So, since Pokemon celebrated its 15th birthday recently, a new Pokemon game(s) came out, AND OCRemix put out a new Pokemon album, missingno.ocremix.org/ I decided it would be good timing to finally pay respects to a very old friend.
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I believe I've mentioned this before, but I got into writing because of Pokemon. When Pokemon came out it was the first REAL RPG I'd ever played, as it truly gave you freedom to do things however you wanted. No two people would play it the same way, and the very team you built was your own and no one else's. That sense of ownership and identity really connected with me at the ripe age of...12? 13? And so I wrote a Pokemon fanfic - before I even realized fanfiction was an established concept. Then again, maybe it wasn't so much back then.
F5ck if I know!But anyway. I wrote a story that was first-person and switched perspectives periodically, the main draw being that most of the main characters were Pokemon and the story was mostly told from their perspective. As the story went on, their trainer realized he didn't feel like their "trainer" so much as their leader and coach.
Eventually I ended up crossing the story over into some crazy-ass nonsense that was a massive crossover with a purpose but also totally nonsensical, and the characters I wrote about fell to the wayside as I got older. They've always shared a spot in my heart, though, and I've always meant to go back and revisit them in a new light as an adult. I tried after graduating college a year and a half ago, and what I wrote was OK, I guess, if just for tribute, but I never properly closed the cap on the characters. Then again, the ways I was planning on correlating my real life to theirs didn't pan out right. So. I more recently decided to write the short piece Like No One Ever Was (which is a reference to the old TV show's lyrics 'I want to be the very best, like no one ever was') and thought I'd take a much more condensed approach. Those 3-4k words are definitely some of hardest I've ever written, in more ways than one. But at the end of the day, the story is a work of flash fiction and is portraying very blunt and simple themes.
The primary theme is: eventually we all grow older, we leave behind our childish dreams, even if we don't forget them, and we find NEW dreams as grown-ups. The other theme is that not all of us turn out the way we thought we would as people. Some of us give in to temptations and lose sight of what we valued when we were young, and sometimes that's actually a bad thing.
If you're reading this then you may be interested to know a bit about the characters portrayed in the story. It's strongly implied that the Pikachu and his trainer are Ash Ketchum/Red, but older and a bit more ragged.
The trainer is a character named Gabe Holm, someone who wasn't really inspired by myself but more someone I thought would make a good leader in the context and be the group's moral compass. He is a dark-skinned guy because I liked the idea of considering racial variety in a world that Nintendo never portrays having actual race besides Caucasian.
The Charmander is a guy named 'Torch,' a quaint and cute little kid's name I thought was endearing when I played Pokemon. I never reference his name because even though it's him, I didn't want to alienate readers and instead wanted them to associate with the same idea that when THEY were kids they gave THEIR Pokemon stupid little nicknames, too. Torch seems like kind of a power-hungry jerk but he used to be a nice guy...a decade ago! xD As teh story progressed he became a more aggressive character, and refused to evolve because he wanted to prove how powerful he could be with speed and skill rather than raw strength. As I hope the short piece illustrates, that has played out pretty well for him. BUT, at the same time, my old friend lost his way somewhere. Through him I'm exploring ideas like the fear of turning into someone I don't want to become.
The key theme of growing up, getting older, and letting go of childish fantasies is blatantly expressed with the idea of these two Pokemon 'trainers' who once aspired to be "masters" feeling some bittersweet victory in that their original goal has pushed them to achieve, and yet it's a physical impossibility to reach that goal. While I was once a "master" as a kid (I caught every Pokemon through the Gold Silver era) life is always changing. New Pokemon keep showing up, and now, more than ever, it REALLY feels like a physical impossibility to catch them all, just like real life makes it pretty much impossible to aspire to reach ALL of your dreams and goals. Life just keeps rolling ahead, and we can try keeping up as much as we can, but we will always be part of our own generation.
With that sentiment, this piece is specifically meant for those who grew up on the original Pokemon and is intended to be a condensed, violent take on Pokemon battling. None of the nonsense or fluff the games and their universe normally provide, just the raw brutality of combat which, in effect, makes you consider that perhaps a life based around Pokemon battling - fighting just for fighting's sake - isn't such a great idea after all.
Torch LOVES fighting, and it's that love for fighting - his obsession - that is his own demise. Sometimes too much of what we love, pursuing it too much, turns us into something that goes against our original desires. Will he redeem himself? I leave that open-ended. Anyone can redeem themselves. At the time of this story, he is resolved to the idea that he is, truly, a Monster, and has given in to his obsession.
Sometimes, as we grow into adults, we lose sight of our lofty goals - BECAUSE life makes them so impossible - and let ourselves fall to temptation and forget our virtues. Instead of trying to be good people and DO great things with ourselves, we become obsessed WITH ourselves, with the notion of being richest, the most popular, the most reknowned...We forget to be the best people we can be, and , rather than focus on being the best for some ONE, we instead focus on being the best AT something. The very best, like no ever was.
