Template
Template Post with new text. Sometimes this place feels like a confessional or I have the yugioh Self Destruct button on hand because I'm really saying whatever the hell I want and people can see it whenever they want to and make their own conclusions.
Mewtwo and Rocket
fascinating thing about mewtwo is that he's never actually said to be explicitly a team rocket thing within the games as far as i've checked in the pokemon mansion scripts and there's only an in game rocket connection with Rainbow Rocket which is years later
Origins is the more canon accurate one being a savage feral beast versus the anime one which speaks and stuff and was super dramatic and also Dan Green I think
So the animation interpretation kind of like… glued itself onto the games one.
(Wasn’t there a girl one at some point during BW or did I misremember that. How. Is mewtwo like a template that can be copy pasted or something? Open source code clone?)
it's just that the animation and pokespe happened to do it first
and that's why origins never says they're connected
but mr.fuji/ dr.fuji is, that's why he made the pokemon house in lavender town
because his pokemon mansion used to be for pokemon
Even Blaine has a connection where he mentions Mewtwo in Zensho and Masters that he was connected to Fuji
There's a photo in pokemon mansion with Fuji and Blaine together
So the timeline goes like this:
Dr Fuji and Blaine team up, Fuji meets Mew in Guyana/Faraway Island, Mewtwo
The in between is the canon divergent parts (Anime with Ai and Rocket, Pokespe with Rocket.)
Ai is a fascinating character but there’s already a whole website dedicated to her and mewtwo so I don’t want to say it in a way when that site said it way better but basically Dr. Fuji (who looks more like Dr. Tenma from Astro Boy within the animation than anything else) tried cloning his dead kid after she died in a car crash but the clones kept dying and one of the last ones connected to mewtwo and taught him about life and joy but mewtwo subconsciously erased that when she died alongside the other pokemon clones.
None of that is in the 4kids version by the way.
.
The Ghost of BW
It’s pretty funny how black and white are pretty much haunting the series not from an actual ghost perspective but like a narrative and fandom perspective
What do I mean exactly?
Black and White was the only time they attempted to break the status quo of a pokemon game but in doing so accidentally validated a wave of edgy fan arguments and pretentious smug people who go “ad hominem” whenever you try to bring up the logical fallacy of team plasma literally not even being 100% genuine about the freeing pokemon thing and ultimately anyone who makes the argument fell for the front. There’s a blatant reason why in BW2 plasma goes between full cyborg ninja pirate criminal shooting laser beams from a giant ship to freeze people and like a handful of people who actually thought they were doing the right thing essentially hide in a shelter for being wanted criminals. The media literacy devil literally lives on the front lawn of the pokemon fandom walking out getting the mail and watering his flowers, smiling at the chaos he has wrought. At the very least it's not Takeshi Shudo's pokemon rebellion with Pikachu being the grand leader and Meowth being the ambassador and Ash dying of old age because like... what?
Aether house was a really good idea, so was the plasma warehouse in BW2 where they took care of abandoned pokemon,
but that should’ve been in BW1. Like I think a lot of what aether did minus the ultra beast science factory thing shouldve
been what plasma did. (except that Sun and Moon also screwed up with Aether by showing them blatantly chasing down Lillie and
making smirks and stuff in the literal intro at that point guys just bring the red flags out and have them start twirling.)
(ignoring that plasma also had a secret lab with the genesect event)
They shouldve actually been like, good intentioned with people and then slowly turn to the extremism
that we see in the games rather than just starting off the bat with “liberate your pokemon!” Like what
if some of the nurses and doctors that heal your pokemon on routes were actually plasma? Like what if they helped instead
of being hindrances? They should’ve been vetenarians and volunteers for like, trapping and being concerned about abandoned pokemon rather than asking to abandon pokemon…
then they turn. (Note: I was definitely thinking of all those cat trapping videos I’ve seen.)
Like a slow build to a sinister evil would be way better executed than the two grunts kicking a munna after the first gym and kidnapping a random kid’s patrat basically showing that some are assholes. You know, moral grayness. I could also be severely misremembering because like Gen 4-5 are my least replayed games. (Current most replayed are 1 and 3, 2, I have a problem of starting a playthrough and then never following up. Don’t start me on the hacks because that’s a whole rabbit hole…)
We’d never get anything like Paul’s chimchar within a game itself because pokemon are a gameplay mechanic, and outside of following pokemon and Amie, they’ve never actually shown much interactivity unless trade obedience is considered. And to do so would be guilt tripping the player into using it every time, which isn’t good for team building or replayability unless its a random pokemon every time… (Black Pokespe did have a team member who was abandoned after someone released them during a plasma rally but I don’t recall which one… the galvantula?) Also keeping in walking like how it was in HGSS could’ve made you think about bonding your Pokémon more?
The illusion of BW is that “yeah, the world has changed because you changed the way this guy thinks!” Not really. The player character doesn’t actively change the world, the most they do is drive out an evil creating a power vacuum that another evil will eventually settle into because that’s the status quo, there will always be people who will exploit pokemon for their nefarious purposes because that’s what would happen IRL if there was magic animals in general. Only difference is that pokemon doesn’t have insane laws and the world is mostly restriction free with some exceptions.
It’s a lot different in mystery dungeon or rangers where the pokemon that gain character development can be preestablished but because in mainline there’s so many different variables to account for and with cut corners we’d end up with something like a lot of repetitive lines like how ACNH works even though an interactive sort of like oak’s farm would probably be pretty good. Like a my pokemon ranch sort of deal instead of pegalo being the only thing.
Because outside of the set pieces, you kinda have to make up your bond with your Pokémon as you go, right? There’s a bunch of little things like personality types and like the memory reading thing, but those are also preset. And even then it’s not like people really care based on how challenge runs basically make things spreadsheet simulators.
Sidenote: Pokémon’s view of America is way too small scaled. japan's view on america based on just unova, yokai watch 3, and earthbound is uh, interesting. they really think we like baseball that much? (heck if i know, i'm not a sports watcher.)
You guys got any American folklore tales or heroes?
We got a hamburger.
Adaption wise though I think BW was screwed from the get go because like out of the things that used BW’s stuff we got Reburst which is… nowhere near BW at all.
Like the pokespe chapter of BW did less of the making plasma look blatantly evil because they got worse there and more of the how would the general public react to this propoganda angle and that was more effective in showing how the propoganda actively worked and how people were actively releasing their pokemon out of societal guilt but people still ragged on it because the story wasn’t close enough to the games like pokespe hadn’t effectively done that for decades on end at that point lmao. I can saw its flawed because there are some parts I’m “eh” about but like I don’t know why people were expecting it to be any different from pokespe doing whatever when the author essentially has to speedrun the game and then write a script for an adaption while also looking in the horizon and seeing that there is another game coming. The way the anime handled the BW story was that they didn’t but that’s because they never actually got to because of the earthquake thing, I heard of that, apparently people bought the script for plasma vs rocket off a bid or something insane? Can you imagine what the black and white anime would’ve been like if Ash had met N before N went on his speedrun adventure of character development for the BW2 anime? Like that would’ve been interesting.
It never made sense for N to have reshiram personally for me because then like “is it true? Is it true that pokemon
and humans should be separated?” Ideals always made more sense because he is idealistic in his hopes but the truth is
set in stone that humans and pokemon should be together because it’s pokemon. Thankfully masters sets this up in the
convoluted way of giving N zekrom and reshiram and kyurem to go “lol. Lmao.” N should’ve been living in the forest chilling
and talking to pokemon but then ghestis had to teach him about society and now Arven has to deal with being chased down by
this guy because he wants to talk to his dog. N said “there is no objective ideal or truth. Hospital.”
I don’t think a BW3 or Grey would’ve been able to like “get”
Unova in the sense of answering the questions of “was plasma right? Were the dragons right? Was anyone right?” .
Maybe a legends game but there’s always the off chance that they might NOT make a story based on like the original dragon’s era
that led to reshiram and zekrom splitting even though that makes the most sense but if there’s anything about pokemon summer and
playing games has taught me it’s that pokemon doesn’t like answering questions for stuff.
Other Manga?
Going through the notes of the lounge…
I sure do mention Pokémon special/Pokemon Adventures a lot
I guess it makes me annoying a bit...
Yeah, it’s a series near and dear to me
Along with the rest of Pokémon
There’s not really many other Pokémon manga I can talk about though because they’re all usually one shots or not translated fully or in copyright hell like Pokewake/How I became a card or you know, any other particular manga’s story has been complete or canned for years.
As much as I’d enjoy talking about other Pokémon manga it’s not like Pokespe where I can read it and find something that can become a plot point for a later arc because there is no “later arc” for any manga. Pokespe is the only one outside of Pocket Monsters (the Clefairy one) and Magical Pokémon Journey to go through multiple generations past gen 4 and have like… an active plot instead of being a gag manga or be episodic. And it’s not like the main artists of any of those mangas have been doing anything new pokemon wise, best you get is maybe fanart.
I think if there was to be an artist who would make a new pokemon manga, I’d want it to be Hitoshi Ariga not because of his pokemon artwork, but because of his work on the Megaman series with Megamix and gigamix because he managed to turn a bunch of gameboy stories into like this Asimov story of complexity about beings who had to do their best while under the three laws. Archie Megaman also kind of did that but it got like unceremoniously killed by crossover money and the writer’s insistence on writing every game adaption as is when it was clear he was doing a lot better whenever he was making up his own thing like did we really need a super rockman adventure adaption and then a 3 adaption, isn’t that kinda superfluous…
Pokemon?
Pokemon.
(I was at an irl library and it’s kinda funny seeing the vizkids labeled Zelda manga be in the teen section but Pokespe is in the kid section because like, true, but the same thing happened in another library I was in where kingdom hearts was also in the teen section and like… sure?
Less fun thing: due to my height people still think I’m a high schooler so they asked if I needed help with finding assigned reading.)
Pokémon try adventure did that too I think… (for like gen 4 to 5) but who else even knows that pokemon try adventure exists? Like I saw it on a wiki page once but aside from a cursory glance at the wiki page there’s not much else to work with or talk about. (Oh, is this the same artist that drew phantom thief pokemon 7 and the battle stories battle network manga? The art style looks familiar…)
(Note: Okay so yeah, it is the same artist and it turns out they’ve been actually doing pokemon related content since Gen 1 with the manga called Get Pokemon. Wow, that one must be more obscure because I’ve never even heard of that one until now. This is the artist who made that one battle network image of Raito! Wow. Really small world moment for me because I’ve seen that art before.)
Okay so I read through try adventure arceus is a whole menace for no reason why is the pokegod always pissed off that’s consistent with every appearance
The BW campaign is also bizzare because the author clearly wasn’t given any info on the games and just the pokemon so the final arc is the characters exploring a “new continent” and fighting a guy named “the black and white king”. A bit on the nose, eh?
Other stuff then?
So yeah, not much to talk about unless I start bringing up fan content, and it’s harder for me to compare fan content to officially licensed product(s) because the fan content can do whatever it wants and they are held up to entirely different standards (the word MANDATE appears and briefly vanishes) . Plus the power of hindsight and working with preexisting knowledge versus starting off working with just gen 1.
Or it has the problem of the author/website vanishing off the internet entirely, like what happened with nearly every Pokémon comic on smackjeeves since the website itself was wiped off the internet outside of the comic creators who moved to comic fury or the internet archive’s backup.
Hard to think that was 4 years ago… I feel like that site’s gonna be like in the back of my mind for quite a long time.
So I don’t think I’m gonna be like “today I’m reading Mokepon, or Mystery Dungeon Victory Fire, or the one with the Eevee who was an experiment but I forgot the name (Shinka?), or petty nuzlocke, or Road to Glory, or Crystal Double Nuzlocke, or rare candy syndrome, or Rebellion, or Nightmare, or it’s a hard life, or yokonoma Fire red nuzlocke, or tale of a cubone” or any other fan comic I had read once that buried in my memory and pops up like a sleeper agent.
Honestly the Pokémon comics were secondary, the real sleeper agent were the Kirby comics on smackjeeves, I remember I’d used to hog the family desktop to read through all of Kirby adventure squad and dream adventure…
Ah, memories.
Catch me out here talking about stuff like gloomverse or Zelda Demon road and simultaneously something like the after subtract and two evil scientists (miss you Ryan) and Mario’s day out and The Dee Army and L’s empire and Kirby vs the squeaks and Mario vs Sonic vs Megaman and Bass Legends and To Defeat them All and I know a lot of the sprite comics i read probably would not hold up but you know, sprite comics are cool.
Anyone remember sprite comic hotels? Those were pretty fun. I remember
I wanted to make a sprite comic once, that’s what that one sprite battle mockup
image was in reference to because I still have the drawings of Kirby characters I made years ago. I might incorporate sprite stuff into the site just for fun depending on how I’m feeling.
Magic, Weapons?
Have I talked about this before? I feel like I have.
I kinda did when I brought up the powers thing
Pokemon are labeled as mysterious creatures rather than magical creatures (minus the arceus movie) but like, does magic exist? There’s a few moves that are called stuff like “magic guard, room, coat and magic powder” and stuff but those are labeled as like normal and fairy and psychic moves usually. Magic bounce is an ability used by mostly psychics
Pokemon turning more science fantasy does leave a lot less from for actual magical fantasy because the usual explanation for anything really is “a pokemon did it” or “science did it” so you’re never gonna see like a regular person cast Firaga unless they’re exceptionally weird and even then the usual weirdness is “psychic powers.”
Mismagaius is like a witch
It uses illusions though, not actual magic
Hex maniac used to wear a hat like a witch
There were the shrine maidens in lavender tower but again, that’s more like…. Fortune telling and religion.
The anime had that one episode with the witch from an ancient line of wizards making a potion which turned Ash into a pikachu (anime canon is it’s own can of worms though and probably should not be counted towards any discussions because the writers could do whatever they wanted filler wise like who would stop them really…)
If pokemon were to be transported to a magic world they’d be labeled as something outside of the ecosystem depending on what pokemon and what creatures
Like maybe in final fantasy a few pokemon could fit into the elemental system and blend in with the iconic summons (also how many things monster wise in RPGs were assumed to be copied from FF were actually from DND instead) but something like the future paradox mons would have to be late game dungeon bosses.
A lot of pokemon could fit into earthbound with the excuse of saying they’re aliens and you know smash bros is fine because like these are all magic human beings and stuff but like the pokemon trainers are on the side and therefore the illusion of not injuring the human is mantained because pokemon trainers don't really have insane stamina or HP unless you're ash ketchum because he can usually tank shit just fine and he keeps getting resurrected
Hey wanna hear my game theory that pokemon is a branch of earthbound/mother 1 and basically Ness is the universal parallel of Red because 199x could easily just mean 1996
this does lead me to the same line of question of like obviously advanced weapons don't really exist in pokemon the same way they do in humanity and the need for guns like lessened and same with weapons because pokemon have insane durability and also imagining like slowpoke or whimiscott or eiscue stepping on a landmine is pretty stupid when voltorb can also just be a mine like whatever war lt. surge mentioned that no longer exists
like in early episodes of the anime guns could be justified because kanto is a lawless wasteland based on the gen 1 depiction by itself
and also there's pokemon moves that are gun like bullet seed and snipe shot and like remoraid is just a gun but something like seeing blue on her jigglypuff with a sniper rifle would be hard to take seriously unless its a parody or it's played completely straight 100%
I can’t imagine red with a gun
And what’s to say it’s a human gun anyways with metal
What if the guns have types
the best comparison i can go with is palworld but like pokemon fans do not like being compared with that game
So like, ESP exists but that’s not magic, aura exists but that’s like fighting spirit which isn’t really magic, and there are like magicians to fight and clowns and shit but like those are more like tricks, and there aren't really many depictions of weapons outside of like anime and maybe like once or twice in the games with pokemon that are blatantly weapons
Based on what I get about aura, it’s just life energy manipulation, and like, Rui from Colosseum could see the aura’s of shadow pokemon, but those were artificial in nature so it’s not really magic, it’s more supernatural science stuff!
*Remembers that guy from battle revolution who was a wizard and used competitive legendaries and teleported* wait magic might be real but just with that guy
Wiki says he’s an illusionist
What is the truth
Creative Stifling?
Continuing my thought process from “what do i read?”
What's canon anyways, it doesn't matter as much as I talk about it tbh...
thinking about that capitalist dread again in terms of creative stifling where everything has to be in a "canon" or "clean" version
mostly because i was thinking on the concept of pokemon as a brand where everything has to adhere to these specific
mandates and guidelines vs pokemon as a story about a bunch of guys who had a video game magazine wanting to make an RPG for
the game boy which took off as a brand and the pieces of reading material and spinoffs were radically different until there
was a push for more brand coherency (I'd say this took effect sometime around gen 3-4ish period). Like, you can consider the
pokemon product manual as a baseline for what third parties have to deal with brand wise: Internet Archive Guideline
it's basically like sonic when there were a lot less restrictions until the dark age hit between american
sonic and japanese sonic until like the colors and more recent area with the supposed story mandates where people still end up arguing over which written sonic is better
The thing is, sometimes its alright to go outside of the box since some stories have lore that
just makes other people go “why add that” like a certain unnamable franchise and their toilet habits, instead of
being like “ummm, you’re wrong because of an interview 12 years ago and a drama cd that’s still canon” be quiet.
What do I read?
Is the writer's log really nothing BUT Pokémon stuff? (pre lounge move) Kind of, it's really the only fandom I've been writing stories for recently.
Post move I think I've been getting into like, digimon.
As for actual books, I have plenty, but because of college and the pandemic I've sort of switched over to just reading fanfiction even though it was the total opposite when I was a teen, I used to read mostly books and fics secondary. I want to go back to reading physical more.
I would love to read more real (physical) books instead of just fanfics but it’s a lot faster to load up FF.net or hop onto a spacebattles forum
or sufficientvelocity and see what kind of story I want to read or i go to tvtropes and go for recommends. Wattpad is a complete roulette.
Ff.net is pretty much my main hub which makes it suck because of how much the website is dedicated to like, being inconvinient. SB and SV are for whenever an author decided to abandon FF.net and like, the largest spot I used was tumblr for like snippets and stuff.
I'm basically drifting in the ocean now whenever I click on a fic.
The thing is, I have plenty of book sources like public libraries and Gutenberg and serial reader, I just never actually use them ever.
Speaking of FF.net, I had a whole backup of fics I should get to reading but I haven’t, because again, why parse through that whole dump of fics when I could just login to my account and see what I have that might have updated when I know most of my followed fics haven't updated in years
The sites really gone down lately, there was that whole scare with the host and quite frankly the cloudflare thing sucks
What about ao3
What About Ao3, that’s like my least used site unless I sort by kudos for the top fics, I only posted there because FF.net doesn't allow for the "you" usage in stories and the last thing I needed was the capitalization council tearing apart the pokemon story I wrote and published at like 3 am (anyone who knows what I'm talking about is likely owed a veteran's discount).
Like to put it in perspective, I still look on Livejournal for fics that are from like. 2012.
I do mostly just end up going with what people recommend are good stories to read instead of just picking one to read out myself.
Even then the end result ends up being something like below:
I am… not reading all of that.
And I close the tab.
I have a very interesting tolerance for stories because I can wade through a lot of things but simultaneously I’ll fly off the handle if i see a thing that really annoys me. Both thick and thin skinned…
This isn’t like a fic review site, but sometimes to write, you need to read in order to better understand what you’d want to read.
Sometimes what you want to read isn’t what you want to write though.
And i think one of my pet peeves has to be canon restriction where everything has to be 1 to 1.
I think creative freedom should be explored more and gluing one’s self to a plot all the way for an adaption hurts it more than helps it especially to the point where the reader could go “wait, i could just play the game if you aren’t gonna change the script or plot points at all”
Like i can tell you how many fire emblem awakening fics I’ve read have just copy pasted the in game script to their stories but that’s like nearly a massive chunk of them
It’s especially weird when things start off as canon divergent but then still retail back into having canon events happen. This probably has been a thing of mine since i watched across the spiderverse and you know, every canon retelling needing to adhere to everything as it happens kind of just leads to a lot of things feeling sameish. Especially when things are nebulous on a story franchise’s timeline.
Max Chapter Count
Working on finding actually completed fics to load into the template but in the end I've been stealing my code from dreamwidth and
dumped them into a libreoffice document so I can just take out the pieces of code that don’t work. Big dump of stuff coming today based
on junk I was compiling on my standard notes that came from my Pokémon cohost when I made it so sometime in May… maybe? The other is just random junk.
Not much progress on that front aside from finding flash drives...
I’m considering making a story that branches off my Leafgreen save one shot that goes more into the Leaf (Lea) of that verse, since I put in my cohost I had one run for WaterBlue and another for False Red.
Gift
I already have my containment zone for pokemon related content with the project page. I didnt feel like making a separate journal just for pokemon again, I already have 2 of those.
Save game load game isn’t strictly game stories though, it may be based on my game clearings but there’s other stuff usually happening, like the one with Red and Mew or the XY one I have which is more Pokespe based but I need to play Y before I can write it out since it’s going to be nuzlocke based.
If I could actually stick to a WIP, though, I’d be unstoppable.
The maximum chapter count I think i could ever willingly do would have to be like 30 because I think that’s as far as my attention span would let me go.
Some of these fics I’ve seen on other sites are like 400 chapters and I’m over there like “goddamn!” How would you even keep track of everything there???
But then some of those 400 chapter reads tend to be a lot of filler chapters where nothing actually happens plot wise. (Not all were Pokémon, but since I’m talking about Pokémon, it’s the example I’m going with. )
There could be a lot more of a better pace if people for stories I’ve been reading didn’t write out every single battle or training session. And unless they make the random battle against some youngster mention something that could be important then it’s not really needed, it could be like a single paragraph instead of a chapter.
Like, that’s my personal opinion. If I’m not having fun writing it then I don’t write it.
And if the story’s not a one shot or planned out in an outline then it’s outright not getting done unless I really sit down and write it out.
I take forever though because I have to sort out all my scattered ideas from my phone notes, and computer notes, and actual printed documents sometimes. My sorting s
kills are nonexistent. I’ve been doing this for years with no focus at all.
Influences?
You might be thinking “oh, the most influential inspirational media for fic ideas must be Pokémon, right? Since there’s a whole chunk of the site based on it.”
And the answer would be me sadly shaking my head and going “no…. I think its persona.” This checks out with the drawings I'm still parsing through.
It's in the low quality gallery section.
The persona ideas I had were mostly crossover stuff, the original idea I had was
"internet memes become personas" but it didn't get very far outside of "sans, goku, shrek" as personas.
I wrote them in discord messages when I was a teenager. Can you believe that undertale will be a decade old soon?
In terms of writing inspiration, the first thing I ever wrote about was smash 4, because I wanted to write a story mode because the game didn't come with one. So this would've been like... 10 years ago. During this time period, I got into miitopia, which became the story of one of my first OCs that wasn't kirby related.
Kirby wise, before the Sm4sh Kerfuffle thing, I wanted to make a sprite comic on smackjeeves. It sucked ass so I removed all traces of it from the world minus maybe a few drawings and two OCs, a girl kirby from the mirror world and a kirby that was a blue kirby who was an inventor/mecha maker and also dedede's adpotive daughter. It's very funny how years later Eggman got an adoptive daughter because the next lineup of fics was me writing a sonic forces inspired story. (Does kirby have a species name?!) (He was called a tough pink puff once, but that was a commercial…)
Note that I say inspired, because I did this thing where I really, really, wanted to publish my stories so I took off a few names and made them original by changing names. But they're all clearly influenced by whatever show I was watching at the time. There will be a few other things, like Precure, sometimes I would outright just make stories based on fics I read for fandoms I wasn't in, like fanfic inception of echoing in a hall of mirrors. Hypocritical of me to say this.
I have a fairly large collection I've been going through but the other issue was that I uh. Never finished many fics. Most of the time I'd say "I'm writing!" and then people around me would go "oooh, can we see?!" and my answer was "no." One time my sibling read a story's first chapter and said it sucked, which really did not encourage me to go very further.
I really only got back into writing stuff with FF14, but that was more or less prompt answers and occasionally writing because I couldn't GPOSE like other people did (I played vanilla and was afraid mods would brick my computer.)
I'm not really the kind of person who'd ever write a massive crossover sort of thing, even though at one point I did want to do so with Smash bros.
I think even though save game load game is a bunch of pokemon adaptions that have inspiration from other material I probably couldn’t have it in me to write out a massive world encompassing crossover type of story and it would have to be little character interactions sprinkled throughout. Big casts mean a lot of things, and once you have a big crossover people expect another one. That’s what happened with Archie comics and their one guy who decided “you know, worlds collide for sonic and Megaman was pretty good, let’s do it again” and the costs for worlds unite killed both sonic and megaman comics. (They also probably got cut for Riverdale but whatever.)
I’m not talking about Ken penders but it is pretty morbid how the ripple effect of using a crossover to wipe out his characters ended up wiping out the comic franchises as well.
A lot of franchises end up inspired by one or another in ways where you can say “that makes sense!”
Like, JJK has a few references to bleach, MHA is inspired by the author enjoying marvel comics and Star Wars, Star Wars is based on the concept of “samurai, but in space.” Precure was based more on super sentai than sailor moon, super sentai was based on kamen rider.
The foundation of pokemon is based on the movie stand by me, and the creators love for kaiju battles.
reading shudo's webblog translations has him directly cite phantom of the opera for mewtwo's personality in the first movie
I have not watched phantom of the opera so I don't know who the christine of pokemon would be, but I think the guy was a theater movie goer type of person based on his repeated phrase of “anyone can be a screenwriter”.
As for my influential things when I apply writing… I guess maybe shoujo or Generic Shonen tropes?
Well sometime I get visions (I believe they are called thoughts) from my daydreams or I just take stuff from things I’ve watched but forgot about.
When I used to try writing just original stories I would imagine cool fight scenes when I listened to music and be like "yeah, this would be the anime opening theme to represent this story." This has not changed whatsoever.
I need to watch more live action/movies/plays. I'm the kind of person who has never seen the entirety of star wars
and most movies I either watched before streaming were disney channel specials or whatever 70s/80s kung fu martial arts
flick my other parent happened to be watching that day. But Idk where I’d get some because some streaming services are some real bottom of the barrel energy movies. especially the free ones.
PCI Collection 2
A secondary collection of Pokemon Centric Ideas. None of these would go into Picking Up Pokemon since they're mostly observations of tropes.
Sort of like what happens with PMMM's contemporaries...
Protagonist Ages:
Being a person who was pokemon games primarily and never kept up with the anime and completely forgetting how much the anime is actually the medium that people interact with to the point that ash made international headlines when he won or lost.
Fascinating reading Pokémon fanfic and seeing who’s picked up knowledge from the anime and who’s picked up knowledge from other sources because the starting age for trainers in game has never been 10.
It’s been 11, like the first manual for RGBY was like “you’re red and you’re 11!” I’m not sure if this is still the case with FRLG though…
I look at the FRLG version of Green/Rival and go “that is NOT an 11 year old” especially when I watched that Generations episode which basically
cemented in my mind that he had to be like. 13 minimum. (It wouldn’t have been that jarring if they kept in the OG version which they were once planning
to do based on the development data (link here: TCRF) (which is also where I got that one sprite of the black haired Red from)
I’m not sure why they lowered it for the anime but even in Pokespe the start age was 11 and in other manga they straight up don’t mention it and the people there have all sorts of different age ranges. Even in the games themselves past Gen 4 the ages start changing like the designs of Black and White were made in mind to be like 14-16 year olds and same with XY Calem and Serena were apparently 17. (N was meant to be 20, which is. A choice.)
Then they immediately rewind it back for gen 7 with being like “ELEVEN”. If circumstantial evidence from other things say that the age is normally 11 then it should follow that people like Lucas and Dawn are 11, right (why are they labeled as unknown)? Or you know, just by looking at the player character, Gloria looks like she’s a teenager more than a child. (Note: Heck if I know, I don’t even remember what I looked like at 11.) This is probably one of those things that isn’t helped by the anime usually also going “yeah we’re 10” so unless something happens in Masters where the characters turn directly to the screen and say “we started our journey at fifteen actually” the answer will just be one of those common knowledge things that’s not actually common knowledge.
I don’t know why this is a thing I’m even talking about. I don’t even tend to use the normal ages in my own stories. Like, in Y2K girl, Leaf/Lea is 13.
My Self Insert Self/Authorsona?
Sometimes I think about personal stories I’d want to write when I daydream, but then I realize they’d be super boring so I need to spice them up. Like for example, stories featured on pokemon journeys.
Not every single person wants to be the very best kind of pokemon trainer, fighting for glory or power, some people just want to chill. If I was reborn into a pokemon world I'd probably just be an NPC that stands around giving trainers random items and maybe I'd have like a low level pokemon or something like my pokecharms card. I probably wouldn't have it in me to scale mountains and cross rivers and seas and battle criminals and legends, maybe for a few months instead of making it a full career. I might have more ambition in the pokemon world but considering they’ve got way better things going on in terms of healthcare and money it could also be less.
I kinda talked about this on my cohost once too.
OG post here: Living IRL
Quoted below...
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.
So, I'd be an incredibly boring person, and that's not the story anyone would want to read.
if i had to be a Pokémon though i think i would be a regional bird that pecks people and lives in cities stealing berries or maybe like a cat pokemon laying down in the sun. I like cats.
...that's just murkrow and meowth.
I had an FF14 Authorsona, but they were mostly just a random cameo appearance of a newspaper writer who spent most time writing and/or being an absolute lunatic in the golden saucer.
Parties for Pokemon Stories:
I feel like a good cast for trainers would have to be a small number of party members.
Take Fina and Geo for example from a few posts ago, the two who have pokecharm cards. They’re pretty much the only characters in my Hoenn story to have a full cast of six pokemon, and even then writing them all is a logical mess as noted by my early commentary.
A story with a huge cast of trainers is something I don’t think I could ever do. Especially if they have full teams.
I cannot imagine it because like, do you know how many pokemon trainers can have at any moment? The trainer shaped trenchcoat is a real phenomenon, because just having 3 people travel together means that you could deal with having to have 18 pokemon all interact at the same time if they carry full parties. Like, even Masters tends to focus on saying "this one pokemon this trainer is buddies with is their pairing, the best one!"
Can you imagine writing that many battles or god forbid a tournament arc with 8 trainers netting 48 pokemon and therefore unless you skip them all, 48 battles ? Those are usually death knells for fics.
On Betrayal:
When I see the word betrayed it has like a Pavlovian dog effect where I start going like “heeheehoohoo” because of 3 things
1. The fact that it’s a DBZ meme for people to go like “what if Goku was BETRAYED and TRAPPED in the time chamber”
2. Takumi from fire emblem fates in the conquest route going like “BETRAYAL”
3. The sheer absurdity of the premise which is normally ash Ketchum getting yelled at by his friend group after losing a tournament and then he goes on the equivalent of a dudebro sigma grindset to get revenge!! Or something. They’re basically like the equivalent of grocery store books you see selling for $3.
Writers started doing it to the PLA protagonist too based on that one segment where they end up banished.
It’s an amusing thing to me.
I wouldn’t write it myself because the setup for betrayal requires being so absurdly OOC because everyone usually supports the main protagonist so all of them turning on them because of something so petty is just flimsy writing.
Really, most of my ideas are just me taking stuff from other franchises and slapping a bucket of paint on them so you really need to look to see where my line of logic came from and then other times I just go “yeah I stole this idea from bleach.”
People who get ideas from other people that got them from other ideas from other people is like a
weird hall of mirrors where eventually the original idea ends up completely distorted? That’s what tropes ends up being,
because people will go “I’ll subvert this!” Only to end up recreating the exact thing.
Rumors?!
I should make a fighting roster TBH
Rumors and Encounters is such a stupid story and premise that it barely counts as a Pokémon story but it does since it primarily focuses on glitch users
and the glitch timeline but then it also starts slowly extending into creepypastas and weird things in general that need To be glued together like limimal
spaces and personalization and the power of concepts taking on a life never intended by the author and I guess?? The collective unconscious??
I probably should’ve brought up that I had played a run of Pokémon red where I had done the Mew glitch before I had drawn Ketsuban.
I encountered Missingno on that save and tried to use it, but it had sucked ass so I rerolled a save state to before doing the glitch.
When I was trying to outline the mew story, I kept thinking “what if there was a timeline where Red kept Missingno and there were consequences?”
I think that’s where the idea for Ketsuban actually began.
I did that run on my birthday, so does that mean that really concept wise that character shares the
same birthday as me? Is that egotistical? I’m sure if this site had more views that he would be torn
apart since I borrowed the face detail from another popular Pokémon creepypasta character (Steven’s OG sprite on his trainer card)
but then I split the more popular concept from that certain mod into “creepy kid” and “apathetic teenager.”
(There is no Steven in the rumors universe because IDGAF about that guy aside from his design.)
It’s not that I’m not a fan of the adult glitchy red that people seem to adore,
it’s just that there’s an inherent part of the story that gets erased when you consider the original
glitchy red was a child pissed off that no one wanted to play his game in particular anymore
because Fire red and Leaf Green were considered the better versions and the people who usually
played the OG were just there to observe glitches and in the story proper doing glitches caused him pain.
Quite frankly if i was erased from existence by a replacement and then dragged back to relevance
because of another replacement and everyone else liked the new replacement more I’d just start biting people.
So maybe Ketsuban is inspired by glitchy red now, idk, the dream was such a long time ago that I have no clue what my brain wanted me to do with him.
(It’s also kinda funny how the new Glitchy Red is pixiv red’s fault because the OG design for the mod was just Pixiv Red. That man refuses to stay dead in the cultural power of pokemon.)
There’s a lot more Reds, the thing is if I keep putting more info on the glitch users page it’ll eventually just turn into Ketsuban and gen 1 friends because there’s a lot more about Ultimus and Cyan that I did not write about but I’ll never get to talking about Glitch User Gold (who is based off the unown centric stories )
or the rest of the og concept because Glitch User May can stop time, and I want to talk about that more versus “Ketsuban, my sad little meow meow
who is an avatar of an eldritch abomination that not even god loves.”
(In a world where all the Reds got along like all the Blues and Greens do
they would be the worst group ever and either spend time beating each other
up like they do in rumors canon or just messing around in their rival’s apartment. Too many Reds.)
And the thing is, there are more people I can put on the page, but I’d rather talk about actual glitches and weird things in games than just
copy paste creepypasta stuff. So some of them are inspired,
But not the same.
Like there’s an animal crossing character who has influences from Aika Village, but they are not the same because my other inspiration was the weird beta worlds left in the GameCube releases.
And the end result is still stupid because on my cohost I was like “I want a fighting game roster of creepypastas and
I want to see them beat the shit out of each other” and I’m pretty sure that IS the main inspiration because something
like herobrine kicking sonic.exe’s ass would change my teenage self’s life.
My favorite phenomena and one I’m going to use the hell out of is the concept of game stats vs lore stats where more or less I’m going full competitive and saying “look if it gets walled by amoongus and killed by stealth rock then it’s trash”
When I whip out my terrastalized Rock tinkaton with smack down doing Quad STAB damage on a haunted charizard (it OKHOs)
Cohost post chain:
Post 1
Post 2
Post 3
Post 4
Post 5
Post 6
Pokespe Thoughts
Think I might’ve had some of these notes during my RGBYGSC reread marathon I never posted anywhere
Mostly on observation stuff
People point out that Red has no parents in Pokespe compared to the games but like, a lot of the protags have no parents. Green's parents? Nope, just his grandpa and Daisy. Yellow has an uncle, but sometimes that's not even canon and he's just some guy she hangs out with. Silver's mom is gone, it's just Giovanni. Crystal just has her mom, same with Gold. Sapphire apparently has a mother but she's never on screen. Ruby has parents. It's a plot point that Emerald's parents are dead. The DPP trio have parent(s). We never hear about White's parents, Blake's are dead. X's parents if they're alive suck because they let him be a shut in for years. Y's dad is never mentioned.
So it's like a 50/50 chance they have no parents or one parent is out of the picture.
Actually, a large amount of characters in Pokespe either never have their families mentioned or they're dead or living by themselves like this is a normal thing for the world
everything in pokespe ties back to viridian forest if mew's considered and even before that everything in pokespe minus 4 arcs can be tied back to one guy deciding that he would do anything to save his pokemon from an incident even if it was the dumbest plan of all fucking time
Pokespe old people suck so much that Oak who sent two children off with the magical plot device that literally causes evil to be created and also sent his grandkid to be trained
by Chuck who beat him up on panel and used another kid’s PTSD trigger to punish them is somehow morally the best out of
them because Agatha goes for full scale murder omnicide and old man [redacted] and [redacted], you know, causing trauma not only for the protagonist’s friend group but also every single person in the stadium and as a whole having ripple effects that might as well affected the entirety of Pokespe as a whole to the point that he’s basically responsible for like 50% of events of the series. (RGB because of team rocket being created, Yellow because of Rocket, GSC because you know, FRLG because of rocket, Emerald as Well, the events of ORAS because of FRLG, XY because of ORAS events, he comes back in HGSS so also DPP.) the only things I can say he wasn’t responsible for were RS, BW and BW2, SM, and SWSH but if I do a reread there might be some kind of connection.
The daycare couple also being a part of that friend group and they were also almost killed because of Neo team rocket, like can you imagine what its like knowing multiple people in the friend group were severely fucked up but only after the fact.
literally 50% of pokespe or everything from RBG to ORAS to DPP can be blamed on this one guy because of the way team rocket was made plot divergent from the OG
Silver is literally the canonical lynchpin of the pokemon universe
if you think hard about it if all of those things didn't happen backstory wise then pokespe might've been like the gamesverse because the world is more brutal as a result of the random action of brutality that was deliberately picked by one man deciding to not go through the process of grief
I would go back in time and beat this old man up
And then I would do it again
7 arcs of things at fault directly or indirectly, 8 if you squint, out of 15.
Conclusion: I need that old man dead.
2 lapras that died from natural causes
Vs
Six children
Idk the math works out in my brain: this idiot
Oh god, they really did make Silver forgive his abuser in HGSS and his mentor and father team up with him, how did I forget that, did I just block it out?
They should have left him dead, Kusaka never should’ve written him in, should’ve just had a
duplicate or something, he did the same thing for ORAS. Characters just end up being written for plot reasons sometimes.
Green has never had a moment where he’s had a breakdown unlike others in his friend group,
which kind of surprises me, because he’s the guy who has had a lot of moments where he’s
nearly gotten killed even more so than the others because Agatha wanted him DEAD. He’s really got his shit together,
he even caught a ghost type pokemon for XY in spite of Agatha doing her generational hater shit. I wish Pokespe
could have more time so we could see more interactions between trainers and pokemon, later arcs don't get as much especially when there's a larger human cast.
Like my favorite early chapter in RGB has to be that one where Green and Red had their parties switch and when they got back Green was like "why are they all cuddly now."
Mt. Silver is such a funny place contrast wise in different mediums
Games: It is a harsh place where only the strongest can survive, Red is here at the peak
Anime; Inexplicably there is an entire town here only for contests
Pokespe: hot springs :)
You ever think about how in pokespe red has trouble distinguishing his left and right hand sometimes because of being frozen
My favorite part about the lack of people reading pokespe means that I can say anything and you, the reader, will have to believe it
Yeah, Red takes his shirt off at one point to fight Giovanni yakuza style on top of a burning helicopter during the FRLG arc (mewtwo and deoxys are fighting as well)
…adding Pokespe characters to the anime? I feel like the best one to add in couldn’t be Green because Gary already exists unless you make him have a sibling. You could have Yellow be a character of the day in Viridian forest like that samurai guy was, she’s pretty much a prototype character for “people with powers” in the pokemon world. She’d never show up again though.
The anime itself is extremely formulaic though where you can put any episode on and guaranteed team rocket shows up and blasts off. Imagine if a girl like Blue was in it with her early thief personality and gadgets as a recurring figure to just troll Ash. It would be quite entertaining. A lot of gen 1 and 2 material is a bit weird thinking about how squeaky the franchise is now, huh. Dengeki Pikachu would never be made today.
Pokespe being in that time period of freedom when the only content was literally 2 games and a few sentences of dialogue meant they could take whatever creative liberties they wanted like making half of the kanto gym leaders evil
very funny how sabrina's been unable to shake off that reputation since the anime also did that creepy shit with the dolls
It's pretty interesting how supplemental material went absolutely ham in between the G1 to G2 period because of the Delay.
Pokespe released in 1997 but the clefairy manga release date isn't even on wikipedia
Like the Red volumes/Tankobon were wrapping up in 1998 based on author messages and clearly kusaka or MATO got to play a spaceworld demo based on the designs of some NPCs that show up in the volume 3 arc in the crowd, but this doesn't even account that the magazine dates were even earlier. Maybe even the anime got inspired by pokespe based on this post I had on cohost a long time ago noting that Shigeru wore a cloak around the same timeframe when Green showed up in the Yellow Arc with a cloak (funnily enough, Shigeru/Gary's was brown, and Green's was originally the color blue, but when he returns in XY its brown.)
People were free roaming to do whatever they wanted when they were making stuff because the lore wasn't established as much AKA Early Installment Weirdness (TVTropes reference WTF?!)
Euuugh, why did I type that.
OG Cohost Post on the Cloak Thing (March 23, 2024): Was reading through the Pokespe XY arc and saw Green with his cape again. I ended up being reminded of that time in the Pokeani where Gary wore his cloak. I wonder if it was just total coincidence between mediums where they both decided that the gen 1 rival would look cool wearing this (the yellow arc started in 1998 and the 1st episode that Gary showed up wearing this was 1999). I think he looked very cool when he showed up in XY, so it worked on me.
Reading through dialogue for Falkner and falkner is here like "my dad is in heaven watching me" and meanwhile in Pokespe
he's alive, a DILF and potentially a homewrecker with Chuck. Falkner Pokespe is so funny, why is he throwing pokeballs with
shards of skarmory's wings like a boomerang, that could literally impale someone. Ball tossing is so crazy regardless in pokespe.
Kahili golf clubs. Crystal kicking. Emerald’s gun. Yellow fishing rod. Bugsy Net. Gold's literal pool cue shots. Moon bow and arrow. I think Lt. Surge literally just shot
his pokeballs out of a cannon and blew himself up once. Where did Giovanni find that guy.
Going Green
looking through some of these notes I've made is making me feel like I'm shooting to keep the rent down
Rival...
people who draw green with fangs, has to be a really good fanart trait
I didn’t notice until looking through the icons, but MATO pokespe did use to give characters fangs sometimes like Green and Lance (notably like whenever he got mad the fangs would pop up for Green, it's not as much in later arcs with the art switch.)
Post I plucked from Cohost (Despite appearing in only 1 game the rival’s Eevee is almost a near permanent character appearance in some fics and I think that is cute.)
looking up green oak or blue oak will get you trees but also the character so i'd imagine anyone studying plants who hasn't heard of pokemon would likely go "who is that boy. why is he everywhere."
(If I start thinking too hard meta wise on certain pokemon characters I start going “ooooohhhh” and wailing and I sound incomprehensible)
I feel like a lot of g1 rival characterization and your interpretation (outside of just copy pasting Gary’s character for the anime) is reliant on the question of
“Do you think oak favored Red more than his own grandchild”
And my answer would be
“Yes.”
He was planning on giving the eevee in yellow to Red
He always lets red go first for the starter pick despite green being there waiting longer
It’s one of those things where it’s like “did Oak give Blue the same amount of help that he gave to red? did he even call oak? Did Glue know about the aides who gave red things? Did Green use his grandfather's name for trading or did he do it himself? ” Don't get me started on the generations episode where Agatha compares them and Terry goes "don't compare me to that old man!"
They try to soften this in later iterations by saying the name forgetting thing is a joke. So maybe this is just me being too hard on what I’m assuming was a relationship of an Airheaded professor and child neglect leading to a child acting out.
(Note: The name switching thing might be annoying to read but it is so funny for me to write out. His name... Breen. No, Glue. Alternate name chart... Toru. Kene.)
Gen 1 is ultimately a story of a guy who wants his friend back when you read the US manual and then he fucks it up. Interpretation wise Midori was probably a tool with an ego but mind you, he was 11. Like I do not think anywhere in the plan of “get into pokemon and maybe my friend will stop being a prick” was “watch my friend get chewed out by his grandpa for being an ass even though I know he brought that pidgeot all the way from route 1”
Like this is the last line from Rival in FRLG from the Sevii island sidequest until you do the championship run.
Hey, player! How's your Pokédex filling up? It looks like it's impossible to get all the Pokémon by hanging around just these parts. Maybe there are Pokémon we don't know about somewhere far away… … … … … … … … … … Well, if I can't do it, there's no way for you to get it done. I'm not going to get all desperate over this. I'll keep collecting Pokémon at my own pace while I train them. That's what I'll do. So there's no point staying here. I may as well leave for home. That's that, then! Smell ya later!"
That more or less just reads like him giving up entirely.
Gen 2 Green is clearly more introspective about his role in the world but Spaceworld GS also offers an interesting glance where Green is now just working as Oak’s aide with Red being the gym leader, which is kind of weird to think about how it might’ve been unintentionally referenced by Sonia and Leon unless I’m reading too hard into it. (Do you think the pokani writers knew about this demo info and that’s why Shigeru/Gary became a researcher too?) Too bad there’s no dialogue whatsoever outside of the demo.
I could tell you some random ass trivia from gen 1 just because of how much development history is from gen 1 and 2 that GF probably never wanted us to see but we saw anyways
like example: why's giovanni's badge look like a feather?
because he was originally a flying type gym leader.
This might be internally referenced by making Blue/Green later look like a pilot with his bomber jacket plus his ace being Pidgeot
Why don't the badge names make sense? Marsh and soul should be swapped!
they were originally named after colors. Makes it funny because Green gives out the Green badge in Japan.
Here’s the translation I pulled from the TCRF for aide Green:
“I used to want to
be the strongest
POKéMON trainer.
When I got too
arrogant, there
was one who showed
me humility.
Somehow... you
remind me of him.
Thanks to him, I
was able to mend
my ways.
Since, I started
helping my grandpa
with his research.
... ...
”
I'm glad him and Red are happy together now.
Alternate Names
Rizzo was because of Radical Red's costume names and everyone was like "who's Rizzo?"
I like how sometimes I can identify who’s played a pokemon game in another language based on the name they use for a certain thing like how I was like “Teselia” isn’t a usual name used for Unova nor is “Rizzo” for the BW2 protagonist, they’re playing a Spanish copy.
Rizzo as in Resonate.
This is also a phenomena with people who used the BW English fan translations like “I see you using the name Warrgle” instead of Briviary over there (I still need to find a working version of those for my own curiosity as to how different they were from the English localization.)
Alternate character name charts were a nice thing but they also made talking about certain characters a pain because people would always go with “I thought that guy’s name was Blake…”
This also becomes a bit annoying once pokemon clearly established certain characters as separate from their anime counterparts but to be fair, for a while, a lot of things did refer to these characters with the same name like in manuals and earlier translations like calling Red "Sacha" (French name for Ash) or some Viz editions that are never getting republished. (Though, it was kinda funny some of the names as comics like, The Yellow Caballero. Sounds like a telenovela.)
Right until Mt. Silver has one of the rawest fights in pokemon at least.
Or you know, you’d always end up with something where it’s like their canon name wasn’t actually real until much much later so you’d get people arguing over merchandise and manga names and internal names and the names the anime defaulted to as the canon ones. This is something I was thinking about with the manual thing since it's clear that there's a precedence for whatever name matches up to the game.
The very funny thing about this is there’s a person out there who has hit the don’t care option for their pokemon games and could go their entire life thinking that Leaf is called Fire, Green is called Red, dawn is called pearl, and Barry is called Diamond without ever knowing if they stopped caring about pokemon. Weird, right?.
Red Rant
I rambled about this in my sword session on the strongest trainers for Pokemon and I was thinking about the red vs ash debacle that has been going on since like the dawn of time
Masters wants to prove me wrong though.
I don’t think Red is the strongest guy in history of all of pokemon in spite of fan and canon wankery because otherwise can you imagine being a grown ass adult and some kid from bumfuck nowhere is the ultimate guy ever (the only notable thing about pallet town in gen 1 before the dual/triple champions is that Professor Oak lived there)
Like I can go to myself for my headcanon “red is strong, but he to contrast this has the social skill of a rock and he has no hobbies. Zero domestic skills, he’d be a shit roommate.” He’s like encountering Bigfoot when he’s not in the middle of nowhere, he’s the type of guy who would stare at you from the other side of the road when a bus comes and when the bus goes he’s vanished .
He has no skills that aren’t Pokémon related in some way, he should be really kind of sad and pathetic if you try to make him play golf or do bureaucratic league meetings or do
academic lectures because people keep inviting him to do them and he keeps saying “yes” despite not saying anything when the crowd is way too big and he looks like a cat with
eyes that are just wide. He is so focused on training pokemon that it just gives him this absolutely serious face but then you'll catch him smushing his blastoise's cheeks and
giving little kissies to his lapras with zero hesitation. He has no qualms about social judgement until it hits him hours later of "oops!"
This has evidence by the way he holds himself in smash bros where he's getting tackled by his ivysaur and holding squirtle, guy clearly loves his pokemon.
and personally like, there will always be a stronger guy, that's the nature of having protagonists that are always catching more powerful legendaries and have bigger feats.
Like eventually he’ll hit a wall, right
It’s boring to have one guy as the number 1 and everyone else play catch up
This in itself is one of the great contradictions I have about myself in regards to red, who is one of Pokémon’s most guys ever
“Wow red is so cool and strong and his boyfriend is cool too” vs “red is some guy”
Religious Applications
Sometimes I find absolutely insane shit just sitting in my phone notes.
I feel like this might cause people to look at me strangely...
I’ve briefly mentioned this before in other journal entries that I believe pokemon would be more leaning towards Shintoism and Buddhism at least in certain regions which were based on Japanese locations. Especially considering that in game legendaries aren’t well documented at least story wise? Like there is a church for Arceus, but it’s called the original one, or Lord Sinnoh, but that was actually dialga and palkia based on the clans. Clearly not the case now because they’re documented in the dex… but there was that one dlc pokemon during SWSH that kinda had worshippers, i think? The weird looking bulbous creature with the horse.
Pokémon religion Christianity application is funny as hell though because like people say the obvious Arceus is God and Giratina is Lucifer but ok, what about the rest
Like dialga and palkia are never taken into account
Who is the Jesus stand in
Like it’s likely a protagonist, since they already have a lot of destiny and chosen one energy in general.
Pokemon protags from an in universe perspective are potential horrors of “how did we let things get this bad to the point we’re relying on a child to fix the problem”
Less so when you’re playing the game but like from a story perspective of trying to write about it from the eyes of an NPC.
It’s probably a bizzare story in universe like how there used to be fics based on how weird TPP would be from an NPC perspective watching the hive mind repeatedly screw up
Especially speed runners
I’d be terrified if some kid blitzed through the reigon at neck break pace and then decided “nah, shit rolls” and then reset the universe
A self aware NPC that remembers earlier saves…
Following this logic though, it can’t be Red, because he started his own religion (Lord Helix) and doesn’t have any sort of
chosen one energy applied to him which seemed to be severely course corrected with Ash. Like, I could’ve considered it,
but TPP happened so Red had like, a legion set upon him, and that’s like, blatantly unjesus like.
Red and Green and Blue and Gen 1 are like Old Testament, they’re weird because there’s no destiny applied to them whatsoever they just exist.
I mean if you squint gen 3 is also Old Testament because of the flood caused by kyogre who could be the equivalent of the Leviathan. Is the pokedex like Noah's Ark (jesse what the fuck are you talking about)
Might it be Akari or Rei, who were betrayed?
Nah, they were more like sacrificial lambs, if they died Arceus would probably just send another kid because it feels like he was just dropping people there if Ingo is any indication
ethan and Lyra?
They did meet Arceus the one time in Sinjoh ruins but that was more of a mind screw than anything else.
Ash?
Well, he does travel around with multiple companion groups (disciples), performs miracles (lifting up Pokémon way heavier than him, his aura power thing…), has died and come back, was betrayed, we don’t know who his father is, and has met Arceus and they were kind of gucci.
People would start a religion around ash Ketchum tbh.
Trainers with Powers
OG Repost, Dreamwidth
Do you think Riley can shoot the kamehameha?
"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... at least until Yamamoto drew him in HGSS... 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 because we have absolutely nothing to work plot wise with so uhhh, elite 4 is uhhh, ecoterrorism."
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). (I used to not have many thoughts about N since I haven't played BW in a long time, I did not like his pokespe version initially but Pokespe is really good at making you want to absolutely dunk on some characters depending on how they're written like I personally would not be able to stop myself from mauling Pryce if I saw that old man and that is basically impossible to explain to non Pokespe people without spoiling an entire arc. That old man may be directly or indirectly responsible for 50% of the events in Pokespe. )
New addition:
I already wrote about this on Ketsuban's page, but I think trainers having powers should be pretty limited in how much of an effect they can have, because if they can throw hands with Pokemon or people all the time, then you don't really need Pokemon, do you? Yellow's powers sound like a big problem but to be honest as a reader, the most she's ever done is use some powers to throw her balls in a weird way when a lot of people in pokespe have a bizarre way of throwing pokeballs, be a pokemon center like three times and even then she can't heal humans, be a minor power up but only for her own pokemon, and then whenever it's a big moment where she could really be used she falls asleep because she's exhausted herself. Sure, if you list just the powers out, she sounds ridiculous, but she's kind of the potential girl of pokespe because it's a big "if and when but never is."
"Yellow might be good if she shows up in this arc", no, she's not going to, because there's no LGPE adaption and she's
like the Knuckles of Pokespe and the Master Emerald is the Viridian Forest. She’s chilling in the forest fishing and eating berries
and talking to trees and flowers, sending her to go fight god would distress her, don’t do that. Most of the Yellow arc's finale was
fighting alongside everyone else fighting for their lives because otherwise Lance would've won entirely regardless of the powers,
even Giovanni had to step in because in spite of the emotional power level boosting thing, the party Yellow carries is in fact kind
of incredibly bad. She hasn't had a major in person appearance since the Emerald arc and the HGSS one was a fakeout where it was like
"did you really think Yellow would join rocket, they have a disguise guy." (Does make for a good AU though).
In spite of having powers I don't think yellow has any like you know, "mary sue" qualities whatsoever.
She got psychic powers that are just overexplained but like Sabrina is right there, psychic powers are pretty uncommon.
I feel like yellow is probably a very easy character for people to probably get wrong in every single shot hypothetically fanfic wise by making her a demure shy damsel in
distress type of character who’s woefully incompetent and clumsy solely so red can save her for the sake of romance when in reality she would probably have a better
chance of needing to rescue red from a situation but like what fanfiction doesn’t have a character who ends up OOC it’s a lot easier to make a character that has
the name of a character and exaggerate their traits to the point of borderline parody.
Please let my white mage cowboy do something man it’s been years
More power to the people who do write trainers with absurd powers because there are in universe powers that aren't just Pokespe, like Aura and Psychics and Whatever N has going on,
like battle girls.... they've got powers. There's technological stuff. Magic, maybe. I do NOT know what aura is whenever fics bring it up,
is it like DBZ, I mean lucario is voiced by Goku's VA? Ash is apparently like the ultimate aura wizard. You could really tell me anything
about the anime and I’d probably believe it at this point, say something like “Cynthia goes on summer vacation in Alola and Lillie learns how to
battle from her” and I’d go “yeah, sounds believable enough”. Like when I look on the wiki, and I see Wave energy, you know what i think about?
I think about that power scaling thing from Gunvolt of all franchises where everyone has like different levels of powers that are supernatural.
Pokemon would be a bit ridiculous if they had adepts though, because they're like mutants from X-men. It kinda just sounds like generic anime power
that lets you do whatever you want because it's life force. Idk. Maybe being a monotype specialist is a power in itself.
Like how fire type specialists tend to have fiery personalities. Do humans have types? Yeah, they're normal. Their moves? Fight, item, bag, and run.
Powerscaling is so stupid because you can find a strong guy in any story and then the rules will immediately be broken by another dude like what happened in FSN where Gilgamesh shouldve won but since his personality for FSN was being an arrogant ass who underestimates his opponents he got punked by a human being even though “uhhhh he could’ve whipped out Ea and won instantly” well, he didn’t. When you take into account other material of canon then it becomes a case of “look, this is the first installment, we did not have all that stuff into account, stop that.”
Nasuverse power scaling is for the den of beasts because their lore has to be found between multiple VNs and a mobile game and untranslated content
and random interviews and multiple genre spanning video games and april fool's jokes and since it’s a multiverse any of their lore could be instantly
contradicted or retconned or outright erased by something like the tsukihime reboot timeline split erasing the OG melty blood from the timeline. Eltnum is never getting back into Lumina, shes stuck in UNIST forever.
My favorite part of this is probably an example I learned on a forum about this guy who can power scale everything because his power is reading shonen jump manga
and knowing spoilers but since the guy’s a nihilist his powers don’t properly work.
One time he was fighting a painter character so he stole the concept of colors. I need to actually read Medaka box and see if there's anyone else as absurd as Kumagawa.
Pokemon Centric Ideas Collection
As it turns out, when I'm writing stories based on Pokemon, I tend to end up writing a lot of things that are pokemon related! Here's a collection.
Me complaining about tropes.
Pokemon Minus Pokemon:
I think a lot of stories would probably do a bit better with less pokemon Vs Pokemon battles, but in order to do that, you'd need to introduce a "non pokemon enemy." Fighting humans is a no-no though unless they're like, poachers. (Palworld....wait, hunter J literally existed, why was my first thought palworld lmao)
Almost like a third faction that isn't human or pokemon, sumo attempted this with ultra beasts and it was kinda a thing they dabbled with a bit in pokestar, but it's still gonna revolve around the same gameplay and story loop, just that they can't be caught.
Again, if you can easily take the pokemon out of the story and replace them… well, that’s just my philosophy of “pokemon should be integral to a pokemon story”. The concept of “replacing pokemon easily” is a pitfall I want to avoid in my own writing though. Like fundamentally if the pokemon aren't the point and can be replaced by like, final fantasy crystals or the seven melodies or some RPG plot device then it's best to start over. The bond between a person and Pokémon is a big part of the narrative so you need to make sure that the bond is seen or at the very least alluded to outside of just saying “me and my Pokémon are friends!” They should have some personality traits, like that one chapter in early pokespe where red and green's teams switched and all of them clearly had different reactions to seeing how the two rivals trained their pokemon. To differentiate pokemon, maybe they could get like little accessories like the scarves they get in mystery dungeon and stuff to be more unique. Not to the point of like, dressing up pokemon in clothes like they do with holowear in Unite, maybe only if the pokemon really wants to wear human clothes for some reason. (I mean, they have costumes in Cafe as well made by Leah, but that's more or less just a thing because they work at the cafes...) If they had cloths that got damaged during battle, then it would be a problem to constantly have to refix it, right? I wonder if there are like battle damage preventative clothes.
pokemon are such an integral part of the pokemon world that people who aren't interested in pokemon are pretty much ostracized and seen as weirdoes, like how Chole used to be in Journeys, or that one guy from the destiny deoxys movie who ash almost fought, or white in pokespe who hated battles until she was told off by N that she was stifling her pokemon and then she went on the battle subway to learn battles (ignoring the scene in between because uhh. yeah.)
like even in pokestar studios the entire gimmick is using pokemon to do battles with CGI
its to a point that people outright can't imagine a world where pokemon don't exist, like in that one anniversary movie where ash died again and he was sent to the real world without pokemon which for him was like a limbo purgatory and he was like "well, what's beyond the towns and things" and his companion girl replacement was like "more towns" and he outright almost lost his mind
Pokemon is just kind of like a weird bizzare world where the NPCs speak nonsense unless they’re plot important and some of them are trapped to talk about things that don’t even make sense in universe like eggs and referencing other games.
Pokemon themselves…
The official answer by Gamefreak during SWSH was "They're just vibing, they're just getting by."
I think they have some level of sentience and sapience, its just that their priorities are mostly chilling, occasionally beating the shit out of other, and eating. Sometimes they brag, mystery dungeon is clearly its own thing that is implied to be the human pokemon world after the apocalypse (at least in rescue team, no answers for other games), and they kind of are like animals sometimes (“feral” pokemon are different to “wild” pokemon). I think they’re like dogs and can have varying degrees of intelligence especially like psychics and legends which clearly know more things.
Extra Characters on the Protag Headcanon Page:
I fully doubt some other player characters will make it onto my protag headcanon page mostly because 1. I haven't played them and 2. with character customization in mind you really don't Need to particularly talk about just the protags anymore when you can make your own OCs. Gloria's the exception because people pretty much meme'd her as the angry yelling drunk scottish girl and meanwhile pokespe decided to just go crazy with Scarlet and Violet respectively by making them Wednesday Adams and a motorcycle boy who thinks he's a legitimate prince. The reason for the latter is pretty funny because The artist (Yamamoto) was like "i'm not drawing that bowlcut, i'm using my own player's hair."
I cannot imagine people liking that default mii looking boy in gen 9, he looks like a victorian child who would die of a cold, he looks like a creepy doll that you’d see have the eyes move and follow you around the room. Character customization would’ve saved him (or just defaulting to Juliana) but I know I'm gonna have to see him be shilled as the major protagonist for animated anniversary features like they did with Generations (Evolutions didn't do this, but I did not like the artstyle).
This is partially why Iron Tamer exists, because I saw paradoxes and went "it would be interesting to have outfits inspired by that like a future or past outfit", it's kind of weird that the customization is uniforms only for ScaVio. The DLC added a few more outfits but like... not that many in particular.
Pokemon Raising:
What is raising pokemon actually like, for a story?
The games make it seem way too easy but then I think fanfiction exaggerates what training needs to be like and stuff like nutrition and monetary concerns and legal burecracy and politics and really kind of boring stuff and I guess if you wanted to write a logical pokemon world it would make sense to have stuff like that but it’s kind of to the point where it’s like why exactly do I need to know all this lawyerese just because Isekai self insert trainer number #560 caught a tyrunt when they're supposed to be extinct and only dragon type clan people can have that oh and they're also secretly hiding information about fairy types from the general public and the OC reveals it? (Not to rag on any Isekai self insert trainers or out there, but it’s just a common thing I’ve seen where they use their like, meta knowledge to cheat the system by knowing things from the games and logic bullshitting their way into power by impressing them and it’s incredibly easy to do so since pokemon is a perfect series for self inserting power fantasies but I miss the days when OCs were mostly actual in universe trainers on their journeys instead of this consistent “im from another world because of gen 7 introducing a way for people to do that and uh, pokemon are fictional, get me a psychic type pokemon to read my mind and you’ll know its trueeeee! Looker, save me!”) (Another Isekai trope I kinda dislike is when the character is reborn at a certain age but died at another age so there’s some weird mental math going on and if it’s pointed out it’s pretty weird, right? I guess this is the same issue when a person travels back in time to a certain age as well and relives their life… okay, rambling over.
The thing is I am not against the amount of fics that are centric on a popular thing because that is the nature of fanfic.
I just feel like it’s an oversaturation type of thing of derivatives where it’s like I have to go "man, this would've been way more interesting if it was played straight."
I have this same issue with isekai manga as is so it's not fanfic exclusive.)
If you try to logic a world then you have to ask questions upon questions and then you realize that the fabric of the world itself is pulled apart by a string known as "gameplay mechanics were not meant to be questioned this much"
Example
how do tms and moves work?
idk, pokemon are magic, they can just do things arbritarily
TMs are like CDs and instructional videos
you literally slap it onto their head and they learn things like in FRLG where they absorb the energy from the CD
how did sliph co create them though
they just did
Whatever happened to fun logic where it’s like “I know this shit makes no sense but just roll with it.” The need to overexplain a
world of magical creatures where they can eat curry and beans and gain power from doing puzzles and kicking soccer balls is BORING.
And really, true realism would be like making bug types super weak because thats how bugs are like IRL. Or rock types being like actual
rocks and theyre always falling apart. A world full of blood and guns and like drugs and taxes isn’t really what I'm looking for in a pokemon story.
Which is funny I say that because one of my patchworks stories is based on a rom hack that has the main character be an assassin because the OG creator liked Kill Bill.
Parents and Pokemon
For being a weird branch of the mother series*, Pokémon kind of has an interesting relationship with player parents.
LEMOTIF.
Most fathers are absent (gen 1’s dad had the weird spot of being cut (role wise) but still remaining in the game— he’s the guy that gives you the Lapras in Sliph Co.) minus Gen 3, but the guy works a city away from his family so he might as well be absent. No other fathers are ever present or mentioned unless I missed one.
Moms tend to be able to heal the party or in Johto, spend your money on stuff whether it be for items or for your room (weirdly, that feature didn’t make it into HGSS minus trophies). They send out the running shoes, they’re clearly in support of sending their kids into the wilderness, despite being recurring figures only two of them have actual names— Gen 4’s Johanna and Gen 6’s Grace. In the anime, May’s mom is called Caroline, but I’m still unsure where the Maple last name came from… a fanon thing? They don’t really do much out of the house until gen 4 has your mom be a contest star, gen 6’s mom is a rhyhorn racer, gen 7’s mom was like in a sidequest where she might’ve been a meowth trainer? Dunno. There’s not much for the other moms in earlier gens. Especially red’s mom.
Most people when writing stories just default to using Delia from the anime, or maybe making up a mom character (usually using the blue hair from the remakes.) Red’s mom appears in Origins but she doesn’t have a name there, Origins was more of a Pokémon red supercut (but used the FRLG designs, plus mega evolution… they should’ve made more for other reigons.) I’ve seen a few names, usually referencing VAs or a different shade of Red. Personality wise they also adopt Delia’s personality and occasionally Mr. Mime. If Pokémon live(the incredibly cursed musical with mecha mewtwo) is to be believed, then maybe Red/Ash’s dad is Giovanni (LMAO).
You can only get so much personality from a character that only shows up like once in the entire game and just says “all boys leave home someday and all girls dream of traveling, said so on TV.” Plus giving out the running shoes. Like she’s in support of her children’s dreams but simultaneously once gen 2 happens she’s like “I haven’t heard from my kid in a while but no news is good news and I’m still proud of them and what they did.” (Of course, at that point in HGSS Leaf was erased from canon and the mom only referred to Red.) Being a parent of a trainer must be hard if they don’t visit often.
Of course the lack of any other lines is game limitations, because who in the world would think about stuff like this for more than 5 minutes? The whole point of Pokémon isn’t to think about your parents, it’s to go out and explore the world.
*The pretty weird overlap between HAL labs, APE.inc, and the people who eventually became creatures inc and like mother
has had a clear influence on Pokémon itself for gen 1 where if you look at Mewtwo and Gigue from Earthbound Zero you go… hmm.
(They literally had a guy on the og gamefreak team that inspired snorlax that they nicknamed Kirby). There’s no homesickness effect
that makes you need to visit your mom in Pokémon but it’s nice to go back.
Masters Lore?
I have to do research into masters for an entirely unrelated fic now because I want to give my OCs custom suits.
Need Gems.
It’s schrodinger’s canon over there because it’s not canon but the characters and memories and feats and personalities are canon
But it can’t be canon, because some people should look older because of the timeline gap in between switch games and previous games (the timeline itself is a headache regardless because there’s no definitive one whatsoever outside of sequel games, everything else is guesswork since that one scenario writer deleted the tweet). I guess giving everyone a timeskip design just for a mobile game would be pretty dumb though.
Everything until they get into Pasio is canon but due to the nature of hoopa and the multiverse it’s also not canon because its full of conflicting timelines (MASTERS ADD ALOLA RED AND GREEN TO THE GAME AND MY MONEY IS YOURS)
It’s a Kirby side mode like meta knightmare
Like dragon ball what ifs
I haven't touched masters in months and no one in their right mind outside of super fans are making a masters lore supercut so maybe I’ll try paying attention by making a super clear team for story grinding since I have a timeslot that was normally for magikarp jump. I don't know what Sygna suits do. They're called Serious Costumes in Japan, apparently dressing as the pokemon makes them have a deeper connection, but it really just sounds like they're making that shit up so they can sell alternate costumes. According to bulbapedia," In-universe, most sygna suits are designed by a famous fashion designer on Pasio, who makes the suits for free and often unprompted by the sync pair that inspired them." Who is designing these things?!
Leaf's Sygna Suit looks like she's hiding stuff under the coat, Blue has those stupid ass pockets, Red’s hot wheel pants, I want to find that designer and ask them what their thought process was for some of these ones I'm looking at on Bulbapedia. Giovanni Nidoran hat. Cynthia has three, which is a thing, I guess. Looking at this further basically iterates that thing in my mind where I truly struggle to have any sort of want for rolling anyone there human wise.
I did like that one time I hung out with Sygna Suit Blue on my alt, I felt like I related to him saying he's struggled. I guess I need to play events or uhhh something because I’m not sure how much is actually featured in the main story. They do reruns, right? Maybe not for the ash stuff since he’s probably not getting rerun because his run’s ended, but now they could have like a Liko collab or something…?
Weird.
I personally have zero interest in rolling because I am not doing anything meta wise and I barely understand the battle system but if any spinoff character was in that I know like a rangers guy or a TCG GB design I’d summon and that’s never going to happen because why make 3D models for characters from older games when you could promote newer games or more popular characters (and they’re definitely not putting anyone in from Colosseum to Battle Revolution either). Like we’re never seeing a character from any manga show up because the copyright and then why promote a manga that’s already concluded years ago (even though Mitsumi or Hareta would be picks I would roll for) or never even had a translation (The one shot characters from How I became a Pokémon card) . Also, the Gacha rates on this game are shit, so even if I did want to roll chances are I’d end up up with some bum trainer from a reigon who had like 4 lines of dialogue and I skipped that shit.
Playing PM on and off again with Japanese and English does give me a bit of a back and forth especially when comparing VAs and hearing someone like Nate use “Boku” when I used to headcanon him using “Ore.”..(Japanese usage of “I” is a pretty interesting thing thats a bit personality based on what I’ve researched) Plus, you know, when you used to have fan headcanons for voices like how I used to have Leaf as Aoi Yuuki (I never could figure out a girl English VA, maybe whoever voiced the old English Usagi or maybe the new one…) or Blue/Green as Yuri Lowenthal (Sasuke specifically) or Red as JYB( Yu Narukami specifically), I didn’t have one for Yellow specifically but I feel like whoever voices Hinata dub wise could do it but with a little more enthusiasm in their voice (I don’t really know many English women VAs because I mostly watch shonen and shoujo in subs…) . I really did like Blue’s English VA in game, Rest in Peace Billy Kametz.
Am I gonna have to look up events on YouTube or is there an event compendium where I can play past events like dragalia lost let me? I miss dragalia lost. It was the only gacha
that I actually didn’t feel like was held back by it’s gacha system, it was more like a mobile MMO at points.
FF14 X Pokemon
This one's from another journal entry.
FF X Pokemon will be expanded?
My ff/pkmn crossover story is still in the concept planning, but I figured out who the party would be.
As for that one journal entry I had,
what would the ff14 part time cast look like as trainers?
Rene's a ranger which keeps his role of being in public service,
Beet might be a Kimono Girl from Johto since she was planned to be from the far east or she's a parasol girl,
Lily is a battle girl, she gets to keep her trait of throwing hands.
Sage and Pepper are contest coordinators, Pepper is a nerd type trainer while Sage is a Lass
M'ari is a fisherman,
Bon's a psychic,
I never did figure out a trainer type for Rin/Pen though. The closest thing he has role wise is Wikstrom, I can't see him being an ace, he's a business guy who's easily swindled so maybe he's an office worker/clerk from gen V?
I did have trainer cards with teams for them, but it's somewhere on the dead tumblr blog. I'm considering pulling the link.
You know how some characters end up with headcanon accents and stuff? Like I made Ul'dah Southern because the ARR voices basically got deleted out of my mind.
this is such a bizzare sidenote tangent but I used to write out some FF14 characters with canadian accents in mind, like my HW OCs minus Rene
i based him on a professor I had in college. Nice guy, a bit weird, apologetic, really wish he didn't have this bad thing of randomly collapsing in classes because of his heart pump thing
I dont think my FF14 WOL fic is ever getting published in any way shape or form
It was mostly a story about time travel and Isekai and like “is it really okay to be the dictator of canon and be the main character when you know you can’t meet that ideal?”
It turned into a little whiny angst fest and I was truly not in my best behavior when talking about it. It truly sucked ass. To anyone who knows the full story, I apologize.
The part timer NPC story is perfectly salvageable though, i think i work my best when i dont have main character syndrome.
Here's the OG Journal Entry for the PKMN X FF14 class idea.
Here's that thing I mentioned back in my other journal post about FF14 X Pokemon trainers:
give red a sword NOW he would be the straightlaced paladin type exactly like mr. meteor final fantasy babygirl
green would be a samurai or ninja (incredibly boring answer, but I don't want to be like, oh he's a rogue or summoner even though carbuncle in ff14 is vaguely eevee shaped)
i think blue/leaf would be mages but either black or red mages (it's fucking vermillion baby!!)
you'd think yellow would be a white mage but she'd be more of a scholar with her fairy planting sacred ground and stuff
isn't that math though
whatever
scholar fisher cowboy combo for yellow is wait
this is just my own FFXIV OC lmao
emerald is a machinist because he gets a gun
there's no gambler class in 14 so gold can't be one but he'd never leave the gold saucer willingly so maybe an ul'dah class would be best for him
he's also a gladiator but he sucks and keeps forgetting to turn on his tank stance and would be better with duty support but he has to grind mogtomes so he's being a terrible lead and he never got his jobstone
crys is a monk but that meme one that only used dragon kick and doesn't know her positionals
silver's a ninja
ruby's a red mage, sapphire's a monk
moon literally uses a bow and arrow in her pokespe depiction so she's an archer, but she would not get a job stone to be a bard, so she would become a Sage because that ties to her medical role
this is entirely different from spectral fantasy which is also pokespe based which i need to write eventually ( I said, like a liar)
July 2024
This is the thing I was talking about before when I said I'd be moving some stuff from journal entries in my Late July post. This is me prepping up for my long standing log for
writing and things.
Doing some observations on my Pokemon fic drafts. I’ve noted now that in my works that I’ve published or nearly completed that I tend to avoid actually writing out the Pokemon fights, which is something I should work on. The nature of battles do tend to follow a structure of “trainer tells pokemon to do something” in the fics I’ve read, which makes sense, the nature of writing a fic means that they aren’t turn based anymore, but I also just recall most battle attempts I’ve written to be “dodge! Do this instead.” I guess that’s why I tended to focus more on the human relationships.
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.
Random fic idea of the day (maybe I should start a collection of these): a fanfic poking at the structure of the Pokémon universe and the typical game story beats but written in the form of an academic 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. I’ve kinda cobbled a bit of my headcanons for Red and Mt. Silver from some fics I’ve read and my own headcanons but the one that’s furthest out there has to be this one I just came up with while rereading the pokespe yellow chapter because I was procrastinating reading emerald.The Red thing actually happens in masters BTW
I might move my ideas and reading notes here if I feel like they can easily be pulled. And here's some more cohost reposts in the meantime, I think I had these linked on the old fanfic directory as well?
Today’s writing mood is: what do I hate more, framing dialogue or writing fight scenes?
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.
The problem is with having so many fics centric on canon divergences and also alternative names for canon characters it gets like. Incredibly hard to keep track of everyone and also toe the line between keeping them in character even though the very reasonable easy solution would just be labeling everyone as OCs based on the characters. Then again, writing out a fic summary with the premise of “I gave this guy ghost powers and shit mentors” is a pretty funny way to justify why things are so bizarre.
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.
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 my Aqua OC who has a full team of 6 water mons, she's on the PokeOCs Page)
Pokemon OCs
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.
(In reference to my magma OC on my OG Cohost Post, next to the aqua girl)
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 or air isn’t as intimidating.
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. So chances are I'd never truly write a PLA story but that one Samurai Kanto story is still on the menu if I ever wanted to expand that.
(In reference to what I think was a shitpost on Larry being a lawyer and Foongy (an Foongus) memorizing the Japanese Legal System which is in itself a JJK meme)
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?
Cohost Repost #4:
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 almost along those 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, 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. Mine are a bit centered on the OG fics I read years ago where it was
like, he was overwhelmed by the bureaucracy of the league, the sheer factor that an 11 year old had to take out a criminal group
and they probably started making people around him targets was a worry of his, the media fame leading to people probably getting
really uncomfortably close to him and ignoring his boundaries and borderline stalking, people who put him on a pedestal without actually
considering he was a human being and being mad when they don’t meet their exact ideals, harassment in consideration of social media,
and maybe something with his rival, depends. Just the other factors alone were enough and now I want to add people deciding to be impostors of him…
Maybe this one’s a bit mean spirited. Not like this is happening anytime soon because I'm supposed to be working on a pokespe villain roleswap story
but unless that shit's a oneshot I do not have the time to properly sort through my notes I'm in SHAMBLES I'm an IDEAS person.
Cohost Zone
The new lounge for pokemon exclusive writing posts.
Containment Zone!
Moving some posts from my journal that were originally from cohost. Keeping the lorem ipsum in the meantime. Just so I don't forget, whenever I need to pull an image I have to use (../) or it won't work.
Repost from Cohost 1. Today I had a dream that Pokémon masters added a Halloween unit that was super busted but everyone was mad because it was just Blue/Green/Rival just wearing a sheet with holes over his head to be a ghost. I think at one point he took the sheet off and wore it like a cloak for the rest of the dream. That’s all I remember. Not sure if that’s stranger than the last one.
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.
I've been collecting misc dreams from my discord DMs as well. Most of these dreams came out that I recall were during the smash ultimate DLC period and like… FGO’s LB6. I had a lot of dreams regarding Saber Caster. Honestly, a good majority were just me dreaming about smash bros and not much else exciting that I recalled or wrote down/DM’d to anyone.
I had one about this Tweet Trend called "Timmyposting" where people made wishes a la timmy turner. A time I thought I was already awake and working, a time I had a lobster roll, and the last one I dm'd about was this time me and Saber Caster tried to survive a zombie apocalypse. I think I recall the last one well because she casted a huge spell that saved the world, but she vanished after it.
I also had a recent dream on 6/19 but the way I summarized it was stupid so let me resummarize it. I was sleeping and I woke up because in the dream I was assassinated, it was 5 am when I woke up so I went back to sleep to kill the assassin.
Repost from Cohost 2:
Sometimes I have crack friendships based on my past interests where I'll be like "Red and Judai/Jaden and Quote Cave Story would hang out." The justification is "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. You ever see pieces of fanart where it's just Judai hanging out in real places occasionally with his duel spirits showing up and him in all sorts of different outfits just chilling? That's what I imagine the vibe would be like if the three of them just started wandering places, maybe Blue/Green and Leaf and Curly Brace would be in those random spots too.
