Last time,
With that battle finished, it’s time for pokemon battles.
Guess what the prize is.
YOU WILL FALL BEFORE ME.
It’s odd beating all of them in a single go is entirely optional – you can walk away to heal at any time, although they ask if you’re getting tired as if they assume you’ll try to go through in one go. But they could just mean in general, since even if it’s business as usual for the player, it should be impressive to beat five people even if you’re healed each time.
Probably it’s just that it’d be hard to code it so you couldn’t avoid them. And also, most of the game design is based around the idea that you’ll retreat and heal when necessary, and it’s this that helps make the game have a wider range of difficulty. I usually made it a point to beat them all in one go just because.
Mankey’s sprite will never not look weird to me. Look at it!
For the record, the entry for nidorino doesn’t say anything specifying the male of the species, just as the entry for nidoranM failed to.
Because he gives you this initially, you can repeat this battle to collect them, but it’s not like it’s particularly necessary to do so.
Sure!
Yup!
Why no dialogue option?
As I mentioned at the very start, the player’s avatar really isn’t a straight avatar and it’s his personality that informs a lot of the non-fighting interactions you have with the world. (Come to think of it, it’s surprising how you have almost complete power within the framework of battling, rather than being told you won’t do stuff like throw pokeballs at trainer pokemon. The only exception is being unable to run, which can easily be seen as something imposed on you by the other trainer.)
I didn’t really want to join Team Rocket – like so many people my initial run through any game is the good one, and besides, they suck. But I resent the choice being blocked off.
And, of course, this is a game people played over and over again. I remember much discussion about an alternate storyline where you did join Team Rocket, although no one had any idea how you’d actually play it. I think there was also the unfairness of not being able to really engage with a lot of the world – you can’t sell pokemon, for one thing.
How can you be in full uniform if you look like a regular sprite? How does that even work?
And what would that entail, I wonder.
The Team Rocket guy doesn’t seem to be absconding. The other trainers are still there as well and it’s not clear if they’re dupes or working for Team Rocket but just with the sense not to wear a uniform when undercover. Luckily there’s a police officer nearby!
Okay fine, what about that suspicious looking guy in the backyard? If you won’t budge from the house, could you at least stand in the back rather than the front?
Sometimes it’s hard to care that Team Rocket is trampling over everyone. They’re a nation of idiots.
Well. That’s all for the bridge. The trainers will remain for the rest of the game to make it annoying to walk across here, and that’s all.
…So, you were scared of the trainers on the bridge, then you saw me take them all out, and then for some reason you decided to fight me? People in this world are nuts.
This also suggests that the whole thing was only just set up. Did Gary run the game gauntlet? Did they let trainers go by in the other direction, or does the first trainer hand out nuggets and a job offer as well?
The mew glitch relies on this guy. We’re not doing that this time, though! I got my mew by a legitimate trade with someone who had a gameshark like you were supposed to, dammit!
Time to see what pokemon lurk in the grass.
Abra!
I seem to always run into an abra immediately, generally when I’m not set up to actually catch it. In this case, I do have my jigglypuff ready with sing but turns out the abra’s faster.
Abra know exactly one move and it’s teleport, which removes them from the fight (or just doesn’t work in trainer battles). It’s slightly useful outside of battle because it returns you to the nearest pokemon center, but really, it’s not like it’s hard to just walk. Since trainers only ever fight you once, it’s always safe to walk back the way you came.
See how this move raises special, which covers both attack and defense? That’s why it, and really the special stat in general, don’t work properly. And, of course, the broken psychic type also runs off the broken special stat. It’s not so obvious yet because this is equivalent in power to something that raises a different stat two stages, but naturally there’s a two stage version of this. Also naturally, mewtwo learn it because mewtwo, fittingly, are everything broken about the game in one glorious package.
It’s one of the great cruelties that you can only get a bellsprout here, after beating Gary, while the only new Cerulean-only pokemon you can get before then is the unhelpful sandshrew. Of course, if you’re really struggling against Misty you might beat Gary, get one and then come back, but if you’re really struggling you probably picked a charmander which means you still have to overcome a water type on Gary’s team to get here.
Huh, that was anticlimactic. I didn’t even use the greatball.
And, of course, right after catching it I run into another one. Isn’t it always like that? There’s all sorts of urban legends around this game but I don’t see anything about this which is totally proof of some sort of supernatural power on its part.
Let’s stop to consider the pokedex again. We observed the teleporting thing firsthand, but who figured out it was thought-related? Have there been studies? Is the pokedex being blindly filled with unsubstantiated myths? In that case, why do we have to catch the pokemon in the first place? The character could just sit down and write all the stories he knows about pokemon, then call it a day.
Now begins the trainer maze.
Wonder where we’ll be going next?
Ah, the around the world business.
People seriously tried to figure out how to stay on the boat when it left, as if the rest of the world existed and all that stood between them and new areas were the walls. And there were fake cheats about getting the ship to return as well. Obviously this was because we were young and stupid and didn’t know how games worked, but still, it was a testament to how much the game captured people’s imagination.
Oh, that’s what you meant!
Or not.
This is probably the easiest puzzle you’ll see in the game.
In a later game these two would probably be a double battle.
I always found this really annoying. In later games they’d sort of go halfway and have people who just wanted to see a particular pokemon, but why not let me actually give them the desired pokemon? More trades, or have them reward me with money or items? Or even just let me hand it to them for no reward, just for the sake of letting me interact with them.
This is even weirder than my and Gary’s houses having signs calling them that.
Well, let’s go see all those rare pokemon of his.
One of the few rumors I never fell for were the ones about Bill’s backyard. Unlike so many areas in the game, you can see just fine that there’s nothing back there and no room to go further.
And inside is just a pokemon. Huh.
Come to think of it, what sort of experiment is he doing? They can digitize both pokemon and any item, and it’s hard to believe humans function differently than either. And as we’ll find out they also have functioning regular transportation.
He sure seems to be taking this as seriously as the situation warrants.
Imagine if someone just threw a pokeball before he had a chance to change his story.
Considering we’ll later see how common teleportation technology is, I think you have to really question what the experiment he was doing really was. Especially with his weird behavior at the start of the conversation.
(Also, when did this happen? Gary makes no mention of it, and even if you assume he’s a far bigger dick than he seems, he’d need to help Bill to see those rare pokemon. I suppose it might be that we should assume a reasonable time lapse between the two conversations, even if for the player they happen close together.)
I don’t remember what I answered the first time I played. But anyway, I’m a jerk who won’t give people pikachu or clefairy, so no.
..the computer, I know I know.
And out he pops from the other one.
No sign of the pokemon…
The character may have his own personality, but it’s often a baffling one. Why wouldn’t he want to see the rare pokemon? He’s collecting pokemon and his rival just mentioned this to him, then he goes up to check out the place.
Maybe that’s what the protagonist was angling for all along. After all, just seeing the same pokemon as Gary did won’t actually get him ahead of Gary.
In that case, are you a trainer?
Not much of a gift in that case, is it? You’re just looking for an excuse to get out of going and spend your time turning into a pokemon instead.
Furthering the theory that Bill isn’t especially grateful, if you leave and reenter, he’s changed his tune. We’re interrupting his experiment time, I guess.
For some reason this doesn’t actually let you look at the pokemon the way you would ones of your own. Instead, he seems to mean PC as in look up some stuff he has about them, rather than accessing the stored pokemon themselves.
Vaporeon in particular has an absolutely lovely cry. For that and other reasons, it was my favorite and generally one of the more popular pokemon with people. After all, this was before umbreon and espeon. If you wanted a sleek dogfox pokemon, vaporeon was all there was.
His backyard may have been of no real interest, but this stuff was. Where did the water lead? Was there any hidden item in that narrow fenced area?
Ah well, that’s all for the cape.
Another one-way ledge. They really don’t plan their routes well.
Back down here, the police officer has coincidentally just decided to take a step to the side, allowing anyone to walk in and gawk at the victims’ house.
And gawk I shall. The lower NPC actually does a good job of looking unsettled, she’s quite active.
Not so unsettled she can’t pun, of course.
Yeah, your house is really trashed. I’m not even sure why there are what look like pokemon footprints everywhere, either. It’s like he dipped his pokemon’s feet in paint and had it walk around just to be a dick.
Oh, just the TM is bothering you? Huh. Must have been insanely expensive if its theft dwarfs the rest of this.
I could never figure out what this was meant to be when playing, I thought it was like an open window or something, until now, when I’m playing with the screen larger.
The bottom is showing the ground, and the top the sky. The guy apparently just punched a hole through the wall like a cartoon character. Well, presumably ordered his pokemon to do the same, but still. And as we’ll see his pokemon aren’t particularly tough compared to mine, so why can’t I punch holes in people’s houses?
Unlike normal trainers, this guy doesn’t stare in one direction, which can trick you into thinking it’s possible to walk by.
But it’s not.
Time for vigilante justice!
I’ve never actually raised a drowzee. My understanding is that they’re decent in this game and worse in later ones.
Violence is the solution yet again!
Beating him means he promises to leave. I’m not clear at all why that’s something I’d want. Then again I guess it’s also not clear why he’s just hanging around here in the first place. Maybe he wants to go over to Mt. Moon with the TM, and he’s waiting for the police officer to wander off completely? In that case he must be able to climb ledges. No wonder the police can’t stop these people, they have superpowers!
Anyway, when he says he’ll return it, he means he’ll give it to you.
Possibly this is just meant as a bribe, although the fact the narration specifies you’re recovering it says you at least were trying to help.
In a more story-based game, you’d run into him again when he’s just done something awful and realize why you shouldn’t let criminals just skip off to keep being criminals. He’d be selling skulls in Lavender Town or something.
Convenient.
But then he says this and I no longer feel bad for him. I mean, the lazy idiot was going to waste a TM on a pokemon that learns the move naturally?
His description of things is odd and suggests that trainers can take a more active role in their pokemon learning moves. It’s probably just the game’s way of talking about leveling a pokemon until it learns the move, but in that case, people sure do take more credit for things than they should.
Here’s this weird house beyond the borders of the actual town, and with open but inaccessible areas nearby.
So, bush. We meet again.
Guess the only way to go is down.
Blown up, you can see that it looks like the blue areas that mark openings in ledges look like stairs carved in them. But this only raises new questions in this case, like, what person carves stairs that run into a fence, and why didn’t they think their time was better spent carving the area right next to it so people could actually get by?
Before we leave Cerulean, let’s check out something I think I forgot to mention.
That’ll be very important later. For now, it’s just one more motivation to hurry up and get to the point you have access to all these blocked off mystery areas.
HAHAHAHAHAHA BUSH I GOT PAST YOU
This seems to mark off roads, but I always thought it looked incredibly weird, especially with the round balls at the end. Pipes?
Anyway, let’s consider stats.
As you can see, the secret to magikarp is that its stats aren’t, actually, all around terrible. When it’s first received at L5 its stats are naturally terrible in comparison to the hopefully high level pokemon of your team, and then you realize you can’t even use it to fight anyway because splash does nothing. Finally at L15 it gets an attacking move, you use it once, you see it does practically no damage, and you go back to not using it again.
But its non-attacking stats are quite good, so it’s actually a pretty solid defender. If, like me, you have a pokemon with leech seed or poison sting, it can help run out the clock on an afflicted enemy. And its impressive speed means that it has a very good chance of getting the first move, so you can send it out against a weakened enemy without much concern of getting knocked out before you can attack. In fact, while magikarp’s stats will improve a lot with evolution, its speed will stay almost the same.
It makes a degree of sense – a pokemon that can’t attack needs to be able to escape battles instead.
Because who else would ever catch Jax’s attention?
To answer your question that was most likely rhetorical! Bill is experimenting on the system itself. While humans have the basic capability of transporting pokémon and items instantaneously whenever and wherever they want it, it’s also a rough system confined to only transporting through space. If we take the other games into account, we also have GSC, wherein three years after RBY, Bill not only manages to make major improvements to the system (or at least its usability — which is saying a lot considering how much Microsoft gets done in three years) but also figures out how to transport pokémon back in time. Because if you figure out how to defy one set of scientific laws, why the hell not when it comes to defying the rest of them?
This is one of the things the remakes expands upon, though, even subtly. It establishes at least that there’s serious limitations on the transportation system (i.e., it’s restricted to one region until Celio figures out how to connect Kanto, Hoenn, and the Sevii Islands in FRLG), but more than that, HGSS all but establishes that this is Bill’s real field of expertise by having him go on about how he experiments with “transporting things” all the time. So maybe I’m reading too much into it (as I am wont to do about this character), but it could be that this — transportation physics/technology — is actually considered to be a viable scientific field in the pokémon world. Or it could be read that he’s actually a straight-up physicist/insert-real-world-science-where-this-would-apply-ist, screwing with the laws of science is his life’s work, and pokémon is just a side hobby. It’s rather interesting, after all, that this is the canon that doesn’t make it clear that he’s actually a pokémon expert in the Professor Oak sense. Sure, some kid in Fuchsia tells you he created his own index, and everyone ever tells you that he’s a collector. But those are hobbies, not an occupation. So it could very well be that all the talk about studying teleportation and working on refining it beyond what it is now is actually akin to a scientist spending decades studying black holes or very specific South American parasites.
Tl;dr, there’s more than a few restrictions on his transportation system, none of which he figures out until GSC. (Or until the rebooted canon gave us Lanette, who will promptly ask the question, “Why the hell don’t you just send pokémon to the next box when your first box is full?”) So there’s that, at least. It doesn’t completely and explicitly answer your question via solid canon proof, but hey, it’s more than the usual shrug fandom gives the subject. Without referring to furry culture, anyway.
But yes, he’s one can short of a six pack, and whatever happened to the pokémon is a mystery left to the ages. And copious amounts of delicious headcanon.
And he is totally a douche to you in the games.
(I am totally reading for more than just Bill, I swear. For one, your commentaries reminded me why I was so very amused yet also highly confused by the sprites, even as a child. I mean, yes, the evolutions were more awesome back then than they are now, but yes to mankey. But beyond that, what is that sticking out of nidorina’s rear? Tail? Horns? Cancerous growth? And why is it that the footprints left by the robber in Cerulean show duck-shaped feet when he owns a machop and a drowzee and we can presume he’s not walking around in flippers?)
And why is it that the footprints left by the robber in Cerulean show duck-shaped feet when he owns a machop and a drowzee and we can presume he’s not walking around in flippers?
Never presume sanity with Team Rocket.
You make a good point with Bill, I guess what’s confusing me here is
1) what sort of experiment was he doing? He was doing something that apparently involved a simultaneous swap of human and pokemon and whatever it was didn’t work despite pokemon and items being digitized all the time safely. And the mixing seems like it was, at the least, not unforeseen since he has a program to fix it all ready. Surely any experiment he was doing in general transportation wouldn’t require he take part.
In Special, it’s not so confusing since you see that the pokemon just happens to walk in at the wrong moment while he’s trying to fix it.
2) Why open conversation by announcing he’s a pokemon? I guess it’s to get a reaction, but surely he’d have gotten that by explaining he’s really human. It seems like he’s pleased with himself. And while later canon has him a broader inventor, here he’s defined by an obsession with pokemon. So – while he says he made a mistake, how much of a mistake was it, and how much is what he was trying to do?
Okay, fair point about Team Rocket. Who else would think taking over a regional center of culture and commerce just to borrow its radio tower is a good idea? Incidentally, I’m also looking forward to your explanation for why the merry hell they take over Silph Co. I mean, if I recall correctly, they weren’t really doing much in the way of forcing the employees to design sweet gadgets for them or anything. And that’s something else that’s always baffled me about the games… if only because I thought that part of the game was insanely tedious.
Anyway, good question there. I have to admit that the original games do a lousy job of dropping many hints, but I pretty much thought Special probably provided the best explanation. Okay, to be fair, Special canon =/= game canon (regardless of what the Special stans say), so thinking of it another way, that part of the game is a really lousy and loose homage to The Fly, only with a significantly happier ending. This may explain why there’s only a cell separation program but not a cell combination program.
More than that, the scene takes on a new light if you’ve seen the Cronenberg take on The Fly. I won’t bog down this blog with details, but to give you a quick run-through of the plot: brilliant but slightly arrogant and immensely quirky/reclusive scientist invents teleporter. Said scientist tests the teleporter on himself but accidentally lets a housefly go with him, which fuses them together at a molecular-genetic level. (Any science fail at this point can be handwaved with “it was the 80’s.”) Said scientist slowly begins to turn into a human-fly hybrid, and in the process, he loses his sanity from the pain and frustration and other poignant things. Yet, despite the fact that he’s spiraling down into insanity, he’s very prone to pretty twisted strokes of humor. (In one scene, he films himself eating — which involves him vomiting caustic liquid onto food and describing in immense amount of detail what happens if he attempts to eat anything solid — as if it’s an educational video for children. And that’s not even the worst of it.)
So keeping this in mind, another way to read Bill’s dialogue is that he’s actually not psychologically stable because of his transformation. This is also why his lines when you refuse become more and more frantic, especially in the games’ remakes. It could also be interpreted that the initial line was actually one of confusion — like he wasn’t sure whether to refer to himself as human or as a pokémon. This reflects the aforementioned scientist’s confusion concerning whether he should identify as an insect or a human (as well as the “I must be upbeat even though I’ve actually descended into a pit of frustration and insanity a long time ago” attitude that particular character had), and it’s something that many Fly homages visit as well. Pokémon just rushes it, though, because it’s supposed to be a one-off pop culture reference (that’s about ten years too late but eh), and as a result, we don’t really get a good look at Bill’s psychological state the way we do for The Fly‘s Seth Brundle or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle‘s Baxter Stockman. And because we’re not given that much time to spend with Bill’s character, the homage that the writers might have been trying to achieve ends up coming off vague because, well, yeah, it’s pretty easy to interpret his lines many different ways. (Even this is only really speculation, but I will say it would be awesome if it was actually absolutely true.)
…And all of this then leads back to your earlier question of how long Bill spent that way and, if it was particularly long, why your rival didn’t bother helping him out. I mean, if it was only a day, then my new personal headcanon is that the reason why Bill’s such an ass after he turns back is totally because of the psychological trauma induced by two transformations sandwiching a massive identity crisis in a short period of time.
I assume it’s really just there because homage and because they already had teleportation, but that’s where the confusion begins for me – there’s no reason for him to be testing a standard teleporter unless, for some reason, humans haven’t been able to be teleported yet. And the cell combine/separation mechanism seems to be totally different than how current transportation seems to happen, which is digitize, then transfer data.
Of course, that might get back to what you’re saying about teleporting across time. Maybe Bill’s trying to invent conventional teleportation because it’s the only way to move things in time as well as space.
Huh, what if he actually succeeded? If the one you meet is from the past and then goes back (assuming that there’s some reason why there can’t be two Bills at the same time or else he could fix his own problem) then the Bill you run into the second time has, from his POV, gone through that a while ago. Might also explain why newly fixed Bill has a SS Anne ticket he thinks would be a good gift when by the time you get to the ship it’s almost ready to leave. He might have moved himself a few days forward and wasn’t thinking of the actual date/even aware he’d succeeded because he was too busy going holy shit I’m a pokemon.
“How can you be in full uniform if you look like a regular sprite? How does that even work?”
I imagine that he wore tear-away pants and a loose jacket, and then pulled his hat out of his backpack, put it on, ripped off his pants (to reveal Rocket pants) and then threw off his jacket. This probably took at least a minute, since unless they were older tear-away pants, the little buttons would have taken a while to undo. He would have also looked really silly, and I’m sure the protagonist was making fun of him for the entire battle.
“Are you wearing a Nurse Joy skirt underneath those pants? A bug catcher’s shorts? Rip them off! Let’s see! If I beat you, will you take your pants off again?!”
Oddly, I find the idea of him dramatically revealing his uniform underneath fine except that the Team Rocket uniform covers most of your body. I mean, sure, you can instantly rip off your clothes to reveal a perfect outfit underneath, but not if the underneath outfit has gloves when the top one doesn’t.
You can if you are an anime.
Every time it happened in anime, I glared at every additional inch of covered skin. Instantly removing several pieces of clothing? Sure. Poofy ruffles that couldn’t possibly work under another layer? Sure. A dress underneath pants? Sure. Short sleeves when your original outfit was sleeveless? IMPOSSIBLE. YOU CAN’T UNLESS YOU HAVE AN ACTUAL TRANSFORMATION SEQUENCE! BE REALISTIC ABOUT IT!!!
They could work if they were rolled up! Unless you’re wearing something with super thin spaghetti straps, of course.
I just imagine that everything that wouldn’t fit under his clothes, like gloves, a hat, or maybe even shoes (I’m pretty sure he was just wearing his uniform shoes, anyway, cuz a lot of people don’t look at your shoes. Also, they probably don’t have big logos that make them recognizable as Rocket boots.)
Also, in my head the transformation wasn’t instantaneous. The guy had to hold up a finger and go, “Wait wait wait, changing!” while the protagonist stood there with crossed arms, tapping his foot and sighing.
But while Team Rocket does bizarre things, they’re not particularly campy in the game the way the anime trio is.
It drove me crazy that you couldn’t return the dig TM the first time I played. And seriously, what kid DIDN’T want to say yes to the Rocket?
Yeah. I mean, sure, you get a TM out of it, but it’s like what’s the point of being a hero if the guy decides he doesn’t care?
I have also really wanted to say yes to being a Team Rocket member before. If they made a game where you could play as part of a villainous team (one of the already established ones), I would so buy it. Multiple copies just because of the awesomeness. But that will probably never happen :(.
I think the problem is it’d be a totally different game. But then again, if they can make Mystery Dungeon…
Can you really farm the TR guy on the bridge for nuggets, or is it just something everyone says you can do? I lost to him, and when I went back they all acted like I’d won.
Honestly I’ve never bothered (you can get infinite nuggets so easily). I’m surprised if they had the foresight to code in a block for that and yet not everything else (or just having him give you the nugget post-battle).
People seriously tried to figure out how to stay on the boat when it left, as if the rest of the world existed and all that stood between them and new areas were the walls. And there were fake cheats about getting the ship to return as well. Obviously this was because we were young and stupid and didn’t know how games worked, but still, it was a testament to how much the game captured people’s imagination.
Definitely why I loved the Pokémon games so much when I was young, and this is a feeling I miss in the later generations. Too bad I can’t go back to thinking video games run on black magic, I guess.
This is also why my favorite cheat was the “walk on air” Gameshark code that would cause your character to hang in the air after jumping down a ledge. You could then proceed to walk over any of the natural barriers in the game world and get to totally restricted/nonexistent areas. (Unfortunately you couldn’t actually encounter anything in e.g. the Pallet Town off-limits grass, because in order to end the code you had to jump down another ledge, and there weren’t any there.) It turns out if you just keep walking into the ocean past Bill’s house, you hit endless ocean punctuated by islands made of jumbled tiles, which are the game choking up map errors because what the hell are you doing out there? IMO the most magical Gameshark code, though if I’d heard of and gotten working the “Battle Oak” one that probably would have had me flipping my shit even more.
Too bad I can’t go back to thinking video games run on black magic, I guess.
But what about all the newbies? Are the older people just killing their flights of fancy with logic, or is there some other reason new kids don’t invent stuff?
Maybe it’s the fact we mostly communicate by internet now. It’s no longer the game all the local kids are playing, so rumors aren’t generated like that, and the internet has become steadily better at fact-checking so wild nonsense doesn’t get so far there.
I never really screwed around with gamebreaking cheats. By the time I got a gameshark, I knew all that’d happen was walking off the map/freezing if you went where you shouldn’t, so I just focused on making my pokemon perfect. Maybe when I finish this I’ll activate some and screw around.
I remember when “Pokemon Black” meant a theoretical, fictitious game where you got to play as a Team Rocket member. Toss your pokeballs and steal pokemon from other trainers during battle!
There’s actually a (fan-made, of course) rom patch where you can do this. My friend registered to their forum just so he could play it, but apparently there isn’t a whole lot of game, and there aren’t a lot of people you can battle to steal from. Also, your partner ends up stealing a lot of the pokémon that *you* want.
That’s what I’d expect. The existing game really doesn’t have the framework to add it in, so you’d have to change a lot. Still, it’s cool people are trying.
Yes, I would guess that the fact that the fandom is almost exclusively online nowadays, and fansites are generally a bit more reputable now than when they were all hosted on Geocities, has done a lot to squash the rumor mill.
On the other hand, “kids these days” could easily still be inventing wacky shit, but there’s simply no way I’d know about it. I’m privileged not to have to deal with children of the same age I was when Pokemon was big these days, so I don’t really know what they’re up to. It’s also probably worth considering that the Pokemon “fandom” is really only a tiny fraction of fans out there. There’s loads of people with Black/White who’ve never even heard of Serebii, I’m sure, and if they have anyone at all IRL to interact with about the games, they might buy crazy fan-rumors. (What about kids whose parents restrict their online activities, for example? They’d be hearing about everything secondhand at best, the poor things.) But again, I’m never going to encounter them, because for me the fandom is the hyperconnected online one where people aren’t going to believe your crazy rumors, or will at least be able to prove them wrong in a matter of hours. So I can’t really know what the fandom is like for the majority of fans, especially the young and credulous ones.
I interact with miniature thumb-havers at times, but I’ve never overheard epic stories. I think you really need people to bounce your ideas off, and the only place with the critical mass for that is the internet which, yeah, is no longer Geocities nonsense. Most kids don’t play the games and probably even fewer are actually following the anime.
Also, probably having more games ruins things. The insanity happened because people were obsessively focused on one single game and trying to wring more out of it. These days, there’s a dozen installments of the basic world to play in, and even if a kid doesn’t have all of them, they know those exist.
Indeed. I never ever heard game insanity from my peers as a child, except maybe for the “pokegods”, which were just what we called ho-oh, marril, togepi and other pokémon that were released overseas before they were in North America.
Rather, all the weird game “glitches” and “cheats” that I heard about were from the internet. Stuff like where if you beat the elite four 999 times and talk to your mother, then she’ll give you a togepi egg. Or if you let yourself faint on the SS Anne and come back later with a Missingno that knows strength, you can push the SS Anne out of the way and mew will be underneath.
And yeah, I’d have to say that it was also probably due to there only being a single game. Gen 1 only lasted about a year before Gen 2 was released. I was spoiled, so my classmates and I all had played pirated and untranslated Gold and Silver ROMs before it was even officially shipped. Someone had installed them on the big fancy PCs in the computer lab, and the typing instructor didn’t mind us playing them during our free time.
It was mere months after the mew rumours were floating around, but it did so much to kill them. No one was talking about pokégods anymore because we already had them. No one was printing out pictures of unreleased pokémon and claiming they were nidogoddess, because we’d seen all the new pokémon and didn’t care anymore. We’d already trained togepi and we’d caught ho-oh, and we didn’t have to do anything as silly as talking to Bill 4000 times so we could get into his backyard.
I saw the same sorta thing in the pony fandom, actually. Back in the first season, there wasn’t a whole lot of worldbuilding or mythology to go along with the series. It was just a few locations, a few core characters and lots and lots of background characters.
In season 1, fans would latch on to those background characters like they held the secret to immortality, and give them complex backstories and claim they were Time Lords, or that some little kid who looked a lot like an adult was actually that adult’s daughter (despite them being different species). They’d ship a background character who’d been seen for maybe two seconds, with another background character because they were both shown to be involved with music. When two background characters were shown in the same location on more than one separate occasion, fanon would be that it was because they were dating.
One character was sitting in a human-like position once, and the fandom took it and started writing stories about how she’s secretly a human, or wishes she was a human, or is trying to make contact with humans.
It is absolutely insane what will happen when you give a large number of fans very little to work with. They will take what they have and run with it and let their imaginations go crazy and start bouncing their crazy ideas off each other until it becomes FACT.
Did you know that there’s one character in the pony fandom who wore shades in her 10 second appearance, and that a fanfic popularized as having red eyes (Vinyl Scratch/DJ PON3)? If you see her in fanart or in other fanfics, then she will always have red eyes, or people will be complaining about her eyes being wrong.
In the season 2 finale, she took off her sunglasses and her eyes were magenta. You have no idea how many people were raging over such a tiny, minor detail as an eye colour that was already pretty close to what they’d imagined.
You make a good point. I’m only on the fringes of pony fandom, but I loved some of the things I saw them coming up with (evil dictator Celestia!) There used to be something similar going on in Homestuck, where every little thing would be analyzed into the ground and through the earth’s core. As fun as seeing the actual story unfold has been, I miss those days of obsession.
I guess the moral is there’s a sort of critical mass for fandom past which it becomes, counterintuitively, less creative. We need to start raising kids in isolation with only one set of games.