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I'm on midterm break at the moment, after a hectic week where I had to write a physics test, a math test, and in-class essays for English and geography (the geo one's just a practice, thank god). To be honest I've been completely checked out since last Thursday, passing the hours on games even though I know I don't have the bandwidth for that cos I've got to take the SAT in less than a month's time and I haven't even studied yet. I don't want to subject you to my first year IB student woes, though. Desperately chasing nostalgia, is what I'm doing. The endless hours I've sunk into Pokemon, Roblox and old YouTube videos in the past few days genuinely make me feel like my brain is atrophying and causing me to mentally regress into my nine year old self, who thought Filthy Frank and ASDFmovie were the funniest shows on the internet, and that Pokemon Brick Bronze was the best game ever apart from Minecraft (if you know you know. high five me if you were there in 2017-18). If this post reads like shit just pretend a nine year old wrote it.
Anyway, this is my personal blog so I'm going to talk about Pokemon fan projects with impunity. Though I like watching challenge runs, my favourite kind of projects were always the story-driven ones, especially when there's some bits from the perspective of the Pokemon themselves (surprisingly, I've never finished any Mystery Dungeon game). I was only reminded of how much I loved this kind of thing while reading Qlockwork's LeafGreen nuzlocke comic "It's a Hard Life", which has pretty much everything I like about that kind of project: fun personalities & team dynamics, epic fights, and the visual medium is totally sweet - I love the watercolour. It got me thinking about some of the other fanmade Pokemon media I loved as a kid, since my parents never let me have a 3ds or anything no matter how much I wanted Omega Ruby and Sun & Moon. So I fed my obsession with the franchise by buying cards from corner stores, accumulating comics and stuffed animals, watching Indigo League on Blu-Ray in the basement before our TV got burgled one year, playing copyright-violating fangames and watching fanmade series online. I thought I'd write about some of these old favourites just to dig myself out of this compulsive gaming funk.
Shippidge's "Starter Squad" series on YouTube is what I thought of first while reading that comic. It's similar since it's mostly from the perspective of Pokemon, with plenty of straight-up deaths and character development. The abrasive, genocidal Charmander character was my favourite as a kid, which is why I never watched the newest episode of the series when it came out 4 years ago since I was upset that he wasn't in it. I dunno why I liked Charmander so much--probably cuz I was a simple-minded kid who thought gratuitous violence was cool. I still really love the series and hope to see it finished one day, though I'll probably be in college by then.
I also used to watch the hell out of Pokemon creepypastas. The Lavender Town legends about Japanese kids spontaneously combusting and hanging themselves with their intestines and whatnot after hearing some special frequency in the theme was creepy, sure, but Hypno's Lullaby was the one that scared the testes off me. I showed it to one of my best friends from back then, and whenever she and I hung around near the woods or at the very edge of the boundaries of our elementary school's grounds we'd joke around about how some yellow demon with a pendulum was gonna creep up and molest us or something. There are some other memorable ones, like Strangled Red, Lost Silver, and Absol (which was one of my favourite Pokemon as a kid).
I was way into Pokemon plushies and figurines as a kid, and used to roleplay with my friend with whatever we had in our collection -- battling, solving puzzles and doing "prison breaks" -- which is not anything I'd admit to my friends nowadays. T'was my version of playing dolls, I guess. The Pokemon TGC was probably one of the most popular things at school back then, after Roblox, manhunt, and mechanical pencils. My other best friend, a guy two years older than me, introduced me to Pokemon cards in elementary school (I say that like he dealt me cocaine or something. He may as well have). He owned a bunch of box sets and had a pile of cards that stacked almost halfway to the ceiling at his mom's apartment, and he and I used to sit on the carpet and play. Once, he got his hands on some special-edition Ash's Pikachu cards that were given out as part of the promo for the "I Choose You" movie, and he gifted one to me, only he was storing it in his underwear. I don't think I've ever experienced a declaration of friendship as genuine as "here, have a Pokemon card with my piss on it" since then, and anyway I'm pretty sure that specific card is worth like $70 nowadays. Despite never having played an official game until I learned to emulate GBA roms when I was like 11, this franchise is responsible for some of my fondest childhood memories. For better or worse, there'll always be a bit of my heart devoted to it.
Anyway, this is my personal blog so I'm going to talk about Pokemon fan projects with impunity. Though I like watching challenge runs, my favourite kind of projects were always the story-driven ones, especially when there's some bits from the perspective of the Pokemon themselves (surprisingly, I've never finished any Mystery Dungeon game). I was only reminded of how much I loved this kind of thing while reading Qlockwork's LeafGreen nuzlocke comic "It's a Hard Life", which has pretty much everything I like about that kind of project: fun personalities & team dynamics, epic fights, and the visual medium is totally sweet - I love the watercolour. It got me thinking about some of the other fanmade Pokemon media I loved as a kid, since my parents never let me have a 3ds or anything no matter how much I wanted Omega Ruby and Sun & Moon. So I fed my obsession with the franchise by buying cards from corner stores, accumulating comics and stuffed animals, watching Indigo League on Blu-Ray in the basement before our TV got burgled one year, playing copyright-violating fangames and watching fanmade series online. I thought I'd write about some of these old favourites just to dig myself out of this compulsive gaming funk.
Shippidge's "Starter Squad" series on YouTube is what I thought of first while reading that comic. It's similar since it's mostly from the perspective of Pokemon, with plenty of straight-up deaths and character development. The abrasive, genocidal Charmander character was my favourite as a kid, which is why I never watched the newest episode of the series when it came out 4 years ago since I was upset that he wasn't in it. I dunno why I liked Charmander so much--probably cuz I was a simple-minded kid who thought gratuitous violence was cool. I still really love the series and hope to see it finished one day, though I'll probably be in college by then.
I also used to watch the hell out of Pokemon creepypastas. The Lavender Town legends about Japanese kids spontaneously combusting and hanging themselves with their intestines and whatnot after hearing some special frequency in the theme was creepy, sure, but Hypno's Lullaby was the one that scared the testes off me. I showed it to one of my best friends from back then, and whenever she and I hung around near the woods or at the very edge of the boundaries of our elementary school's grounds we'd joke around about how some yellow demon with a pendulum was gonna creep up and molest us or something. There are some other memorable ones, like Strangled Red, Lost Silver, and Absol (which was one of my favourite Pokemon as a kid).
I was way into Pokemon plushies and figurines as a kid, and used to roleplay with my friend with whatever we had in our collection -- battling, solving puzzles and doing "prison breaks" -- which is not anything I'd admit to my friends nowadays. T'was my version of playing dolls, I guess. The Pokemon TGC was probably one of the most popular things at school back then, after Roblox, manhunt, and mechanical pencils. My other best friend, a guy two years older than me, introduced me to Pokemon cards in elementary school (I say that like he dealt me cocaine or something. He may as well have). He owned a bunch of box sets and had a pile of cards that stacked almost halfway to the ceiling at his mom's apartment, and he and I used to sit on the carpet and play. Once, he got his hands on some special-edition Ash's Pikachu cards that were given out as part of the promo for the "I Choose You" movie, and he gifted one to me, only he was storing it in his underwear. I don't think I've ever experienced a declaration of friendship as genuine as "here, have a Pokemon card with my piss on it" since then, and anyway I'm pretty sure that specific card is worth like $70 nowadays. Despite never having played an official game until I learned to emulate GBA roms when I was like 11, this franchise is responsible for some of my fondest childhood memories. For better or worse, there'll always be a bit of my heart devoted to it.
