#[yea that kinda struck a nerve with him ooooops]

[bb-drayster]

Okay so the short version is that our League fucking sucks and Champion Lance also fucking sucks. The environment is toxic, there's no safety standards, and basically every kid gets funneled into it to sink or swim. And the ones that sink get desperate to find a way to stay afloat, and more than a few of them end up joining Team Rocket just for the money, which feeds into our organized crime problem.

I respect one (1) Gym Leader here and that's Blue, because he at least does SOMETHING to support kids who flunk out of the Gym Challenge. But one out of eight isn't enough, and a lot of the issues can't even be solved at that level and would need the Champion and Elite Four to intervene, since they're the ones with the power to actually make rules about things. And our current Champion thinks everything's fine the way it is and the challenge being "tough" just "weeds out the weak."

Anyway. Gym Leaders have various degrees of suck. My great uncle is like... he's family. I care about him a lot. But his perspective on League stuff is... bad. And even if I love him, and I can't not, no matter how much I don't like him, I can still recognize that the regularity of defeated challengers needing to get their Pokémon emergency help is a huge fucking problem.

And he wants me to replace him when he retires so... I've gotten a lot of that harshness directly pointed at me in training. It's in a supportive way, but... the only reason he stopped telling me to man up when I told him my body was past its limits was because I told him I'm a girl.

Okay, that's kind of long and rambly actually. Sorry.

yeesh. and that’s the short version? crazy stuff goin’ on in kanto. everybody’s got their skeletons in the closet but. can’t say i was expecting all that.

last part kinda reminds me of drayden. that same bullshit adults always spill when they treat you bad just to make you “stronger”? or whatever. yeah. don’t feed into that.

-🐉