Alright, to the pokemon league!Oh hey I just flew into a flock. A L40 taillow, whose animation is one of the rare flying ones that isn’t hovering above the air, appears to battle, then Groudon pops out to hover on a spinning plate of air too and as I said I totally hated sky battles but it’d actually make sense here!

I fly Latios past a whole bunch of islands I can’t land on, over the entrance to the pokemon league I can’t land at, and finally to Mossdeep City. I know it’s standard to not let you fly anywhere you haven’t been, but you get the flute once you’ve (more or less) unlocked everywhere, so it wouldn’t be gamebreaking.

I decide Lucki’s decided to really prove a point about her unstoppability by boxing Groudon for now. My poor sceptile is actually my lowest level pokemon at the moment, a mere L37, so I take her out to be my lead for now.

My anorith evolves!

Armaldo’s tough armor makes all attacks bounce off. This Pokémon’s two enormous claws can be freely extended or contracted. They have the power to punch right through a steel slab.

Honestly, not that much of a fan. Anorith looks really weird, but armaldo is the most standard bipedal tank look. I appreciate it’s still got weird eyes, but they’re nowhere near as weird as anorith’s.

Ah well.

I exchange it for a corphish – fond of those guys, the name always makes me think of them happily eating corpses – and set off! It’s pretty easy to find my way to Everglade City, but there’s a massive waterfall.

I don’t believe it! A Surf pro like me can’t climb a waterfall?! says one of the two trainers there.

The HM move Waterfall… Rumor has it that you can’t use it unless you defeat the Sootopolis City Gym Leader, Wallace. Rumor? True fact! explains the other.


This is one of those really weird quirks of the game. Generally, games lock access by having the person not teach you the move until you’ve proven yourself. But Red and Blue instead had you seek out the HMs by exploring thoroughly enough, at which point you can use the HM on your pokemon and they can use the move just fine, but somehow you can’t order it outside of battle until you’ve beaten a gatekeeper. I had the impression it was some sort of law since there doesn’t seem to be any physical reason for it to work this way, and the way the gym leaders talk about it doesn’t seem like it’s a matter of needing to beat them to master the move, plus it never has anything to do with the actual gym (“Wow, your ability to defeat my water pokemon means you fully understand how to cut down trees! Now go beat some guy’s poison pokemon to figure out how surfing works.) but there’s no explanation for that, either.

And here it is, staring you in the face. The first person is clearly ordering his pokemon to climb a waterfall, though it’s unclear if he actually has the waterfall HM on hand or just surf. As the second person explains, it doesn’t matter – the game has a weird division where you can’t “use” the HM until you have the right badge, except you can use it just fine in the sense of booting it up, teaching it to a pokemon, and having them use the move in battle.

Weirder still, the people in the world don’t seem to understand how this works. She’s not laughing at him because everyone knows he won’t get anywhere until he beats Wallace, she’s saying it’s a common rumor that they’ve now verified.

So what the hell is going on?

Well, we do know the badges have weird effects.

Let’s ignore the fact they prevent disobedience. I think the original idea of them making pokemon obey was supposed to be just that pokemon found it suitably impressive so they were willing to believe your orders would be good ones, at least going by the fact there was that episode where a pokemon decided to ignore its trainer after the idiot lost the badges it’d worked so hard for which suggests there’s other factors that could be in play besides straight mind control.

There’s still the fact they also somehow boost your stats in a way that ignores the existing EV stat cap. How? Why? How does simply having a piece of shiny metal in a case mean your pokemon is faster or hits harder? You might be able to argue that it’s really about inspiring your pokemon in the same way as the obedience, except that it’s not that each badge makes them overall a bit better, the badges give out a particular boost or not. So in the first game, you can get four badges without getting a single boost, then go beat up Surge, get the speed boost badge, then catch a brand new pokemon and it’s now got a boost in any battle – any battle within your game, because this doesn’t apply to link battles.

(Of course, that doesn’t apply this generation – even though it did in the originals. That only makes what’s going on more confusing.)

So: badges seem to have some major effects on pokemon, apparently to the point of making them unable to use certain moves outside of battle. Even more interestingly, the fact that all games from the first have had moves you can use out of battle that aren’t HMs means that pokemon don’t need badges to do this – you can teleport or dig without a problem, and when generations altered which were hidden moves, we saw that pokemon were able to use those without issue. So there’s something in place that’s preventing your pokemon from using the move, and it needs a badge before it’ll let you use it.

Point is, the pokemon league is an evil dictatorship controlling the populous through invasive technology.

Hey, maybe the HM-block mechanism is in the pokeballs. We know it can’t be in the badges because that’d allow for people who just didn’t get any to use the moves and realize what was up. But pokeballs are tightly controlled. The only possible source of non-controlled pokeballs would be Kurt with the apricorns, and all it takes is for him to be in on it and then no one would even realize this wasn’t normal. After all, if no one ever has a pokemon that wasn’t caught in a pokeball, how could you even tell this wasn’t normal?

(…and the generation where HMs aren’t tied to badges is BW/BW2, where there’s at least one trainer running around who doesn’t seem to use pokeballs. Perhaps that was to avoid a plot hole!)

(Also a possibility is that BW2 is set before the rest of the games, before anyone figured out how to lock down certain moves. Team Plasma is the last gasp of the society that remembers when pokemon weren’t nothing more than a commodity – the rest of the games take place in a future where “pokemon rights” is a nonsense phrase.)

…But hey, what do I care? I’m human and soon to be queen of the smoking world, and I have both the waterfall TM and the badge needed.

(Okay no I can’t stop – dystopian fic where rogue trainers are kept under control by refusing them badges, so they have to fight their way into a gym to take them and be able to continue to fight! Coordinated raids to get enough badges for the weaker members of their terrorist cells and new recruits! Gym leaders working to disable the badges and keep them restricted to the few they allow, and porygon partners trying to hack the system itself! Do that, someone!)

Well, after all that buildup, I’m sad to say actually using the move isn’t that great. The screen’s covered by a waterfall animation, then you’re at the top. I try dropping down to see if I’m at least allowed to watch that, and nope. I wanted to see my pokemon swim upstream!

I head to the pokemon center.

The Victory Road is the place where many strong Trainers gather from all over the world. They use Pokemon from other regions as well as from Hoenn, so we can’t let our guard down even for a second!


Ooh, more evidence that there’s some strong nationalist tensions between the regions.

Okay, into the path itself.

A sigilyph then kicks my ass.

I blow half my items just keeping my vibrava alive long enough for it to run low on moves and stop almost killing me each turn. Then his stupid rhyperior survives with like 1 HP and knocks it out. DEATH TO THE OTHER REGIONERS!

Let’s pull out actual team for this, then:

L38 sceptile
L38 Raiden
L39 Saurius
L41 Irin
L38 Flare
L42 Silver

I suppose I could also go fight the million water trainers across the routes to level up, but let’s see how far I make it with these guys before grinding.

Now to murder that stupid sigilyph with Irin. None shall oppose me.