I'm currently caught within two communities at the moment. One could say it's a facade, but then I've always had to do that. There's never a time these days where I'm not, for all it's worth. I have to routinely piss off several people and simultaneously please others every day of my life. It gets exhausting when I have to make such baby steps.
So I remembered I even have a blogspot because 'oh yeah, i did sign up for that didn't i' because as I've mentioned, I can't stand the ephemeral nature of websites such as reddit, twitter and tumblr. I cannot for the life of me engage in endless scrolling. Bluesky does it too, and being the ex-twitter people, (haha, one might consider it a funny joke. you'll never get me to call it by a single letter, though) I suppose I should expect that, but then I could hope the butterfly had half a sense. Maybe not, they're ditzy in real life too.
Currently, my goal is to finish writing fanfiction on Archive of Our Own and a specialised fanfiction website related to the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon series. This is with me currently being quite pessimistic since the former website was scraped dry of all its content to feed to an AI. I don't like dating these things, particularly since I need it moreso than other websites than I can mention, but god it tires me so much. It's certainly not intelligent, it's just scripts checking probabilities and ranking them back to you. Do you know all 'wheel-spinner' applications are rigged? Trying to weigh them on random chance is like trying to rewind a tape (and I know what that's like), meaning, there's no real probability at play here. But then having idiots go on about how it's so intelligent boggles the mind. At least my mind. They aren't intelligent. I know what real conversations are like and I know what conversations with bots are like. Sometimes it feels like people don't remember when chatterbox or whatever its name was came about in like 2010 or something (I was still in primary school at that time, so that year and younger is the threshold) and I remember experimenting with it at the time. Load of garbage. Can not replicate a human. These 'things' are the same and make the same kinds of mistakes. If I want honest mistakes from a person, I'd just speak to a person. Oh well, it slightly amuses me the concept of asking an AI of what it thinks the ending of my currently planned story is based on the multitudes of existing fanfiction on AO3 and then having the AI come up with some bogus about some happily ever after or something. I haven't necessarily planned a depressive ending, nor a completely happy one, but I'd be curious what probability hits if that nonsense were to come my way.
I won't do it though because principally, I don't really think there's any point. I could ask it 'what do you think' and the question in and of itself answers itself without me needing to open a page; technically it doesn't 'think' so therefore the question is a falsehood to begin with. I suppose the better question would be 'what prediction of words could you come up with based on this understanding of a million mystery dungeon fanfics' but like I said, it's a lost cause. All roads lead to the same conclusion. Since it's not a real thing, it's a god damn statistics manipulator. I'd rather operate based on real people.
Although sometimes, it's hard to tell what's a real person and what isn't.
Is this how you make headings
sometimes i otherwise post nonsense you know.
I don't mean 'real person' as in, 'can I look behind the screen' I moreso mean in terms of what most refer to as a 'typing style.' Because this is through a screen, I can only make assumptions because of the fact that many of these people are strangers. Most younger people have distinctive typing styles that I adopt in some ways, and others I do not.
By younger, I was born in the late 90s, so make your guesstimates based on that prediction. My birthday is already public anyway.
But by real, I guess I sort of mean literate. Now my standards are a bit skewed; I never went to any 'special' school but I did need speech therapy at a young age because I wasn't talking. Documents say as such.
I have no doubts, but my definition of real covers multiple facets. I believe, straight up, that people are walking in a world of delusions. We've all been lied to, folks. That's why I'm writing this story, because once you fall out of the cognitive dissonance hole suddenly you feel like the only person on the planet who actually gives a damn.
And I know that's trite and cliche. It's so deep I can't even talk to my own mother without cognitive dissonance entering those conversations, and she's the closest to getting it. Why mass adoption of a blockchain system with no developers is a farce to expect, why simple 'engagement' works nothing, and how non-featured the whole thing is.
Qortal
internet censorship is all the rage. so qortal is like a new internet... although currently, right now, it's kinda leeching off the internet to do its own thing. I imagine in order to create its own unique algorithm, we'd need mass-scale adoption, but it's a pitiful mess.
On websites, I posit myself as being controversial. It's because I am at odds with the normal internet. But in reality, that just means another standard. I certainly don't really consider 'the internet by gen x' to be a good standard, and I'm sure many others don't either; modern internet websites are run by the same kinds of people and older. Or pedophiles. No inbetween.
There's a lot of whooha about how much power it uses (oh why take out an entire city, but electricity is also taught incorrectly), alongside how 'worthless' the currencies are (and I agree), but truly, I think it's all the managerial nonsense that it requires for a diet version of an existing site.
At first, all that was on there was a diet youtube. Then it was a diet website creator and I'm not a html person. Then it was a diet ebay, and then we put things up to sell, and nobody bought them. They're not things I can sell on ebay because one of them was an extra gift from an ebay seller (politeness is a virtue), and the others were dog-chewed but still usable. Then it was diet dropbox, and then diet twitter.
By diet, I mean the bare minimum functions of what you expect these applications to be for were there. You can upload and watch videos. You can make a website using HTML (no experience), you can put items to sell, files to upload, and then the last one, an ephemeral post generator which buries your post in amongst a shitload of idiots posting every video under the sun from the most addicted of doomscrollers.
It functions like a torrent; the 'network' is a bunch of nodes all duplicating data across separate nodes, and you're duplicating that data on your own end. My mother coming from a family of technically illiterate loons (I will link my grandfather a page leading to a story and he will only read the first chapter even though there is a giant link on the page saying 'next chapter' because he's a paranoid fritz) thinks this is revolutionary (has never torrented in her life while I have barely scratched a few for the obvious reasons, and it's not fun finding a dead one).
She has no idea how far 'behind' it actually is.
Constantly she will be pestering me to attempt to market it to people. I attempted doing so once, and I knew the response I'd receive. The one time I did try, the response went a little like this.
"Oh that's a neat idea. But why would I need to go to a platform that nobody uses, and serves no benefit to us as a result?"
This was after a takedown of requests. The point is that because of the torrenting system, anything put on there cannot be taken down because it's not uploaded to a server that can then be attacked. The only way to attack the system is to shut down all the nodes, which is feasibly impossible because it's all local storage.
Trust me, I will relate this to Webkinz and Pokemon soon because that's the topic of this blog primarily.
Steam ended up acquiescing to some idiot pretending to be Nintendo. There was a lot of back and forth over links and domains and whether 'Nintendo' outsourced their legal department to chase down mario models (to which I say, given they're currently targetting that teraleak idiot, you're a goddamn fool), but in reality, it's just that garry is a stubborn jackass who got away with it because the dude got rich over a mod.
So naturally, wouldn't you want to move to a platform where you couldn't have your things taken down? These were her constant questions around the time of this. Generally April 2024, which was a year ago, roughly, as of writing this post.
The problem is simply that people take things for granted. But also, it's not simply that everyone on the internet is an idiot and she's correct. She's wrong on plenty of things, and this is yet another part of that.
The nature of the Steam Workshop was that besides the front-end, everything functioned succinctly and understandable to a bunch of people who quite frankly did not deserve the amount of patience I had to put up with in regards to anything I had to do there. To the end user, you just had to click subscribe, and suddenly, there was that model, or that map, or that addon, for immediate use and consumption. This was despite that several models had terms and conditions. In the cases of bugs, some were reasonable, and I would often go out of my way to attempt providing at least images if not a proper description.
For instance, it's a minor thing, but the Charmy Bee model from RandomTBush's pack had one of its wings caught on a certain threshold of its physics, making it very hard to pose. Nobody had noticed this quirk, because many people don't use the physgun for posing since Ragdoll Mover suffices for most people (if I see another A-pose inkling though I will scream). A simple image from a top down perspective and a description was all that was needed and RTB would update the pack. I would like to hope that simple cordiality was how all interactions occurred, but definitely not.
I don't want to list my entire set of grievances with the Splatoon community here as much of it is made clear in the fact I dropped that platform in 2022 and then basically completely in 2024, because while I was making things, the majority of people who understood what I was making and why were absolute lunatics. Not everybody; it's dangerous to make such wide sweeping assumptions especially when I've been the target of such unnecessary slander before (and I've made this argument before in retaliation. I've been placed on pedestals for being a model child and it turned me off all manner of fame and fortune, so that's particularly dangerous to do), but a significant portion of people. I respect the quiet ones. It's usually the loud ones who don't read that I'm referring to. The ones who impulsively chuck themselves into the comment section because walls of text are impossible for them. I'm sorry for your mis-laiden childhood, but you're meant to be a teenager minimum. Please pick up some books for heck's sake.
Nobody's going to use a platform if the platform in question has a reputation or various other things that need dismantling. Especially if you're 'everything but one' like Qortal is. It is a blockchain. It is a currency. It's also an internet... that nobody uses, is ultra slow as a result, and therefore useless for most people unless an audience of detached 30-50 year olds~ (average) fits your style. Quite frankly, I'm caught in the inbetween.
I coined that from this by the way. he didn't finish this cause he grew up and tried to pretend he was a woman. quite frankly, i can't stand men who do that. so it's poignant. multiplied.
this is coming from a stint of pessimism where it's a giant game of grasping at straws. the world's hysteric at point. My discerning now has to come from fractures of different places because someone will make sense, and another won't.
i think this is how you make a heading, pokemon a go
I wanted to make this blog because i recently finished a playthrough of Pokemon Ultra Moon. I initially didn't buy it, and I played a pirated copy anyhow. This isn't some admission done for surrender, I don't even really care.
First of all, the story is completely butchered. I played sun and moon (both, multiple playthroughs) when it released. I was more drawn to moon version, but the sly bastards had to give people a reason to buy sun so they put frickin vulpix in the sun version and left snowshrew (goddamn why is it called sand it's particled water wtf), in moon. that's the only reason i bought both, was cause i wanted to name my own damn vulpix. ultra came out literally a year later and i saw it for the obvious cashgrab it was, and avoided it.
I still think dexit is a lazy coverup effort to obfuscate the absolute sheer lack of effort they wish to put into these games. The designs are suffering as a result, even if I can put up with them now, there's an obvious shift to where they love shoving 'gimmicks' onto mons that really don't deserve it. Morpeko has to look like a beanbag, for instance. Blipbug has that stupid thin appearance. Rookidee looks like someone made a grievous mesh error, and even if that's the joke, god damn I hate it.
Gen 9's full of a few bits of this too. The Pawmi line is a literal getting bigger, Scovillain's leaves look unfinished, Bellibolt's dumb eyes (the 'eyes' are the same gimmick as Rookidee, the real 'eyes' on it are the dots that look like nostrils, do you feel proud yet?).
You can put up with this, but now it feels like we can't get certain Pokemon without caveats. Flamingo? It's a balloon pool toy. Dolphin? It's just a literal dolphin. I have grievances with Komala being a literal koala too btw, even if I can put up with and appreciate all of these Pokemon for different reasons, it feels like I have to wait for the 'stint' because they can't be creative anymore.
It's confirmed that there are people in the company who do this shit because it's 'funny' or it garners a reaction. To say nothing of how quick Wooloo, Lechonk and the long mons (which they keep making) blew up on social media and then died only to resurface when they do them again and again. Quirks like Oshawott's whiskers or Luxray's mane being 'shorter' don't actually affect that many people. But it's starting to feel like Pokemon come out unfinished, especially when they hold themselves to such ridiculous restrictions that they can't even make a flying Eevee evolution because the fans have drawn 20 thousand pictures of one or something.
It makes me long for the days when we'd get actually cute Pokemon. Not experiments like Meowscarada who was manufactured to be easy bait for people to body pillow (leave the rest to your imagination), but, like, actual winners. Even within the recent gens. I like Flittle a lot, I know, shocking, I'm a girl and I like the dainty frilly Pokemon. But funnily enough, and I don't quite know if this one was meant for me either, I like Glimmet a lot too. Glimmora feels too gimmicky (haha, what if it's bigger) but I like Glimmet a lot. Just a spooky little crystal flower whose perspective changes how it looks. There are a few from gen 8 who I genuinely think are great too, Dreepy, Indeedee (both of them), the Impidimp and Hattena lines, Toxel's whole line, Applin's line and Gossifleur's line are some of the Pokemon I have virtually zero issue with.
It's hard to say that I 'have issues with' because I like to consider that even the gimmick mons with their gimmicks are liked because of their gimmicks in some form or fashion and so sitting here makes me feel like a curmudgeon, oh nobody's allowed to have fun because I bought Pokemon at 11 years old (by purchasing an illegal cart and then mooching off my friend, being real, cause the only thing i 'bought' were books) and so that makes me the sole judge on how people should enjoy pokemon. But it makes me long for the days when actually cute mons existed. I'm a huge sucker for the small cute mons, it's why I'm writing my story, cause in the main games, everybody only ever talks about the final evolutions. Only they matter. There are eviolite tiers, but it's all competitive and I suck at competitive play. I just like playing with my blobs. I know, shocking, I'm a woman.
But when you're making these mons for supposedly 'people like me' it starts to feel a bit tired when people online hyper-react in such a manner that makes me look 50 years older. Smoliv, for instance, or Lechonk, where it was all gooing and gaaahing over essentially giant spheres. I like giant spheres. But does it warrant that kind of reaction? I literally said above I like Flittle, and that also is a giant sphere if you squint (well i mean it's 20cm officially or something, but shut up) but I wasn't ogling like I just passed (what doesn't need to be said really) or something.
PMD used to be an outlet for me where the smaller mons could be more powerful. In case you don't know, PMD doesn't use the stats system of the main games. When Pokemon gain stats, there's an upper cap. Some Pokemon are better than others in terms of efficiency, it's going to take longer to level a Zigzagoon as opposed to your main Pokemon because the game is designed to be played with the normal starter Pokemon, but theoretically, all Pokemon at stats of 255 can be at the same power level, it's just a matter of moveset at that point. Which is why they lock evolving to post-game, actually, because functionally evolution serves no benefit in the main PMD games. You gain a hard cap of stats, but as I said earlier, that's meaningless. The items that up your EVs in the main games, the vitamins, just up and raise your stat completely in these games. Even at level 100, your stats can go all the way up to 255. You'll be oneshotting things by the way well before you hit 255 and when you're max-levelled. Unevolved too.
And don't at me about Super Mystery Dungeon, those are specific story sequences and they actually hijack your stats to make the fight easier. When you evolve, it's actually kind of a scam; the benefits don't actually match the scripted sequence at all. So in actuality, you're kinda screwed. That request (to have evolved mons in the main games) birthed out of ignorance, btw.
I don't just mean this because no more PMD games are being made. I don't want any more PMD games. Having one locked behind microtransactions or missing half the Pokemon bothers the absolute crap out of me. I'd rather way until fans have stopped ogling over sugimori's palette to make sprites than wait for TPCi to make a half-baked Gates at best in the current day, because that's where they're headed if they do something like that.
I like Gates, btw. I've played it. It has issues, including in its story, but it's an enjoyable experience when you put stipulations on it. Otherwise, god damn I do not want a repeat. I don't envy the folks wanting a remake, because while I get your grievances, I'd be hesitant in assuming they'll fix every issue in the current day. We could even be looking at BDSP level of laziness in regards to its issues, where they're the bare minimum nobody understands.
Let me create the theoretical gates out of mustache twirling (my tiny hairs that keep reminding i once pretended to be a mario by enacting them into existence, i guess), using the bare minimum of the most common complaints.
No dex? Well, just put the rest of the unova dex in. That's all people care about, right? Otherwise, the only others in the game are related to story NPCs. Therefore they kinda don't count.
One mission a day? easily solved
Text speed? sped up
but what about the issues people don't mention? Paradise at maximum benefit to the dojos with no other hacks applied to the game only provides about a third to your move metre. the cap is set at such a stupid range that nothing in the game will touch you by level 4 or 5 for any given move provided it's not something weak like Water Gun or Vine Whip, but some people like myself dislike the absolute heck out of incomplete bars. Not to mention nothing about the fact that some days it'll randomise maybe... two thirds of the bar instead, for no discernable reason.
The less said about that one shop that's entirely a scam that just disappears if you use it or not the better actually.
To say nothing of moving facilities, which nobody has mentioned. Renovating over a plot of land is a giant headache. You have to walk to the thing, dismantle it, and then rebuild it with the same materials, and the same upgrades, and the paintjob, all separately. To say nothing of the dialogue when you get a new shop being literally exactly the same for every single Pokemon. I too dislike when localisers drive to meme country (Super's full of it, actually), but this is the opposite extreme. I feel like I'm manufacturing robots with these idiots. And I was hacking the heck out of it to make the system faster than it actually was, to be fair, but I feel like I would have noticed this even on a slower playthrough, which I have, so it's not simply 'i cheated the game so i cheated myself' there's no benefit to THE EXACT SAME TEXT BOX every time you create a new shop. Goddamn I envy how the Japanese can put up with robots (I don't, I pity their existence every day)
What about the great glacier cutscene where the localisers gave up and then had all the characters in the scene repeat words in it over and over again? I'm actually going to link the video because I think it's important to showcase how utterly maniacal these loons think 5 year olds were going to put up with, because this is atrocious.
https://youtu.be/8gTKB3OnWgY?si=nB3StEya5so5GIYz&t=2711
and yes because i know people can't read a youtube link, the '&ti' part means i literally set it to the exact time so you're not waiting through all the garbage of the contrivance of the HAPPI portion. bureaucratics. watch til about three minutes, it is just nonsensical idiotic repetition of the same three words. No person speaks like this. It plagues all of anime, and it's why i largely don't watch it anymore.
I was recently at a family gathering, where I was internally surprised to hear my 15 year old cousin admit the exact same thing. To remind oneself, at her age, I practically gave up on serialised anime myself in practically every form, but she's grown up in an age where it is ruthlessly shoved down her throat, and she's basically a normie. To abstain from it is a personal decision. Her younger brother, btw, has pivoted to reading audiobooks of the traditional things. I can't claim to know what they're into, but I make the point to understand that to relatively normal people, the 'anime' way of speaking is unnatural and shouldn't be localised in this manner. Even if I love and appreciate Gates for touching on certain themes, those are buried under a myriad of surface-level gleanings of its storyline off the internet, and otherwise, it's nonsense like this?
And by the way, the man in the video (who played the game) also decided to pretend he thought he was a woman as well. The other one... I don't know what happened to him. He doesn't have a handle. I assume he's either tolerant or something else. I can't claim to know.
BDSP did things like that too. There's the Fairy type and its associated berry, but it's otherwise just an upscaled DP using their source code (and therefore replicating the glitches) just with a questionable, unfinished art style (not completely stylistically inclined, given how some pokemon do not scale correctly. just make them rumble models or something).
This was about me talking about why i made this and it pivoted into three tangents, help me this blogpost will be long.
I recently finished Ultra Sun and Moon. The AI cheats in that game. The only reason people suggest it is because the AI is primed to attack its most common counters, and so the majority of the second half of the game was me heal-spamming mons because I came in woefully unprepared. Most of the time their stats are several levels above where they would be in other games, making it more of a challenge to actually win each fight. Keep in mind, I'm not a Nuzlocker. I choose to respect people who make their own rulesets, but I actually don't mind the cheese. I will be angry when it's something like 'removing set because nobody uses it' because I just think that's skeevy by default. I've repeatedly used the EXP share and the likes in the past. Granted, only Lusamine gave me any difficulty as a result in base sun and moon, on my initial playthrough (of moon, because I played that first as my primary edition), but I liked it that way. Originally, I was planning to use the mons I'd transferred (about 12 save file's worth, with most of those boxes filled almost to full) in future titles as team fodder. In Moon, my initial issue was that I didn't like having to run around in grass for 5% or 10% mons like Jangmo-o (my favourite pseudo) to spawn, so if I could transfer my Pokemon to future games to use as team filler, I could experiment a bit. Get the 'simple' mons, and then cheese through the game using older mons to see how they really work out. Not all were level 100, most were catches cause I was bored one afternoon making a story about how dawn the red stone found a starly and caught it to save it from a devastating injury or some shit and now it just sits in the box. If I delete it, it goes into the ether. That doesn't sound fun.
But then game freak went screw you and now that's no longer a guarantee. There's other things I dislike too, how desaturated the textures are compared to merchandising (where curious, they do not use the sugimori colours despite comprising the majority of pokemon's profit margins). I will walk in an average shopping centre, with crane machines, and I will see Pokemon plushes almost every time. Rarely there's another in case it's some other kids movie that needs promotion, like when sonic 3 came out I saw a couple of sonics and shadows and knuckles. But almost every time, it's Pokemon, with some rare kirbies shoved in there (plural, do not ask me where the hell they're getting all the colours from for these guys, it's probably some bootleg stuff i wish i could sigh at)
and every time, they're not using sugimori colours. Anime colours only. Not pink cheek pikachu.
Yet you will have purists insist that because sugimori drew some pet piece of art (which btw, I hated in 2005 when i first opened the pokemon website as a youngin) that it's sacrilege to demand they actually look a little bit brighter. pikachu is allowed to have pink cheeks because some idiot will misinterpret the art to such a degree that it actually affects how they look. This is the current lot spriting the mystery dungeon sprites for the collaborative project btw, and the only reason they don't touch the old pokemon is due to effort, outside of egregious cases like bulbasaur (the skin being entirely green like its shiny) where duh no one's gonna contest it needs a change, but they'll waste effort on slight tints over the 200 or so pokemon and their shinies who still don't have sprites at ALL.
Pokemon's biggest media franchise tagline comes from the merchandise. Otherwise it's invisible. The games don't contribute to it. The show doesn't contribute to it. The cards maybe provide a little tiny smidge of support towards it, but even with how those get sold, I don't imagine they're selling. No it's the stuff that's everywhere under your nose. Pokemon plushes were routinely being sold in Coles and Woolies for a while. Pokemon toys, the plastic figure kind, have been routinely sold in capsules repeatedly for decades (that's how I found out about them; a small Skitty bobblehead figure from a $2 capsule machine was my gateway into Pokemon at 6 years old. it sits in front of me at my desk, its tail is missing and its feet are chipped, but it's still in good condition). I have a notebook and a pencil case of Pikachu not because I bought them, but as a gift about a decade ago from family members who knew I was into Pokemon (back when I appreciated it and didn't have nearly as many issues with it). To say nothing of the egregious amounts of keychains and lifestyle products, as well as all the deals they do these days. Pokemon is a lifestyle brand now. They do not subsist off the games. They could get rid of the games department tomorrow entirely, and Pokemon would still coast by. The games do not sell for Pokemon, even with the fact SWSH and SV were the highest selling games on the system. How many people around me in real life are going to notice the 70/80 dollar game versus a $5 crane machine toy attached to an IP that everyone recognises? Pokemon subsists off of the merchandise. They just keep the games around because they're Japanese, and they love sticking to tradition. That's all it is, people. It's just sticking to tradition.
This is why they've taken all funds out of the spin-off games, because those sold even less than the mainline titles, and only did them out of goodwill or some other reason (Detective Pikachu was in development since the 3DS's death i think). Mobile games are crack for these companies.
I don't want to get in that. It's a whole bunch of tired 'oh but they're not catering to me and they're moving on' stuff that I don't want to wax on about. What I do, however, is an equivalent child, roughly, anyway, to my cousin I mentioned above who doesn't watch serialised anime anymore (she still watches ghibli (bligh wtf autocorrect?) but that's like saying you've watched disney, for normies it's perfectly serviceable).
I pity this young girl because she's still obviously nagivating her place in this sorry state of affairs we call the internet. Some admins in a server harassed her for not playing gen 5 (if she's 15, that game came out before or while she was being born) of Pokemon and therefore not being qualified to give an opinion on it (to which i say poo, i've not played any of the first three gens of pokemon but i have plenty to say of the functionality in any of those, that argument is so tired) and while i was disparaging 8 for its own reasons, with heavy emphasis i was criticising the game and the company's decisions, that it has nothing to do with the pokemon ultimately (even the ones i mentioned above, I can put up with the decisions because i'm a functioning adult who can ultimately just whatever these things, it's more the general trend that upsets me rather than individual choices), then she comes out with honestly the stupidest thing that could be said, even considering she is an extremely young child.
It's the same as always, why are you a fan if you can't claim to literally be the living definition of the thing. If you don't consume the whole thing, you aren't a real fan.
I feel like this is just internalising the aforementioned bullying I mentioned, which actual adults were recommending her she reconsider given it's likely whoever was pressuring her didn't have their best intentions in mind (I don't exactly think a well-rounded opinion on a game is obtained by bullying someone into playing something they don't want to). Given this girl's relatively passive behaviour, she seems very reliant on others to form her opinion. Now I stress, consensus has its place, obviously, but I'm talking in the sense she has no internal compass for when things go wrong. It results in glossification like this where she basically comes off as indignant when she really isn't, this is genuine curiosity, but I'm afraid to engage this, and the conversation basically ended there when this occurred because there was no way in the span of a few discord messages that I would be able to thoroughly explain to this child why what she's saying utterly reeks of insecurity.
This is cherry-picked, granted, but the only thing I left out from her was an insistence to end the conversation, a repetition on the first sentence, (why do you not like the main part of pokemon, how can you call yourself a pokemon fan, basically) and then asking why i was in a pokemon server about pokemon if i have grievances with pokemon. Yes, she is a young teenager. That's exactly why I can't respond, it's like talking to a 2 year old, she just wouldn't get it.
For those that do, this is why I'm making this blog post. Partly to test my writing, partly to vent, but also because I was denied the chance speaking to essentially a toddler (she's a young teenager, so she's allowed on the platform, but she has the maturity of someone five years younger than her when it comes to confrontations and I dearly hope she pulls herself out soon) and because it concerns several of my core points of why I'm making my story.
Being a Fan of something doesn't mean you have to like literally everything
Pokemon is a several figure franchise. If space is such a thing that the closest star makes your brain short circuit the distance before you get there (and by the way, it's not even real so that probably blows up harder), then trying to fathom Pokemon's heights will destroy you, and it doesn't even come close to a star in the sky (supposedly....)
If you can't fathom just how much goes into Pokemon, then just on the most logical of basis, I hope you could understand why her point elicits so much amusement out of my mouth even bringing this up. This is why she feels like a five year old, these concepts don't register to her at all.
I want to make this less about her and more the general sentiment, because arguments on the internet feel like trying to correct the obvious rather than actual.... discussion. I've established on my internet presence plenty, on steam, on youtube, on twitter, when I was on them, that I've loved Pokemon for a long time. Deeply. As I mentioned above, gateway drug skitty was 6 years old. It's not alone either, and I don't just mean the family memoirs. Mcdonalds toys with plastic figures and spinning tops still lie in my boxes somewhere. The Seel figure was a gift from my friend at school. These things don't spontaneously get forgotten, when I make my statements about why Pokemon; they're reinforced because of my love for the franchise. Nobody sets out to hate anything unless they're spurred to for attention or some other motivator. Hate or dislike (because I'd be hard pressed to call it 'hate' when I can't even claim to be passionate about it anymore, wordcount aside) can come from love. This is obviously a concept she has yet to understand because mentally she's the kind of child who should spend more time offline learning these basic social constructs. Coming from the self-aggrandising idiot I was in my youth who constantly pushed everyone away because I selfishly only cared about myself, that probably doesn't sound like much. I agree.
For years I had to wonder because this kept happening repeatedly and keeps happening with things I like. Sonic stopped writing well, and when they attempted swivelling back, something still felt off. Something still felt wrong. I wasn't excited. Not because someone told me not to be excited, but by the time I'd waited for what I wanted, I didn't want it anymore.
Pokemon turns around and gets rid of all of the Pokemon being in every game. The quality plummets. But Pokemon exist on the internet, and I can just research everything I need without buying the games or even pirating them (it's not a morality issue, I hate modern emulators and trying to set them up, and I don't think the games are worth playing even illegitimately, that's just my personal opinion).
Splatoon was going great... until they drip-fed the currency in the third game to the point it got me banned officially for what truly is my own fault, but mostly because I'd given up on trying to work with the good will of other people who'd stopped giving a damn. Fission used to praise me for being able to follow the key nonsense with the first wave of the switch stuff. I literally remember a time where we played salmon run, and I was just reciting stuff I'd read off gbatemp and it flummoxed even him on how it all worked. It was something basic; you just jam metal into the switch joycon (i alternated between a screwdriver and later a jig because i couldn't bend a paperclip to get it to work with the precise movements i wanted) and it was some nonsense about compatibility programs and the levels and layers needed to decrypt files, and he was basically astounded. By the way, I still know nothing on how you're supposed to make enhanced models (besides the subdivide button but nothing else) so I put that point in for comparison.
I'd stopped buying video games after 2022 basically completely, only for the switch 2 direct to be complete garbage (mario kart's too). Games now cost 120 dollars, with the only significant feature upgrade in mario kart's case being a big fat advertisement for mcdonalds (there's irony in my typing this which will matter to solely me), and the console itself costs more than the wii (which i've asked several times only to receive the same point every time of 'it was $500 for the console' which doesn't split hairs at all given we bought four wiimotes AND a game on top of that so in reality it's more like 350 maybe) only for the sake of menu clutter (there's like 100 pages and it's all the fucking costumes which is just so disgusting you're lucky i'm not vomiting on the fuckin keyboard). mario kart would've looked fine... if it wasn't overconvoluted to crap. there's a jump button... but the cape will also make you jump. i love redundancy.
oh and commuting lessons in mario kart being a thing now there're no menu transitions between courses. free roam is nice and all, you know, but the world map is nonsensical in biomes as always (ah, japan and your ignorance to climate, size and scope, indeed surely this won't bite you in the ass when you re-add the real-world locations) and the mulling around just looks dull.
it's stuff like the billboard where they put all the racers in front of it that really makes me go wry. Look guys, it's mario kart. you can play as all the characters you'd hope to play in mario kart (jesus why were 10 seconds of that trailer wasted to tell us we could play as mario? god damnit it's MARIO KART i'd hope i'd be able to play as mario jesus). it's mario kart. we've made it so fancy you're going to loathe driving between tracks, but we assure you it's mario krat. now cough up fourty extra bucks for some new items, the removal of menu transitions, a few qol things and the metric ton of model work and menu space to implement all of the new characters.
after you give us your life savings for the console.
let me put it succinctly, of how much money i make, the switch 2 currently costs at least the significant majority of it. I don't want to be making any specific targets, but I'm talking just the console, without the game. Then on top of that, you're asking for a fourty dollar increase for essentially a dlc upgrade.
I stopped buying video games in 2022 mostly because I'd run the song and dance. It's not that I don't play games, it's just I've tired of all the goddamn gallivanting I have to do for 'status points.' I don't play nothing, it's basically close to nothing, but it's not nothing at all. I do still play MD sometimes, and otherwise, I'm mostly just experimenting and tinkering in the background the way I've always done.
I mostly either appreciate things from a distance because I have the internet, or I still have old games, or likewise.
Assuming this girl's logical position, then I don't like these franchises. And she'd be right, because I don't. Principally, I hate the directions most of them have turned, and therefore at face value, I don't appreciate them at all.
But in truth, the matter is more complicated than that. It's the same reason diehards defend the reason they buy these games, these games made an impression once upon a time. That reason may have been lost to time, but those form such long-lasting connections that it's easy to prey upon them. A friend may have played with you, or recommended the game. Sometimes it was a gift from a family member, and you self-motivated yourself to appreciate it on its own merits. I'm hardly scraping the surface, and there's no shortage of 'what' exactly can motivate someone to stick to a brand. It could be these things in tandem, or even more. Disney straight up manipulates it these days precisely because they know they can get away with it, and Nintendo is knowingly pivoting in their direction because it works.
That's what I'm doing with Pokemon right now. I engage with it as a merchandise franchise because as it's trying to sell merchandise rather than sell functional games, I decide to go where the money's flowing. It makes such a little difference to me, and it isn't even significantly contributing to the games anyway, not that I'd buy them even to look at the box. They just suck.
Outside of buying the odd plush here or there (which is not that often, i assure you), i'm solely engaging with fan works. I don't play mainline rom hacks, but PMDO has been in development for a while. I'm pretty comfortable playing that whenever I need a PMD fix. I've even set it up with my own sprites since some sprites have gotten much needed overhauls (Sprigatito, Noibat) but didn't get shinies when ones already exist for their old sprites, so I just took those and chucked them in after 20 minutes faffing about in photoshop. god it's tedious.
And since I'm making my own... well it's like a craftsmanship thing. Besides, other people are making their own interpretations, good and bad, and I like seeing what people come up with. Within reason, there are some things I can't stand and I refuse to mention them here.
I used to be the scoffer, like, 'how would there be enough people to make things worth a damn that aren't obviously fan made' but you can't say that about Pokemon anymore. Next year, the franchise turns 30. 10 year olds who played the original games will enter their fourth decade, to say nothing of those older than them, or even younger. I'm approaching 30 in a couple of years. When I was 11, everyone played Pokemon, which was late 00s, not Pokemania. This stuff endures. It lapses and rises with the mood. There's a healthy supply of content if you don't obsess with status symbols.
There's also the saying 'be the change you want to see in the world' if you're dissatisfied.
To be fair, in the conversation, I probably could've stood to be less abrasive. But I'd assumed I was within a contingent of adults, most of whom expressed similar sentiments in the past with zero issue, even if we fundamentally disagreed. They bought and played the new games. I have no issue with people who choose to buy the new games, even if I'm an old woman waving her fist at clouds at the same time. It's not something I have to set out and change, not that I could do so anyway.
But to insinuate my tone was anything resembling hate is overblowing it. Ultra Moon exhausted me. I simply attempted a playthrough up until Rainbow Rocket, because I'd heard so much goodwill from gameplay enthusiasts on how good it is and how regular sun and moon are nothing. After a while, I just decided I'd look up bulbapedia for the rainbow rocket section because the trainers were so tiring. It would always be one or two pokemon after an egregiously long section of running through hallways while the localisers attempt being funny so as to make it bearable (to which i say thank god and i pity you).
one of the bosses, cyrus, had a houndoom. the wiki listed its ability as early bird, but its ability was actually flash fire, and this irritated me. I have no idea if it's the same in ultra sun, but I would wager that it might be, I haven't checked.
I was using a magmortar, you see, with the moves flamethrower, fire punch, rock slide and earthquake. Dark's only weaknesses are Ghost, Fighting, Fairy and Bug. My only ghost type was Decidueye, which doesn't work well with all the fire, ice and flying in the array (and the fact it's slow). My only fairy and bug type was a Ribombee, and Houndoom is part fire, the others part flying or ice, and I was saving him for Palkia, who's part dragon. Its only moves were surf, thunderbolt and earth power, which were all neutrally effective on it. part of my strategy was to use magmortar primarily to rock slide since both houndoom and honchkrow were weak to it, knocking both out. crobat would also falter to rock slide, and weavile had no moves that would otherwise damage magmortar in any significant capability. I got houndoom to like, 1hp, and since I needed every drop of rock slide (since the secondary types were mostly weak to it, it hit both opponents and it was fairly powerful), and I didn't want to waste earthquake on such a miniscule amount of hp, i decided i'd use flamethrower/fire punch to deliver the final blow, but it got absorbed. To say nothing of how these games lack documentation, normally they're thorough about this. For me to have to fix this mistake... it speaks volumes.
https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/w/index.php?title=Team_Rocket%27s_Castle&diff=prev&oldid=4234993
I was otherwise alternating the partner between a lopunny who knew a fighting move (also to counter basically everyone but weavile, but magmortar wasn't going to have trouble with that one) and an ice move (for the flyings), and a magnezone who was eletrifying all the part flyings with discharge whenever magmortar wasn't going to be able to rock slide or something. all were generally favourable given natures and the fact of it being a relatively casual playthrough, physically oriented pokemon got physical moves outside of rare exceptions to cover the type chart.
the entire game, thoughever, i was experimenting with a mod that allowed you to carry the pc everywhere so i could experiment with more pokemon. by god, playing through it with the ai in that game is exhausting. there's one double battle in particular on the beach route on the third island where you fight two trainers after obtaining the sharpedo. They both use frillish. The gimmick of the battle is that they're constantly using surf, and because both of them have water absorb, they're healing themselves for the entire battle. The entire game operates as if the battle tower ai was turned on for every semi-decent trainer in the game, and it's so exhausting. At this point, my magnezone was still a magneton with only thunderbolt, which doesn't hit both pokemon, and I was running an eevee at this point. By god, it was exhausting that every battle essentially had to be a giant planning game. I don't fault those who genuinely enjoyed the 'challenge' factor of the ai not being pushovers the way they otherwise are... but it's so tiring to play the game like that all the time. it took me at least 3 weeks to finish the game and i was so tired at the end of it, the date i edited was at least a day or two before I stopped.
At best, I was mildly miffed. The game is fun. It has a lot packed into it. People can find things to enjoy in it. Its story feels like a parody itself and none of the decisions make any sense outside of a censorship context (by having everyone criticise lusamine's decisions as if she's the same character from s/m but then proceeding to do nothing with how utterly nothing her character is in THIS game), but i like the new pokemon. I like the cool forms. i like alola even if functionally about 70% of the game was the same as s/m the slow progression of it turning into something entirely different was mildly amusing, but like i said, the story is trash and garbage, so these were just minor things. The sheer variety of pokemon that i got to experiment with in this game from many of the gens was absolutely sublime; i limited myself to pokemon i would solely find in this playthrough alone, and for the kicker, i put in a mod to make everything shiny just to spice things up a little since shiny colours always felt ignored. Helped me look at certain mons in a slightly different way too, even if the cheese factor might upset some people (I'd already played base sun/moon as a set, and this was fundamentally the same game. i'm allowed to experiment, i wasn't planning on trading any of these guys anyway, they're to stay locked in the playpen).
So my disparaging my playthrough has nothing to do with overall metrics. It was an experiment mainly because I've historically avoided battle towers and the like because I'd prefer it to be part of a normal 'playthrough' so since I'd heard so much about how the gameplay of this one was so riveting I decided I'd dip my toes and tailor it to my liking. Like I said, the only mods I ran were to allow the PC to sit in the options menu, and shinies. No 1 hit kills or anything, basically a standard playthrough but with a different skin and some minor qol because having to run back to a pokemon centre to train a couple dudes is time i don't have.
Onto her second point, which is mainly that if it's not an outright 'i hate everything about pokemon' then she'd understand. oh boy, reading comprehension. you're about 10 steps behind.
look for those who don't get it the answer is a resounding yes
It's complicated. Of course I hate things about it. But those bits of hate aren't driven by needless rage broiling within. I'm simply tired. It's pattern recognition. An issue happens. It doesn't get addressed. It worsens.
The answer is a resounding, 'yes, i do hate everything about pokemon' but it has nothing to do with wanting to be a contrarian. it's also a big 'no, holy hell, i do not hate everything about pokemon' because i have personal attachments that keep me within fanspaces to keep on the creativity that has long since been missing from long-burnt out artists looking for a paycheck.
Ultimately, within this context, though, it is a no, because if you can't claim to hate something completely, then you're not a hater. Needless haters are tiring. Let's put it that way. It's so tiring, i don't even want to put words to explain how tired i am.
I'm agreeing with her sentiment, as well as the obvious insinuation that if you do hate pokemon entirely, why would you spend effort deriding the thing you hate. yeah. why indeed...
this is partly why this'll be multiple parts because god hell do i ramble and i'm probably gonna have to talk about webkinz tomorrow. maybe this'll be for the better. i dunno. maybe it'll never happen.
but it's the last one that really gets me with what i mentioned about the fanspaces.
the notion you can only like something if you only ever engage with the 'official' content
i want to make merchandise someday. maybe when i'm older. maybe it'll never happen. but it's a desire.
in high school i made a project that would form the basis of something i'd take out of school. only drawings have been posted, and the idea's taken on multiple forms since. i'm not willing to be specific. it's not obscure though. or at least, i haven't put it on a site you don't know me on. it's not on qortal. trust me, it's on the normal internet.
let's say i make some drastic redesign about.... 5 years into the project. the fans i've cultivated who enjoy the original iteration now have a limited stock of that original thing i made, and so value of it goes up because it's a limited edition item. makes sense.
now let's say, that because i'm the creator, that means nobody else is allowed to make any thing i've made, original or new, because i own the thing, and that means no derivatives. no fan art, no fan 'creations' and every single thing gets dmca'd.
how many customers do you think i'd retain?
the answer should be supremely obvious to anyone with any logical capabilities, even considering nintendo's litigious nature in the past in relation to fangames and fanprojects, even those created for 'free.' People create false notions that pirating isn't pirating if you own an official copy, or you back it up from your own copy and then share it. Fun fact, those aren't actually ways to avoid it being piracy! You're just making excuses for yourself. own up to it and stop pussyfooting around the subject.
the real answer, is that's up to one's own personal moral compass, just as in terms of 'unofficial customers'
now i'm on the side that i think many of nintendo's attacks on things like palworld, even considering my opinions on it (i haven't played it and i'm on the side of knowing they're plenty derivative on purpose), are utter scum. But the notion that engaging with them means you're a criminal or 'lesser' of a fan... it's a murky tide.
I don't like bootleg plushes or bootleg merchandise. Many old bootlegs I've bought are starting to wane in softness because of their age and lack of quality. But plenty of official plushes have that issue too, just on a lesser scale. (usually the ones sold in america)
it circles back around to this, especially because that's partially why I'm writing my story, in a way. People are outsourcing their responsibility and morality to people who have zero thought or concept of their well-being. It may be just a silly little misinformed girl who speaks another language one day, but the next day, it's censorship. The day after, it's a site getting taken down, and then misinformation being spread. Another day, people are killed and then false messages are sent out. I'm not saying one needs to be entirely self-reliant and listen to nobody, but outsource too much, and you're just a vessel for others to inhabit.
part of the reason i'm writing my story is because i tried explaining my opinion to multiple people. strangers on the internet. my best friend from school. my family who all lives multitudes of distances away from me. nothing worked to get people to even see a fraction of the logical fallacies that underpin our entire world. not even the whole thing, because some people some days will willingly engage in a conversation that will swerve one way towards thinking differently, but it's like a rubber band, it snaps right back into form, and slowly it cracks away. I'm so tired of rubber bands, but when the people who aren't rubber bands have their own form of rubber bands... it's a very lonely existence.
i'm done trying to 'convince' people, but I don't want to self-internalise every single lesson I've ever learned. this story is basically my outlet for the things i see that no other pmd fic addresses. I've seen it, they all get really close, but then it's another snag, another hiccup.
You need some manner of discerning to survive in this world. I pity that poor girl, because she's so young (mentally) that trying to explain this concept to her is like trying to explain the concept of a different web browser to my grandfather, it's an exercise in futility in sincerity. Best to just answer as succinctly as possible for maximum comfort. he's coming to visit in 4 days for another week by the way. damn harassers trying to take the money from a house they practically sacked him with. seriously, that thing stank and there were multiple issues. they're denser than he is.
especially when your status is as shallow as 'i only consume official pokemon media so that makes me a pokemon fan'
and that's fine. there's plenty of those out there. and i pity whoever was bullying you to play gen 5 with death threats (seriously wtf). sounds like a bunch of equally dense folks from my vantage point.
tomorrow i'll talk about webkinz. maybe maybe not.
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