue… it’s a bit annoying.

Red (non Sygna outfit) and Blue (Classic outfit.)
I don’t think the GB outfits are ever appearing in this game unless they decide to make let’s go specific outfits and the game really doesn’t like doing timeline bending stuff based on what I’ve learned about alola grimsley. There goes the chances of Alola Red And Green.

Made some more progress in my sword playthrough. I try to have shorter game sessions these days so I don’t waste my entire day with regret.

Doing a thing where I was refreshing the lobby to get units to show up. But uh, it seems hard locked to only show Roxanne as the morning greeter. I have no clue why, but I managed to see Red and Blue at least a few times…

Sort of Pokemon related because we cleaned out the attic and found a bunch of childhood books and the Wii and things. It’s pretty weird to think about. My neocities site could almost fit onto this SD card but it’ll soon grow past that.

Doing some more filekeeping and house cleaning and remember that time I said I had around 200 rom hacks and RPGXP Pokémon games downloaded? I split the two between RPGXP games and hacks and it turns out majority of the GB was being hogged by the XP games. How much? 60 out of 80 GB of the original Pokémon folder. I’m suspecting I have a digital hoarding problem. At the very least now I know that it’s probably because a lot of those games tend to have a huge roster of Pokémon.

I beat Pokémon sword’s main game. That’s pretty fast, right? Started at the end of the monthish in July so that’s like almost a month of playing. Starting up a monotype run since I don’t feel like particularly touching the postgame yet or buying the DLC. Maybe ghost or flying? Ghost has that watchtower area, so I’ll start there first.

The sprite ripping saga continues?! This one sprite of yellow Pokespe has gotta be the weirdest thing of “it was definitely passed around as a hot potato for years” and no one knows where the original source came from anymore because it’s so old but made during the DS era but I still see it used within various GBA hacks whenever anyone remembers that Yellow exists. It seems like the origin might be Serebii, but that’s the only spot that has a bunch of DS era sprites that are of similar nature to it. I might have to check the forums.

https://forums.serebii.net/threads/coroniss-pokespecial-manga-sprites.29049/

Confirmation that GBA styled sprites for the pokemon special characters from the Serebii website came from a user on the website. Still looking for the DS versions though, but hopefully they don’t have a photobucket logo covering them.

https://www.pokecommunity.com/media/albums/stuff-ive-done.8323/

Different set of pokespe sprites by a pokecommunity member.

Another Yellow Sprite has appeared. Pokecharms actually has a lot of custom sprites for their trainer card maker but I’m probably not hunting down every single one of them.

And as it turns out, I don’t have to do that either because pokecharms lists the authors for whoever made the sprite if the image is held down, or it’s labeled as being made by pokecharms since the old trainer card maker had user made submissions.

https://archive.pokecharms.com/works/yellow.4947/

Read through the SWSH portion of Pokespe. It was pretty fun, got to see a lot of characters interact in a bunch of different ways (my favorite trait is that Professor Magnolia basically just drove a camper van the entire time in an entirely different art style.)

Blease…. Alola…

Playing pokemas and always thinking in the back of my head “eventually these two will be in as summer units!” Only to come up with a realization that chances are these two would just be used as costumes for their younger selves. I hope I’m proven wrong one day.

Note: Check the chart post like last time.

Hey, remember the trainer variant chart I made for the Kanto trio? Well, I’ve expanded it to feature other reigons! Groups in this post are: Johto, Hoenn, Sinnoh, and Unova.

The regional variant finale, Kalos, and every other reigon. That’s kind of it for default trainers, once customization became a thing there wasn’t really much need to keep focusing on these ones until Masters inevitably adds more costumes for these guys (and not just Red). I honestly used to think Lucas was the most neglected protag popularity wise but Calem might as well not exist even in the eyes of the art team. The hardest part for this project was hunting down the new year’s card designs, the rest I just pulled off the one wiki. Chances are I’d just make this a separate page on my neocities so I can keep the kanto one as is.

Today’s masters convo: Hanging out with Will. I couldn’t come up with a bonus photo to use that wasn’t just me making fun of his clown getup from Pokespe so I just used the album instead.

My favorite thing thinking about togepi is the fact that the regular common togepi depiction is like “awww little thang” but then there are two depictions where it was like “what if the thang was weird.”

Sabrina’s day out. She’s kinda got the most depictions that are all radically different between each other in every single medium but it’s evened out with her game depiction being the nicest. Picked a picture from Pokemon Zensho since it’s one of those nicer Sabrina’s rather than say, her anime one, which is pretty much like the one thought about in the common perception.

Thinking about it, she kind of reminds me of Hotaru and Homura these days being like, the black haired girl who seems emotionless and has supernatural powers (even though Sabrina’s is more blue/greenish.) Maybe it’s a common character archetype?

Riley’s day out. I feel like every single question I’ve ever had in regards to “what is aura” would be answered if I just said “Ef it” and watched Lucario and the mystery of Mew. I did not keep up with pokemon movies, same with the anime itself.

Quote from the SWSH dev interviews in regards to pokemon levels of intellect:

“They’re just living, they’re just getting by.”

Probably one of the answers I’ve seen in response ever to the question of “hey are like the monsters in the world sentient or what?” I think about this all the time.

With the power of photo editing and Pokémon sword having one background that is literally white colored, I can have a transparent version of my trainer just hanging around. Not like I’d ever have a use for this unless I decide to use it to make OC designs in Sword or something.

Oh yeah, Sword went so fast that I managed to clear up a monotype run. The theme? Ghosts, obviously.

Pokemon masters is uh…. It’s going well, I think. I’ve got new OCs now.

Starting to suspect that Paulo isn’t doing well.

My least favorite part about attempting to figure out where in the world a hypothetical masters could take place timeline wise is when I read a piece of dialogue that basically ruins the theory because it places Red’s age as a kid instead of adult aged which basically collapses the entire timeline I was attempting to go with. Unless Lear’s just older than he looks, which I don’t think is the case.

Pokemon masters is giving me the energy to make some very MS paint esque edits. (Note: Check the masters edits page.)

Dialogue from the “two champions” rerun event. Not sure why they don’t exactly put all the events in like some kind of event banner thing (minus the Ash one for obvious collab reasons) but like I’d rather take my dialogue from the game itself versus YouTube. It’s a personal preference.

Pixiv red from the perspective of like years later is still the phenomena to me personally because like what other Pokémon protagonist aside from drunk Gloria even got that kind of pulling influential power in like that being their defined personality based on the internet depiction instead of what was canon within the games

Shows up
Refuses to elaborate
Becomes face of character for years, ignoring remake depiction
Inspiration for original art of various fanon depictions and fandom arguments (Red Vs Ash)
Vanishes when alola happens and Masters goes with the modern red
Return to cultural sphere forcibly (V1 Red was based off pixiv red)

Sidenote: there’s actually a pixiv green variant, you can tell when he pops up because the HGSS collar gets converted into a white hoodie

Had a rather stupid comedic story concept in regards to the concept of “(this story) itself is outdated and it would be a lot funnier to have like the concept of the character as is (without any new addition) dealing with the modern counterpart”. Basically, the concept of child Red vs adult Red in Alola. Because technically with virtual console that’s possible.

Okay, that’s everything that I’ve thought of that was a draft in my phone notes. Nothing in my actual cohost drafts so… huh. Empty.

I need to solidify what this guy (Ketsuban) is like as a character to me so I made a character chart for inspiration on what I’d like him to be like and it ultimately swerves between like “the most chaotic human being that can’t hold still”, “complete threat that disregards all notions of the concept of rules” and/or “pathetic wet sopping cat.”

Without pokemon influences. I think the longer I write out the guy the more I realize that twitch plays pokemon lodged itself into my brain lore wise in spite of the 10 year gap.

Definitely one of those images I feel like is also radiating strange vibes like with the page it properly belongs to.

Nemona’s Pasio debut event.

This will likely be the last image of an event I use for this account and also posting on cohost Masters content with this phone. Pokemon masters is an active battery drainer and my phone battery has been deprecated for quite a bit so going forward most of my images will likely be solely from my tablet until Cohost’s shut down and then I will need to look for another place to both post and host these images which I have been mirroring on neocities.

Snippets from Nemona’s Scream Tail Debut Event.

Spoilers for Scarlet and Violet because of the nature of paradox pokemon being tied to the late game which I semi know of through scouring YouTube videos and being witness to unfortunate twitter arguments where the solution should’ve been muting the tag

I feel like the imagination theory gained traction alongside than the time travel theory solely because of the dex entries being incredibly vague and the concept of a dubious paranormal magazine which happens to coincidentally describe the pokemon plus the fact that the pokemon paradoxes are basically cryptids and the theories about the turtle because like I was watching theory videos at some point and like a game about a person’s dreams being unable to be made so they forced it into reality matches up with like things that can be done in pokemon with stuff like the dream world and extralink

And more or less the theory was only made because of the book featuring pokemon that were paradoxes that became DLC but what was seen in the book artwork wise didn’t match up exactly with what the players were shown in game and the Tera crystals being utilized to do things that were beyond human scope i.e creating the professor AI in the first place. The actual Time Machine in that case would’ve been like the DVA system from persona 1 which did in fact create a parallel world based on the dreams of a person but I’d be spoiling persona 1 if I went any further.

Area Zero also didn’t help because if there was past pokemon then where the heck were the actual past pokemon as in terms of fossils and also every single future pokemon being like the SpongeBob chrome meme or looking like metal sonic probably made people go “are they like actually real or made up” because it’s weird to imagine that’s what the pokemon of the past looked like just being unga bunga caveman or like pokemon colored in with a neopets paintbrush themed mechanical but its also kinda funny.

PLA has its own issue where it’s like hisuian pokemon don’t really exist outside of certain areas because logically they should’ve gone extinct but they’re fine and chilling in the DLC.

Anyways it’s a time paradox all the way down with the book being given to the professor ( who came from parallel timelines )by the protagonist because of Terapagos summoning them from an alternate time before they were violently mauled to death by the motorcycle paradox pokemon.

Yep, the protagonist is accidentally a part of the time paradox of one of their friend’s parents being killed offscreen.

Oh yeah, since I’m still on the theme of paradox pokemon, check this out. Pretty much accidentally predicted the caveman theme.

I guess if I’m doing “self made discord compilation posts” I can’t forget about bad egg and the thing about red’s hair color that personally drove me nuts.

Current mood working with what is probably like, the largest amount of screenshots I’ve had to deal with for the masters project. And it’s only one event, I can’t even imagine what it would be like if I wasn’t making a personal supercut and decided to do every single thing, sounds like an archiving nightmare if it was a completely obscure gacha game.

Actually, since I’ve got the page open, a lot of the boss butch images from dreamland 3 are pretty humorous, Kirby is just having a hard time in all of them and then you get to Ado’s page and he’s like “be serious.”

I think in terms of aesthetic, dreamland 3 has always hit like that feeling of being a ”comfy” game for me in comparison to like it’s completely high energy beat em up arcade styled sister game super star. Funny statement to make considering that it’s also got the bleeding eyeball. It’s one of those games that has a lovely feeling but also one of those games I would never 100% willingly ever again because most of those mini game puzzles were me second guessing myself a lot of times. I got owned by a children’s game more times than I’d like to admit. This is also like, the same aesthetic feeling I get from Yoshi’s island (SNES) edition which I might end up posting more about if I can go get some images to like compare the two games.

I feel like the amount of influence Kirby has had on me as an artist and writer definitely is way higher up there than pokemon but I just don’t have anything new to say about Kirby because a lot of people have already gone way more in depth to the lore than me in all sorts of terms and my way to discuss Kirby stuff would be less of a huge lore dump and more of “making a fanfic that was my personal huge lore dump based on a GameCube game that never got released.”

I think one of my personal favorites had to have been amazing mirror though, literally half of my name for my main came from one of the levels. (The other half was one of my FF14 characters.)

So like, personal art style games for me would have to be Yoshi’s island, Kirby’s dreamland 3, and amazing mirror, which means I’m 3 for 3 on having games that absolutely suck to 100% on replays.

Kirby GCN pretty much is like my personal white whale though especially when people were finding out information based on the internal song titles of what songs from what games that were being developed simultaneously shared the lemotifs of the incomplete game (like how yinyarn’s final boss theme came from the GCN game or how triple deluxe used different instruments for a Wii song because it used an early build of the song). Not to mention how the GCN game itself has kinda been an internal thing they keep going back to like how Star Allies was the vision of it. I’m still hoping to see this exact edition of it since new footage popped up like with the dedede fight at E3.

I’ve already gotten a lot with just the Mario leak and Spaceworld pokemon gold and silver, so I’m hoping for a 3 for 3!

Since I’m mentioning GCN and how it’s gained spiritual successors in nearly every Kirby game following, it’s interesting to see how it’s created like a trail of investigation based on the development history on it and people’s nature in meticulously checking details to see if they align. Good work, team! Though admittedly it’s pretty weird how the Kirby remake treatment kinda lasted what, two portable console generations compared to how pokemon makes remakes for nearly every gen…

Nightmare in dreamland was probably an aesthetic downgrade for me though, they didn’t even make butter building yellow. In comparison, super star ultra’s pretty much the start of the modern Kirby revitalization revival because the mechanics that came from super star went to ultra onwards and pretty much became mainstays within the series. It’s also another personal game to me because it’s pretty much the thing that taught me about sprite edits since the comic site I frequented had plenty of Kirby sprite comics that were just about their recolors.

How are you getting out posts this fast with images— I can type pretty fast and look up images just as quickly.
Does cohost have a post limit like tumblr did? Bit too late to be asking that now though.

There’s also Kirby air ride 64 as an unused Kirby game that got retooled into a new one years later, but since GCN air ride was seen as like a good game it’s not really as wanted. Still would be nice to see it resurface somehow.

Damn bro, you got the whole squad laughing. Pulling stuff from TCRF to talk about now.

Everyone already knows about like smash bros’s forbidden 7 from brawl
Plusle minun, bunch of melee characters, tetra…

I think having a pokemon trainer that moved around in subspace instead of being offscreen would’ve been pretty weird huh but he was being considered at one point. I hope smash bros dojo stays up/ was archived because there was some info on subspace’s story that was there at one point but never actually made it into the game.

A graphic from Kirby 64 that would’ve been for the unused animal characters. Also, Adeline, who is treated as different from Ado, but the two have like, a weird thing within Kirby canon where it’s like “maybe they’re the same, maybe they aren’t.” I wrote a fic on it once, said they were separate. Thinking about it now, I feel like that one fic that had ado and Adeline as separate characters is pretty much the same thing I’m doing now with Fire and Red, right?

Last thing before I go in: the TCRF edition of the pokemon FRLG source code leak which featured the previously mentioned lack of a redesign for rival and the black haired Red. Next post is a bit weirder though.

More or less an opinion thing about evolving art styles and design philosophies for pokemon.
I don’t really talk much about character designs but like Geeta is so distracting to me because my friend was into HNK so whenever I see Geeta she just looks like a collab character to me and some characters in gen 9 do not register to me as being Pokemon characters and end up being “a bit off from the pokemon I’m used to” and the target audience isn’t me anymore and the characters would match with what’s in so yeah, that checks out, obviously. Like any character in terms of pre revamp rerelease designs kinda looks a bit weird next to some of the characters who have different kinda styles especially since the art style of Pokémon has evolved as the games have changed. Comparison photo of Candice (a gen 4 character who got no redesign for her remake), Iono (from gen 9), and Piers (from Gen 8.) I had them all on my masters save so I went with them.

And this isn’t the case for stuff from like gen 7 because the artist made sure to try matching up to the previous art style and maybe this is an issue of like how designs change over time to match what’s out and trending and sugimori hasn’t really done big work on designs going forwards but I definitely feel like I’m not changing my about description on neocities for gen 1-7 because I feel like witnessing the number of pokemon grow in real time to the 1000s and knowing I would not be able to recognize them all on command is basically admitting I may have outgrown the series a bit.

Yeah so I still love pokemon but I don’t really think I’m that interested in the switch ones so I’ll just keep playing the older games and posting fangame stuff and masters things.

I’ve been talking about basically everything but Pokémon on this page now. Anyways, yokai watch! I need to get back to playing YW2.

The direction of Pokémon I feel like might’ve been affected by yokai watch? I’m like 50% sure that the reason gen 7 even had like weird dex entries was because of the horror of yokai as in the term and the whole bracelet dance thing and the rotom dex was because of whisper’s ipad and yokai watch was basically stealing the audience of children during the 3ds era and that’s why Alola ends up going back to humor because the target audience was more interested in seeing Jibanyan fail and be a loser and fart jokes in terms of the anime whereas the Pokémon anime was airing XY which has had very different vibes based on my watching. Does make it pretty funny though since alola basically had a huge boom with people playing Pokémon go and how it was an anniversary game so like the yokai watch threat wasn’t even a major thing. (note: if I start talking about GO I won’t shut up on how much the game kinda killed itself because of the pandemic and niantic twisting people’s arms with events and if you live in a rural area you get screwed)

In the one sided battle of pokemon vs yokai watch pokemon clearly won but like they were literally from the same publishing company, this isn’t like a monster rancher thing or Digimon where the threat was external, so there was no need for people to outright pivot two franchises against each other. The thing is since Pokemon has such a basic RPG fighting system literally most people only get around to playing Pokémon and then when they touch any other Mon franchise they go “it doesn’t play like Pokémon!” Course it doesn’t, it’s not called Pokémon, so by default labeling everything with mons as a Pokémon ripoff is a peeve of mine. Other gameplay styles exist.

I’m a Mon enjoyer. Like I’m terrible at playing them aside from Pokémon but like, coexistence.

I really am just turning this page into a Kirby page, huh.

Out of all the things that have been addressed by the long gone miiverse posts in regards to triple deluxe and planet robobot I feel like the dimensional mirror essentially being responsible for the corruption of Sectonia through subsequent manipulation by dark meta knight is something that has always stuck out to me. Mostly because the ending of amazing mirror was like “don’t worry, shadow Kirby has got this” and then literally every other game following amazing mirror only has more evil mirror clones pop up and in Kirby battle/fighters shadow Kirby has gotten a radical redesign and went from that shy cowardly Kirby to a guy who pummels on sight. There really is just an evil mirror floating above dreamland at all times making evil reflections.

In terms of contrasting sequels, my favorite example of the Kirby franchise has to be the 3ds outings and how wildly different they were in terms of aesthetics (fairy tales vs robots) and the contrast can be found like incredibly easily through the final bosses.
“Kirby is fighting the magical beanstalk (that the final boss fused with)” to “Kirby is using the halberd to fight off a sentient supercomputer that wants to wipe out every single life form and it gets to the point he uses his robot to perform the giga drill breaker” within the span of two games.

Also fun anectodes about planet robobot: the increasingly bizzare methods that the composers used to create a bunch of sounds.

The 64 crystal shards factory theme remix features composer Jun Ishikawa using his reading glasses to make the guitar twang sound, but the glasses broke afterwards.

The final bosses meowing sounds were performed by an actual cat of one of the developers (Shinya Kumazaki).

HAL labs also keeps hiring increasingly more expensive voice actors to do voice grunts (the VA for all might voices leongar in forgotten land) and also using the VA for Kirby to voice the female villains (Sectonia and Susie alike).

This has probably gotta be one of the funniest images to come out of the guest allies wave and like there’s just so much I could go over but like: daroach is drawing the thing that possessed him after a botched treasure hunt, Adeline being the only one there with a drawing in a radically different style, dark meta knight’s crappy sword, the sheer fact that they’re all hanging out and getting along when dark meta knight has like probably the largest crime count in Kirby alongside daroach but for wildly different reasons.

My favorite part of Kirby cafe aside from the food presentation and chill remixes is the food dessert items which are labeled as “things meta knight secretly eats at night when no one is watching.” Cute.

Oh yeah, dreamland 3, really cute, just uhhh, ignore the dedede fight where he’s asleep like in dl2 but his eyes pop wide open when the dark matter rips his stomach open to reveal itself.

Ah, yes, Zero, the big bad of the dark matter trilogy, the purveyor of multiple fan theories, the considered big bad of the series, the guy who made dark matter to take over the universe since it could not feel or comprehend emotions, turns out in star Allies to be like Kirby’s long distant cousin figure because of the ancient cosmic god that is the lord of destruction, and responsible for a ton of childhood nightmares when he ripped out his eyeball and shot blood.
In 64 he had a band aid on top of his head you can use to shoot him.

The juxtaposition of how cute Kirby is and how casually non cute some of the final bosses get is probably one of my favorite things to explain to non Kirby people because they get some of it because of all the Kirby godslayer memes, but my favorite part is how nonchalant Kirby is about the affair outside of some dire moments.
The Kirby series active use of possession and brainwashing and then subsequent breaking of those things by Kirby does make for a great contrast because of like how horrifying it could be in any other setting but it’s just an average day in his life and all he’s gotta do is solve some puzzles and fight out the possession.

In the bad ending, this unnamed Queen character basically glares at the player if they don’t have all the crystal shards, which would be potential for like a lot of bad things happening especially since like some games can make bad endings canon like what happened with Sonic CD having bad futures pop up in later games implying that sonic didn’t win.

In the good ending the Crystal shard shoots a laser beam at her and An entire planet’s worth of dark matter comes out (how did it FIT) understandably causing the resident newbie of the Kirby friend group to panic since she already witnessed her home being invaded and had to flee and put back her country’s treasure. Kirby though? He just whips out his phone and goes “I will handle this” and then he does.

I always like looking at concept art and seeing like. What could have been scenarios for games, like twinkle popopo which was the original concept for Kirby, or my recent stint into capsule monsters, or you know, the Kirby 20th anniversary book which featured a lot of concept art including an image of the cut GCN characters that would later become both Magolor (redesigned) and Morpho Knight (No redesign!)
Kirby dreamland 2 wasn’t going to have Kirby ride the animal friends originally, it was gonna be a tank!

Something that’s always made me wonder though is the next concept art of dreamland 2 of dark matter. Now why does he have a human face? It’s never explained within the anniversary book. It raises questions in my mind (because of course it does) of “is there like a subsequent human design for all the characters or just this guy.”

Note: with my current long term project being in regards to properly archiving all of my posts the ones (pokespe) where I have dialogue in particular host a bit of a problem in terms of “I really don’t want my website swatted for panels of fan scanalations.” Chances are I’ll be replacing pokespe ones with subsequent equivalents from the tumblr blog poketransparents which is where you’ll see edits of Pokespe panels that are transparent alongside other pokemon stuff. Or just memes that are already floating on the internet or like official artwork from tumblr spots like pokescans.

Thinking on it and since I still have the tumblr poketransparents page open, it’s kinda fascinating that there’s legitimate fan scans that people still use to read Pokespe before the Viz scans and in between the Chaung Yi translations, like the only translation outside of the Viz scans is the one by dragon guard floating around online for stuff up to Yellow. The rarest of all the translations is probably the Viz first edition ones where the manga panels were flipped to match that of a comic and they’d color in panels for their covers and then they decided “actually pretend those ones don’t exist.” I might post the covers for them as just a “this would be Pokespe in an alternate world where they decided to pretend it was a comic.”

Alright, found some of them! Look at these, it’s like looking into an alternate world. Especially since these weren’t all edited from actual colored in pieces of artwork. That’s right, official Pokespe in color! Kinda.

Some extras. There’s none after the yellow arc got released because I’m pretty sure that’s when Viz went back to the first editions, but could you imagine a world where they kept doing this for stuff like the mini volumes? I kinda like the protagonists having like their own different names on the top panel to make them stand out but this only reinforces the cowboy yellow thing in my mind.

A bunch of AUs were born from seeing these panels of red wearing rocket outfits, but I’ve never seen anyone draw him with Giovanni’s suit/fit. That’s probably what I’m going with for my one AU (if anyone even remembers me talking about that…)

One of my favorite things about Pokespe Lt. Surge, he’s always strapped at all times. He’s got little electrodes, they are ready and prepped to be shot out of his ridiculous gun cannon, man decided his life goal was to menace those pallet town twerps but then weirdly enough for gold and silver he’s surprisingly nice to them helping find them after they went missing after getting sunk in a lake (long story.)

Pokespe misty… I feel like out of the Misty’s we had (games, anime, and spe), she drew the worst straw because she basically got screwed out of the relationship as Red and Yellow got closer together, she didn’t even get to be the chosen one for Suicune and was a sub in, and then she basically became irrelevant for the rest of the series as other regions took center stage and red’s friendships moved from the gym leader alliance to the primary colors alliance.

I’m doing a new thing for the marathon where I’m comparing volume to volume experience wise since they’d be published simultaneously based on the magazine. It’s not in timeline order but at this point I kinda don’t care, I’ve already broken the rules by reading SWSH and XY in separate areas.

I’ve only ever made one drawing for the rocket roleswap red and I don’t have it with me, so I’m mostly going with the pokespe image in mind where the easiest way to start off the explanation is: what if the heroes and villains roleswapped

Obviously the first thing people would go with was rocket, but I instead went with “well, what if it’s actually the heroes and villains of their respective arcs”. It’s kind of weird to explain and it’s mostly just a line of thought that led me to being where I am with this story swap AU.

From there it kinda turned into what I’m referring to as the kitchen sink AU where it’s like, the good gym leader alliance is now aligned with Rocket, the evil gym leaders are now children (in reference to the dark memory image), the elite four are also children, there’s basically like no reliable adult in this world whatsoever. Sird is also here making a mess out of things.

Blue became the masked man equivalent and basically plucked the elite four to be her masked kids and then just like. Kept picking up random kids. Like gold silver and crystal also joined her, which shouldn’t make sense because Giovanni’s also a kid but the explanation I’m going with is “time travel/ fallers.” This is just some bizarre experiment of a world.

Yellow became the equivalent of lance but apathetic to nearly everything, so there’s a very one sided battle of lance as a child trying to deal with this random person who keeps showing up to screw him over out of his very good plan to save kanto and he’s being a huge brat about it.

Green is the only normal guy of this group which makes no sense because Oak also got turned into a kid, Sammy oak is a real design from the anime.

Typecast’s also an pokespe AU I need to work on but that one’s far easier to explain in that people get like subsequent types and Green/Midori was incredibly unlucky with getting mentors that were so godawful instead of going with Chuck that it basically made him a worse person and his type was impossible to properly identify. Red, for example, would’ve been Psychic/Fighting in this AU and Blue is initially misidentified as Normal only to be later clarified as Fairy.

The whole time in spite of my name I don’t think I’ve ever actually posted an Oran berry to this website. Whoops.

My name is less in reference to the mainline version which heals for 10 HP, it’s named for the PMD version, that thing’s a lifesaver.

Finishing up the touches for my new pokespe marathon methodology (and still avoiding the masters dialogue post thingie.)

That might be the last bit of dialogue I post for masters on this site, otherwise I’d likely just post it straight onto the neocities page…
And why exactly did I start up a collection of pokemon masters related posts including dialogue walls?
Well, it’s mostly a bit embarrassing. Because I had finished playing Magikarp jump, you see so I had a free time slot. That’s right, the only reason I started posting stuff I found interesting from masters was because I started playing masters just a bit in between me finishing magikarp jump and not wanting to basically play a bunch of games through delta when I mostly had them on my computer.

Probably going to keep like a collection of pokemon transparent posts for my site now, probably just ones that look really nice but chances are it’ll just be Yellow, Blue (girl), and Red because those are my favorites and those look the nicest. Thinking about it, my one ff14 comic really was just me trying to replicate pokespe but very unsuccessfully.

if it wasn't for ff14 the trajectory of my life would be in the pits because I was slowly becoming an internet asshole negative Nancy type who scoffed at people's posts and even on instagram seeing people be happy made me unhappy and I'd go onto discords to complain and then I stopped going into those crab bucket areas. The pandemic didn’t help because pretty much everyone was solely online which made this mentality worse.

breaking the habit is the only way to get out of that cycle of regression but sometimes its still like you go to check out spots like comment sections and twitter for that short lived dopamine hit and then it's like "oh yeah, the content blocker"

you get like a bucket of cold water in your face and you go "damn I used to be like that?" When thinking about your old posts.
internet sobriety is a real thing. I mostly left every place I went to aside from one ff14 discord and then there I left too because I was like “thanks for helping me be like, more normal on like posts and stuff, but I think this place is also contributing to me not feeling great because it’s a constant performance act.”

So in a way, I have ff14 to thank for me going back to a well adjusted person after the game stopped working and I went back to cohost and stuff! Because first I made the tumblr stuff for FF14 on tumblr after hopping from twitter, after all.
Not that pokemon related though, but I just wanted to get it off my chest.

It’s so funny how quickly this went from a Pokémon centric page to a page dump about literally everything but Pokémon but occasionally it rebounds. It’s like my burnout from the back to back SWSH playthroughs also went straight onto the page where anything that comes to mind will pop up as long as I can make it related to Pokémon. Anyways, I’m considering maybe going back to my fire emblem awakening playthrough but I’ll have to figure out how to not make Fredrick eat all the exp. How’s that relate to Pokémon? Conquest.

Magolor has to probably be one of my favorite Kirby characters because of how absurd he is. He gets called a liar and a wizard and both of those are considered crimes on the same level. He’s a larper for an extinct ancient race and the name he chose means false paradise. His final boss form is called “traitor magolor”. One of his final boss descriptions he slips up from asking Kirby for help and goes “I’ll get to toy with you again, haha!” He has a panel in the moretsu pupupu hour manga where he asks if he can blow up the school. He gets sent to hell and goes on a catholic redemption arc and then he goes to another dimension and introduces capitalism to the inhabitants and the yellow he wears is explicitly in reference to being Judas.

If there’s anything about Kirby that I do enjoy a lot outside of it being the series that introduced me to my friend, most information about the games is pretty much explicitly answered within the games through the little cutscenes or pause menu descriptions. Before, maybe there’d be like, the instruction booklets giving out stuff like how dark matter was attacking pop star out of jealously since it didn’t comprehend emotions. The most annoying thing to deal with personally for me was the miiverse post era where it’s like “this is the stuff we couldn’t fit in the game, our bad” because it made this very confusing plot point for a character because they couldn’t figure it out so it left the game ambiguous for a bit. (Im referring to Susie by the way.)

The contrast between the handful of games I have on the switch now is pretty funny though

Pokemon sports game! Slice of life simulator! Game where you have to fight off a cult that is resurrecting their dark lord only for you the person playing the game to then find out that the player character is related to the dark lord tangentially, the lore implications shattering everything previously known about the series! Love talking about Kirby, absurd.

Info blurb on sync stones. Still working on the voló event text bubbles.

I’m thinking that if I do happen to finish up the pokespe marathon before the shut down I’ll be reading through the IDW sonic comics and the Archie Comics (maybe the 160 onwards run?). Maybe also the British Fleetway Sonic the Comic (mostly known for having the sonic referred to as an ass and the super sonic that’s unhinged.) I probably wouldn’t be able to post it here, but I’m just thinking of like, things I want to read in the future comic wise. (To say nothing of my incredibly long backlog of actual books, movies, and shows I still haven’t gotten through…)

I’ve always found it interesting how a bunch of arguments I’ve observed seem to center around “IDW sonic is kind of a jerk for not just killing eggman” like that’s not just the same argument as “why doesn’t Batman kill joker?” For starters, sonic is a kids series, so him violently murdering eggman isn’t really a good look. Additionally, it’s kind of against his freedom rule if he takes the life of another person, he wants people to be free to do whatever they want and hopes eggman rebounds to being good because for a while in IDW he was! And then he released the zombie apocalypse. There’s a sheep girl that is basically like a normal girl trying to keep up with the zany antics but in her eyes she’s basically just like a witness of a horror story and having the very normal reaction to what it would be like to be thrown into the weird world of sonic vs eggman. Because to sonic, it’s fun! To that girl, it’s like seeing the guy who solved the apocalypse and caused it being in this game where the casualties don’t mean a thing.

In terms of Archie, a factor I was thinking was interesting but never really got to go into play before the 252 reboot was the whole chaos factor thing where Eggman was hypothesizing in universe that sonic literally was the avatar of chaos and no matter how badly he was beat in the short term he’d always rebound back even harder in the long term. Kinda wish they got to properly finish off the mecha sally arc but there were a lot of factors that basically made it impossible to get anything done and they were tied up in legal issues (for more on that, you can check out the thanks Ken Penders blog.)

The last event that I’ll post for pokemon masters, the one about Volo and Jacq! Didn’t have enough images for the text so I just used the terminal montage one because like bro’s head is a triangle.

I was thinking about the whole character design thing in comparison to how BDSP is the only pokemon remake that has no redesigns for the characters whatsoever which makes them stick out a bit compared to later designs only to remember “oh yeah, they did have a redesign. For the contests. Only the contests.”.

Is the classic sonic and modern sonic thing the same thing you’re doing with the pokemon franchise between game boy and the modern timeline? Maybe. Possibly. I’ll say Yes. I think I’m more of a sonic fan than I’d like to admit, but mostly for the multimedia stuff. I’ve barely played any of the 3D games aside from generations and adventure. Same goes for 2D outside of classic and advance.
I don’t think I’ve seen a character be so mangled like how boom sonic basically got screwed over from the get go and the only thing people remember fondly about him was the cartoon.

Fixing up a post for BDSP outfits since I only had the overworld outfits from the wiki.

Oh yeah, new year’s dawn. She’s on the design chart but I wanted a separate one for her.
Also, some missed outfits from pokespe in regards to contest outfits. I kinda wish contests were a mainstay instead of just being cut out entirely from gen 5-8 and then only returning for the remake, but I can say that for a lot of mechanics in pokemon that were there until they weren’t. But then again, feature bloat does exist…

Another good detail about Kirby games
The increasingly long song names that all have meaning within the context of the game

Moon flower over water/ moonstruck blossom/fatal blooms in moonlight

A reference to an idiom basically about how if you’re looking at a flower’s reflection in the water instead of the actual flower then you’re completely screwed

Two planets approach the Roche limit

Vagrant counting song of retrospection

Malus Pumila of Judgement (the title for magolor epilogue)

Onward to a pain my heart knows well

The funny part of this is that these will be right next to songs like ice cream island and big boss!

Ketsuban’s such a weird character because concept wise he’s like three different creepypastas stacked onto each other and a multitude of cobbled influences from various characters that make my brain tick and meanwhile his for his rival counterpart Cyan I just said “he’s like Sakuya Izayoi, don’t think about it too much.” My brain works in weird ways.

Rumors verse is basically something I never talk about because it’s somewhere between “thinly veiled jokepost” and “actual story about what it would be like if creepypastas existed in universe with a metafictional component of being born through human existence rather than in universe.” That being said, one of the major scenes I’ve been writing out has been the main character having to learn about parallel universes from Mario. It’s quite a tale.

I’ve always wondered what it’s like to be a non battling Pokémon trainer. Of course this can be found in like anime episodes and through like various NPCs in the game but I’ve always wanted a dream Pokémon game where you can take multiple pathways of doing whatever you want in terms of the various gameplay things (contests, underground, secret bases, amity park) in like a slice of life scenario without having to worry about the stress of a usual plot of an evil team and legendary— or maybe if you pursue the path of a trainer that’s what you get to do.

When I say “evil team” though, I know it’s been multiple generations since we’ve had a genuinely evil team that was in it for being evil rather than being like, misunderstood rejected children, or sports fans, or like, students going on strike.
I’m thinking maybe the stuff for this like dream hypothetical slice of life game would be like animal crossing/johto games where a lot of things are time based and like depending on the region picked is how severe the hypothetical problems are— unless this game takes place after every single protagonist’s journey is finished?

Actually, there is a game that kind of fits what my vibes are minus the lack of being in familiar regions and with NPCs and it’s the fangame Pokewilds. Hasn’t really updated in a while though so can’t really say much about it.

Another aspect: being able to start off in spinoff regions or visit them. Only problem would probably be Orre or a rangers region due to how radically different they are and also it’s been years since I thought about them in depth so it would be harder for me to write on them. Not to mention rangers games are basically like nearly impossible to replay because of touch screen reliance…

Looking through old official 4 komas on pokescans, I don’t know what anyone is saying or why Rapidash has been drawn like a real horse.

Collection of various Red and Rivals from 4 komas. Kind of in a dubious area in terms of “should they be on the project page?” But considering these were all officially licensed and sold under the brand, I’d say “yeah.”

Some bonus transparents from a separate non 4 koma thing (the let’s find pokemon books.)

The Red (FRLG) and Leaf appearances in the “let’s find pokemon book”. This is basically like the only official depiction of this version of Red with a blastoise, it’s pretty rare to see him (or Red in general) with one.

Note: Update page with starter chart and spoiler bars

Yep, revved up the reference chart and pretty much the most underused starter pairing for everyone would have to be Red to Blastoise, Green to Venusaur, and Leaf/Blue/Unused Girl with Charizard. Masters could make them mix scouts though.

Really should be going to sleep at this point but one last thing for the starter thing: Rival’s Eevee which likely is not making an reappearance outside of merchandise due to 1. Leaf already having an Eevee and it would be redundant for two of them which leads to 2. Trying to figure out a canonical evolution for it would also mean explaining where it’s been for years unless they make it an Umbreon or Sylveon (to sidestep the issue of “wait, which Kanto game is actually the canon one” because it’s been retold so many times now and from what I get LGPE tossed a wrench into things.)

The pokemon craft DX comic. Mostly just from a single site ( http://fieldguidetopokemon.blogspot.com/) with an additional page from an online store… Notable for being like the only depiction of the girl from the Japanese strategy guide who would later become Blue Pokespe and the inspiration for Leaf and then Green (LGPE).

Kirby design philosophy for characters having characters not have limbs pretty much makes it go to a point where I go “yeah you could throw rayman in there and no one would bat an eye.” They’ve got similar concepts in being like characters in a dream like world anyways.

In terms of one rule I found pretty interesting that I think was in gen 1 but has slowly phased out by way of spinoffs: Can pokemon wear clothes? In gen 1 the answer was sort of “no” but the moment contests appeared this rule was tossed.

Physical clothes would always get damaged by battles unless specific material is created to be like, anti battle material. Mystery dungeon kind of has that with the various scarves.

For pokemon unite, the answer is technically "No" because holowear is holographic.

But in pokemon cafe's case that's clearly an audino with a festival yukata and Lea makes the outfits they wear.

Note: This is an entirely seperate thing from pokemon that look like they're wearing clothes like gardevoir and sawk and stuff. Idk, I think the fact that sawk looks like it's wearing gi and then it's either flesh or there's like a blue sawk underneath is... weird.

Another thing I tend to overlook: the power of multimedia in terms to relative popularity/perception of characters outside of the games. Like, Misty and Brock are largely popular due to their anime counterparts essentially being in nearly every single episode until gen 3 to the point where most people pretty much tend to go with their anime counterparts in terms of like, memes, and association, and character personality. But in terms of other characters and game counterparts it’s a mixed bag to if they even get more than one episode dedicated to them and a reappearance. And in terms of other multimedia, I pretty much associate Erika with her pokespe counterpart as being a part of the good gym leaders alliance for Kanto that was for the RGB and Yellow arc and her role in pokespe more or less embodies the concept of the yamato archetype that is represented as like the Japenese ideal of a woman (ultimately the archetype is more fictionalized than based in reality) . Pretty interesting, right? Depending on what media take you’ve viewed or associate most with a character gives you an entirely different version of the character.

I like sonic channel art because it’s like sonic and friends aren’t always in these high speed chase kinds of scenarios, sometimes they’re just hanging out and having fun

This piece of sonic channel art really does sum up the sonic knuckles rivalry and how knuckles is the fighter and how sonic is like a silly little jester who pisses him off

This can also be found in sonic the fighters where knuckles has a nice jaunty tune whenever anyone fights him but sonic but as soon as he sees sonic his theme turns into a siren signal and he is on sight

I’m probably not getting to it before the shutdown but in terms of like characters that are clearly based on other influences (Yellow being a cowboy, Ruby and Sapphire’s entire dynamic being based on contests and gyms, Moon being based on a Korean actress) I really gotta wonder how much influence Wednesday Addams had in Japan to the point that verbatim the pokespe rendition of scarlet is based off her.

I’m considering maybe moving HGSS from its reading spot (it was supposed to be paired with SUMO) and putting it in between the volumes where platinum would go (39 and 40.) It is a shorter arc so that would make sense. If I can get the notes made and sorted on time. Wish me luck!

A thing from DPP I found kind of interesting while sorting through notes but also I have no clue how to articulate it well.

This one’s more or less a question I also have in regards to games proper in handling the pokedex called: Where’s the info coming from, where’s the info going.
DPP kind of just reminded me of it because like out of all the pokedex holders, only one is actively like filling out entries and the later arcs I’ve been reading the characters range from “forgetting they even have a pokedex” to “they lose the pokedex for a long period of time because their friendship was more important” to “this guy just uses munna to medicate himself to lock in” so maybe like having a sample of like 20 kids or so is not the best way to actively be getting literally all the pokemon because once the teams are set outside of like later gen evolutions no one catches new members. Heck, Togekiss wasn’t even like a documented pokemon until HGSS.

So in terms of “where’s the info coming from”, in game, its theorized to just be kids writing entries or maybe the rotom dex and in paldea it’s literally just one guy who made a phone app. And that makes sense, because not every dex entry sounds like realistic or feasible because Marcargo is as hot as the sun. In terms of other things though, I think in indigo league it was like, some guy was just making stuff up who was a reference to the gen 1 pokemon zukan/encyclopedia that is no longer like super canon (stuff like Count Tajiri showed up and like the time scientists experimented on a primeape by drugging it). In spe, I think it might just be like a collaboration of scientists all the way down where it’s like they’re writing the entries and it automatically is scanned and released when a pokemon is like seen. Because in DPP, they scanned a yanmega and got the entry. Conceptually the pokedex in Japanese is called an illustrated encyclopedia so like in execution professors are like crowdsourcing kids for labor to get them interested in the world. Possibly as a career choice. Or something.

Great. Where is it going. Even in game I’m like “okay I’m filling out entries but do I like get anything out of it? Where is this information actively going, am I putting this in a database or lab or like, is the pokedex like Wikipedia?” No, in game the only thing you get is a diploma. Like, professor Oak has his radio lectures within GSC and HGSS, so is he like actively giving out the info from dex entries as like trivia aside from like legendaries? Is there like an in universe science magazine where everyone is writing articles? During the platinum run, the elite four are like in the pokemon association building looking for info on myths and legends to investigate Giratina so is this like a case of the professors who either build or order the pokedex to send children funnel the information into the association? Or is it like the association gives the information for the dex. How much does like the average common joe know like in and out and in between universes. In terms of the games and animes it’s clear there’s more pokedexes and starters and pretty much the pokedex number jumps as soon as the rotom phone exists to the point it’s a common household thing so maybe oak sold the patent. Like, does some random NPC idk like… gambling Gary, what does he know. Do trainers schools get like mini encyclopedias that are books made for like info that then gets outdated when a child catches Arceus and then he reveals all the secrets of the world. Note: this is turning into more of like a “how are people in the pokemon world taught” which is like I guess it’s the trainer school which is less necessary in the games because like as a player character you don’t do any of that, sometimes you just go to a professor and go “hey can I have that” and they go “yeah.” (Note: that was gen 4. Other gens the professors kind of just go, hey, take this thang.)

That’s kind of a funny perspective to think about. Scientists and researchers alike violently fuming because idk, Nate from Aspierta town just caught Genesect and now the scientists have to actively study it and classify it and like figure out a useful way to categorize it.

In terms of pokemon go then it’s pretty much a bunch of trainers all over send like all the pokemon to professor willow and I guess the researched pokemon are sent to be distributed amongst other researchers or something, idk, I haven’t played pokemon go in years. Remember how people went like “they’re grinding the pokemon into candy” and then it’s like “we are not doing that, stop trying to make this children’s franchise dark for edge points.”

Sometimes I really do just get ideas shoved into my head unprompted. Today’s concept is more or less, idk, a thing on pokemon breeders? I feel like in universe breeders must be confused as hell if game mechanics are to be taken into account with trainers mass breeding and releasing and stuff but I guess that’s why ability mints were made and it’s become significantly easier. Knowing myself though my brain is going to be like actively making a story about like two breeders who are in a daycare that isn’t as good as the ones seen in game and then they get into absurd scenarios. I can make ideas but then my brain is wired to make them seem “humorous” to me.

In terms of non pokemon RPGs, here’s what I tend to be playing.

Final Fantasy
Earthbound/Mother Series
Honkai Star Rail (on and off again) Note: Not a JRPG since it’s developed by Mihoyo which isn’t a Japanese company but still has the same gameplay formula so I’m keeping it here.
Fate Grand Order (on and off again)
Mario and Luigi
Fire Emblem
Yokai watch
Dragon Quest
Persona

I’m trying to branch out way more often but the problem is I have a bad habit of starting games and then never finishing them up meaningfully and then I forget where I was.

There’s plenty of games I’ve been meaning to get to too, like anything from Tales of or SEGA’s library of RPGs like Phantasy Star and Skies of Arcadia and Valkyria Chronicles. Most of my knowledge comes from playthroughs but it’s a lot different actually playing a game then just watching someone else play it.

In terms of birthday posts, completely forgot that Whitley’s was a few days ago (sept.16) and Sapphire’s is actually today (9/20). That’s pretty nice, since I’m working on cleaning up the notes for these two arcs respectively. I said it would go fast but tbh I spent like a lot more time than I’d like to admit… it wasn’t an all nighter, but it was close.

It’s the anniversary of BW today(for the Japanese release)? Didn’t even realize that, guess I had good timing when I posted my manga summary/notes.

I’m old, this year anniversaries for

games keep coming up…

Pokemon Masters released a new event

for Lear so I documented it. In terms of my two accounts though, I’mdropping to just using one and the other as an alt again.

You think they’ll put Pokémon games

onto the NSO? They’re pretty much the only games that haven’t

made it. Heck, even Starfy (a game series known for never

making it overseas outside of the 5th game) made it (while

unlocalized) and in terms of the game corner gambling aspect they

could just bump the rating like they did with earthbound or make a

Pokémon switch online feature like they had with the N64 18+ games.

Sort of a last minute thing I thought of which I’m tentatively titling “what teams might in game protag trainers have if they appeared in battles like Red did?” I didnt make the banners but I did make the collages.
Here was my ruleset:
Note all the gift pokemon/forced encounters per generation (teams should try reflecting their generation in terms of having “new pokemon” or “additional evolutions”)
Plus merchandise and wallpapers
Mostly ignoring mystery gift/wifi events/ pokewalker/masters picks (if it’s not obtainable within the game if you miss the IRL time period then it doesn’t really count.)
It kind of ended up being another wallpaper collection thing.

Can’t forget the Unova crew either (note: the victini is the exception to the no WiFi rule since it has a BW2 event if its transferred over). I haven’t really done the switch/3ds ones outside of ORAS since they have more game dependent circumstances and there’s not really much in terms of art to use for later protags. (I might do XY, idk.)

Thing I missed , the old pokemon gold and silver logo where it was just called Pokemon 2. I would love to see this hypothetical world where this kept happening and we got like pokemon 3 or like… pokemon 7.

Source.

In terms of unused concepts and things from games, I’ve already mentioned pokemon and Kirby a lot on this page, but one I’ve completely neglected is Sonic, which ranges all the way from game 1 in terms of stuff that was supposed to be used and then didn’t and subsequent internet investigations into looking for every single detail about the unused content both in and out of the games in terms of classic and modern. Fun stuff to watch through to be honest because once it’s seen or heard it can’t be unseen or unheard like how Sky Chase zone is actually a winter based theme .

In terms of ideas I’ve had for like fangame stuff…

• game focused solely on double battling like colosseum/XD but with more options

• game that had you with a set team the entire time and you start off at the top and end up at rock bottom having to find all your teammates again

• game focused on my fan concept, Big Unova, and takes the protagonists through like a more western southern area (like Texas)

• the slice of life game idea, which I’ve already talked about before

• I once had an idea for a mystery dungeon game where they did detective stuff and dealt with like… an ultra beast mafia. It was a very silly idea.

Oh yeah, I had bookmarked and linked that one interview where Masuda was like “Pokémon’s a utopia, don’t worry about it.” This one is from 2012 so that’s nearly a decade ago but the stuff probably still applies…

https://www.zeldadungeon.net/pokemon-directors-finally-answer-the-eternal-questions/

I don’t have anything else to work on that I can get done as a long term project before shutdown. In terms of everything I wanted to do, I had plenty more, like I wanted to go through all the Pokémon movies and rank them and then like start rewatching indigo league like I’m doing with watching the XY anime, I wanted to finish up my Y nuzlocke and play through the legacy games and then compare them to their actual ones, more on Spaceworld based on personal investigations, I was downloading strategy guides off the internet archive to try and play a game with one, a retrospective on twitch plays pokemon and its impact as a cultural phenomena, rumorhunting stuff like the pokegods, researching gen 1 pokemania, speculation coverage of like what pokemon might’ve been inspired by what things like in terms of mythological beings like gods and yokai, I was doing a catch them all route/ starter solo run in a translated copy of Pokémon green, researching various artists and their styles, the concept of like “nostalgia” and how it was ultimately broken during the switch era, and at some point I would’ve played games in different translations and compared localizations and language choices. I wanted to write more articles and do more in depth research based on citations and point out more things that were influential towards Pokemon. Really really wanted to do more stuff and post it out, but it was a good run.

I feel like Pokémon (more than just special/adventures) would do really good with an anthology type of manga because there’s plenty of artists I’d love to see have a full Pokémon manga but a small bit might be good too. Digimon just had their own manga anthology full of shorter chapters and since I’ve been reading more game adaption manga I thought about it.

I wish pokemon adventures had an easier way to be abbreviated. Pokeadvent?

Hehe. Sus.

I think what would’ve probably been my most difficult long term project would’ve been actually learning Japanese in order to play Pokémon in its original language tbh. Kanji and Kana and whatnot. I don’t even know what Pokémon primarily uses.

In terms of “well, try and learn Japanese though”, there’s this one Pokemon special fan site that’s all in Japanese that gives out trivia (like how editorials were objecting Ruby being the contest boy and Yellow not being good at battling or catching) and stuff from interviews I would love to know but I can only rely on a translator which I know is probably screwing stuff up.

https://pkspedia.com/

In terms of other pokemon manga, well, dogasu’s backpack seems to have them covered in terms of existing and it’s kind of weird to see that there’s actually been a TCG manga that’s been going on for 10 years and has never been mentioned. Oh yeah, clefairy manga’s here too, last released volume had Red hanging out with Lillie.

In the pocket monsters manga (clefairy) at least for gen 1 it was clear that the artist was just going with like, the sprite interpretations as read off a gameboy and like this was the first ever published pokemon manga and later on they appear slightly more on model but like every time I look at them I go “wow.” Ultimately though this manga can never be localized because of how many crude jokes and potty humor would need to be completely removed and it’s like jeez, it’s a lot.

Other art by Mato I’ve found online that’s pokemon adjacent but not as well known as the pokemon special stuff that ran…idk how to describe it, actually, other art… (others being stuff that’s been online for years). The Ash stuff has been seen since it was a guidebook but like the spepedia and pre-serialization stuff were things I had saved from like Reddit and tumblr. Mato still does draw like promotional material for like non pokemon stuff and self publish. Yamamoto managing to copy the art style onwards for finishing up the GSC art was still super impressive because I mentioned that as a child I had never even noticed the difference (there’s concept art out there which I posted already of stuff he had submitted while they were looking for an artist to succeed Mato and it does match up to later stuff he made for like RSE onwards but it would’ve been far more jarring to see as is.)

I found the concept art I was talking about! Yeah, the first one is like nearly identical in composition to one that is in the chapter where Crystal and Yellow meet except with Yamamoto replicating MATO’s art style.

Last one I can think of, the covers from mezase manga master which was a japanese exclusive tie in for teaching how to draw using pokemon. I’ve used/seen the center image before but I had no clue there were two others.

Note: none of these images are mine, I’ve pulled them mostly off of tumblr, respesctively one called the pokemonspecialblog and the other being theviolenttomboy.

I’m still thinking about clefairy. It’s kinda funny how in terms of two manga that are centric on clefairy and pikachu both have a clefairy that talks and a pikachu that doesn’t.

Doing a cursory glance and like now that I’ve seen pocket monsters being advertised on the back of the volume cover and knowing that Dengeki/Electric Tale is like one of the first manga adaptions for the anime is making me wonder what the time table even was for gen 1 back then in terms of merchandise material. This is less of a thing for current gens since most of it’s aligned but like the first gen was February 27 1996, the trading cards were in October of 1996, Pocket Monsters (Clefairy) was November 1996, the anime’s first episode was April 1 1997 and in the US 1998, and Pokemon Special/Adventures was first Serialized in March 1997 (where yellow’s birthday comes from) and the first volume was released in August 1997 (where red’s birthday comes from). Doing research on Wikipedia lets me know that Dengeki pikachu was also released in April 1997 and that Pipipi Adventure/Magical Pokemon journey was July 1997. What a busy year. I’m not sure on the licensed square enix 4 koma release dates currently but Zensho/The True Story was April 1998, Getto Da Ze started off in March 1999, and the Golden Boys was November 1999. The exact date isn’t known as for a lot of them outside of Special/Adventures but Gold and Silver the games released on November 21, 1999, so maybe the golden boys was actually the first gold and silver adaption before pokemon adventures since it was still on the Yellow arc. That’s interesting to think about.

I still kind of find it comically whacky that such a largely popular franchise like pokemon has had so many manga and literally almost no one cares about them aside from a handful to the point that nearly every single manga that Viz didn’t release in English is lost media (well, depends on if they were released in other regions or not). I think lost media is one of those things that is one of those things that makes me go “I will try to find them. Too.” Unfortunately, google search kind of sucks these days.

In terms of pokemon, the ultimate dream game has always been for a lot of people an “all region” kind of game. I’ve always found the idea to be a good idea, but in terms of execution it would be really difficult in terms of like level scaling and like how is it justified for every pokemon location wise and how exactly would it be made in order to not give either the developers or the players burnout from just how big the thing would be. Plus balancing all the mechanics unless they’re made region exclusive because dealing with trainers who have every mechanic sounds terrifying. Unless it’s like miniature versions of the regions like what I saw emerald mini do.

In terms of pokemon, my ultimate dream game (outside of the slice of life sandbox game) that I know they’d screw up in execution forever would be an official “pokemon maker” game akin to everything that hackers and RPGMakers alike have been doing for years. Not in 3D, solely 2D. The problem with it is it would kill every single hack ever because the lawyers would go on full offense and kill every single pokemon fangame community like they’re probably going to do with palworld (after a whole session of people constantly saying it would be sued it’s kinda crazy its actually happening and it sets a terrifying precedence in terms of patenting if the patent for something as vague as monster catching gets set up. Like the reason games don’t have a nemesis system or didn’t have like pause screen loading minigames is because they were patented for years. Thank goodness it’s not copyright because I feel like a lot worse things would happen if TPCi decided every single “pokemon like” was fair grounds to go scorched earth and then it could slowly trickle down to like fan content in general like fansites and art and writing, even though I’m mostly ambivalent of palworld outside of “lmao, pokemon with weapons.” ) and gamefreak would not make like a full way for people to utilize every single piece of internal data for the games themselves (because it would reveal too much like most game developers don’t want all of their information for the process out in the open, it’s mostly controlled and leaks tend to have the leakers punished severely) and it would be an extremely limited thing because like if someone goes ahead and makes the ultimate region catch them all game then like, what the heck is gamefreak going to do in comparison. I think it would be intentionally bad to ensure real pokemon games developed by gamefreak would sell forever.

“Well, what about an all region MMO or something like other Pokémon fangame MMOs do?”

Still has the same problems with the dream region game. Plus it’s own new set of problems with like Wi-Fi and in game chats.

I doubt an MMO would work out between Nintendo or TPCi because like what do they do once the servers shut down like they did with Wii and DS and Wii U. Completely doubt they’d keep it up. Also, microtransaction stuff in MMOs run absurdly deep. Maplestory as the example mostly because that’s the MMO I’ve spent the most time with as a kid to an adult (sorry FF14, you were more in my college years.)

In terms of what I’ve been up to playing right now, I started up yet another monotype run of Sword. I have no clue why aside from like… it’s pretty easy to do team building with raid dens, I guess?

I had no clue what to do for this player since I like giving them like backstories and stuff so I went and said “idk, she’s a mailman or something like Noelle from Dragalia lost.” They don’t look anything alike but I’m hoping with the amount of customization I can pretty much make them look somewhat similar outfit wise.

Thinking about it though like most of these stickers people spammed sure were incredible in their range of emotions. Doyahhhhh.

In terms of this gal and her various gen 1 appearances between the craft comic and special, well, the strategy guide appeared first in April 1996, pokemon blue(the 3rd game after Red and Green, not the US one) was released in October of 1996(correction: was announced in October, released in December), Blue (the 3rd game for Japan) became localized Red and Blue for international releases, the first appearance of Blue in pokemon adventures was…according to that one site, August 1997 for the magazine and/or December 1997 for the volume collection, and pokemon craft DX came out in… I don’t know, literally nothing I’ve looked up about it gives a release date outside of the vague description of “11 months after the strategy guide”. So uh, yeah! She’s also a part of that weird time frame of 1996-1999 I’ll be considering in like my new vague gen 1 section thingy (I haven’t named it at all). This part is like, the expansion pack section whereas before I was just talking about the game, now I’m gonna try covering like… all of it. As much as I can.

In a way, it’s a time capsule of select episodes in the anime during the time frame of its release and most notoriously known for it’s goon energy which is entirely understandable, but it’s kind of fascinating that Electric Tale/Dengeki accidentally accurately nailed down the ending portion for Ash being that he’s still endlessly going on a journey to become a pokemon master, but the only major difference is that he’s going on it with Gary. In the actual episode proper, Gary’s the one who asked him how close he was to becoming a pokemon master.

Trying to think of any other notable pokemon anime to manga adaptions that aren’t just movies that are lost media and like. Ash and Pikachu is also lost media, I think aside from the one polish fan website, but I don’t know polish. At this rate I’m going to have to become an omni translator.

I think horizons has like, two, but both of them were focused on Liko’s school which she immediately left a few episodes after and it doesn’t seem like any of them have continued since their initial debut. I wonder if Ash will ever have some kind of random cameo in like a spinoff manga dedicated to him or if he’s just like, gone. It’s almost been a year since the final episode of his departure aired in Japan.

In terms of other artists/writers I would want on like my dream pokemon manga anthology idea, off the top of my head…
I think Araki writing pokemon would make him have the pokemon as stands
Shiro Amano since his KH manga was pretty nice looking and the jokes were pretty good when I read it. Like. Years ago. I think he’s on 3 now.
I would’ve loved akira toriyama (RIP) to make one since gen 1 art was DBZ esque
And of course, not gonna forget Hitoshi Ariga.

I also think a shoujo artist would be good, maybe like, the precure Kamikita twins.
The Zelda artist duo for the books (Akira Himekawa) would also be good.

I still think this official piece of artwork for silence bridge that reflects Gojo bridge and puts Red in the place of Yoshitsune and Snorlax as Benkei is a sick piece of artwork that goes hard. The vermillion harbor one was also based off an Ukiyo-E painting as well, the 53 stations of the tokaido . These were both made on woodblock prints.

Apparently the pokemon /games cycle has hit SWSH where people are considering it good now and like completely ignoring the dexcut thing for a minute and the graphics and animations because those were the most complained about but like I don’t think I’m going to budge personally on my opinion, the base game felt extremely mid to me to the point I was like “I don’t even wanna spend money on the DLC” so I didn’t. Like ignoring the wild area and raids then the game is still one of the shortest mainlines. I mostly blocked a lot of discussion on both sides because both of the sides were absolutely ludicrous and extreme regardless between blind hate and blind praise, too many people lost their minds over a Pokémon game.

What else do I have in mind for pokemon games… uh, a few mechanics I think would be good but we probably won’t get…

• a good skip cutscene button/ I’ve played a pokemon game before, I’m good/ no tutorials please mode

• New Game +/hard mode with better implementation

• for remakes, the radio feature to switch sounds to the older version was nice, that should’ve been a mainstay

• accessories for more pokemon like how Contests/Musicals/LGPE had them but that’s the most like far away dream I have in terms of implementing because there’s already so much dev time put into everything else and I’m here like “I want you to allocate time to a thing for more 3D models that won’t be allowed in competitive like ball seals” (note: this wouldn’t be a problem for 2D entries where they could’ve just been stuck on and static like musicals)

• rideable pokemon outside of just like a single pokemon like how PLA and LGPE had it (see problem above for how I feel about this being feasible though)

• keeping in non battling types of things like contests

• keeping in things like a customizable room/secret base/dream world (which had furniture as well)

• seasons/ phone calls to keep playing the game fresh and connect with characters (note: Scarlet Violet kind of has this with the room invites for the second thing, right, just keep that in.)

• a “sandbox” type of game where you can do whatever in terms of everything (less feasible, more of a personal kind of thing.)

• an optional human follower like the anime does with companions that show up/maybe they can be customized almost like a second player (stat trainers kind of did this for double battles but they were dungeon only for DPP and then battle frontier exclusive after)

Ultimately since pokemon is a team building based game the concept of transferring mons from a different save to a new save might be implemented weird. I think a good way would be to lock them behind badges based on their levels and treat them like trades. It’s less of an “keep them in home and then bring them back” and more like in RPGs where you do NG+ and keep like all your old equipment and stuff but to make up for it everything is harder.

Playing masters is wild sometimes because like I’ll login to see like the cute Pikachu present I get on the 25th for summons and also just see Red like looking at me in my lobby like 🧍‍♂️

TCRF browsing is always kind of fun especially when it’s stuff where the player of the game is never supposed to actively see it but stuff ends up slipping through the cracks anyways like how BW1 Cheren’s model was accidentally used during an promo video. My favorite variant of this which seems to be removed from the page was when Tatsuya Suou was just located in the files of fire emblem heroes.

Source for the cheren thing.

You know, I’ve never been able to get the links right for the markdown here.

Other Pokémon spin-offs I’ve played…
Mystery dungeon 1 (Blue and Red)
Rangers
Rumble
Shuffle when it was mobile…
Cafe Mix for a bit.
There’s not really many more to play or go through that are more recent, they’re mostly mobile these days.
I’m working on the other mystery dungeon games, I haven’t really had any interest in them aside from listening to soundtracks, I know that PMD2 has like the best ratings and everyone else kind of hates GTI and then Super is alright...?

Speaking of long forgotten Pokémon things that lie dormant in my memory… how the heck do I get this thing to work on the flash archives, I always get stuck at the server login bit. I’ll look into it again.

Please. Pokemon Tower Defense?

I think that a manga to manga crossover would probably be mostly just be pokemon adventures and a handful of manga that have enough characters in the roster but the problem is the genres are too radically different so the best anyone could come up with is like, probably a 4koma or joke book. Jumping immediately from like the borderline shonen (mostly kodomo) high octane battle zone Pokémon special marathon to the relatively chill shoujo of magical journey/pipipi is helping me ease away from my burnout feeling. Seeing Hazel hanging out with her Pokémon and going through day to day scenarios is nice.

Thinking on it, Pokémon concierge also captured this like relatively chill feeling of like, slice of life scenarios with Pokémon pretty well even if it was a handful of episodes. I’m thinking maybe I just want more hands down chill moments in Pokémon versus more high octane battles like all the time. Less intense. This does kind of match up with how I am in terms of like my personality type where I know a lot of people who if they were dropped off in the Pokémon world they’d be like “yeah! Time to become the best!” And I’d be like “nice. I’m gonna live in like, floroma town and be the NPC that gives you berries.” I think it would be a peaceful life. I’d like carry around Budew and eat honey and maybe walk down to Jubilife to go shopping.

What will I be watching, what will I be reading?
I don’t have much going on in the watching department outside of “stuff saved on my list based on other people’s recommends or stuff that I never finished in college I found independent of that.”

I’m still working on the big three. I watch seasonals but not really as they air. I think I’m leaning more towards slice of life in the winter and shonen stuff in the summer. I don’t think I’ve got it in me to watch another long show unless it’s super exciting so once I finish Naruto I might take a break from watching super long shows (naruto movies not counting, or I could just bring out a filler guide .) I wasnt much of a TV person so there’s a ton of massively influential shows and movies I’ve never actually completely watched which I’m hoping to change as an adult including more live action things. I’ve got a bunch of books recommended that I’ve downloaded and classics from Gutenberg. Plus all the series I need to catch up to. I haven’t really actively read outside of assigned readings in college, last time I was engaged I was doing Greek mythology for class so maybe I’ll get back into listening to Greek podcasts. Or maybe watching more live plays. Or Shakespeare. I should get back into ballet too… Plus poetry. From both spheres, East and West. I’m not picky on what I watch or read when I get the time too, I’m just more of a game person usually. I’m also doing a manga reading challenge based on the one from my anime list. But otherwise, the only place I’ll be on post shutdown will be pillowfort and neocities. Can’t really think of anywhere else.

Part that’ll definitely kill me inside is when I’ll eventually find something I want to tag and go “this will be fun to share” only to like. Remember there’s no more posts.

You know, for as much as I mention FF14 I don’t think I’ve ever actually posted any images of my player characters. I had two forms of them, one was when they were NPCs and the other was their WOL concept. I had a brief moment where I also was replaying Miitopia with them as the main Miis but I didn’t really get very far, I think I got to the desert area with a new team and then I stopped. Maybe I’ll pick it up again too.

Thought about Maplestory and that time they had like, a monster raising game where the localizers/translators were clearly bored out of their minds. Don’t think this one’s available in game anymore though.

I’ve always wondered what the deal is with ghost types because like they’re sometimes dead souls like phantump’s a dead kid and Banette’s a haunted doll that came to life because the doll gained a spirit but sometimes we end up with like. Pokémon ghosts like the dead Marowak which clearly isn’t ghost type and is like an actual ghost. Do ghost types not qualify as actual ghosts sometimes?

POV: me talking about Pokémon to some people in my friend group who only have like surface level knowledge about Pokémon and end up going “what is an ultra beast or paradox mon, what do you mean alternate universes and a multiverse, what does that have to do with ash and Pikachu? There’s more than 151/493/649?” Sometimes I wish I could have that level of bliss but chances are I’d end up with another franchise that consumed a chunk of my life and brainspace. It’s kinda semi interesting because like a lot of them have like played maybe a few games ranging from OG gen 1 to like maybe one on the DS or 3DS and mostly play GO these days but things that are like not that far on the layers mechanics wise or gameplay wise like STAB or Nuzlockes or monotypes or status infliction or using stat boosting items or competitive items or better TMs are mostly like things that I need to semi remind them that they exist. To be fair, I used to be mostly an attack only player until much later on in life where my other strat is whittling down the opponent’s HP alongside making them powerless with stuff like attack lowering moves. It kinda drags battles out sometimes though. And you know, I don’t know everything about Pokémon either. I barely know a good majority of the Galar or Paldea mons, eventually I’m gonna hit a point where another big milestone is passed and I’m just not gonna recognize any of the Pokémon or want them on my team compared to the games I’m more used to.

Honestly I’m kind of running out of things to say, mostly I’m just coming up with stuff on the fly because I want to post official artwork that I’ve wanted to host from pokescans but never had a good time or reason to come up with a reason.

I’ve been hanging out with my younger relatives because of family events and as a person who plays video games they sometimes try to relate but this ends up being the result when we have no overlapping games in common. I’m sure they’re fine games (monetizing practices aside) but I’ve never had an opportunity to play either.

I really need to start drawing more often. On the writing department, well, I’m a known yapper if I can get anyone to listen to me when it comes to everything but writing stories, but my drawing skills plummeted during the pandemic and never fully recovered. I’m not really gonna be any kind of large professional in any field, more of little doodles for supplementing tales. I think that would be nice.

Speaking of mobile games… Masters has been fun as like a totally different battling style from mainlines and I like seeing all the Easter eggs and what not for like story stuff and regional character interactions and personalities (aside from some of my nitpicks) and things but man, sometimes the character rates are abysmal and that’s supposed to be the main draw of the game outside of the crossover stuff. Like it’s not that bad compared to other gacha games I’ve dealt with but it doesn’t feel great to end up with a pool of 4 and 3 stars you’ve already got with the other daily pull than was 10 summons (tbh I wish that one was back because I’ve still got nothing new from the new one.)

It got worse with the new anniversary arc suits though because the pity rates got bumped to the point you have to do more summons than the usual amount with the same 1% chance as a master fair which is lower (45600 gems per banner for a guaranteed summon when there are 3 special units available on seperate banners for the limited time and the number is only increasing from there) and it breaks if it’s a non spotlight unit. 100% F2Ps probably feel way more pain than what I’m going through but like I’m actively deterred to spend what little gems I get from playing casually because I’m like “what if I get pitybroken by some character I’ve got no interest in” which as I’ve been slowly finding out is a lot of characters outside of a handful. It would be fine if I knew what was meta or not but I don’t so I’m like “man” most of the time.

Aside from everything else I kinda don’t like that mobages and lootbox mentality is created to prey on unsuspecting people who can easily fall for their vices and end up maxing out their money and ruining their lives or like, that majority of these games are made to target children who will end up maxing out their parents money instead. This has been a problem for years though, it’s just weird to see it develop as a person who’s game experience was largely console based. I was naive, I guess.

I think the thing is that my constant shifting relationship with current mobile games/ mobages is like, even when there’s stories and units I like to play as and use, eventually they just end up being left behind for a new shinier more expensive unit and power creep is inevitable to the point that mobile games are pretty much doing that to each other because they all need to be better to retain the player’s (money) attention. Like, cookie run ovenbreak immediately got middle child syndrome compared to kingdom.

That being said, maybe I’ll get back into kingdom since it’s more of like a management simulator sort of thing and last time I really played was between the BTS and Disney event. I think they added a custom cookie feature but I haven’t done it in a bit. Also the lore was kind of insane, the cookies had invented religion in order to worship their creators who for all intents and purposes did not mean to give them sentience and were just gonna eat them and one character basically lost her mind from this and became the great evil and tried killing all her friends.

Seriously, I have no clue why a game series that started off with a single guy running from a witch turned into this thing where there were religions and saints, last time I looked they were fighting dragons or something and the moon goddess had split herself in half and so had the sea goddess. There’s a lot of stuff thinking about it now.

Jeez, this event was almost 3 years ago? I feel super old now. There hasn’t been a collab since hello Kitty and Mimmy showed up, but I feel like they should’ve switched with the sonic collab that kingdom got.

Not like the collabs ever get rerun, if my ovenbreak account still exists I’ve got some pretty rare stuff.

“So what’s recent in ovenbreak anyways—“
They added actual OG god cookie and an evil doppelgänger referencing Odile from swan lake.
Okay, maybe I might get back into ovenbreak too. I liked the little bellflower cookie with the glasses. My account is definitely gone by now though.

I’d kinda love to play more games that kind of have similar gameplay loops to GI because like there’s quite a few of them that have similar things but then I end up getting tripped up by the new terminology or it doesn’t quite like “tick” the same way I did when I got super into playing it during the pandemic and more or less the only thing I’ve got that’s close again is Star Rail. Plus the fact that nearly every game that’s like it is also super huge in size too…

I’m not sure how far the story compendium/ event replay log for cookie run ovenbreak goes nowadays actually but now I’m thinking about it and it is kinda funny about how this one cookie and his friends are like all common guys running into the world where like their great big goal was “let’s not get eaten by a witch” and now they’re in a fantasy blender world where anything goes in terms of events to the point they’ll be like battling dragons that are trying to wipe out everything but them to events like having to correct the timeline because the director of the time travel agency is actively causing problems because they got bored and want to challenge their past self to another event where it’s something like a murder mystery where the detective is a literal child and it turns out gingerbrave was just fine, some jam landed on his head. A werewolf stole some vegetables. There’s a literal boy band group called the Cake pops. The last event before I left was like a fashion show event.

Cookie run’s not really a game made to play with your favorites in mind though, it’s mostly just like the legendary units or the most new ones that end up being the most important ones for competitive. Which is something I can say for like. Every game that eventually gets pvp at some point. Only place to do challenge runs would be self imposed or with trials and that’s kinda pointless. Which sucks, because butter pretzel is one of my favorites but she’s average and likely been powercrept by now.

The new feature of unlocking cookies being only through this points system instead of leaving it up to chance is… alright? Terrible if you’re brand new and doing catchup, but I guess now the only thing to use gems for would just be outright buying the cookie or maxing out treasures.

I’ve got another trainer chart thing to update??? Apparently??? There were like. Trading figurines for a short lived board game.

This is so weird. I’ve never seen Brendan wear blue before in any kind of material outside of this or FRLG Red wearing Yellow.

Here’s an archived version of the official website…

Back to Pokémon art posts. Regional variants were a pretty neat idea, huh. Like how pokemon evolve to become different species type wise depending on the environment theyre in. Convergent pokemon evolving to fulfill a similar niche is also cool, I love when pokemon integrates actual like animal biological phenomena into its rosters and world building.

Smeargle’s a pretty fun mon with an interesting thing that in being able to use every move. I always liked how during the Pikachu shorts in Johto he’d be hanging out with a group like this one. Also, smeargle’s mad funny because since it could use every move people would make some absolutely crazy setups which eventually led to Darkrai basically having its signature move like completely nerfed and destroyed.

I think there’s kinda something really fun about how the Hatsune Miku Project Voltage project was so good that it actually got extended to have more songs, presumably more than just the ones announced. I wanna see how far TPCi goes with Miku. I hope the elusive masters crossover becomes real ever since seeing that official art with her and Rosa.

Crossover characters are always a conundrum for mobages because usually they just never get rerun in the slightest and never get any meaningful buffs and more or less are just collector’s items. Also I just thought about it and what if they just didn’t give Miku a voice at all because of the copyright. Weird.

18 types for 18 Mikus. It would be fun to see these used anywhere in an actual Pokémon proper game, but maybe the best I’ll get is someone making like custom sprites for them on showdown.

I think probably once I finish watching up the XY anime or get to a point I think is good to take a break, I’ll get back into watching horizons. It seems like it’s been pretty fun so far in terms of being different since it’s got more of the plot focus on Liko and her pendant and her bond with her Sprigatito. Kind of wish the dub wasn’t like that with the replaced music but the musics been replaced for years now so I should be more used to it, right…?

So with my favorites, I posted like all my favorites once in terms of like 1st and 2nd, but outside of that one of my current all time favorites is Azumarill. Aside from being like the sole survivor of a botched nuzlocke run at Flannery (I named mine from the run Bubbles), I’ve always liked Marill as well. No real deep reason aside from that, I just think it’s cute.

Looking through like, unite costumes and Azumarill really is like an Easter egg rabbit thing. I like when pokemon are like abstract creatures.

I’ve got zero preference when it comes to faves, I kinda go with what I think is cool, or badass, or sometimes cute, or mons that have personally put in a lot of work during playthroughs and gave me a newfound appreciation when they proved to have some kind of interesting niche I had never considered before during playthroughs.

And that’s the thing I like most about Pokémon’s large roster of introducing a new mon or thing every generation, because there’s bound to be a Pokémon I’ve completely ignored that can become a new thing for a new generation that can then become someone’s new favorite. I’ve always liked that I can look at things that use different Pokémon in new ways and go “oh, that’s an interesting way to see that Pokémon, I’ve never thought about that before.” That’s why I like Pokémon, it’s a series that can always change and do whatever it wants with its mons. It’s been innovative since it’s first entry. It’s kinda mixed to what they do with them though but terrastalization seems like it’ll be a hard thing to top for the next gen’s meta changer.

So like. What do I want my final like definitive post to be before there’s nothing left to be posted?

Idk, look at Choco and Mimi again.

I’m not really a good person at saying anything truly heartfelt or deep for like. Things going away, so I won’t. It’s been a short lived time on cohost compared to others, but I had a good time.

Follow up to a neocities post about pokemon villains and also a follow up to the gen 1 weirdness post:

the interesting development factoids of capsule monsters : you as the human player were supposed to fight alongside the pokemon, different color whips which was scrapped because it was too cruel (which it is) but became badges, the general amount of scrapped pokemon we still don't know all of and how it was less of the dungeon explorer of kanto we know now as gen 1 and more of an apparent like... "digital underground dungeons." Like the whole point of the link cable was that the pokemon were virtual beings and the pokeball is a leftover of that concept… I digress. Also the anectode about red and blue being the overseas release solely because it matched the American flag, all can be found on a bunch of interviews.

gen 1 rocket having whips is significantly different in comparison to every other game where it's just pokeballs. Plus the fact they have their sprite where their eyes are shaded over. This actually carried over to the anime where the rocket grunts have eyeshadow/shading except for the usual gang of Jesse and James and Brunch and Cassidy. (What, of course I’d use that joke!) so whips were kind of an “we had it in capsule monsters but forgot to take it out for every sprite” thing like how it’s on Sabrina of all characters. (This might’ve been a factor to why she was a rocket member in pokespe.)

gen 1 cool trainers/ ace trainers also had whips but this got removed for 2 but if you look at the spaceworld graphics the whips stayed (example image I used)

the only sprite that keeps a whip is the tamer class which also has like the giant lollipop which is more or less supposed to be beastamer and therefore not the norm.

A lot of early installment weirdness for gen 1 can be found in the fact that the game wasn’t really fully solidified as a franchise at all with pokemon more or less being a game made by a small dev team who went like “hey, it would be neat if we made an RPG for the Game Boy which utilized trading. Let’s base it off stuff we all like!” Pokemon is ultimately just a series about monster kaiju battles but what if the monsters were your pets and it’s like children’s levels rather than shonen so the minute there’s like a weapon that could actually harm a person you go “woah man put that down” because there’s no reasonable way for humans in pokemon to actually fight back for later generations aside from using their pokemon and anyone who can is a weirdo who shouldn’t be considered unless they specialize in fighting like battle girls and karate guys do. Team rocket stands out as the exception to this because they still have to be the guys responsible for killing Marowak so they can use the skulls for profit so the rocket grunt clubs her to death in origins, or whatever happens in LGPE, but it’s a constant that she has to die for Kanto.

all other teams afterwards having colorful outfits and clear uniforms and cosplay makes them kind of feel less intimidating when compared to like an actual mob and mafia but then they become more colorful looking likely due to the anime and in contrast giovanni becomes even more menacing but like, a multiversal mob is a bit silly. Spreading yourself out too thin with ambitions there man, you’re gonna get owned by like a multiversal Red.

Like ultimately compared to everyone else in the series, team rocket’s goal of money and profit is a lot different than environmental worries or fronts for being better but actual manipulation of people and the contrast is that it’s completely selfish gain and like without a long term goal because Giovanni seemed perfectly satisfied with his ambition of making money and it’s not known how long he was actually running stuff behind the scenes with just rocket . there's not really anyone there for like selfish gain in later gens based on my memories, everyone has some kind of deep esoteric reason for doing what they do aside from like maybe gym leaders because their role is to appear and then exit as soon as the town is left unless you're in a gen that has gym leaders act as active authority and show up, they're the most forgettable of pokemon's large cast of humans because my focus was primarily on the pokemon.

poaching is a real thing, like, in terms of most other teams goals team rocket is simple but effective
"we steal a the pokemon"

Another thing is pokemon has a lot of influence from japanese media that was out during the Tokusatsu/henshin boom (kamen rider, ultra seven, godzilla, super sentai) and I read rocket might be based on a villain group from one of those shows out during that time so what I really need to do is start getting into Toku and then my mind will be totally blown.

I feel like pokespe yellow is kind of a character that’s fundamentally misunderstood the further pokemon moves from it’s gen 1 philosophies of like people living with nature in harmony with pokemon vs the horrors of technology and as pokemon becomes more technology based a character who’s ultimately representative of like, Mother Nature kind of sticks out in a weird angle. I think this misunderstanding sticks even in her source material. Sort of a companion to my “gen 1 is weird article” like the rocket one and I finished ORAS and she didn’t show up so I wrote this out.

Natural healing and empathy powers are off putting by pokemon standards but things like auras exist so for all we know she’s just got a way to share her aura in terms of giving her retroactive reasoning because thats like what mega evolutions and Z-moves do. Yellow personality wise is kind of like a shoujo character who was thrown into a shonen and her team evolving at the very end when she kind of abhorred that because she couldn’t recognize her team anymore is kind of like her crisis of faith and loss of innocence at least compared to other characters. Wish we got to see more of her reaction but she uh. Fell asleep. Ultimately why i like yellow is that in spite of being a pacifist character she normally tries to give an ultimatum before going full into the fighting. She did threaten to drop the SS Anne on those rocket members that one time and never hesitated once to blow up Lance before the final confrontation on Cerise island. She isn’t whiny about it and I think that’s what makes her stand out at least with other pacifists in media I’ve had to deal with over time. She’d be a terrible game protag what with her team but Pokespe isn’t really all about stats considering how a tepig was able to keep up with alder’s team. She was created in mind to be the exact opposite of Red in terms of not being able to battle or catch well and that is kept up but the level boost thing is kind of also a thing with stats flaring up like the beast aura… now I kinda wish she could show up and interact with Riley. Too bad we’re never getting new remake arcs.

In terms of the whole nature thing as well, pokespe has done this before by citing pallet town as a place that was pristine and free of pollution and the viridian forest is the big example of “magical forest of nature”. The concept of pokemon being able to sense things being awry because they are ultimately beings of nature is also a repeated plot point within spe with things like the absol and the lake verity explosion leading to the pokemon being angry at humans. In terms of Japanese belief systems, Shintoism and Buddhism both have emphasis on respecting nature and the belief that every living thing has a spirit, which would explain why the forest itself can seemingly manifest powers as it shares its spirit as a blessing. Even during something during ORAS I thought “kinda interesting that even though it’s moved past viridian forest it still apparently hints that like the planet/nature itself can like summon people to act for it” and generally, Celebi has also kind of shifted into that direction of summoning people like during HGSS. That’s more of a plot analysis than a meta analysis which was more or less the reasoning of “we need these characters to show up during the remake arc to advertise the remake.” But with later generations games wise, things like Cursola existing and the various rotom phones and ultra megapolis point more towards a heavier science angle, right? It’s interesting in terms of “a new angle thats different from the more simple stuff.” As technology marches on in the real world, the pokemon world also reflects it.

But since gen 1 was just kanto in terms of locations and then abandoned buildings and the philosophy of “let nature reclaim what was abandoned” and there’s a character that is like a nature vs nurture conflict (lance is on the nurture side because I believe he was definitely raised in a way that made him think might makes right especially with the dragon clan) this retroactively makes the arc be like “but why though” especially since the powers that healed kanto and the world basically immediately gave them leeway to start doing their construction project type of things again. The thing she represents isn’t 100% a priority anymore. Of course this is also a speculative bit but since she’s a character that has no real reason to appear since third versions and extra things during the switch were ignored she doesn’t really appear because like, the Viridian forest is her domain, so she kinda just stays and chills. She’s not a fighter like Red and she’s not as strong as him in base form, so she’s kind of like in terms of DBZ comparisons like she’s like the dende and Gohan of the group. (Note: In terms of everyone else gen 1 wise, Red is Goku, Green is Piccolo, and Blue is Bulma.)

Note: This is definitely a contender for the picking up pokemon page, which I’m unsure what to do with going forward.

I definitely didn’t connect the dots beforehand but this is a thing that makes a lot more sense about this part of the GSC arc now: Kusaka definitely played the Spaceworld demo in between the time frame of writing out the Gold and Silver arc before the Crystal arc released. The fact that gold uses a skateboard like in the demo and the plot point of Red becoming a gym leader (like how he was supposed to be in Spaceworld) and how Daisy is a lab assistant, all of that can be found within the Spaceworld demo. Pokespe is reflecting a game that technically doesn’t exist because of how much it got reworked.

Dev history for GSC is fascinating because like it was in between Pokémon blue, yellow, the orange islands arc of the anime and like it’s basically 2 different games based on the spaceworld demo to what we got now. Conceptually a lot of the old maps for the johto demo can be theorized to be in Sinnoh which like aligns with all of gen 1-4 being based on Japan, plus how a bunch of pokemon in Spaceworld were used in Sinnoh in terms of adding in more baby pokemon, and how there’s just a lot of fascinating stuff to consider since GSC was being developed in the time period of 96 to 99 and ended up in an entirely different direction so much that I personally refer to Spaceworld GS as “Gen 1.5”.

Also doubly fascinating how Pokespe also reflects bits and pieces of this unused game . Impostor Oak appearing in spe; the cameos of Spaceworld trainer designs during volume 3, gold’s skateboard, and the whole rocket taking over the magnet train subplot might have been Kusaka just taking what he had from the Spaceworld draft of the manga and just gluing it with the plot of GS.

1997 was the airing of the og anime which meant that gen 2 was being developed concurrently because Ho-oh was the first pokemon shown, plus togepi was also there.

Pokespe also released March 3rd, 1997. And the tankonbon chapters themselves for RGB all release from the timeframe of 97 to 98 with the yellow arc lasting until 99 so within that time frame was the spaceworld demo. (Note: I can’t read Japanese but these show the chapters as they released in the magazine format in chronological order— https://pkspedia.com/02_datebase/06_serial/magagine/poken-serial-magagine1.html)

The spaceworld demo was in November and the arc chapters of the saffron city siege featuring imposter oak were January of 1998. The entire subplot in GSC proper about Red becoming a gym leader in general!
Because he was supposed to be, and Kusaka gets sent games/footage ahead of time so he can start making the manga that promotes the material. These pieces of material I keep talking about can all be found on the TCRF page.
But in terms of “why does Spaceworld use Red as the gym leader but refer to Blue in terms of the name?”

Because Spaceworld Gold was built off of Pokemon Blue (which aligns with sprites for gen 1 pokemon in SW) which was the 3rd version game compared to Red and Green which became US Red and Blue. There’s an weird alternate world out there where Red’s the one stuck with the color name debate.

Correction: Blue and G/S were being developed concurrently. The delay led to Blue coming out first and Yellow being made in order to capitalize on how popular the anime was/keep people interested in Pokemon after the delay announcement.

https://www.nintendo.com/en-gb/Iwata-Asks/Iwata-Asks-Pokemon-HeartGold-Version-SoulSilver-Version/Iwata-Asks-Pokemon-HeartGold-Version-SoulSilver-Version/2-The-King-Of-Portable-Toys/2-The-King-Of-Portable-Toys-225900.html

Bonus images in regards to that time frame, stuff like Corocoro scans and anime promotional material . Who could forget about the famous pikablu..

Corocoro magazines sure were the way of leaks, at least right until the 3DS had the demos and pretty much every pokemon was revealed right out the gate. Or people who’d get their predownloads loaded in earlier than street date. That’s how I ended up getting spoiled on the entire Sumo roster.

More from Corocoro from the timeframe of 96 to 98. Fascinatingly even in the 98 stuff they’re still using screenshots from the Spaceworld demos rather than the fully revised gold and silver.

Kinda fascinating how the only Red there is the one from the clefairy gag manga while pokespe red is nowhere in sight because Corocoro does publish pokemon special, I guess clefairy Red and Ash were way more popular at the time.

I got all of these linked off of https://www.zoidsland.com/.

The funniest out of context things I can think of in between the arcs is the concept of Red and Deoxys being brothers and /or Red is a father and Deoxys is the son and the time there was a villain wearing super armor and then Gold spent legitimate money to make an exact fake of the costume and wear it at the same time as the villain.

Notes from FRLG, RS, and Emerald

Pokespe Red’s arc in FRLG is such an interesting way to take a character who for the most part was a hero protagonist and turn it on its head by pointing out that “yeah, it kind of is weird that he has no parents in the picture at all or family to protect and only had Poliwag and it’s a plot factor” and “outside of being good at fighting, who is he as a person? Is it selfish for him to only be here for the sake of fighting? ”. It’s almost borderline deconstructing his character trope.

Okay so now I’m actually reading through RS again and the scan scene is so weird for these later arcs. Dragon Guard scans covered up to Yellow, the Chaung Yi translations are still on the internet for GSC but missing chapters, and the gen 3 translations are either missing entirely or just the Viz ones, and the DPP arcs onwards are all fan translations. Did Viz just snipe everyone who had copies of the older translations or something?

The ORAS versions of Archie and Maxie effectively overtaking their GBA counterparts has given me this sort of strange effect upon seeing Pokespe’s Maxie that lives in a cave and “actual legitimate businessman Japanese White Archie.”

Note: In terms of posting panels I can’t do that due to potential copyright reasons but Maxie is also just outright drinking in his cave.

I completely forgot how quick this segment goes from “Ruby thinks this fish is ugly” to “Norman fights his own son” within the span of 3 chapters.

Current Arc Reading Experience (RS)

Sapphire: Whee, yay! I love adventure!

Ruby: Can I stop being put into situations I am TRYING to win contests before my DAD finds me and I keep having to FIGHT crimimals

gabby and Ty

I really do like the parts of Pokespe where they take some NPCs and elevate them to a more important role even if it’s for a brief moment (like the Super Nerd and Jr that were in the yellow arc)— it makes the world feel connected and lived in when they make cameos later on. Gabby and Ty were always an interesting bit of RSE moving around and interviewing the player for the TV cameos— the first games to do that feature in the series! (Of course, now I’m talking a bit ahead of the arc but the TV aspect is an important plot point for later on and now since it’s what allowed Norman to locate Ruby to begin with.)

I had zero memory of how lopsided the bet was

Ruby has 80 days to get all the ribbons. It’s 49 days to the deadline and he hasn’t gotten one? Sapphire has four badges at this point.

Okay now that I’ve read the chapter though how long does it take in universe to do a contest because Ruby just went through the entire normal rank in one go. He’s speedrunning.

I’m used to names getting complete liberties within translations especially when the original isn’t there to be compared but.. did this translation name the three generals Mack, Mitch, and Marge just to match with Maxie? It’s kinda charming.

What is not charming however is naming Wally’s cousin Wallene. Stop that.

I like this bit regarding the gym leaders debating on which team is in the right because of how much sides have been pushed by both of them; sure, Aqua might’ve turned off Mt. Chimney and caused a town to have a crisis but they’ve also been legitimately concerned for the environment and helping out Roxanne and the professor while meanwhile Magma’s tried to get that volcano back to normal helping Flannery . Make no mistake, they’re both criminal groups and have tried to off multiple people and Norman’s reason for not taking a side and ditching in relation to the possible threat of reprimanding from the association is due to his son being directly traumatized because of the Pokemon association. This reread has actually made me think way more when I actually recall the recontextualized bits from my memories.

“You can’t post every panel from pokespe you enjoy”

How could I not post this.

I will break my copyright rule so you can look at wallace.

Small Red and Yellow references spotted (that’s Red at the Snorlax bike race and Yellow’s vermillion swimming contest.)

There’s a spoiler bar here somewhere or I’ll just use the read more?
One last character introspective before I head in.

Yes, I understand that a fundamental part of the narrative protag split before the weather Crisis is Sapphire rejecting the lifestyle Ruby has where he isn’t clearly using the best of his ability because they are both traumatized by the same incident and unaware of it: why did it have to be the caveman outfit again though that is so not weather appropriate when you’re facing a tsunami. Ruby also lashing out similarly and externally on his Feebas sucks but he’s done this before where instead of facing the problem he ran away and shoved it under the contests and it was noted. Now that things are blatantly worse he can’t pretend to be as ignorant. But at the same time now that Ruby’s actually locking in it feels kinda weird that there was entire offscreen segment of Sapphire training? I’m unsure how to feel about Sapphire at this point if you can tell by how many of my posts have been just on Ruby. Course I know what her deal is but despite her being in the lead of the bet and the 2nd protag and rival to Ruby it feels like she’s been around less.

I also finish up the Spe arc of FRLG since it’s super short and I’m delaying the RS chapter since I’m not a fan of the backhalf

Look at this single TCG art that became and entire pokespe character

Being a menace apparently is a family trait in Norman’s family. Where did the Maple fan name come from, is it just to contrast with Birch?

Last thing I expected during all these 3 v 3 battles was a gamefreak cameo. Plus a moment where Bruno’s nunchuck gimmick reappeared, Brawly used them. I think this was the only other cameo I’ve seen of the early gen guys aside from the bike cameo.

It’s a good thing that Kusaka was able to establish the proper way that the games would go with the whole champion and elite four thing in order to finally get past that plot hole hurdle caused by the yellow arc.

Initially it was just a tournament in spe, there’s a new rule added: The winners from previous tournaments were selected as the elite four and then the champion is the current winner. So anyone who wins the tournament also does the new setup.

This is the hoenn way they do it. I have no clue what Lance’s elite four was then with this new version.

Stone.png

Me looking at Steven: Huh, he looks familiar in this art style and not just in the pokemon character way, then I realized that Yamamoto basically takes this eye style type and uses it for N in a later arc.

RS arc is done. Go look at the medium page for more details.

Destiny.png

Doing rereads of these arcs in particular alongside everything else pretty much confirms to me that Pokespe is the worst place get a dex in because you’re always surrounded by highly concentrated complex nonsense happening to you at a constant and depending on how severe it is you’re likely to also witness people dying around you and have it caused by you or people targeting you. I think it’s the nonchalance of it that gets to me as well, like they’ve outright accepted that they’ll always be in danger just for having a pokedex. Blue literally met her parents after years of being apart and they were kidnapped in front of her and then she has never had an on screen conversation that wasn’t related to the fact that she has never been with them for a long period without something bad happening (to be fair, they’ve only been in like one arc.) It's always been a dangerous situation in pokemon media regardless of the medium but pokespe does not hold back with putting these children and teenagers into situations.

Writing up my thoughts on the emerald arc. There wasn’t any photo posting or many panels because I was mostly trapped at the DMV the entire time I was reading a lot of it and the panels I do want to show are basically the one’s that everyone’s probably already seen (the major team ups and dexholder ultimate attacks.)

RS Arc (Summary)

I like early RS but not late RS as much. Kinda apprecaiate that it finally gives a depiction of the super legendaries as super legendaries that are capable of causing disasters but it’s like an entire volume’s worth of nothing but that. Entire panel spreads dedicated to them is very impressive. Somehow it managed to pull off emerald’s duel legendary plot before emerald happened and then Ruby and Sapphire started wearing their emerald outfits too so I guess Kusaka lucked out on writing that or he was told ahead of time that would be a thing. There’s a lot of different moving parts like the aqua (sub leaders of sea scheme) and magma admins (with their memory flame thing) both battling against the 3 gym leaders and 3 other gym leaders and then Steven also brought in the elite four, so there’s a lot being added within a single volume with a lot of buildup that somehow makes these two volumes feel slow. The whole mirage island training arc segment in the midst of the super crisis is probably what does it for me because it’s not the hyperbolic time chamber get back out there Steven needs your help. Plus they lost the bet because of the time technicality. So there’s a bit about the arc that I kinda don’t like so far that I feel like is pretty much the primary reason that people like this arc and it’s kind of hard to describe outside of me being like “I wish Sapphire was less of a static character and that the two had more time to interact before the entire reigon literally ended.” I feel like a problem is that Ruby has more dynamic character development and has a parallel with Courtney/Marge (I was reading the Chaung Yi translations) with being a contest goer whereas Sapphire does not have anyone in Aqua to bounce off of. I’ve likely said this all before, haven’t I… And it’s totally weird because I haven’t had this issue with any other arc’s characters! Like the RGBY cast, the GSC cast, both of them together, the DPP cast, the BW cast is probably the best one because they basically had a redux of this arc minus the traumatic backstory , the XY cast I especially believe is ride or die.
Maybe ORAS does this better but I remember my OG reaction to ORAS being that I did not like it much at all and I'm kinda afraid to revisit it and learn that the problems I had with this arc got worse.

FRLG Arc (Summary)

At this rate I'm really going to reread all of Spe within a year. I just copy pasted this from my notes with zero cleanup.

The FRLG reread I did in between the RS arc was kinda funny because I was like "okay I'll only read 1 chapter" and then I read the entire thing There's a lot to be said about the way Spe utilized the remake content as the revisit for character development and plot before they were children in RGBY and now they're teens. all the PC guys being here is neat, like I said, earlier arcs were good with cameo usage.

Like how the Sevii islands are the focus and Deoxys because of the birth island thing. three new rocket generals even if Sird was originally a TCG card however I could not stop seeing the three beasts without thinking "BEAST MODE BABY" because my brain has some quirks I guess. the confirmation on Silver being giovanni's son that was Kusaka originally taking an insane lucky guess. also really funny how Lorelei showed up and Green went "weren't you actively trying to kill everyone" and she did not acknowledge that. Girl went home with zero repercussions. only thing I don't think I liked was Blue's parents (even in my OG reading). but that's because they are more or less plot motivation because the girl just wants a normal life and can't have that because of being a pokedex holder. It's kinda interesting to see how it's like, Red doesn't have a good reason to fight because his family members are just his pokemon, which I mentioned before in an earlier post. really funny to think that he is technically a brother to an alien.
pokedex holding is basically like being a sailor senshi since it means you're destined to get into world ending threats even though that's also like that in the games pokedex status is quite strange. it's seen as a status thing in spe because all the dex holders have a title and respective talent now in the games it's basically an app you can download on your phone so it should be accessible to everyone

we are probably never getting a BDSP/PLA follow up that deals with Sird which is kinda dissapointing because the concept of the bootleg pokedex was interesting and Sird kinda lives rent free in the minds of Spe readers like me. it does make me want to reevaluate my HGSS position though because like the way Gio and Silver's dynamic was in this one is like night and day with that one i guess it could be because giovanni was like. dying. Okay so up next I finish RS and then E and then I move onto other stuff, I was just supposed to reread RGB and I've already gone through 4 gens worth of Pokespe because I also read the XY arc.

Emerald Arc (Summary)

It’s official. By the end of the year I will definitely have read all of Pokespe again up to wherever Scarlet and Violet is. Shoutouts to Todd Snap for being a major character even if he wasn’t named.

The emerald arc is… I already read FRLG and mentioned that when I was younger I mostly skipped over Emerald’s bits because I found him annoying. But now that I’ve reread emerald he’s just an excitable kid who loves battling but no pokemon initially. It’s not a charming level like how Gold was a pest but he kind of makes up for it by having a bunch of weird devices on him at all times. Like he’s so gimmicky in comparison to everyone else with his gun and hair and… the Wally thing but… the first impression is really going to be a long one. His entire attitude is mostly a front like how Ruby and Sapphire were. His ability of the whole soil thing and seeing what places pokemon come from is a bit counterintuitive because why does he need a pokedex then? The formation thing is like the thing pokemon rangers do minus the capture stylus. Actually, having a ranger in the cast would’ve been neat but I think the only ranger manga content was daisuke club exclusive and the only canonical mention its ever had in Spe was the manaphy egg appearing at the end of DPP.

Todd snap appearance is pretty funny because that’s the second time Pokespe has made an N64 spinoff important to the plot (the first being that in the Yellow arc a lot of the items Blue uses are devices based off of Hey You Pikachu, and the caterpie babysitting chapter has Yellow carry flowers that are from Hey You Pikachu as well.) There’s a man with a sword in a suit of armor and it’s Archie and they kill him after he had already died. He had an evil surskit. His sword is like a light screen barrier. (I could talk more about the Sird thing but whatever. It really is kind of dumb that there's a whole plot dedicated to this person who ends up in team galactic and it's just never followed up on whatsoever. ) Gold shows up in the exact same fit and armor just to mess with everyone. The main RGBYGSC cast is pretty much my favorites out of the cast due to how long we got to spend with them. (I feel like if I had to deal with just them and their quirks for 30 years though with their quirks becoming more and more one note I’d probably be sick of it, so good for having rotating casts. Pokespe is the one medium that does this outside of the games so people compare it to yugioh and Jojo for a bit.)

The Johto Guys (minus Silver) showing up is pretty much the big turning point where everything starts ramping up , everyone gets a big battling spotlight with their ultimate attacks. Gold and Crys do play a big role in this, but I wish there was more time for the casts to interact before it’s straight into “big fight final boss rush ahhh!” Gold’s pool cue thing being a utilized tool is executed far better and is a lot more reasonable than emerald’s trick master equipment, one has a far better hook in reality and could reasonably be a game thing. So seeing stuff like that for shot throws and helping attack boosts and cheating at games is way cooler in my eyes than the dirt gun. The purifier thing was interesting, but the ultimate attack sequence was the thing people usually think of when this arc comes to mind, right?

Pokespe would do really do well with an anthology sort of thing. Revisiting older characters would work out pretty well and a bunch of plot arcs were missed so maybe one shots are what this world needs more than “another epic adventure to save the world/reigon!” This could really use the sonic universe treatment, but I have no clue how a western Pokémon comic would even go because that thing would be absolutely corporate and mandated to hell and back.

Oh yeah, emerald chapter. It’s good. Like it's the ultimate fanservice moment where everyone basically goes "the phantom kyogre battle is awesome."
(You know, I just thought about that. Wasn't the plot of the jirachi movie jirachi making a fake legendary as well? How much of the arcs for FRLG and Emerald are based on pokemon movie plots? I should investigate this further.) I feel like Pokespe’s at its best when the trainers are using pokemon battles to do outright insane shit based on dex entries. It’s also a lot better in my opinion when it’s also not glued to a game’s plot points 1 to 1 but I can understand why they can’t do that for later arcs which are kinda hit or miss. The best arcs are when there's more distinct stuff going on instead of being a plot supercut... it's not always 1 to 1 anyways...

An entire arc that’s dedicated to actual battling is kinda neat in execution because it’s like actual legitimate pokemon battles based on the technical styles of the facilities. It’s the first for pokespe outside of some official matchups where it’s actually attempting to be using game mechanics instead of how earlier material in pokemon went with “random bullshit go” effects (well, everything but the ash anime) . It’s funny how the heads in the battle frontier are all sorts of like “we hate your ass”, they are so petty to this actual child because it’s supposed to be a tour of the frontier before it actually opens. I realize now that he wears the 10 on his back because he’s the 10th dexholder. I like the whole battle frontier summarizing information that’s given out to the press for end chapters, pokespe has a few things like that where it goes and explains a bit of its own lore/mechanics. Do you think Yamamoto knew he would plague the pokespe reddit when he made the human Latias? I check there sometimes and they actually made it a rule that they couldn’t post her anymore. It’s notable for the FRLG and Emerald arc that there were a lot more references to the anime like with armored Mewtwo and Human Latias, it would be neat if they could put in other small references that aren’t like super intrusive to the plot and structure of the world that are just harmless Easter eggs instead of making it like a huge plot integral kind of reference. The crystal and emerald friendship thing is nice as well because I don’t think Emerald otherwise would’ve been able to get through everything if not for Crystal continuing to catch every single pokemon. It’s kinda funny how Crystal is the only one who actually does things that is like the in game 100% dex completion thing. The further arcs go in Pokespe the less there is any actual skills that are reflective of gameplay stuff for dexholder titles from Pokemon which I feel like is a missed opportunity. The title things aren’t even brought up for later characters outside of like a trivia book. (There’s also a bit of diminishing value where it’s like the idea well is running dry. They called Sun the saver because he’s saving a lot of money or X being the Loner because he was a shut in. No.) Everyone bounces off emerald interestingly that he gets to talk to but the ruby sapphire dynamic being reset because he pretends he doesnt remember the confession kinda sucks but it doesn’t piss me off like it did with what I remember of ORAS.

Emerald’s anti Pokemon stance is fascinating because the reason why is also interesting, like I’m pretty sure he might have a condition for his height because he used to deal with having pokemon for support and then his extended family started harassing him over it (his actual parents are dead and dude’s an orphan). He didn’t have a scene like Ruby did with his Feebas in such a violent way, but I just realize that was kind of a parallel with him rejecting the friendship of his pokemon by not using them in that one tournament battle. Him admitting that he likes pokemon and that being what breaks the petrification has probably hit my top scenes in pokespe. (Other’s include Red’s (Sliph Co triple attack, you don’t know what friendship is), Yellow’s (Pikachu, let’s stay together a little longer, the time green mentored that junior trainer), (The GSC final arc having Bill teleport all the pokemon at once, Blue with the legendary birds), (I guess RS would be the back to back confession scenes), (The DPP’s dex reunion where they all mention that the pokedex beeping was a significant sound to them because they were always together), (Black and White saying farewell on the train ride and their reunion in BW2 before it gets cut short), (The XY rendition of the AZ flowette scene), and I don’t have anything yet for other arcs.) I think in terms of arcs that feel like they’re final, the RSEFRLGE run is that for the concept of a full dexholder reunion team up thing. Other arcs might have them cameo but otherwise this is the largest iteration of the full (current) cast being around doing things. The RGBYGSC run was that of the MATO art style.

Considering that the collector's editions also end at volume 10's emerald arc feels like Viz also understood that this is pretty much the like most definitive place to end on because no other arc afterwards is as interconnected aside from cameos like the new ORAS edition chapters adding in red and blue and XY having Green (Guy) mentor the kalos gang but otherwise outside of maybe additional things having a phone call and the fact there's a huge time gap between ORAS + HGSS to DPP with the dexholders is uh... hm.

So there's not a lot of confusion on this in comparison to the games because most pokespe content basically goes in order of the game release right up until some additional content shows up or the question of "wait, where are the other dexholders during this event?" The logical reason is "well, they kind of live in a different country." But I still wanted to write this. Not taking into account stuff like the actual in story time years wise because that’s in a trivia book (Spepedia) that I do not have on hand.

the pokespe timeline is as follows based on some extra stuff:

okay so there's RGB to Y to GSC to RS to FRLG (they don't happen simultaneously) to Emerald which I'll call the OG Dexholder arc, consider this to be like Part 1 to 3 of JJBA but there's no stardust crusaders or anything, if you skip an arc you will be confused because they like to have references to earlier events (I guess you could also do RS first because it isn’t as reliant on referring to early arcs but why.).

The New Dexholder Arc starts with ORAS (A DPP protagonist cameos in this as a child) and HGSS then goes to DPP to BW to BW2 to XY(I think? I'm not sure when XY takes place timeline wise but Whitley gets Delphox in new additional chapter content) to SUMO to SWSH (Moon cameos in SWSH in a phone call) to Scarlet and Violet which I'm assuming is after SWSH and not a prequel or anything because it wouldn't make any sense based on the lineup.

There's no BDSP or PLA or LGPE arc because there was no time to do that at all because there was a big sliding effect of chapters being released very slowly based on publication for BW2 and the 3DS games coming back to back to back (this is timeline order, not publication order). Like to the point that volumes had to be released in a mini format instead of numbers format for every arc past HGSS starting with BW.
There's probably never going to be anything like the big interconnected dexholder stuff for Emerald ever again because chances are it could be contradicted by other things.

But anyways, this isn't a reading order, just start with the Red chapters, it's literally only 3 volumes. I started with Yellow but that's because I saw it in a school library once when I was a kid which I've said before.

DPP is a semi good starting point iirc since it's kinda like "here's an explanation for the pokedex holders!" but then you'll be confused to who this Sird person is.

Note: Find the original tweet of this sketch since it's the one for the art of pokemon special book but the official website's link doesn't work. Also there's some ranger adaptions that were posted on an online exclusive club that are canon and just take place in between FRLG to Emerald (the deoxys mission) and DPP (the manaphy mission.)

Current Rankings

1. Yellow

2. Gold Silver Crystal

3. Black and White/ Diamond Pearl Platinum

4. Red Green Blue/ RS (1st Half)/ Emerald

5. XY/ HGSS/ FRLG

6. SM/SWSH

7. RS (2nd half, post confession)

8. BW2/ORAS

Currently ongoing: Scarlet and Violet

On a rating of 1 to 10 with 1 being my personal best and 10 being “I would probably not read this one outside of a marathon.”

Explanation/Breakdown (I’ve been editing this as I’ve finished arcs):

My favorite arcs in Pokespe are the early gen 1-2 ones, then after is BW tied with DPP, then XY. I’m very open with saying that I might be biased towards liking the first 14 volumes more than later arcs because of how different the tone is in comparison to later arcs.

It’s not to say that I’m not a fan of later arcs in Pokespe, it’s just one of those things where if I’m not engaged I tend to recall less of it more which is what happened with FRLG on my first read and then I never went for a reread and the emerald reading I just spedread so I could see the heroes no longer be statues and never properly paid attention to the new guy because I didn’t like him. The added drama kind of also is a turn off for me because while it was fine within the first few arcs it was applied to but it kinda becomes difficult to sit through and marathon when the protags are constantly going through something in nearly every arc, some of them can’t catch a break. Plus the whole thing with Sird never being followed up on in a satisfying way makes it a bit hard to go through FRLG+E knowing that she’s still out there somewhere during DPP.

I like my pokemon stories to be more lighthearted and whimsical rather than being complete edge fests and despite the panels shown off, I can assure you that the BW arc is not edgy at all outside of those two moments and has my favorite protagonist duo in the form of the dreamers. I like DPP because it’s mostly a return to form with the comedy duo and the dawn equivalent being equally as goofy by playing their straight man. Even though I say all of that, I understand I’m a total hypocrite because one of my favorite arcs in Spe is the XY arc, which can best be described as a thriller with a bunch of moments people have posted as being edgy (the essentia Pinsir panel comes to mind.) It’s good to have a balance in mind and from what I recall some strike it well and some… do not. I feel like my memories of FRLG are far too muddy for me to give it a proper ranking. I always did like that the remakes led to a follow up story right until ORAS because ORAS had the problem of the villains both being dead so they uh… ORAS Spe did a lot of things. I don’t think I liked it very much.

I can’t exactly rate BW2 even though its a part of BW without being biased about the fact that it took 7 years to finish because of the development cycle of Pokemon games at the time and that the plot moved at lightning pace without ever giving any of the new main characters enough time to properly develop— like you’re telling me that Blake was experimented on as a child and he goes right back to working for the people who did the same things to him and I’m not supposed to see it as a parallel to Whitley being in a cult as a child and think “oh, she’s gonna break him out of the cult mentality somehow” but nope. He just says it. The others have no lasting impact on my mind despite me reading them recently but that’s because they have the problem of not lasting long enough to have an impact (Sun/Moon, Sword/Shield) or I still need to reread them. Last I finished was GSC and then I started RS so I’ll do a back to back of RS to FRLG to E and finish my marathon there.

Future Edit:

I accidentally went ahead of the RS reading and finished FRLG in one go since it’s only 35ish chapters to go through and this is the part where in my head it’s kind of difficult to evaluate in comparison to the first arcs but this one is more “mature”. The nature of pokedex holders I feel like is the most defined by this chapter where it turns out that they just have these things happen to them. The thing that stuck out to me the most was seeing that one gag from Crystal return and realizing that these are all kids in this situation. I do wish Green’s parents had more screen time because they basically were a plot motivation the entire way through. the girl. I’m inconsistent with the name thing.

I’d rate RS higher based on the re-reading but the final chunk is slower than expected and I feel like Sapphire despite being the 2nd protag had way less character development in comparison to Ruby.

Future Future Edit: Changed my mind, RS is one of the ones I feel like I’m never gonna make my mind on where it would go or not. It’s all over the place based on how I feel about the second lead and how the 2nd half is pretty much battle after battle after the confession and how in the end I feel like it’s just too Ruby centric for me to rate it even though I like this Ruby sometimes.

Future future future edit (like future trunks): It’s Spe September. I’m making a follow up post on this but I basically finished the marathon way faster than expected in terms of everything but the notes and once I sort those out I’ll make the post. Emerald is hard to evaluate as a stand alone since it’s so dependent on the arcs before it to make sense and in terms of the remake arcs I still am not a big fan but it’s not like I actively hate them, it’s kind of just one of those things where the final product is something I’m like “alright” on. I feel like pokemon special is good still but it doesn’t hit the same way it used to when I was reading earlier arcs in the spring and summer.

I think in terms of DP like these characters all grew and developed because of each other and being in the similar age range so they are actually the embodiment of the trio that Cyrus wanted so badly.
Everything that is pre gen 5 is still coming as good in the lineup of what I’ve read so far because its like spending time with these characters is doing wonders for their development
In terms of a secondary issue though, I’m starting to feel like they should have slightly smaller teams because outside of the core three they started with I kinda completely fail to remember the extra 3 that were caught during the split up.
Note: Out of the original three I grew up with (Red, Yellow, Gold), I can say that Red's like the good guy with a heart of justice and the fighter, Yellow's basically built to be the opposite of Red in terms of starting off as naive and a kind and peaceful person who will not hesitate to cut you down if you get in the way of that peace , and Gold is the perfect contrast to the two of them because he's kind of known in universe to be a prick but still a good person and he's ultimately the jerk with a heart of gold.
I am booed immediately.
I hope pryce dies of old age in his gym surrounded by the ice he loved so much and/or celebi sends him back to the time hole
think in terms of pokemon special characters with personalities i bounce off of (ruby and blake) I feel like at least with blake he could be salvaged if his fake flirting personality was his real one or not making him a literal super cop superintendent or making whitley the protag because like she inherently has the more interesting story of being a child raised in plasma and now she's experiencing extreme culture shock

poor cheren and bianca got totally screwed over by BW's manga in comparison to their game counterparts in terms of their character development being subsequentally all over the place and the nature of bw2 being like "errrr... they're here now, i guess."
The year gap between bw and bw2 in universe for the games always makes me wonder because it's like parallel to red leaving but the thing is the player never comes back
Wish more Pokemon games were direct sequels instead of only two games ever exploring the potential of the cognitive dissonance of being a new character in a world that moved on without the protagonist. Like how in nuvema and pallet you can see the old protag’s parent and it’s not the same
you can never go home
it's the same but different, don't you know?
That's kind of how I feel reading these again.
In a twitter comment Kusaka stated his inspiration for Whitley and Foongy was a movie of a girl who could summon bugs to attack for her
Correction: Yamamoto’s the movie guy since he’s the one who draws in all the references like how the missing people in the XY cast are cameos of NCIS and Criminal Minds which sure is a random cut…

If I had the time and effort and also this site wasn’t shutting down I would look for more interesting commentary between the twitters but I kind of find it neat that he (Kusaka) does in game playthroughs and then writes out the pokemon special chapter for it with a corresponding main character reflecting his in game team, which is what X’s team was for XY and also like, Platinum getting pokerus on her pokemon might’ve been an in game thing.
In terms of comparison to western video game adaption comics, Kusaka is kind of like a guy who’s writing like, Sonic comics who actually has played the game and is writing stories based off his playing. Not sure on other character picks though in terms of what their team picks were or if every team is reflective of an in game playthrough which it probably isn’t.
This literally was an arc that in a bubble is just nothing. I don’t even feel frustrated by it, everything’s moving so fast. The chapters being so short now really does make this a lot easier to read through though marathon wise. I’m not gonna lie, there was definitely not enough room for like anything in that one at all. Felt like the pacing was 50 mph.
In terms of “there’s a lot of plot threads stacked up from earlier arcs all playing out in alola” I feel like it’s just more or less a “we had to kind of do this because the stories took so long to adapt alola was already out by the time the volumes were releasing compared to the magazines” So uh... yeah!

I've read through everything for my last thing on cohost being finishing up everything from pokemon special/adventures from emerald onwards. Re: Spe Rankings

Note: Follow up to the current rankings post from Summer. I’ve gotten everything done but scarlet and violet. Not really “ranked” in a normal way in terms of numbers, more or less like “would I reread this as a standalone or outside of a marathon?”.

I think a lot of my issues with later spe arcs past BW is that there really isn't like a big amount of time dedicated to the world anymore and it's more or less like "PLOT." A truncated and abridged version of a game plot too usually. It was kinda easier when there was less plot to compare it to but when the games have more plot heavy stuff and spe can’t fill in the gaps like it used to then it’s left in an interesting position in terms of… what can it do to be different? Should it be different at all? I’ve also been reading through Zelda manga within September as well, so it’s definitely sticking out in the forefront of my mind in terms of Nintendo adjacent series that are adapting games into manga. Note: in terms of other Nintendo manga I’ve read through, moretsu pupupu hour/kirby manga mania and an earthbound manga, one is a gag manga and the other was also a straight adaption. Other Nintendo manga I’ve looked into tend to also be one shots or just gag mangas or 4 komas (clefairy manga, super Mario kun, actual licensed pokemon 4 komas during gen 1) so pokemon special/adventures is an exception (it always was because initially Kusaka and Mato were supposed to be writing a gag manga and then it became plot driven because of the clefairy manga existing.) . Otherwise they’re also anthologies or just a story that stars an original character that sometimes gets into the plot of a story but otherwise avoids it (fire emblem has like all of the examples with various games.) Also, it’s really fun when you pick up a manga adaption and they vary with radically different art styles like the FE4 manga which also has this example with one being heavily like stylized following art trends at the time and the other is also a gag manga.

Pokemon? Pokemon.

SV isn’t done so I don’t want to evaluate something when it’s not even finished.

I feel like a lot of the later half of Spe suffers from the hiatus making so every arc needs to be one and done. Things like the entire yellow arc which was a kanto revisit with an entirely new plot and crystals intro being a few volumes during the GS arc wouldn't be able to happen now because like a lot of pokespe chapters were reliant on being published through multiple magazines and the impact bw2 had on the entire series going forward cannot be understated on how the 3ds having back to back releases pretty much made pokespe this juggling task between game promotion. Since manga and TCG and anime all have to be aligned with the games… you see the problem when the 3ds games released yearly and the author has to also play the games as they release to take notes…? Also the multiple magazines that pokespe published within kept getting dropped during this timeframe so publications were a mess. And it certainly felt like during XY and SWSH that there was a lot going on where every chapter was dense and things had to happen at such a fast pace. SM went by so fast I could barely even tell what was happening because it was like I was watching a highlight reel.

In early arcs they'd have like red and gold and co (until Gen 5 pt 2) go through nearly every location and route and like meander around and explore the world but for something like SWSH they pretty much speedrun and focus mostly on the major plot with marco cosmos and like the characters don't even go on foot, they go through an RV. The good authority and bad authority (where there were more than just Giovanni) thing that was in early arcs is completely gone by the time RS rolls around and character divergence mostly drops and most subplots get wrapped up within their arcs, which is good, except for Sird, who has not been addressed since DPP and likely will never be. The executive deciding to tie together the three GBA arcs is like the idea that is kind of hard to follow up on because basically it was the ultimate fan service for Spe but it also put in the idea of “let’s have a reunion for the pokedex holders” for arcs after and it’s… just not happening. Closest chance for that was pokemon world tournament and that was a no. Second closest chance was rainbow rocket and there was no room within the SM story itself to do that. They didn’t even make the league in SM either so like they pretty much just stuck the USUM story into it too and that’s like, the last time Alola will ever even be relevant within spe outside of maybe like a few cameos. Moon did get a mention in SWSH and like the kanto guys minus Yellow made full appearances during the 3DS era but that was like pre timeskip stuff.

In terms of the arc rereads , BW2 itself, I think it's basically my least liked arc because it's like the opposite of what I liked about pokespe in terms of it's everything like it's mostly in one location hub , they try having a new support cast with the school arc but they don’t really do much (cheren and bianca notwithstanding), the entire plot gets rushed (like imagine what a proper BW2 arc would be like if they focused on the double identity thing with actual pacing and school angle rather than it being like bam bam bam every chapter.) There's barely any time for characters to react to things outside of like maybe a few panels in regards to things. Probably the most undercooked main characters where they have a cool concept but the way it's put in writing is like "shrug emoji", and like the BW agency reunion was the one part that I was looking forward to the most and it was a good payoff and then Cheren and Bianca nearly got one too before Blake immediately goes "no time for all dat, we got plot." The sheer fact everything got wrapped up in 24 chapters is impressive though, extreme work there. Like the wait was agonizing but now that it’s over I’m kinda just like “that was it I guess.”

As for ORAS, I kinda feel like it’s like how I felt about RS in terms of “it’s more human than pokemon.” I think I had a realization in terms of like what it is about spe I don't like sometimes and literally it might just be when there’s attempted emphasis on relationships especially with the RS cast which are built on this premise but Ruby and Sapphire fumbling the bag with Ruby constantly wanting to do things himself so he can protect Sapphire makes me just throw my hands up. Sapphire had this issue in RS already where I didn’t feel like she got to do much in spite of her being called the 2nd protag and then ORAS’s initial thing is built on lying to her. If I had a tier list Ruby would be at the bottom because like good intentions and the worst execution. Sapphire rebounding back from that though is also pretty impressive too but like please don’t have a third iteration of the RS thing. I can forgive it because it’s literally just been two guys working on the manga for nearly 30 years though, not every idea is going to sit well with me or match my preferences.

Ironically Emerald who is usually like the person people like the least became like the best person in ORAS to me because he got rid of his ridiculous hairstyle and is the most level headed person in the room most of the time and like he wasn’t that bad in the vacuum of actually reading emerald again and figuring out that like some characters in spe he just had incredibly poor communication skills and was masking his emotions due to being in his situation and he was also on an insane time crunch with the battle frontier (this might also be me projecting but out of the characters so far he does seem like one who does have a condition for his height between things like red’s inability to connect to his hands and yellow’s narcoleptic tendencies and Blake might have alexithymia but with the nature of the confession it’s hard to tell in terms of “was that what Kusaka was going for or is it another pseudo scientific thing like how X becoming a shut in apparently gave him heightened senses”). It’s also kind of interesting that ever since I read that comment during DPP about not giving the main characters supernatural qualities they’ve mostly leaned heavily towards hard science minus the two characters that make me go “that’s a little weird.”

For SM, I can’t really have an opinion as much as like compared to everything else I read through it went so fast in a snap that I didn’t even have time to like fully process outside of the notes because it was more like a “blink and you’ll miss everything.” In terms of making every new arc a standalone I feel like it kind of loses a bit of what I liked from early stuff and even later stuff because I thought everything was pretty solid right until BW2 and the only one I felt still matched up to what I liked was XY.

I feel like it's weird that XY basically came out as good as it did compared to all the other arcs that came out probably because like it had no hiatus it was just like "okay go go go". No ZA for it though nor cameos but it really did get the best sendoff compared to like the nothing in other chapters during its time frame. (Also I’ve just noticed a trend of these final chapters for these later arcs just being the protag walking off into the distance or something.)

Ultimately the game plots being the way that they are now where they’ve got stories that are good it makes Spe have this weird issue because it can’t do a 1 to 1 copy of the game’s plot but it also can’t be too divergent because if another game comes out like a remake or sequel they have to find a way to ensure the characters come back in a new form and justify how things changed (consider the ORAS arc and the ending of XY where Kusaka was like “I wanted to kill Lysandere but after the last time I killed some guys it was hard so idk”). (Kusaka has also notably said he doesn’t like writing remake arcs because after an arc completes he considers a characters arc finished so it’s hard to go back and find interesting things for them to do.) Since all the arcs and chapters and what not are also shorter too there’s less time to even think like “oh that was a weird character decision” because oh, the character has already been forgiven and we’re moving on.

This is the post where I first began posting Leaf headcanons.

Blank slate protagonists that get personalities added to them in later iterations isn’t something that I’m not used to since I’ve played other games that have blank protags gain personalities elsewhere, but it is kind of funny when you’ve developed a personality that’s so completely noncanon because of the nature of blank slating.

Like in my headcanons, Leaf is a girl who was raised in the 2000s and therefore has all of that cultural background applied to her— which is doubly noncanon because I’m applying a western experience to her. To me, this is a girl who was into dress up flash games and warrior cats who would have an Eevee sparkling rainbow blasting OC and say “rawr.” She was very happy when Sylveon existed. Her bike would be a skateboard and she would secretly be punk despite clearly being dressed like a prep girl. Her and the FRLG redesign of Red (Fire) are twins since I saw the manual as a kid and went “oh, they’re siblings since they both have brown hair.” She starts hanging around Misty and Erika more often because she tried dating the rival once and it didn’t work out.

They (Fire, Leaf… Terry) simultaneously exist with their gen 1 counterparts and their group is known as the successor trio. One day I’ll properly write about all my headcanons for other Pokémon protagonists which are a grabbag of either my own fics, Pokespe, or just me randomly making stuff up. I like to have my pokemon trainer characters be reflective of the time period their games came out sometimes so while Red has a Geocities page that died, Leaf would have the vibes of an NPC in THUG 2 and play guitar hero.

“But if FRLG Red gets called Fire by you sometimes, then FRLG Green should be called Water?” Funnily enough, no. His internal name is Terry. There isn’t a WaterBlue anyways… would the Yellow Equivalent be like, ThunderYellow or LightningYellow?

Speaking on FRLG Red and Gen 1 Red it is incredible how for a few years people absolutely were in this divided battle on which design was better or not— it’s that exact argument that led to the creation of Pixiv Red. I like both designs for different reasons but it’s also simultaneously funny how there’s another distinct discourse on if Leaf and Green from LGPE are the same or different characters. Meanwhile, everyone accepts that Blue (rival) is the same guy throughout. What a fascinating design thing.

(Making the design chart was pretty funny though because Rival’s hair goes from brown to neon orange and it’s never returned back to brown it’s just orange forever now.)

The pokemon trainer making mood. Well, in my case it’s more of “half designed OC made through Piccrew or that one Flash trainer maker.” Maybe if I’m feeling proactive I give them a team too. I’m more of an ideas person than someone fully fleshing out stuff though.

Mysterious things of the Pokémon canon that keep me up: Overthinking whatever’s going on between Leaf, Blue (Pokespe), and Green (LGPE). Clearly all based off unused girl but aside from Blue wearing Leaf’s outfit in spe there is zero confirmation on if there’s just… two identical girls? Name change?

Personally I just go with them being separate girls. One’s got a blastoise, other’s got a venusaur, they’ve got entirely different friend groups, one’s a more nice peppy girl and the other has extreme chaos energy (seriously, what other character throws poke balls at the player to try “catching them.”) They can coexist.

Hm Banner

This one has been cooking for a bit for my WIPs where I'm like "yeah, the gen 1 red and the gen 3 red are just two different people with the same name, don't think about it too hard." Sometimes I call him Fire to match with Leaf since I still headcanon the two of them as siblings like in my last post about this.

Red (Gen 1)

• He’s a mother’s boy. Didn’t keep in contact because he was worried rocket would make her a target.

• Immensely smug about his strength and is aware about it but it’s hard for people outside of his friend group to know that he’s smug because he has mastered a poker face from years of dealing with his rival.

• Kind of a guy who gets weirdly unhinged and hotblooded during battles (where he gets an edgy reputation)

• You could describe him as Chuuni (middle school syndrome where he's an edgelord) but the thing is he literally might have powers to back it up (In reference to glitches)

• His only interest is Pokemon and playing on his old NES. He used to play baseball but dropped it off. When he gets older he might get back into it as a hobby sort of thing.

• it took him a while to readjust to the way technology changed after Mt. Silver (same for both Reds.)

• gambling problem (snuck into game corner and bought plushies like in gen 3 hoenn.)

• Loves training pokemon but was overwhelmed by the burecracy of the league and that’s why he went to Mt. Silver. Came back down because he still loves pokemon despite everything else.

• Always sleeping in weird places and cannot cook for the life of him despite liking a lot of food. Gets his rival to cook for him.

• likes sweets and cute things but it ruins his cool image so he pretends not to like them

• I now realize that Pokespe red and Origins Red are outliers to my headcanon zone because they’re both atypical shonen yapper protags.

• his dad is an average work salaryman (based on earthbound phone guy, an unused piece of dialogue in sliph. Co where his dad worked there, and a dialogue in celadon mall based on a baseball game), all his adventurous traits come from his mom.

• Captured every Pokémon up to gen 2 (evidenced by his stadium teams)

• gen 1 red and gen 3 red are either the biggest haters to each other or best friends. Possibly both.

Green/Rival

• He's a playstation boy to rival red (reference to placeholder names)

• Without a grounding rival, either two things happen immediately after the championship: He doubles down on his supposed callous behavior which then leads to Extreme burnout once his reign ends or he just keeps getting worse because he can’t be beat (not like rocket behavior, it’s internal towards himself and not his Pokémon.)

• Sometimes step 1 or the champion step don’t even happen because actively driving everyone away is pretty draining

• He would still be as successful but also bored out of his mind

• Usually ends up in Viridian city even if he isn’t the gym leader just to be relatively away from his grandfather or ends up isolating himself further away doing independent research or being a tracker or something that keeps him going

• Friends with Blaine because they exchange trivia and he might work under him sometimes.

• Was childhood friends with red but then started bullying him because they were the same height and age (canon because of the gen 1 instruction manual)

• Terry exists as like a simultaneous figure in the same way Trace does but Terry doesn’t have the same burnout issue where it’s primarily because of family expectations (being the grandson of Oak is treated differently in various canons where it’s like they either get along or it’s hinted they don’t at all.)

• parents are dead (plucked from Pokémon Zensho).

• he would be an instagram foodie selfie type of guy but red keeps ruining his photos by eating his food and he has to take a photo fast enough to avoid red’s hand getting in the photo

• has a bunch of misc hobbies like birdwatching and stamp collecting

• Raticate is in this Schrödinger’s cat situation because why wouldn’t it be.

Green's Eevee
I have headcanons for the Eevee now.

• it is a girl

• she is sassy

• she doesn’t battle sometimes unless absolutely necessary

• she is incredibly stubborn and somewhat spoiled. likes Pikachu.

• incredibly impulsive like a cat, insatiable curiosity

• doors will open for her

• bites people but nibbles green

• screams sometimes for no reason

• daisy dresses her up for contests sometimes

• puffs herself up sometimes like pidgeot does to look threatening. She just looks like a ball of fluff

• is it the same one from Yellow? Maybe yes, maybe no.

• Possibly evolved into either sylveon (after the kalos trip) or umbreon (to parallel red’s espeon) or not at all (gigantamaxes instead)

Blue/girl

• having multiple contradictory headcanons in regards to leaf and blue/green does make for confusing headcanons but it’s already confusing in Pokémon canon anyways so whatever

• Sometimes they're the same girl with the same design

• Sometimes they are not and seperate and in different age groups with leaf being related to red but red's not called red

• Sometimes they're twins or ones a younger sister

• Sometimes they have a sister/mentor relationship

• Lives on the Sevii Islands to not be a pallet town girl

• I default to use the early pokespe personality sometimes where she's a trickster thief type but make the backstory of her be an ex rocket member because that's more reasonable than "she was kidnapped by a giant bird”

• She’s like an orphan. Or something. Maybe also her Pokespe thing where she’s silver’s “sister” so she’s Giovanni’s daughter? Idk, aside from her Pokespe personality I don’t have much for her.

Fire/Gen 3 Red

• I project some personality traits of my own onto this one way much more than I do with Gen 1 red

• He's kind of lethargic sometimes and falls asleep in weird spots.

• Possibly has psychic powers.

• The kind of guy who likes wearing the same shirt over and over until it gets worn out. Has a laundry chair.

• Doesn’t like loud noises

• Has a tendency to start new things and then drop them unless he’s super interested in them.

• Doesn’t get social cues that well so Leaf has to fill him in sometimes

• Needs to have things repeated sometimes because he was inattentive

• Has a bad case of RBF and can’t hold eye contact well

• since he caught hoenn mon to finish the national dex for FRLG he’s been in hoenn at one point (I took this from emerald Kaizo rom hack appearances where he’s a menace.)

• Gambling problem (plays Gacha games)

• Can speak but just chooses not to (confirmed canon by masters)

• “No one will believe you.”

• Atrocious sense of fashion and tends to mostly wear T-shirts

• absolutely terrible with crowds and people and was overwhelmed by the fame of being champion

• Interested in Aliens (Deoxys Event)

• ambiguously weird relationship between gen 1 red and gen 3 red. Same guy? Reincarnation? Parallel worlds? Even I don't know, it keeps changing whenever I write it!

• “I’m him and he’s me.”

Leaf

• I already made a post for her.

• possibly a prankster

• not as interested in fame for battles (my headcanon as for why she’s never been seen in tournaments but it’s mostly because they prioritized Red…)

• she has a Pikachu that enjoys being in her ball. Weird!

• possibly runs a flower shop when she gets older? As like an alternate path for Green being a researcher and Red being a Pokémon tracker.

• Gen 1 Red isnt openly hostile to her like he is with Fire and they could have this awkward mentor thing but Leaf doesn’t want to deal with someone who dislikes her brother so it’s weird.

• she can talk but whenever she dislikes a person she just stops

I wish there was any kind of canon that portrayed her with Red's personality or like with a Charmander? I don't think there's any pokemon canon that's given her one outside of Smash bros.

Okay, I've finally decided which WIP I'll prioritize. It's kinda hard to explain but right now it's a pokespe villainswap AU where all of the characters who were villains are also children. And some extra characters too. Essentially, Kanto is a younger region instead of an established old one and in light of being completely neglected by the pokemon association and overlooked it takes everyone outside by surprise when there are two different villainous factions (Team R and the Masquerade) that proceed to team up and start wreaking havoc all over. I kinda was originally just gonna write a Rocket Red fic but then I thought "what if Pokespe Red was the leader of Rocket, though? How would a character who's such a good guy have to be like to fit in that position?"

Map Headcanons (Check out the Pokemaps Page)

"It is said that once every ten years, a child is born in Viridian Forest, possessing mysterious powers"--Pokespe (Sourced from Bulbapedia but I have no clue what arc this is from).

I recall the powers skipped over Silver, Yellow is 11 when the arc starts (but 8 during RGB), Giovanni is another one but he's in his 40s (according to another wiki, unless he's 30, which I don't buy.) , which means Lance must be somewhere in the 18-20 range and... yeah, there's no way I would've ever been able to figure that out with Mato's art style (I thought he was a teenager... in hindsight, this makes the yellow lance fight even funnier because this grown man gets blown up by a child). This just means there's some 30 year old person out in the Pokespe world who inexplicably has Viridian Forest powers and missed out on that world ending debacle.

I guess there could be other potential magic forests in the Pokemon world but that's clearly not a thing pokespe will probably ever touch again because it was a case of "we need something to fill the gap of time between G/S since it got delayed during spaceworld so we're just gonna... make something up for the yellow plot."

So possible candidates are Ilex in Johto (because Celebi), and Winding Woods in Kalos (because having it next to Pokemon Village and Snowbelle City seems more interesting than Santalune which is a map copy of viridian, plus Xerneas as the guardian of life).

I don't think Eterna forest is one solely because of the haunted mansion blocking out whatever potential magic there could be. I doubt the swords of justice would allow a person like that to exist in Unova because of their distrust of humans (N is not a part of the powers thing because he only has a base level understanding nor does he have the healing or mind reading powers and also I don't think he's 30 years old).

Late night WIP worries

“Well, the pokemon Korosu protagonist did explicitly use their pokemon to assassinate people but I skirted around the deaths minus a few implied statement, it’s not like I’d ever write an on screen murder”

Remembers that one WIP that explicitly focuses on characters that have killed in their origin stories

With my current outlines and notes outside of the single digit “shits” and “damns” I’ve got going, there’s really nothing I have that’s like, explicit death. I feel like it’s something that comes with the territory of needing to balance between realism and what Pokemon has shown within its mediums (they all have very divergent takes on it). It’s different implying a death through other characters than showing the death within the story. It’s one of those things where I myself cannot push to go darker outside of psychological stuff which I have. Around? Like the highest I’d go is teens.

See, this is why I stick to general rated stories, trying to explain my thought process on a snagged thought of how I’d rate this thing is just my excuse to not work on it (it’s not even the current WIP…)

Oops.

Nanaya

At some point in my life in the past I decided “you know what, I’m gonna read through a bunch of Pokemon Creepypasta for no reason” and now those buggers have been living rent free in my mind ever since. I watch fighting games sometimes and sometimes I go “you know, that knife wielding Blue from that one pokepasta would probably play like Nanaya Shiki if there was ever a fighting game…”

There is no need for that.

Actually, the melty blood comparison was pretty good because canonically (IDK what happens in type lumina) some of the roster is made up of rumors made manifested and like nightmare scenarios for the protagonists which sounds like a reasonable way to explain how the pasta characters could exist. That being said, there would be like 5+ Red’s on this roster with just the more popular pastas alone and that seems ridiculous.

I’ve got an interesting concept on like my entire “player based morality” thing that stems off MOON RPG and Undertale and Deltarune and plenty of RPGs based off this but those are the most prominent in mind since I’m playing through undertale where its like yeah it’s totally weird that the player exists in a bubble and kind of just has the world kind of adjust to them like the world is actively created for them to tool around in and I apply it to pokemon sometimes because regions are pretty much largely abstract player playgrounds but then I also have a simultaneous concept in mind that stems off Red that is called “the protagonists can’t stand the way they’re portrayed.” Kinda like the whole thing on celebrity culture and how Red definitely has in universe merchandise that he wasn’t allowed to protest because it was made when he was a child and how if stuff like the games and anime exist in universe of pokemon then like every single character has been weirdly portrayed and a lot of them probably hate it. In terms of like most to least affected, people who’s journeys weren’t well documented (GSC/HGSS, SM, XY) came out fine, but people like RSE, ORAS, DPP, BW and BW2 probably didn’t come out as great. Because those games did start off the entire TV interviewing process of news reporters battling you and interviews being posted live on TV, BW for setting up the kid as a hero of destiny, and BW2 for using the player in pokestar studios as an actor making a ton of money and like, not a single coin is given to the player, the most they get is items their fans give them. Red’s the poster child in my mind as “Mr. Marketing” because who knows how many in universe knockoffs he probably got (if the anime exists as is, then Ash Ketchum is an exaggeration made for the sake of not paying royalties for portrayal.) Obviously none of this is remotely near the confines of canon.

In terms of the ranging scale of how the protagonists would be in terms of being eccentric for the sake of getting people to leave them alone, they’re not happy about it. I think they would have meetups just to exchange stories on how their journeys went and how much they went through and how it was normal to them then in the moment and completely bizarre how everyone around them relied on children to solve their issues. Then comes the marketing problem as soon as they become champion and the responsibility of the region gets shifted onto them. Because one end, they’re being sold without any kind of permission in this grossly exaggerated way and the adventures they went on that were likely life threatening basically get downplayed and the pokemon that were dangerous are seen as cuddly and friendly without any training at all and that idea is sold to impressionable people who then go onto pokemon journeys and adventures themselves and underestimate how much they’re actually going to be in danger and teams are basically like seen as jokes instead of actual legitimate dangers. (Not in like a gun or kill kind of way but still in a way people would not be mentally prepped for.) The second thing is that basically being immortalized as a marketing tool and then people argue on the fictionalized portrayals and bring them up as the protags basically go through the cognitive dissonance of “you helped a lot of people and got regulated to a side character that people wear on t-shirts” would probably also cause a lot of them to become eccentric as to keep people away from them. A third thing would be people who are probably jealous of how it’s like “these people are so lucky and they’ve got super powerful pokemon and got things handed to them” but like, I feel like that downplays how a lot of it probably wasn’t all sunshine and roses. I think there might be jealously for trainers that got to stay innocent and have a good pokemon journey while some of the protagonists went through hellish situations. Like I don’t think some of the protags that went with legendaries (ORAS, Platinum, Black, XY, SM) would be like… a-okay. I’ve got like a photo in mind where a character is holding up a photo of themself where the photo looks happy but the person behind it looks miserable.

In terms of sword and shield though on this interview based player thing, they’re probably fine, SWSH is built on top of pokemon battles being treated as celebrity culture (my personal gripes on this are my own and I will not bring them up). Honestly, I’m more interested in the fact that Leon was definitely also used as a marketing kind of thing for however long his tenure was and the moment he lost to the player his stuff was probably immediately being removed off shelves to make room for the new champion. That in itself is an interesting premise of existing only as long as you’re good enough and how that person would probably have extreme burnout, do I think it could be executed well though? Not really.

I’m not a completely edgy person all the time but sometimes like the cheeriness of pokemon like in terms of nearly everyone is perpetually happy all the time and smiling and the world is nearly 100% perfect kind of throws me off especially when you immediately get out of like scenarios where there should be more of a reaction like sootopolis city or the spear pillar or ultra space and then the most you get is a character going “that was pretty weird, huh, well, time to go beat the pokemon league!” Course since Pokémon is a kid’s franchise the amount of competent adults on average is going to be a handful and they can end up also making things go in the opposite direction of casting too wide a safety net like what happened with SWSH to me. And the games are played to have fun, not to have people think actively about like, what does the protagonist think about it, since pokemon protags are largely blank slates for the user to project onto.

And I’m also not going to be like “everyone should be portrayed as angsty about everything all the time and sad and bitter and crying and stuff” because that is also not what I’m going for. It’s just one of those things where I end up going “I just think there should be a range of more emotions than a default smile.” I wish more protags appeared outside of just one so we could see how they feel about the adventures they went on and not just the vague way masters has been doing it so far in my mind where it’s like “yeah, we did that thing too and had a great time.”

Ultimately I think this concept of “pokemon trainers can be a bit off putting” mostly stemmed from the fact that a lot of fanart and fanfics surrounding Red in terms of Mt. Silver for years mostly portrayed him as either this super cool stoic guy who lived on a mountain for mysterious reasons and also fanart that portrayed this guy living in a cave where Gold saw him living in a cave and went “what is wrong with you.” It wasn’t just that he was super cool or angsty, he was both, and also kind of a dork based on his in game commentary during gen 1 proper and you know, also a nice guy considering the copycat dialogue for GSC and HGSS. I am too contradictory on Red as a character to actively come up with the right way to describe him. Thinking about it, gen 3 and 4 also had caves with underground and secret bases. You could fight Steven in meteor falls that one time. Maybe more pokemon trainers need to be boss fights in caves. Caves rule.

In terms of pokemon games and glitches, I kind of find it fascinating that like out of all the gens that have like some kind of massive bug breaking thing that led to massive exploits (gen 1 missingno, gen 2 coin case, gen 3 pomeg, gen 4 void) or just broke the game until a patch (gen 6 lumiose city save, BDSP menu glitch), I can’t think of anything notable for gen 5 outside of like, a stuck zoroark. I’m sure there are glitches, but like, when I was doing my research session for glitches I could not find any kind of iconic weird glitch.