Glitch Users

I completely forgot about the origin of Ketsuban technically coming from a discord DM that was in between me watching Spanish Dragon Ball Iceberg Videos (long story.) I guess this is now the containment zone for the glitch users and the subsequent rumor universe, which is kinda based on Persona 2 and Melty Blood but this is just the pokemon centric part of it.
Most things pulled from Glitch City Laboratories and artwork from Bulbapedia. I really hate that google images have been completely obliterated because looking up glitch stuff nets me nothing whatsoever. Most new additions from youtube thumbnails or official artwork or other people’s screenshots, some glitch screenshots from PRAMA Initiative (it's in french though.)

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 (down below) instead of any kind of coherently written or elaborate thing yet minus the sprite concept I just posted about a revamped glitch user Red with visual glitch effects (also down below). 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. " (which I also think might've been a digimon thing.)

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."

To make more sense of the broken, glitching world missingno resides over, I go with one of my map headcanons that the gameboy stories are on a seperate timeline compared to the GBA stories and the 3DS stories. okay so the best analogy i can go with right now is that arceus is like bahamut in granblue fantasy where he created one world and then abandoned it to make a new one or a more game like one is that arceus keeps making minecraft servers and steve became herobrine because the server corrupted and now arceus is afraid to shut down the server and also arrogant like "you really expect me to care about every single world and person i've created (while being blatantly hypocritical about his precious chosen one who he sent to save history)" so he just keeps making new ones.

They exist in a world known as the glitch dimension and can only interact with reality through electronic objects. So in that way... they're like Digimon...

This is a very funny statement because it sounds like "oh, so scary!" but then we actually got leaks of beta pokemon between spaceworld and DP and just... look at these guys.

This is the original concept for the glitch users. I need to find a way to rewrite this so it isn't just a bunch of walls of text, but for now this is the full concept for them and their powers, which I made on the same day as the discord posts, plus reposted to other sites.. This is the first time I've ever been so blatant on their existence though. (Note: How exactly do glitch users come about in universe? Figure that out. The answer is "a mistake happened." Like the trope uhhh "blessed with suck." )

I basically just DM'd this one guy on discord with this concept of: Look at how WEIRD pokemon glitches are.

the glitch world kinda exists in parallel to the original world/timeline of pokemon

Here's the list of the most well known areas for the pokemon specific glitch/haunted zones. Lavender Tower (You Know Why.) Vermillion City (Mew Truck!) Cinnabar Island (Missingno) Ruins of Alph (Spell of the Unown.) Goldenrod City (For Coin Case) Battle Tower (Battle Tower glitches) Mt. Silver (You Know Why.) Mirage Island (if it ever shows up) Jubilife City (Access the Void) It’s 9 to 9 for haunted places and users

(Fire doesn’t count, he was just in the OG image batch as a joke.)
Glitch Pokémon tend to have a thing that marks them as incorrect in the world and they are promptly either brought back to the glitch dimension by one of the more harmless members or killed on the spot. For people who do execute things properly, there’s usually a problem of the fact that the glitch user number is relatively small because they are NOT supposed to exist and it’s a miracle that they’ve survived for a long time whenever they leave their world. The moment a glitch activates that could cause huge world ending ramifications the user is basically ejected from the regular world and their timeline gets cut off. So then the glitch world gets another piece of junk data added to it.
People who aren’t meant to have glitch powers but survive tend to be almost “infected” and start displaying pieces of random glitch Pokémon or traits of them . People and Pokémon instinctively avoid them and for the most part they end up being attacked by legendaries on the spot if they ever have the misfortune to run into one. Minus Giratina, because it knows what it’s like to be rejected.

Ketsuban: This guy has such a ludicrious out of universe story where I need to specify that the original guy came to me in a dream, which was sometime in March. I'll requote it here: "The other Pokémon related dream I’ve had in a while was also kind of weird. I was playing through a copy of Red and whenever I’d beat the game I’d end up back at the start like in a loop. I kept getting weird hints too like there was someone else playing alongside me. It wasn’t anything scary, just more surreal. Maybe I’ll write something for it." The first dream was kinda funny as hell because it was about a shitty costume getting added to pokemon masters which was Red's rival wearing a blanket over his head like a ghost.
(Actually, I just looked through a bit of my sketchbooks because I forgot my most recent ones for the gallery and the sprite sheet thing... so the sketchbook page with Ketsuban's labeled as 2/29 (because it's a leap year in 2024), which means it wasn't March. The sprite sheet I posted on cohost was made on 5/26 and sat in my drafts because I was too lazy to post it. So he's got a confusing origin story even out of universe.)

A cheerful young boy, but he's kind of weirdly offputting in his nature as a "glitch user" where he kind of clips in and out of reality. It really doesn't help that his power is related directly to Missingno which only makes him look like a visual nightmare. I have him in the gallery seperate but I'll also place him here too. 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 (this one's harder to see, but he also has the tail from kabutops on his sprite). The original post from Cohost: "The prompt I went with in my mind was “what if I messed around with missingno sprites and made a weird guy?” Behold. My weird guy. (I’m doing everything but working on the website at this point.) Cohost probably compressed the quality to hell though. You can see the design process slightly shift the longer I spent on it. Lol."

"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." He just wants to play with people, don't you know? It's not nice to ignore people. His eyes are bleeding but he's totally normal.

What exactly is the relation between Ketsuban and Red and Fire from the protagonist headcanon zone (I think I forgot to mention that most of the protagonist headcanons are shared in their own universe so Red and Fire exist simultaneously)? Truth be told I uh... haven't written it out very much aside from Ketsuban not liking Fire and generally not being nice to him in a way that gets very invasive and bad for everyone involved. Ketsuban was Red at one point and now he's no longer Red and instead of going about in his own way he decided that he would make it everyone's problem. In terms of hierarchy, Fire and Ketsuban have a Yuji Sukuna like relationship. Ketsuban tends to bully Fire, but Red bullies Ketsuban because Red is a hard counter to Missingno's bullshit. No Leaf puts up with Ketsuban's nonsense. He's the guy that shows up and no one likes him.

But how exactly are ketsuban and missingno related? Well, easy. He's a missingno. Missingno doesn't exactly have a will of it's own as much as it's raw power (while simultaneously it does have one. It's a contradiction, that's what glitches are. Actually, I change my mind, it's like the master crown from kirby. it's a pokemon, so treat it like one, or just do whatever you want.) There are more out there, like 'M ( Iyazo) and... I don't actually know the other missingnos. I forgot about SMT, these guys really are just digital devils lol at some point though ketsuban stops being a little hater and turns his attention to god. ketsuban keeps trying to fight arceus for some reason like "fight me!" and arceus keeps going "what is that thing down there... i don't like it... that's scary..." and no one on the legendary pantheon wants to even LOOK at ketsuban and he keeps screaming at them "look at what you have wrought, look at what you've abandoned!" He'd without a doubt be the Chaos Route.

Him and his friends just kind of pal around in the glitch dimension and hang out like in those ENA videos and occasionally just clip through reality, like to human eyes what they do makes no sense but to them its normal to be like… glitching. The wings are more inconvenient than they look. It’s really hard to get through doors sometimes if they get caught on something, occasionally they just pop off. He doesn’t even fly with the Aerodactyl wings, he just floats.

In universe ketsuban's a bizarre encounter because he fights you with pokemon that don't exist, aren't registered on the pokedex, make weird garbled noises (note: if you've never heard the pokemon yellow cut anime cries, think of that), attack with moves that don't hit or affect the pokemon in a "wrong way" (like when missingno's water gun attack bugs out sprites), and he only appears in weird spots so no one can verify if he was real or not.

I’m trying to limit the glitch powers to be that they can only really effect pokemon rather than people because even in gen 1 interviews there was the line of question of “if people have powers, what do they need pokemon for?” So having an in universe limit helps. Ketsuban is still horribly broken beyond belief because he can drag out things that Don't exist and therefore do not follow the type chart or just have an infinite number of items or visual and auditory things.

He could break reality if he really tried, but he doesn't.
Idk the level of severity that Ketsuban can properly display. As the author, I'm going to flip flop on this forever based on how seriously I want him to be taken. In my mind he's kinda like the spot from spiderverse. Like he can flip flop between a joke or a huge problem. (Same goes for his personality. He’s both the protagonist and antagonist of the glitch users.) No one can really tell if he's serious or not about the fighting and ursurping god thing because he's mostly unable to sit still and properly execute anything he says.
he's got a level of self awareness of the fact that he's a "red" and that there's a multiverse of everything (save files.) Possible input reading awareness as well based on twitch plays pokemon. Maybe that's what Missingno sounds like to him (since he uses that power the most, they're the most connected.)
Normal designed Ketsuban (I played with his design in mind during a sword playthrough..)

Abandonware:
Abandonware is an improvement hack of pokemon red that ended up with the nickname abandoned red because the game was abandoned. To simplify it, he's called abandonware because the game was abandoned, and abandoned, and abandoned, and--

In spite of the redundancy, he had some kind of self awareness even beforehand due to the enthusiasm of the original creators passing their code onto a new set of owners, and those owners to those owners, and eventually everyone who tried to finish the hack grew to the same level of apathy including himself over being "just another Red improvement hack".

(cursed items take on the emotional feelings of humanity like in JJK, so he gained the apathy of his original creators the longer they held that particular feeling about him. But I think objects gaining power from emotions is a general kind of trope and not just JJK exclusive? It's the most recent thing I can think of an example of though, so go with it... that is to say, glitches are just a new kind of curse based more on the digital world than physical reality. Maybe the glitches are connected to the collective unconscious as well?)

it was kind of an embarrassing existence of being ditched and people would take the ditched version and attempt to work with it and drop it and work with it and drop it and they'd keep getting close to the finish line only to just decide to not finish it at all. The improvement hack was to have a more mature take on kanto but the most that ever happened with the game was making red look older through his sprites and slightly raising the levels of pokemon in battles. anything else like adding in betamon, new plot features, and new maps for kanto only existed in the new defunct forum post on an abandoned site. Ketsuban dragged him out of his IPS patch.

In spite of this, him and ketsuban do not get along and have an apathetic sort of relationship because abandon is aware of the fact that his original game and legacy are considered a bug ridden mess and how people have replaced him with the remakes or attempt to work on improvement hacks and here comes ketsuban who appears to have willingly accepted that factor and uses the glitches and can laugh and smile and play around all he wants but the light never actually reaches his eyes. What a morbid existence. He doesn't even use his own name anymore.
Not like he'd ever point that out, because if the boy dragged him out of his world and gave him existence to call him his big brother, what's to say he can't just as easily snuff it out?

Wisteria:
An experiment by Ketsuban in an attempt to replicate the powers of cloning. "If missingno can clone items, can it also clone people? Could I clone myself?" It was to quote ketsuban "an absolute dogwater kind of event, big bro do NOT come over, I messed up big time." He was supposed to be centered on events in regards to lavender town but instead of being a 1 to 1 replica of Ketsuban's personality he's to quote Ketsuban again "a big weepy crybaby grandpa." In abandoned's opinion this is slightly better because it means he doesn't have to deal with two creepy children that act the exact same. Abandon does not want to know why he's called a grandpa.
He's got the behavior of a genwunner except instead of being annoying it's like "I don't get it... why does it look like that?" Instead of his hair being black, it's white. And he uses a giant nail. No one knows where it comes from and everyone tends to avoid him because he's carrying it around. I also have a design for Wisteria based on my Sword playthrough... he was a monotype Ghost Run.

Myosotis (temp photo from nueh nana's piccrew)

"Your friend's 'M appears to be abnormal." Based on the unused girl from Gen 1, and might actually be that girl.

A concept that existed only on a sheet of paper in a drawing and was later integrated in different forms. She has lived a long life in the fringes of the world, only getting occasional peeks but not overstaying her welcome. Unlike Ketsuban, she's not jealous of the people who do exist in a happier world, and only wishes the best for them. (She wishes she could go on that adventure too, but being in Rom hacks is close enough. Let Leaf be happy.)

She's the only one who is truly aware of Ketsuban's life before he became Ketsuban, why he behaves the way he does, and in general is a hard counter to him because she has the exact same powers. He doesn't like this kind of self-reflection in the slightest and in order to ensure he could have "fun" without being "nagged" he battled her at one point and the clash was so large that she ended up drifting in the glitch ocean.

Ultimus:

A denizen of the glitch dimension who has a bit of a complicated story to his existence due to having several points of origin that could all be a valid reason he exists. The first would be that due to the exit performed by Brock through walls being a time skip warp, he's the second rival noted in the "rival twins" glitch and only popped into existence then. The second would be that he's always existed due to missingno. The third, which has been rapidly denied by Ketsuban was that he was another attempt to create a clone of a person, being that of his rival. He's more curious than aggressive but the glitch pokemon he has in his party are very aggressive and he's often dragged away by the glitch version of Professor Oak before he can fully surface into reality. note: ultimus normally doesn't have his legs detached, that's just my screenshot misaligning the sprite.
glitch professor oak!
least talked about guy of the cast, like I have zero things to say about him he's kinda there you can consider him to be an exact copy of professor oak personality wise, his job is to make sure all of these self destructive children don't fight each other or try to blow up the normal world and basically keep them out of the world. Glitch Agatha also exists but like she's basically just regular agatha. Any glitch trainer that is like a prominent battle and not like a messed up sprite exists but they're so minor they don't make it onto the page.

Ragon:

A copy of Yellow from Pokespe. "According to a witness, its body was surrounded by a strange aura that gave it a mystical look."

A minor existence in glitch city that decides to play the same role as Yellow does in the gamesverse and help any poor soul that ended up in glitch city or a glitch location by accident. Probably one of the nicest denizens of the glitch world.

"The sea and the sky... Both are my allies! " Basically has the power of a dragonair due to being a direct copy of the pokedex entry and Yellow's powers. They'd be more powerful if they also didn't carry Yellow's tendency of falling asleep after using the powers.

Glitch User Gold is a guy who basically has like 20 billion terrible things happen to him subsequently in a row but continues tanking them because he's like a universal pincushion. (You can tell this guy was me just going “yeah, whatever, spooky spaghetti.”) Due to his connection to the unown after going missing in the ruins of alph, he's kinda gained the ability to mess around with electric objects. (Ketsuban can also do that.) The funny thing is that although the name of "glitch dimension" sounds more powerful, "glitch city" is actually the ultimate form (because in gen 2, glitch dimension is actually less broken than glitch city). Him and Ketsuban are attempting to be rivals but it’s severely one sided because Ketsuban literally has everything but the kitchen sink and is the most broken of the glitch users because of how gen 1 is the equivalent of a game being made through arcane wizard coding magic and scotch tape. A gameboy pokemon game is like, less than the size of this entire website. That’s crazy to think about. Gold hangs out with the HGSS cast but since he never gave out his name and has incredibly pale skin they've taken to calling him mold ethan.


Lyra is the most well adjusted and friendly of the glitch users because her power is so unwieldy that it doesn't even properly execute all the time. Since she's relatively harmless, she's allowed to leave the world more often. She's friendly but she's also really sad because her entire life basically fell apart for no reason and now she's not allowed to see her family anymore or her friends and there's a guy who looks like her friend but he's actually just someone else and like no one is explaining anything to her at all. However, Lyra's Acid Rain VS Red's Exploding ZZAZZ Bulbasaurs is a stand battle. Which pretty much was the inspiration to make this page expansion.


Crystal (Kris) and Brendan both have a location in terms of their glitch using. Which means as long as they are far away from the battle tower their powers don’t work and they’re entirely normal. So they’re also Lyra levels of friendliness, but the two both have a competitive streak. They love battling normal battles and not the weirdo glitch Pokémon that tend to roam the glitch dimension. They do make for good exp.

Glitch User May accidentally used her power during an argument with her friend and never figured out how to turn it off. Living in a groundhog day scenario where she lives the same day over and over, because time has stopped. As much as she wants to progress, it feels like she's exhausted herself of the world because the moment time starts moving again, things are going to be weird because she's gotten so used to people saying the same thing over and over again. It especially sucks when she wants to talk to her neighbor and he almost gets it... until the day resets, and then he doesn't. She's also got this weird berry which she accidentally used and it's uh... breaking reality a bit.


Glitch User Dawn isn't really a glitch user as much as a glitch discoverer. She's the most aligned with her headcanon page. Dawn's consistently a chosen one, which sounds like it would be great! Note how I said one.
Someone had to draw the short end of the stick of being the chosen one, the one who lives and dies as a pawn, the one who will never be understood by others because of the power gap, the one who cannot make friends as nothing more than fleeting moments, the living unreachable ideal, and even when you think it’s over you’ll just be reincarnated again. She’s fine though, promise!
Every save, every run, every time she's in PLA, she goes through the same scenario of living and dying and losing all her pokemon as they all sort of blend into her memories. She can't even recall what her first team was anymore, does it matter when she'll be called to save the world again? For better or for worse, she’s tied to the concept of being a hero.
She's doing a way better job than Ketsuban though, that guy's a mess. As for her powers, the power of accessing this area known as the void, which I guess is the pokemon equivalent of the backrooms. (but all these places are.)
Lucas doesn't really have much going on and his power's an exact copy of Dawn, so there's nothing much to say, except for the fact that he was trapped in the void because he screwed up the execution. Also he's picked up a really archaic way of speaking.

Rumor Hunter Pack: A girl who frequents an in universe forum called Pokemon Online who has been doing research into things as a side gig like cursed video games and creepypastas. Gets involved in a very lengthy story in which the things she kind of semi makes fun of turn out to actually be real. Oops.

Faraday Family: A group of exorcists who work frequently to get rid of things that infringe on the domain of the lord (christianity is real in this universe, sorry) that were more established, like curses and demons and ghosts . Virtual rumor cyber demons are kind of out of place though.

Cyan Oak: A younger brother figure to Blue Oak of the rumorsverse who showed up one day out of the blue in the viridian forest drifting on the river with injuries. Spends most of his time within the gym helping out the trainers and people of the city, but he has yet to catch a single pokemon or have any interest on going on a journey, preferring to stay home in Blue's apartment. He's nice and polite and keeps to himself, but he keeps glancing at a leather pouch in his pocket sometimes. Wears a turtleneck, and if he's not wearing a turtleneck, it's probably a green scarf that he knitted.

What's with the heterochromia I got it from Furina de Fontaine. Cyan is related in some way to ketsuban with mutual levels of loathing between the two and for good reason involving the ramifications of consequences of your actions when you treat the entire world as your personal playground only for someone to catch onto what you're doing and rather than fess up immediately hit the reset button (You weren't self aware before this save file, what gives?!) That is because Ketsuban, fundamentally, is a grade A bratty 12 year old who found out he has superpowers and is functionally immortal (well, he only found that out after the fact), and is going to ride that high for the rest of his life. If it wasn't for them being cursed with these powers, all these characters would probably just be regular pokemon trainers going about their days. The kanto kids were screwed over from the get go, though. It gets a bit more complicated than that, but here's what I can say in a basic form because I still need to write the stories for them.

Glitch Collectors Co.: A spinoff branch of Sliph Co that was meant to help out with technological issues but ended up uncovering glitches and basically going mad from the revelation of a broken parallel world. Now they instead attempt to find various glitching or cursed objects to add to a large collection. Their leader is known merely as the collector. Glitch collectors prefer to treat the glitches or curses with the utmost seriousness and want to contain them, but they have to keep finding people to send into areas to try finding them and it’s basically just playing lethal company.

Glitch Hunter Squadron: A branch of Interpol that plucked a few members from the ultra beast squadron, these people exist independently from them and act as normal citizens attempting to spot and eliminate or experiment on glitches. They clash with the demon hunters and the Glitch Collectors all the time on methodology.

Bill: The creator of the original pokemon storage system and time capsule. Is immensely confused as to why all of these things happened with his PC and how they went under the radar for so long.


Other trainers from the protag headcanon zone exist abliet with a few changes. Most glitch users come from alternate worlds since Fallers are a concept in universe for Pokemon Lore. The Rumors universe is a side universe that isn't really main game compliant. Example 1 would be that Red in the verse looks like Pokespe Red but has tha mannerisms of Game Red. Blue Oak is having a very difficult time in this world because a lot of incidental things keep happening to him and his friend group and his brother's friend group for no reason (The one Fire and Leaf are in). The other brother, Cyan doesn't have many friends aside from Yellow who he keeps saying isn't his friend, but lets Yellow hang around anyways. To see more of these guys in action, there are two routes for them: the Rumors AU which goes into a completely different direction that's less pokemon centric but still has them, and then just plain old fanfics on them. I tend to focus on them more in Rumors specifically. When that page is up I'll post it.

Going to link to the Pokemon Map here since it's also headcanon stuff. Pokemon Map This one's for the protags. Pokemon Protags Here are non glitch related characters. Pokemon OCs