#not that anyone from tpci will read this. but still. i needed to get this off of my chest

[doubleddenden]

Fuck the Pokémon Company International.

They hired a third party company of lawyers that sent a DMCA to Relic Castle- for those not aware, Relic Castle was a friendly online forum dedicated to Pokémon fan games, rom hacks, and game jams- all of which were free and did not earn a single penny, and were just loving pieces of playable fan art. It would have been 10 this year.

Funny how they do this after their Twitter account kept retweeting fan art and talking about how much they love fan art the last few weeks. Hmm. Funny how that works.

I've heard people claim they legally "have" to do it, but look at Sonic the Hedgehog- not only do they encourage fan games, they actually poach talent- that's how Mania was made. Ideas, too- that's how Frontiers was made. "Legally" they could have just left it alone. "Legally" they could have just taken ideas from it like GF has been taking from fan games for the last 10 years (variants, the SwSh league, etc). "Legally" they could have just kept riding positive PR from Legends ZA and kept fucking quiet.

But no, they can't handle not being in the spotlight for any reason. They intentionally create negative press for themselves just to stay relevant. Fuck you, The Pokémon Company International. The only reason you have success is because of dedicated fans that you relentlessly punish for no reason except greed. I hope your filthy, greedy, money grubbing, selfish executives lose their jobs and are replaced by people that actually care some day.

And thank you, Relic Castle, for the fun times. I hope this doesn't deter any of the devs from there from creating, and I think that if you guys were to make Pokémon clones akin to Nexomon or Coromon, I'd gladly buy them. You don't deserve the treatment you've been given for making playable fan art.

Do better, Pokémon. Shame on you. You don't deserve the fans you have and you dishonor yourselves and your legacy when you do shit like this.

[yeah-yeah-beebiss-1]

In the pokemon debate, I wanna say Gen 6 deserved better. I always liked the character models in that more than SM or the new gen 8. Now it the map and camera angles have to be adjusted, making seemingly cramped locations, and a pretty drastic zoom-in, which doesn't barely off the environments. It sounds odd, like THAT'S my hang up, but XY was just so comfy. And yet no Z version, but USUM was really needed apparently. Is it possible to change devs from gamefreak to anyone else competent?

Honestly, I really think XY was a victim of the jump to 3D (i.e., the excuse Game Freak is claiming for S/S despite reusing now-years-old assets). Making six generations’ worth of Pokemon models at higher specs than necessary for the sake of future-proofing was a genuinely huge undertaking, but it paid off in the fact that they were able to reuse said assets for just about every significant Pokemon project since (ORAS, SM/USUM, LGPE, Go, Masters, and S/S all reuse the models and animations developed for XY, adding new Pokemon as needed). The catch is that getting all of that up and running took so much dev time that they didn’t really have a whole lot of time to populate the game with content, hence the minimal plot and near-zero postgame. I think the overworld aesthetic was them playing it safe in terms of keeping things familiar, and then the jump to the less stylized look of Gen VII was them thinking, “oh shit we really need to make a change to convey that this is a new generation of games” (when Gen V looked pretty similar to Gen IV).

Have you read this article? It’s all conjecture and speculation, but a lot of details do make sense, and it’s a massive case of what could have been. The extraterrestrial sci-fi angle the earlier material for XY allegedly played up sounds cool as hell, and I honestly think it would’ve been one of my favorite generations had it played out like that. But therein lies an example of Pokemon’s success stifling it - the franchise is such a cultural juggernaut now that they’re afraid to get too weird with it for fear of spoiling expectations, despite that weirdness and experimentation being exactly what made it great in the first place.

It kind of makes me wonder what would’ve happened had Gen V been better-received, since it feels like that was one of their last big attempts to shake things up and it was met with a lukewarm reception by Pokemon standards. If anything, I think that lines up with the timeline of Junichi Masuda ceasing to give a shit - GF was still putting substantial effort into the series up through Gen V and was poised to do so for Gen VI, but the rushed development cycle for Gen VI led to them paring it down and playing it safe so they could have it on shelves for an annualized release cycle, and the fact that even a neutered Pokemon game sold just as much as the previous ones made Game Freak/TPCi realize that the brand is so strong that it makes more financial sense to put out annual releases even if they’re not up to snuff than it does to delay the games as needed so the devs can make them as intended.

[toonstarterz]

Having a lot of free time on my commute to boot camp has made me crazy enough to write an Ikarishipping fanfic. That ain’t a complaint by the way. 

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/12660134/1/Empathetic

Rating: T

Pairing: Paul/Dawn

Summary: Gym Battles? Easy. Winning the Pokémon League? Child's play. Becoming Dawn's stupid boyfriend? Paul's greatest challenge.

Disclaimer: I do not own Pokémon, TPCi, or any of its properties. Bless you, Satoshi Tajiri.

~ Empathetic ~

Contrary to what people may think, Paul is not some stone-faced, unfeeling bastard. He has emotions just like everyone else. Serious. Bitter. Exasperated. That last one’s been happening a lot lately, and the cause of it comes from everywhere. His chimchar failing to meet expectations, the trainers in the corner that won’t shut up about Brandon of the Battle Pyramid, that blue-haired friend of Ash whose name alludes him that tries to get him to show a smidgen of compassion.

Paul is exasperated.

Paul’s hates useless small talk. He always answers people with only the minimum amount of words necessary–or a cold scowl if he can help it. But that girl–Dawn, right?–is tailing behind him after he exits the Pokémon Center and it doesn’t seem like she’ll leave him alone unless he talks to her.

He mentally groans. If he has to say something, he may as well be honest.

And so he talks. He talks about his dislike for Ash, his distaste for how similar the boy is to his brother Reggie, and how inane ideas like ‘trust’ and ‘guts’ annoy him to no end.

He expects Dawn to start spouting nonsense about how right Ash is, and how wrong he is. What he doesn’t expect Dawn to say is how people can have vastly different styles despite having similar beliefs, and how those contrary styles don’t necessarily make any one person wrong.

At least, that’s what she meant to be say. Her actual answer is much more simple-minded.

But the important part is that Dawn didn’t reject him like so many others, and when your training style goes against the majority rule, that’s oddly comforting.

Paul is thankful.

He runs into her again about a year later by chance. Yes, chance. He refuses to call it ‘fate’. He just so happened to be in the area following his win at the Lumiose Gym when he bumps into Dawn right in the middle of the north plaza. It’s probably his biggest surprise of the day, second only to the gym leader he’d just beaten that was also a talking robot. They exchange awkward pleasantries, and Dawn invites him over for lunch at Restaurant Le Nah. And it’s only because Paul has no excuse, and that he’s actually quite hungry that he agrees.

He plows through the double battle with just his weavile, and helps himself to an order of soup and breadsticks while Dawn enjoys her salad. She offers to foot the bill.

It’s only later that night that Paul realizes that, by pure definition, he went on a date with Dawn.

Paul is not displeased.

Paul is not fond of pokémon contests. They’re far too showy and impractical for his sake. But while he has no interest in contests, he can respect that pokémon coordinators need a mastery of skills are that are far beyond Paul’s level of understanding.

When he sees Dawn on the broadcast trounce the competition with a combination of discharge and ice beam to create a cage of electrically-charged ice, he is quite honestly impressed.

Next time they run into each other, he asks her to teach it to him.

So they set up a date, er, meeting the next day at a local park where they have a few practice battles and in no time, Weavile and Electivire have mastered the technique completely, albeit in a style more suited for battling. As a thank you, Paul offers to buy her a meal.

As they eat in silence, A girl with giant pink ringlets saunters up to them and starts giving them the third degree.

“This guy your boyfriend?” she asks, loud enough for the other patrons to hear.

“No, Ursula,” Dawn says, barely hiding the annoyance behind a smile. “This is Paul, one of Ash’s rivals from a few years back.”

Paul makes some sort of grunting noise that simultaneously says, “yes” and “back off” to this Ursula girl. She takes the hint and exits the restaurant with a satisfied smirk.

Paul is irritated.

Less than two months have passed, and word around the coordinator circle is that the esteemed Dawn is now dating some edgelord trainer named Paul.

Paul reads the excerpt in Coordinator Monthly, clicking his tongue in distaste.

If there’s anything Paul truly hated about being a pokémon trainer, it’s the publicity. Warding off reporters, kids badgering him for battling advice, that goddamned fanclub that arose when that photo of him in an undershirt leaked online. It’s why Paul travels alone, away from all the scrutiny so he can keep all his focus on training. But all of his attempts to keep a low profile were apparently all for naught.

Zoey is the first to confront him. He cooly brushes her off, simply stating that it’s mindless gossip and completely untrue. She leaves him alone after that, but not before giving him an eye that said “you try anything funny, and I’ll break your legs”.

Barry comes soon after that, demanding at the top of his lungs for an explanation lest he fine Paul for betraying him. Paul doesn’t know what he means by that, and frankly, he doesn’t care. He gives him the same answer he gave Zoey, word for word, and Barry eventually believes him.

At some point, Kenny steps up, and Paul saves the poor guy a lot of trouble by outright denying everything before he can even get a word in.

Paul is tired.

Paul excels at a lot of things. Training, battling, pissing people off, the list goes on. But the one thing he never got the hang of is being a socially functional human being.

So when Dawn invites him over to a banquet for coordinators as her plus-one, Paul is disinterested, as if trying to find some benefit to going that will help him be a stronger trainer.

“Why?” he asks far too directly, “Just ask someone else.”

“Everyone else is busy with other plans,” Dawn explains, a bit miffed. “And you’re my only friend left in the whole region!”

Paul stiffens, his mind stuck on the word ‘friend’. When was the last time anyone ever referred to him like that? Kindergarten?

“People will get the wrong idea,” he tells her gruffly. “And I’d rather not give them another reason to think that we’re dating.”  

“Since when have you ever cared about what people think of you?” she counters.

Touché. Still, he’d like to keep the pests at bay, especially now that they’ve finally started to leave him and his nonexistent love life alone. But as far as he can tell, all the coordinators at the banquet will be people he’s already explained himself to, so the possibly of another rumor spreading should be exponentially lower.

“Fine.”  

Paul is naive.

After a long day of training for the Pokémon League, Paul checks into the local Pokémon Center. Nurse Joy sympathetically tells him that they’re overbooked and that he’ll need to share a room with someone in order to stay. Not surprising, he surmises. The League challengers are always monopolizing the Center during this time. He’d much rather get his own room, but he can deal with bunking with some random trainer for the night.

As the nurse hands him the room key, it’s only then that he notices Dawn further down the reception desk, a room key in her hand marked with a number the same as his own.

That night, he glances from his book as Dawn exits the shower, clad in a white rope, and her glistening, blue hair hanging over her bare shoulders.

Paul is frustrated.

Paul is a man of routine. Wake up, eat breakfast, train, eat lunch, train, eat dinner, read a book, sleep. Lather, rinse, repeat. If something were to incorporate itself into his precious time, it would have to be something of great importance.

How Dawn managed to sneak her way in there, he’ll never know.

Today, Paul is listening with one ear as Dawn laments on making the semifinals of the Unova Grand Festival. She hasn’t made it this far since Sinnoh all those years ago, and understandably, she’s nervous out of her mind.

He notices Dawn’s fidgeting hand, so he places his own ice-cold palm on top of it in an attempt to calm her down. “You’ll be fine,” he says offhandedly, not even looking up from his phone.

Dawn eyes bug out, and she goes red in the face, as though Paul has violated her in some way. When she realizes that this was Paul’s weird way of showing affection, she smiles softly, and places her other hand on top of the pile.

“Thanks Paul,” she says with a sigh of relief, “You’re a good friend.”

Paul is ignorant.

“Do you want to go out with me?”

It doesn’t show on his face, but Paul feels like he was just blown back fifty feet by a hyper beam. He swerves his body to stare at Dawn as if she’s grown a second head. He scrutinizes her, looking for some trace of teasing on her expression, some hint of humor in her body language, any sort of indication that she’s only pulling his leg.

There is none.

“Why?” he asks, with all the careful seriousness he uses in battle. “I don’t date people.”

“I know, but…” Dawn bites her tongue, trying not to sound foolish. “I really like you, you know? I mean, you’re smart and determined and not as heartless as everyone says you are.”

Paul thinks she’s rationalizing. That she must be blinded by some great desire for romance that she’s ignoring all the very obvious reasons why he would not be a good boyfriend in any respect. At least, that’s what he thinks at first. He knows from first-hand experience that while Dawn can be naive, she’s not frivolous, nor is she the type to lead people on. In that case, she must honestly have some romantic interest in him, as absurd as that may sound.

And if he’s being completely and utterly and totally honest...he’s rather fond of her himself.

Just a tad.   

“Fine,” he says curtly. “I’ll go out with you.”

A jubilent smile stretches across Dawn’s face, and she immediately starts listing off places to go on their first “official” date, while her boyfriend of three seconds grumbles in agreement.

Paul is content.

Paul nibbles down just below Dawn’s collarbone, eliciting a faint moan from the coordinator. He gently pushes themselves onto the bed, and slowly moves his tongue down Dawn’s figure while she straddles his waist.

At this moment, Piplup steps into the room and squawks in horror. In the shadow of darkness, all he can see is a big, scary man forcing himself onto his beloved trainer.

Piplup launches forward with a drill peck, and Paul screams loud enough to wake up the entire Pokémon Center.

While her boyfriend gets checked for rectal damage, Dawn takes Piplup into the hospital lobby to have a magnificently awkward talk about human relationships.

Paul is humiliated.

Paul isn’t sure how to feel at the moment. One the one hand, he’s just accomplished a huge part of his dream that many trainers could only hope for. On the other hand, he feels weak in the knees, as if all the attention on him is physically beating him down into the ground. Or maybe that’s just the solid gold trophy in his grasp.

“Congratulations, Paul,” Cynthia says to him with a tender smile. “May you carry the title of Sinnoh League Champion with honor.”

“Thank you.” Despite of himself, Paul smiles. As of now, nothing could ruin his relatively good mood.

At least until the press conference.

With the reporters and cameramen bombarding him like a machine gun, Paul resists the urge to curse them out and instead puts on a face of what he hopes is dignity.

“Mr. Champion, what’s the secret to your immense strength?”

“How do you respond to the allegations that you’ve abused your pokémon with illegal stimulants?”

“Is it true that you are dating Top Coordinator Dawn?”

“No comment,” Paul spits. “Next question.”

The next onslaught of paparazzi is even more ravenous, and after an hour of fending off the vullabys, Paul retreats to his hotel room. Dawn is there with a cup of tea and a comfy bed.

Paul is drained.

Paul hardly doubts himself. Oh sure, ninety-nine percent of things annoy him to no end, but barely anything makes him self-conscious. He’s so used to people chastising him for his harsh training methods that such things now slide off like butter. Years of being called a douche, a stick-in-the-mud, and an asshole has given Paul a lot of thick skin.

But when a young trainer actually called him a ‘nice guy’, Paul visibly bristles.

Worst yet, his former rival Ash Ketchum is there when it happened. As a precocious little boy dashes off in excitement after receiving the Sinnoh Champion’s autograph, Ash is giving Paul the most aggravating yet genuine shit-eating grin the latter has ever seen.

“A ‘nice guy’, huh?” Ash lightly teases. “I always knew you had a heart.”

Paul glares back at him as if to mentally punch him in the face. It isn’t the first time someone has accused him of getting ‘soft’, and it’s a trend that’s been bugging him for over a year now. They always say that it’s in the little things, such as the hint of warmness in his fierce eyes, or how he now compliments his pokémon about five percent more often than usual. And every damn time, they always say it began when he started dating Dawn. Paul cringes at the possibility of losing his edge to romance.

“No need to worry,” he tells the young man with the pikachu on his shoulder. “That’s just the image I have to put on as Champion. Absolutely nothing’s changed about me.”

Paul glances aside, having made his point. He hopes that Ash, is his infamous ability to take everything at face-value, will drop the subject after that. But when he sees the guy stifling a laugh, a surge of rage rushes over Paul’s body.

“What?” he barks.

Ash crosses his arms, knowingly. “You just said ‘No need to worry!’ You’re talking like her now!”

It takes all of three seconds for the the color to drain from Paul’s face. He races forward in shame, trying to hide his mortified expression from Ash’s exuberance. No amount of humiliating defeats could rival the terror that comes with adopting your girlfriend’s catchphrase. He stops in the middle of a clearing, his mind racing as Ash catches up to him.

At what point had Dawn brainwashed with all these flowery emotions? Paul considers smashing his head with a rock to self-induce amnesia and revert back to his old, happily unhappy self. But then he remembers there’s too much to lose.

Like it or not, Dawn had been good to him–like a spoonful of bitter medicine that tastes awful at first, but makes you feel better in the long run. Whenever he was doing more than his daily ten hours of training, Dawn would remind him to eat dinner. Whenever he forgot his ‘please and thank you’s, Dawn would punch him in the arm. Whenever the stress of being Champion was too much and he sentenced himself to solitary confinement, Dawn would drag him out so they could watch Cleavon Schpielbunk movies over ice cream sundaes.

Indeed, every ounce of logic was screaming that Dawn was ruining him. But in his shriveled up, raisin-like heart, he knows that Dawn is probably the best thing that’s ever happened to him. And that feeling he gets when Paul realizes that he, the man who worked through blood, sweat, and tears to get to the top, couldn’t handle the fun-loving nature of his own wonderfully imperfect girlfriend can only be summed up in the most prominent word in his dictionary.

Paul is pathetic.

[jolteonjordansh]

Alright, I have to make a vent on some opinions that I have really been trying to hold back just to have less ranting/venting on this blog altogether. But at this point, the issue is bothering me so much that I cannot stand it anymore. You can call me petty over it if you want, but...

I am so tired of all of the speculation and ridiculous hype over Pokémon on Switch and the franchise in general.

This isn't me saying speculation is bad. It's harmless fun. But it's become particularly bad this year. Every day, some new rumor pops up about Pokémon on Switch. Every day, people start getting mindlessly hyped over potential or even likely fakes and rumors, spreading misinformation everywhere, getting people all psyched up for "that new Pokémon Direct happening tomorrow!!!!!!!", which then never happens. And then people whine and complain. It's an endless cycle of excitement and disappointment and it's kind of obnoxious when I see people going on about rumors as if they're 100% true and I swear, so few people have any idea what it means to take things "with a grain of salt" and just take every freaking rumor as true. We're literally almost just four months into the year and I have seen more rumors and videos about rumors and whatnot in that timespan than I have my entire time being part of the fandom on the internet to now--which was before Generation IV started. 10+ years of being in this spiral of a fandom and I have never seen so much insane hype over a game we literally know nothing about and so people just grasp onto more or less completely baseless rumors just for any form of excitement in their lives.

I know I sound like a really grouchy and "no fun allowed" person. I don't have a problem with people making harmless speculations or just having fun. There are a lot of young kids in this fandom after all, but there are also plenty of grown adults. When a majority start taking rumors as almost facts and start spreading around tons of misinformation, it starts to get really tiring. We could be more than several months off from Pokémon on Switch--maybe even more than a year--and I'm so drained because of all of this. I have almost no excitement for the game at all, not even as a concept anymore. I really don't care anymore. At this point, part of me wants the game to just release already so people will finally shut up, but here's the thing, and it's something I've noticed that's become a lot worse in recent years:

Even when we get a new Pokémon game, fans immediately start begging for the next one. They are never satisfied. I get that the 3DS generations were weird and bumpy for a lot of people (myself included, though I enjoyed some as much as I could and do legitimately like Generation VII a lot), but people go on and on about it as if we never get any new Pokémon and they're like starved animals waiting for so much as a bone. I’m not speaking for every Pokémon fan here, but this feels like the majority from my experience.

I think there are a lot of factors to this. There's a good majority that felt the 3DS generations were disappointing, the inflation of mediocre F2P Pokémon spin-offs rather than a lot of the actual full-fledged ones we used to get might be making these time spans feel a lot longer, but also I feel TPCi dug their own graves with this one. Particularly with Generation VII, TPCi practically lives off of hype culture. They were releasing new trailers every couple of weeks, ultimately not only revealing practically every new Pokémon but even spoiled post-game content, pretty much leaving almost no surprises in the end, all to get people excited.

I know I sound like a whiny person. "Let the people have their fun! They're not hurting anyone! You're just being boring!". I get it. But I feel this kind of behavior is really toxic because when you take speculation and hype to this level, and then people finally get their new game and it's nothing like what they were told based on the rumors on the internet or they got overexcited over some news only to be disappointed by the facts, they get so needlessly angry over it, as if it's Game Freak's fault that rumors on the internet were wrong and they didn't get the game they were expecting. As if it's Game Freak's fault that people got themselves overhyped. I'm not white-knighting Game Freak here, oh no. I have plenty of things I could go on about with their choices and decisions, especially lately. But people really only have themselves to blame when they buy into rumors and then they end up being not true. I'm guilty of falling for some rumors here and there (not really any Pokémon ones, the early DP days quickly taught me that), but this hype culture is getting really toxic and damaging and it's just made me exhausted from the franchise in general.

Part of me can't help but want to take a break from this franchise and just get away from it, but that's just kind of hard these days. I'm surrounded by the franchise every day and am part of communities with good friends where I can talk about things besides Pokémon. I work a job that relates to the community so I kind of have to stay in touch with it. It's really damn hard to take a break from the internet, not because I'm "addicted" to it necessarily, but because I have a lot of connections here. I don't know what to do to get out of the funk that has me so tired of a franchise I still honestly love--flaws and all--but it's going to be an uphill battle. 

Maybe I need to focus on more creative projects (this detachment from Pokémon and general exhaustion in my life has really hurt me finishing off Orre Week, really sorry for such a massive delay), and I have a lot of lore I've come up with for my own version of Orre that I'd really like to talk about and expand upon (I'll probably save it for next Orre Week). I can't imagine writing a full-fledged fanfic for that kind of thing (especially now), but I'd love to give at least a window for what it'd be like for those interested. Maybe I need to do my Z Project with Zephyr and his adventure through Kalos, or my Moon project with my OC there that I've been very nervous to get into due to SJW culture overreacting to me doing it wrong. I don't know. Maybe I just need to find a way to step away drastically and come back with a fresh mindset.

Sorry for the angry venting. Sorry if I sound pretty whiny for just a fandom "having fun". Misinformation just really bothers me, and this constant cycle of excitement and disappointment (not necessarily on my end) has just killed my interest, and we don't know a damn thing about the game yet. But if you read this far, thanks for hearing out the ramblings of a tired old fan.