#given that we collect cards of living people with powers based on them but not exact clones

[claire-starsword]

[acetrainermags]

Pokémon Adventures: A Childhood Obsession

In 2006, I received a consolation birthday present of a GameBoy Advance, the flat kind that didn't have backlight and was powered by AA batteries. My brother had just been given a GameBoy Advance SP and a brand-new game based on the animated film Cars for his birthday. My parents, in their infinite wisdom, knew I shouldn't be left out of the fun. Thus, I was given a hand-me-down GameBoy Advance with a used copy of Pokémon Sapphire.

A GameBoy Advance very similar to the one I grew up with. (Image via Wikimedia Commons)

Sometimes, I wonder if my parents regretted it.

You see, that gift - which was likely an afterthought, let's be real - kicked off what would become a years-long obsession with Pokémon. I had no idea what I was getting into when I turned that game on for the first time, but I eagerly selected my first Pokémon (a Mudkip I naturally nicknamed "ABBY" as any young girl ought to do) and began my adventure.

Unfortunately, my copy of Pokémon Sapphire has since been lost to time, but Pokémon remained a formative part of my childhood. I loved battling my neighborhood friends, comparing trading cards, and huddling around the TV to watch the latest VHS tape I'd picked up from the library.

Another thing you should know about me is that when I enjoy something, I'm all in. Pokémon was not an exception: I devoured every bit of media and lore I could find. I entertained myself by reading pages on Bulbapedia and Serebii, two of the best reference websites for the franchise.

This was how I was introduced to the franchise's manga adaptation, Pokémon Adventures. The series, also known as Pokémon Special or "PokéSpe" for short, only had a few volumes available in the United States at the time. Still, I devoured every bit of information I could about the story and its expansive cast of characters. I'd always been a voracious reader, and when you combined that with my favorite video games, Pokémon Adventures seemed perfect or me.

But like I said, at the time there were only a handful of volumes available in the United States, where I lived. The ones that were available were nearly impossible to find in your typical Barnes & Noble. So I did what any other self-respecting Child of the Internet would do in the late 2000s: I found an alternative. And that's all I'll say about that.

A few years later, U.S. publisher Viz Media finally decided to start bringing the rest of the series stateside. With the limited cash that an unemployed 12-year-old had, I stared my own collection. This included one volume (vol. 14) purchased from a "going out of business" sale at a Borders bookstore and another (vol. 7) from the gift shop in the Japan area of Disney World's Epcot. Why I remember this, I have no idea.

The two Pokémon Adventures volumes I've owned the longest. They're a little worse for wear, but I treasure them.

Now I'm an adult... in a loose sense of the word. Pokémon still remains one of my favorite interests, and it remained a great way to connect with others. I met some of my favorite people in college through a Pokémon Go group chat, where we would alert each other when rare creatures spawned on campus (shout out to GoCast, you know who you are).

My manga collection has also grown. I was finally able to collect all of my favorite volumes from my childhood, up through the "sixth chapter" or story arc of the series (vol. 29). I take one off the shelf to read occasionally, especially when I need a "comfort read" to make myself feel better. However, I haven't read the series chronologically since my childhood.

I decided to change that this year. I mean, I've already got all of the books, so why not?

That leads us to this blog. After spending four years as an English major in college, I picked up the habit of marking up my books. I know, I know. Such scandal. Unfortunately, manga and graphic novels don't really lend themselves to this process. I just can't bring myself to mark up the beautiful artwork with my terrible handwriting.

But I still wanted to engage with this story like I would any other. Originally, I just planned to share my occasional observation or joke on Twitter, like I did when I read Fullmetal Alchemist in 2020. However, the more I read, the more I realized I had a lot to say about Pokémon Adventures.

It's easy to be cynical and say that the Pokémon Adventures manga is just another cog in the marketing machine with a singular goal in mind: to get people to buy Pokémon games and merchandise. While that is probably true at some level, I find that Pokémon Adventures goes beyond that by having complex characters, engaging plotlines, and clever ways of integrating existing Pokémon lore into a different medium. The series creators - writer Hidenori Kusaka and artists Mato (vol. 1-9) and Satoshi Yamamoto (vol. 10 onward) - aren't just concerned with promoting the Pokémon franchise, they also want to tell a good story.

Satoshi Yamamoto (left) and Hidenori Kusaka (right), the current artist and writer behind the Pokémon Adventures manga. Image via Bulbapedia.

I'm not sure where this reading journey will take me. At first, I thought about writing a post about every single chapter as I read it. Then I realized I would be writing at least 300 posts just to get through my personal collection. Then I wanted to write about each volume, but Tumblr only allows 10 images per post, and that's not enough for me.

All this to say, I'll be posting about the chapters in chunks, with a wrap-up after each volume and story arc and the occasional "extra" post if I want to write more in-depth about something in particular.

Some things will be lighthearted, like a bizarre reference to Tom Sawyer in vol. 1, implying that Mark Twain exists in the Pokémon universe. Others will be more serious and analytical. For example, I can't wait to talk about the character of Giovanni, arguably one of the most recognizable villains in the Pokémon franchise.

In any case, it will be an adventure (see what I did there?), and I'm delighted to take you along with me. Our journey starts at the beginning, with a boy named Red in a place called Pallet Town.

[romanianwilkinson]

EVEN MORE DISCORD SERVER SENTENCE STARTERS

A collection of quotes from my Discord server with friends. Feel free to change pronouns/wording as desired. CONTENT WARNING(S) FOR: Suggestive, crude, violence, gore, absolutely cursed. [ PART 1 ] [ PART 2 ]

“ Murder is therapeutic! ”

“ IT’S CALLED BEING AWESOME AND FUCKING POWERFUL AND I’M DOING IT. ”

“ I've given them an 8ft tall juice box. ” “ It's full of bone juice! ” “ NOT THAT KIND OF BONE JUICE!! ”

“ I KNOW BUT [NAME]’S FAT ASS IS MAKING ME ACT FUNNY. ”

“ [NAME]... You burp like dads sneeze. ”

“ Catboy twink shortage. ”

“ I'M NOT LETTING THE GOVERNMENT TAKE AWAY MY CATGIRLS! ”

“ Has the government already taken catboys? ”

“ Why does it always come back to the catpeople here? ”

“ The government outlaws catboys and confiscates the catgirls. ”

“ It's always either cat people, tearing down the government, or tiddies. ”

“ [NAME], that’s cannibalism, you can’t do that. ”

“ You can’t eat gods without toebeans. ”

“ HELL YEAH, SHE’S CONFIRMED FOR NOT JESUS! ”

“ You're telling me, that someone's been holding out retractable titties on us?! ”

“ WHY DO YOU WANT TO BANG BUTCH HARTMAN?! ”

“ Do the drums, but sexy. ”

“ She is attractive because she is the Devil. This is what we have learned from Catholicism. ”

“ WHAT ELSE ARE TIRES, OTHER THAN CAR BEANS!!!!!! ”

“ She is a Snacc, so you hold her securely like one. ”

“ Holy cake, call that communion bread. ”

“ It's a skeleton, I don't think it has a gender. ”

“ You’re straight, you’re not majestic. ”

“ INDEED. I HAVE HOOVES. ”

“ How to Give Your Enemies Trauma 101. ”

“ Quiet, we’re approaching the therapist paddock. ”

“ Jesus has breached containment. ”

“ I really am cursed with knowledge of forbidden snacks. ”

“ Hey pog, are ya champ? ”

“ You ever look at a sheep? There's something messed up about sheep. ”

“ I can’t be convinced the art of charcuterie boards is not something inherently fae in nature. ”

“ THEY MUST FUSE FOR THE ULTIMATE CHICKEN TENDIE. ”

“ We shall absorb the folly of man, grow and expand those snacks until they become a really big tendie. ”

“ GOD I FORGOT HOW PLANTS SMELL PLEASE BURY ME IN THE DIRT I AM LIVING!!!!!!!!!! ”

“ Size of a cow, the speed of a cheetah. ”

“ NEWS OUTLETS NEED TO STOP ASKING UNINVITED PEOPLE TO COME TO MY HOUSE. ”

“ This is what plays in my head when I'm Head Empty No Thoughts. ”

“ ... Okay. Exception made, but only specifically for roasting those overrated turkeys. ”

“ THIS IS IT. THIS IS THE DAY I'VE AWAITED FOR. ”

“ THE APOTHEOSIS IS UPON US! ”

“ The wives that stay together commit war crimes together. ”

“ They tell time, they tell temperature, isn’t there anything a cat can’t tell you! ”

“ THE SHRIMP ARE FIGHTINGGGG. ”

“ Today is the day he officially babied for the first time. ”

“ I HAVE COME TO PROTECT MY WIFE. ”

“ Oops I've accidentally created a murderer. ”

“ You're all dying??? Can't relate. ”

“ Sometimes all you need to make a friend, is to devour their corpse. ”

“ I mean I was talking about her big mommy milkers, but I also wanted to leave my words up to interpretation. ”

“ If your coven gathering doesn't include some dick jokes, what's the actual point? ”

“ I’m legally not allowed to kill, or have anyone die for me. ”

“ YOU CANNOT CLEAVER YOUR WAY OUT OF DOUBLE STANDARDS! ”

“ Get back here!!! We've got a BURGEONING FRIENDSHIP now, so that means you also get the aggressive self care spiel! ”

“ To no one's surprise, it was indeed, more gay shit. ”

“ [NAME] absolutely could become Sonic the Hedgehog if he had the means, and thus must never be allowed to do so. ”

“ THE WRITERS HAD A LITTLE TOO MUCH FUN WITH THIS SEASON - GIVE ME A BREAK. ”

“ I want to get into a gunfight on top of an elephant. ”

“ You know you want to get into an elephant-based gunfight! ”

“ If only [NAME] had the attention span to assist in scientific exploits instead of just like. Punching people. ”

“ Which god is the one punching my death member's club card? I wanna make sure I get that free sundae after 7 punches. ”

“ EVERYONE WILL APPRECIATE THE WALL BC ITS A GOOD DAMN WALL. ”

“ PLEASE GIVE US THE REVERSE MONSTERFUCKING WE ALL DESIRE. ”

“ Okay, I know you're right, let me have my dignity. ”

“ She can have a little licky. A little taste. As a treat. ”

“ I MEAN THERE WAS TONGUE. JUST NOT. IN THE WAY YOU'D THINK. ”

“ When will I get devoted worshippers? ”

“ I mean, they COULD, but then we wouldn't have Delicious Fanfiction Tropes. ”

“ Which level is Dante Alighieri in? I wanna punch him in the schnozz. ”

“ Gender? Never met 'em. ”

“ Wasabioli wasabioli give me the formuoli. ”

“ Don't ‘de-flesh’ my bones. ”

“ Would it be better if I fleshed your bones then? ” “ Yes. Give me more of that good bone flesh. ”

“ I inject you with more of the bone juice. ”

“ WHY ARE THE GODZILLA PEOPLE STALKING ME? ”

“ BECOME ONE WITH THE WORMS. ”

“ Oh, I'm a self-made sauce type. ”

“ Stop using chairs in unstable ways! ”

“ I’m travel size for convenience, and that convenience is crimes. ”

“ The mountains are proud and dependable, unlike us airsick lowlanders. ”

“ THE MOUNTAINS ARE GASLIGHTING YOU. ”

“ WHY AM I THE ONLY ONE WHO KNOWS YUNS? ”

“ Ny’all is the one true contraction. ”

“ Y'all are both cursed to me. I've never heard nor read these words in my life. ”

“ Not the false prophets again. ”

“ The thigh is blessed. ”

“ I've seen him at practice, and I can assure you he has an ass. ”

“ I will put anything and everything I want onto my pizza as I please, including you. ”

“ Bone apple tea. ”

“ I progressed the regress. ”

“ Cult of the new moon gender! ”

“ I wish to be a unit of measurement. ”

“ Wh... How many hands does [NAME] HAVE?? ”

“ Which has absolutely nothing to do with Mothman. ”

“ That’s right: the robot wife was me all along! ”

[chalabrun]

where danzo got his sharingan (theory)

When it comes to the matter of where exactly Danzo attained the infamous Sharingan that littered his artificial arm, it begs the question: just where did they come from? Or, more specifically, who was the Uchiha who provided Shin Uchiha's genetic basis? I hope to explore this and more in this meta.

A background: What we know

To begin, I think it goes without saying that Shin Uchiha was the one who provided Danzo with his arm graft. Now, something I think can be reliably disproven is the fact that the Sharingan on Danzo's arm weren't harvested from the victims of the Uchiha Clan Massacre. Instead, through Uchiha genetic material, the Sharingan there were from a single genetic source. 

Naruto Gaiden ch. 700+7, Sasuke confirms Shin as the source of Danzo's grafted, Sharingan-riddled arm.

Shin, with his missing right arm that corresponds exactly with the one Danzo had.

While perhaps it was popular to theorize that the Sharingan on Danzo's arm were harvested from the victims of the Uchiha Massacre, while it's already been proven false, one of the biggest holes in this theory is the fact that Danzo's right arm had been concealed and bandaged before the Uchiha Massacre even started, suggesting that Danzo had such procedures done before it was even suggested or brought to light. That, and Orochimaru had left Konoha before the Massacre had even occurred, at least a handful of years before the likes of Naruto or Sasuke were born (as the Massacre happened when Sasuke was roughly 8 years old). Or, it's strongly suggested they'd left before then.

Ch. 121, when Orochimaru confirmed their own defection from the village as more than a decade before Part 1.

But, as this would go on, this leads us into our next point.

A background: Danzo & Orochimaru

Orochimaru when they were a member of Root.

One of the most mysterious facets of the plot is Orochimaru and Danzo's working relationship, and how far it went. While a fairly shadowy time, there are a few concrete absolutes of what Orochimaru used their scientific prowess for in service to Danzo; or rather, what advances were made before Orochimaru's formal defection. 

The first, and most notable, was taking Anko Mitarashi on as a student and using her in their experiments, prominently with the Curse Marks. 

Orochimaru insinuating at Anko being their past student during the Forest of Death arc.

Anko struggling with her own Curse Mark we learn she received long before Sasuke ever attained his.

Orochimaru, after their revival in the Fourth War arc describing some of the mechanics of their Curse Mark.

One thing significant about the Curse Mark (or, the Curse Seal of Heaven, as it's formally called) is the fact that it had in a one-in-ten success rate, meaning that, while working under Danzo, Orochimaru likely had the jurisdiction to conduct such dubious, fatal experiments with forbidden jutsu despite the casualties incurred. Given Anko's age (24 in Part 1) would've been 13-14 at the time (give or a take a few years from the decade or more since Orochimaru's defection), it meant that Danzo likely authorized them so long as he benefited from the Sannin's experiments. Which leads us to the next point.

Danzo & Orochimaru: An interest in Hashirama

Now given the relational age of students/test subjects like Anko, this leads us to the next most notable. As many people know, the Root agent known as Yamato was also a test subject of Orochimaru's, largely in the twilight years when they became more and more unethical with their experiments. Now, again, here's something to consider:

Danzo, exhibiting signs of possessing Hashirama's cells during his battle with Sasuke.

Now, as we're given a timeframe for when exactly Orochimaru was a part of Root and doing illicit experiments for Danzo's benefit, this leads us to the next most prominent test subject we're introduced to in Part 2.

Yamato, around the time of his introduction to manga & Tenchi Bridge mission.

Ch. 291, where Orochimaru expounds on the experiments they did with the Shodai's cells.

As we learn on the Tenchi Bridge mission, Yamato possesses Hashirama's cells from experiments conducted by Orochimaru who came across (or was given access to?) Hashirama's body they extracted the First's cells from. Now, taking into account Yamato's age this early on in Part 2 (26), the math there would have to factor in Orochimaru's defection and the time since. So, 26 - 14 (adding an additional 4 to factor in the 3 year interlude period and year-long Part 1) = 12, making Yamato around the same age as Anko (give or take a few years) when Orochimaru was experimenting on their Curse Marks while being a part of Root. Especially since these experiments' test subjects are confirmed to have all been children.

Now, while this might seem like random pieces of information, this will become very important. As we can infer from this alone, Orochimaru had a dedicated interest and access to the bodies of the Founders...

Orochimaru using Edo Tensei for the first time during the Konoha Crush.

...as evidenced by their debut use of the Edo Tensei kinjutsu that demands genetic samples of the ones being summoned in order to work. Hell, the first time they utilized the Impure World Summoning kinjutsu was to wield Hashirama and Tobirama against Hiruzen.

Orochimaru: Their interest in the Uchiha

Obito/Tobi on location in the Sharingan lab secreted within his base of operations.

Now, something I think needs clarifying is this: at no point in the manga was it ever confirmed that Orochimaru ever had access to the Sharingan harvested after the Uchiha Massacre. The only one who had, however, was Obito Uchiha as Tobi. In fact, it's strongly insinuated that Danzo likely gave Obito unprecedented access to the victims' bodies and allowed him to harvest all the Sharingan he desired, as seen in the aftermath of Danzo's defeat where Tobi/Obito is shown in his lab with hundreds of Sharingan samples. And the only plausible way it would've been remotely possible was if those Sharingan were from the Massacre's victims.

The prelude to the Hokage Summit when Tobi outright mentions meeting Danzo before.

This doesn't mean that neither person never coveted the Sharingan's power, however. It simply debunks the notion that any of the Sharingan in Danzo's grafted arm were ever Sharingan belonging to the victims of the Uchiha Massacre. As seen with Shin, the Sharingan were artificially made in a lab from Uchiha genetic samples from an unknown donor (or, unwilling test subject, more likely). 

As stated by Shin himself, he and the other Shin clones were cultivated by Orochimaru, not composed of stolen Sharingan from Massacre victims.

The Shin clones themselves from Gaiden, all shown with identical Mangekyo Sharingans like the original Shin.

And, of course, Orochimaru had an extremely well-documented covetousness for the Uchiha and their abilities, best evidenced in their interactions with Itachi and Sasuke Uchiha.

During Orochimaru's years in Akatsuki, they attempted to steal Itachi's body shortly after he joined, but lost their hand as a result.

Orochimaru during one of Sasuke's training sessions before they planned to take his body (mostly) voluntarily as their new host.

However, aside from this vested interest, it can't be overstated enough that Orochimaru is only ever canonly shown targeting living Uchiha, namely Itachi and Sasuke, both which resulted in failure. Regardless of how that interest manifested, what is canon is the fact that Orochimaru only got such power from two sources: the Sharingan they cultivated themself, and the Uchiha survivors they targeted, those being the Uchiha brothers. 

Uchiha Shisui: The possible Uchiha donor?

Ao when he used his Byakugan at the Gokage Summit to confirm that Danzo was not only in possession of Shisui's eye, but that the chakra of his arm matched Shisui's as well.

Now, with the fact that Danzo has reliably proven to have possessed cultivated Sharingan from a single donor, by the looks of it, that donor would've been Uchiha Shisui. However, I doubt this is the case due to the fact that 1) it defies the time period that Orochimaru would've been in the village long enough to collect such samples to create Sharingan imbued in Shin and 2) Danzo is shown with his arm being sealed before he's stated to have ever stolen Shisui's eye for himself. 

Danzo, unveiling his trump card at the start of his battle with Sasuke.

As we can see with this particular panel, a habit Danzo had fallen into was concealing his right, grafted arm and keeping them sealed. 

Hiruzen and the Elders' Council deliberating the possibility of needing to eradicate the Uchiha.

As shown above, Danzo habitually kept his right arm concealed before the Uchiha Massacre even happened. In fact, just panels ago in the same flashback is when Shisui is shown with his right eye missing. In such a consideration, the time between Itachi and Shisui's conversation and Itachi paying witness to the Massacre's deliberation likely wasn't long at all. And certainly not long enough of a time for Danzo to have stolen Shisui's eye and used them as a base for his arm's Sharingan (especially since Danzo has no probable scientific knowhow of the level Orochimaru possessed who had become a missing-nin for years before this point). While his eye certainly is, another consideration to make is that Ao only is capable of recognizing Shisui's chakra that he encountered with his Byakugan before, while never noticing the other Sharingan or Hashirama's DNA (especially since those with Hashirama's cells can be sensed as having them).

Shisui during his conversation with Itachi just panels before Itachi would meet with Hiruzen and the Elders' Council.

Now, while it's been shown before in the manga that eye transplants can occur with just the right amount of medical knowledge and performed by the recipient (as shown with Madara and Izuna's eyes, and later with Obito transferring Itachi's eyes to Sasuke), it goes without saying that medical and scientific knowledge aren't always synonymous with each other. Much like how Tobirama excelled in the sciences while Hashirama was stated to be an expert with medical ninjutsu, or how that dynamic became true again between Orochimaru and Tsunade as the Sannin, Danzo being able to transfer Shisui's Sharingan for his right eye doesn't mean he possessed the scientific knowledge necessary to cultivate Sharingan from it, timeline disputes and narrow timeframes notwithstanding.

Therefore, I don't think that Shisui's Sharingan provided the basis for the Sharingan in Danzo's arm. There is, however, one last and likely possibility.

Uchiha Madara: The most likely Uchiha donor

Now, while this might seem incredibly farfetched, I have a lot of reason to believe that Madara was the genetic template for the Sharingan in Danzo's arm and Shin Uchiha's body. And I have reasons for this, too.

Madara is the most likely Uchiha, and the one who would've gone unnoticed if his body had been experimented on.

Madara at the moment of his death, not long before the end of the Third War, approximately.

When Madara admits to his own status as a "lost" Uchiha.

Now, given the reasons I've stated above, and the fact that Danzo/Orochimaru had access to or knew the locations of graves of the Founders (Hashirama & Tobirama), it gives me reason to believe that they also knew the location of Madara's corpse and were able to procure genetic samples from his body. Given the fact that he was pronounced dead by the shinobi world decades earlier, it leads me to believe that it's entirely likely Madara's body would be the least-risky Uchiha to experiment on that would fly under the radar of the Uchiha Clan who likely wouldn't have ever allowed the village access to their dead clansmen.

It's implied Orochimaru may have experimented on Madara's body before.

Black Zetsu explaining how he led Kabuto to Madara's corpse to begin with.

Admittedly, this page might seem enough to blow holes in my theory, but I think it's worth noting that 1) Kabuto was never aware of Orochimaru's experiments on Hashirama's body nor 2) that Yamato existed at all (especially when one factors that Kabuto would've been taken under Orochimaru's wing around the time these experiments had been going on at all). What's more, the manga itself does have contradictions of its own with previous plot points being undone or contradicted by later ones, or the story being established by the time the manga was nearing its end (such as the relevance and power of the Uzumaki clan not being noteworthy until the Fourth War). 

Madara's body was experimented on once before by Tobirama.

One must also factor in that it wasn't the first time Madara's body had been experimented on to discover the Sharingan's secrets, setting a precedent.

Ch. 681, after Madara's first death.

Given the fact that Danzo had worked under the Second Hokage before, and because Danzo was likely the one who gave Orochimaru access to Tobirama's kinjutsu and cadaver, it also stands to reason that Tobirama's brutal pragmatism and dehumanizing regard of the Uchiha could have later influenced Danzo's absolutism with the Uchiha Massacre and passed on to Orochimaru (despite the fact that they turned out to be even more pragmatic and level-headed than Tobirama).

But, aside from this precedent of Madara's posthumous availability as a test subject of Uchiha-centric experiments, there's more.

Orochimaru & Kabuto reverse-engineered the theory of the Rinnegan's manifestation long before the Fourth War.

Ch. 559, after Madara's debut in the Fourth War.

As this page properly furnishes, something stood out to me: Orochimaru and Kabuto had experimented on the Rinnegan before. Or, more properly, the theory behind how they came into being. A common thread seems to be that older generations were aware of the Sage of Six Paths and the Rinnegan, and given the fact that it's unclear how Jiraiya attained this knowledge, it's probable Orochimaru may have been in the know as well as the Toad Sannin. With all this in mind, it's extremely likely that Orochimaru not only also knew about the Rinnegan, but began synthesizing theories as to how it would manifest in the first place.

Ch. 559

Given the fact that Orochimaru has found the extremely esoteric before, such as probably locating Ryuchi Cave, one of the legendary sage regions on their own (versus Jiraiya reverse-summoning himself due to affinity with the Toads), the idea of them finding Madara's cadaver and utilizing it in experiments is a likelihood as well. 

Closing thoughts

So, while this theory went into a lot more than just what it says on the tin (such as Orochimaru's experiments with the Founders, debunking the Uchiha Massacre victims in Danzo's arm theory, etc.), I hope it was enlightening and possibly opened some eyes!

[popculturebuffet]

Static Shock: Shock to the System and Aftershock Review

“You know what? 13 years ago, me and some friends sat in a restaurant all night and daydreamed about the kinds of stories we would tell if we had the chance. We wanted to expand the concept of superhero to include characters that kind of looked like us, who had some of the same background, experiences and dreams as we did. We wanted to create something fun that a new generation would respond to the same way we responded to our childhood heroes -and damn if we didn't succeed beyond my wildest dreams. Today, Static Shock is a household name with millions of fans of all ages (Is there stuff I'd do differently? Yeah, almost all of season four but why nitpick?) Static is the most successful thing I've ever helped create and I'm both proud and gratified that people have taken it into their hearts. “ 

Dwayne McDuffie, Co-Creator of Static and Writer for Static Shock

This review is dedicated to Dwayne McDuffie and Robert L. Washington III.                                                        Rest In Power Static Shock is awesome. I grew up with the show watching it both first run on the WB and second run on Cartoon Network and loved it as much as I did other large parts of my childhood courtsey of DC like Batman the Animated Series, Teen Titans and both Justice League Shows. What makes this unique among the DC Properties is that Static wasn’t really a big name when he got a show. He wasn’t even part of the DC Universe. 

See as I had no idea for probably a good decade, Static actually came from Milestone Comics, a company ran by and focused on african americans. The goal was understandable: While black heroes existed at the time, and there were some fantastic ones like Storm, Jim Rhodes and Steel... these guys weren’t the center of their universes. The big faces of the big  companies, Spider-Man, Wolverine, Hulk, Iron Man, Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, The Flash.. were white. So milestone was a shakeup of that with the main teams and heroes all being black, from Icon, an alien who’d lived among man but rather than end up in kansas like say superman ended up imprinting on a slave woman centuries ago and has been with us since, who was encouraged by an energetic teenager named Rocket to put on a costume and do something with his powers and his community, Hardware, a tech genius who had his work stolen by a white asshole and wanted to fight back and BLood Syndicate, a group of gang members all caught in the “The Big Bang”, a huge fight between all of Dakota, the midwest city where the comics take place, that ended when the police released a bunch of experimental gas that gave them all super powers. 

As most of you who have watched the show already know, this is where Static comes from. Static was the company making their own Spider-Man, i.e. a nerdy teenager who suddenly gets super powers, in this case Virgil Hawkins who at the prodding of a friend took a gun to The Big Bang to get revenge on a bully. .but ultimately couldn’t go through with it, decided it wasn’t him and got rid of the gun and ran.. and still ended up in it, becoming Static, a young hero dedicated to using his powers to fight other “Bang Babies”.. a term that dosen’t really sound that great and they really should’ve thought through. But Phrasing aside the character was great and I look forward to reading more and only haven’t because I have to buy the issues gradually, but DC is currently re-releasing the individual issues of Static, Icon, and Hardware weekly in anticipation of a reboot of Milestone Coming in May digitally on Comixology at only 2 bucks a pop, and rereleased the original print collections that were long out of print for 10 bucks each, though i’m getting static on it’s own since i’ts really not that much less expensive as it only collects four issues while Icon and Hardware both collect 8, so I can wait a bit there on Hardware and already own Icon: A Hero’s Welcome.. and really need to review it at some point. 

While Milestone’s output was good, at least from the two books i’ve read, with Robert Washinton III, who sadly not only ahs also passed but was fucking homeless for a while  in the 2000′s.. what the actual hell, writing Static alongside Dwayne McDuffie, whose later moved onto animation writing tons of Static episodes all of them classics including the school shooting episode, the first three rubberbandman episodes and both Anasazi episodes. Point is it had good writers and artists and even had a distrbution deal with DC, so they had a leg up on the glut of other comic book companies.. but happened to start at the start of the comic book crash, a huge downturn in sales in the 90′s as the speculator boom, i.e. a bunch of people assuming every number one would be worth golden and silver age money, forgetting a character has to BUILD INTREST and this stuff takes time, and whose attempts to sell fast flooded the market with comics no one wanted,, caused the roof to cave in and with a bunch of assholes pegging milestone as a “Company for black people” rather than you know, a company trying to add fucking diversity and represntation to the comics industry, and that simply wanted a unvierse that was centered around people of color instead of white guys. The company eventually had to shut down, and was left to lisencing.  This is where the show comes in. Producers HAD been trying to make shows based on Milestone for a while, as far back as the mid-90s and the company was was all for it but the closest it got was an x-men style team series using various characters whose first draft was terrible and whose second draft by Alan Burnett, a producer on various DC Animated shows who’d go on to produce Static Shock, that McDuffie and others really liked but sadly did not get picked up. eventually though with presistance Static ended up getting a series and as I said McDuffie went on to write for it though he did not develop it. Some changes went into place naturally to make it work for an early 2000′s kids show and while i’ll probably miss so since again, only read one issue as we go. But due to Milestone coming back my intrest was peaking, hence finally reading the copy of Icon I had to buy from the library years ago due to keeping it overdue but am now EXTREMLEY glad I own as i’ts incredibly rare and really damn good, and wanting to read static, doing so lately since it’s finally on digtiial and again not too expensive. So join me as I give you a shock to the system and revisit this hell of a series to see if it holds up.. which just to cut that short it does and i’m only holding off binging MORE because I want the first two eps to be fresh enough in my head to review properly.. and also go over the various voice actors because that’s a thing with me now and charcter co-creator dwayne mcduffie because he’s awesome. 

As I like to do when covering a series first episodes, let’s run down the voice cast. 

First up is an UTTER LEGEND, and I use the term voice acting legend a lot, and mean it every time and have good reason to use it when I say it, and Phil LaMarr is a GOD in the buisness, having done a metric ton of voice acting roles, and being easily the most proflific black voice actor in animation. He’s also done some acting work, mostly in pulp fiction which I have not seen, but his true staying power and talent is in animation so here’s just the roles I feel are most notable or may not be very notable but i’m bringing up anyway because it’s my list. 

His roles besides Virgil include Lester Payton the Texas Ranger who showed up for one very good episode of king of the hill to be badass and show up the hickish, stupid and very punchable local Sheriff, Gearld’s obnoxious older brother Jamie O on Hey Arnold, Hermes Conrad from futurama, Carver from the Weekenders (PUT IT ON PLUS DISNEY), Axel Foley for exactly one bit in Clerks the Animated Series, but anyone whose seen it will know exactly which one, Micheal on the Proud Family, Black Vulcan on Harvey Birdman (In His Pants), Hector Con Carne and Dracula on Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy and Evil Con Carne, Jack on Samurai Jack something I didn’t know for decades (and I didn’t know about the carver thing till today though i’ts obvious in hindsight), John Motherfucking Stewart on Justice League and later Steel and Adult Static in the Unlimited seasons, Osmosis Jones on Ozzy and Drix, Bolbi Strogofski on Jimmy Neutron (And yes i’m just as shocked as you are.), Wilt on Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends, Marcus on Life and Times of Juniper Lee, Bull Sharkowski on My Gym Partner is A Monkey and Also a Sociopath Please Help God My Life is a waking nightmare..... okay the rest of that title is implied but we all watched the same show, we all know in our hearts that was the title

Moving on, he was also, and yes there’s MORE: Maxie Zeus on The Batman, Philly Phil on Class of 3000, Both Robertsons AND Fancy Dan on the Spectacular Spider-Man, Jazz on Transformers Animated, Kit Fisto and Bail Organa on Star Wars the Clone Wars, Gambit and Bolivar Trask on Wolverine and the X-Men, Aquaman I, L-Ron and Green Beetle on Young Justice, J.A.R.V.I.S. and Wonder Man (Simon Williams) In Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, Gabe and Carny on Kaijudo: Rise of the Duel Masters (Really miss that game and have been snapping up what cards I can get lately), Baxter Stockman in the 2012 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (And there’s also an awesome photo of him with 2003 Baxter... the two best together in one place. I got chills), Dormammu (I’ve come to bargin) in various Marvel Shows, Noville in Mighty Magiswords, Zach’s dad Marcus in Milo Muprhy’s Law, Craig’s Douchey Brother Benard on Craig of the Creek, showing he’s clearly come full circle, And Mr. Scully on the Casagrndes. And given It took about two paragraphs to cover all of this, yeah, I MEANT legend. 

Next we have Kevin Micheal Richardson as Virgil’s Dad Robert, and it’s the first time since I started introducing Voice Actors on a show that i’ve overlapped. I already covered him during the second episode of legend of the three caballeros, but for the short version he’s also very acomplished, very damn good and I somehow missed he played the old blind guy in hey arnold> Needless to say the dude is awesome. 

Virgil’s Sister Sharon is played by Michele Morgan who was in the rap group BWP and did some smaller roles outside of this the one exception being Juicy on the PJ’s, which I have not watched much of but REALLY do not like, though i’ll at least give it credit for being a decently long lasted black claymation sitcom at at time when there were, and hoenstly still aren’t, many black animated shows. 

Back to long casting sheets, next up is Jason Marsden, who is one of my faviorites as i’ve realized recently as Ritchie. As I also found out only recently he started on the Sitcom Step By Step and while that show is .. ehhhhhhhhh, he is great in it because he’s great in everything. He also apparently has his own internet variety show which I have to watch now. His roles include Max Goof, ironically given I was just talking about that role a few days ago, Haku in the english dub of Spirted Away, Micheal, the kid being yelled at by a bunch of 80′s cartoons characters not to take drugs in Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue!, Nermal in the DTV Garfield movies and The Garfield Show, Tino on the Weekenders (SERIOUSLY DISNEY), Snapper Carr on Justice League, Rikochet on Mucha Lucha! for the last season (Why I do not knkow and while I love the guy he was not the right choice), Felix on Kim Possible, Chase Young on Xiaolin Showdown (WHich I did not realize was him and now I do easily his best role and I REALLY should’ve), Red Star and Billy Numerous on Teen Titans, Speedy on Batman Brave and the Bold, Impulse/Kid Flash II on Young Justice, and Fingers on Kaijudo. He hasn’t done as much lately which is a shame but hopefully i’tll pick up again. 

Next up is Hotstreak, Virgil’s brutal bully turned unhinted pyromancer played by DANIEL COOKSY, another actor i’m happy to talk about and another faviorite I haven’t seen much of lately. Daniel was an actor from childhood, playing Budnick on Salute Your Shorts, but he quickly gained a long and storied catalogue of VA Work: His first big roll was as Montana Max on Tiny Toon Adventures and if there is a god he’ll be back for the reboot, Stoop Kid on Hey Arnold, the incomprable Jack Spicer on Xiaolin Showdown, far and away his best role and part of why Chronicles sucked so bad was he was he didn’t get to reprise the role, The titular Dave the Barbarian, Django of the Dead on El Tigre (Had no idea), Kicks utterly insufferable big Brother Brad on Kick Buttowski and apparently he’s back at it again after laying low for a bit as he’s voicing Snag in Long Gone Gultch.. which I already really needed to watch but hot damn, I missed him. Sign me up. 

Frieda, Virgil’s crush and close friend who in the comics was his main confidante and love intrest but here is eventually pushed aside, is voiced by Danica Mckeller whose work didn’t seem all that familiar.. until I found out she was Ms. Martian on Young Justice. Hello, Megan. Very talented and she did get a major role in a dc show eventually so good for her. Can’t wait for season 4. 

So with our major players out of the way,  let’s talk about Dwayne. McDuffie is an AWESOME man and my respect has grown for him more and more with time. A writer and editor at Marvel, McDuffie has a decent resume doing smaller but awesome books, which I got most of for free last year when Marvel was giving out free digital collections due to the lock down, like Damage Control, a sitcom set in the marvel universe about the company that picks up after superhero battles and the logistics and antics that insue and Dethlok, about a pacfist trapped inside a cyborg zombie. He was as mentioned one of Milestone’s founders, and wrote Icon, Hardware and co-wrote the first few issues of Static. He’d go on to a pretty stacked career in animation, writing on this show and Justice League before becoming  story editor and show runner for Unlimited , even making a return to comics as a result writing the Marvel miniseries beyond and an arc of Fantastic Four in which Black Panther and Storm filled in for Reed and Sue while the two of them worked on their marriage after Reed did.. pretty much everything he did in Civil War. He also became head writer and show runner for Ben 10: Alien Force and Ultimate Alien, revamping the franchise a bit, and Alien Force, at least the first two seasons are awesome and I feel people overreacted on the changes. Ultimate Alien is okay, but has it’s problems but the finale was awesome and left the man’s legacy on a high note.. as he sadly passed in 2011 due to heart complications. He is truly missed and produced some utterly amazing stuff whlie he was alive. So on that melacholy note let’s see what happens when his creation hits the tv screen shall we?

Shock to the System:

This episode is written by Christopher Simmons, who is apparently a huge art designer guy.. but i’m not sure that’s the same chirsptoher simmons. Much more notable is the writer of the episode after this Stan Berkowitz, who was showrunner for season 1 and has done a LOT of DCAU work and is suprising talent, having written a lot of awesome Justice League episodes including Secret Society and The Royal Flush One. Point is we’re in first class hands.  Before the episode itself I want to talk about the intro and how it’s unique among DCAU shows. Like most Western Animation the intros for DCAU shows didn’t change much over the seasons with the most I can see is JLU changing up the footage to preview the current episode and later adding Hawkgirl to the intro after her return to the team. I THINK superman the animated series changed some of it’s footage too, but I can’t confrim it and may of just been imagining it. As i’ve talked about on my blog it’s normally a pet peeve of mine, mostly because shows you know, change after season 1, characters get added some one shot characters used for the intro never return, and after a while it can feel dated especially in more recent shows where the status quo is not at all set in stone and things change quite a bit. But sometimes it can be good enough that either the dated elements don’t matter or general enough that you don’t need to change it and i’ts just that good.. and given Batman the Animated Series has both in spades, you can see why i’ts probably my golden standard for intros and after superman the animated series DC mostly followed suit. But being part of the teen superhero boom of the 2000′s Static is unique in that it splits the diffrence: It’s intro gets the character across perfectly like a good intro should starting with Virgil getting out of bed and running a comb across his head before showing off to his sister to bug her and literally running into his dad who hand shim his bag and smiles, silently showing off his family. He then runs to school and runs into some trouble.. and said trouble changes for each intro, with Rubberband Man for season 1, Kanga (Whose name I only know because I happened to run across it) for season 2 and your guess is as good as mine for seasons 3 and 4, though Hotstreak is a constant. They still save some money for seasons 1 and 2 by recycling some animation.. but that’s alright with mea s it was good animation, and the improtant thing is cycling out old villians for new ones, while Season 3 is the only out and out redo to show off Richie taking on the Gear identity, adding about 10 seconds of intro to let him show off.  Seriously it’s an utterly great intro and like the other DCAU intros outside of superman, stuck in my brain. 

The other change that’s ENTIRELY diffrent from the rest of htem is that the music changes each time. The first two have the same formula just with a difrent vocalist and backing track: a superhero theme but with some hip hop beat boxing over it. The first intro is fine enough, not specattcular but stilll god. The second song.. is eh. Not really great and feels like a marked downgrade from season 1 and just dosen’t blend an ocrehstiral superhero theme with the beatbox elements NEARLY as well. The third song though is my faviorite.. even if I HATED Little Romeo as a  kid because I really did not like his nick show, it’s more a straight up rap song, but it has a faster beat that fits the intro better, and Romeo’s bragging fits Virgil’s character and penchant for Spidey quips perfectly. I also find it ironic that the theme that blends in with the dcau the most, the first season’s, is the one from BEFORE they decided to put it in the same universe. Still this season’s intro slaps, I just like the LIttle Romeo one a bit more.  The opening scene is picture perfect. Some masked crooks looting a warehouse are loading some stolen TV’s into a van when suddenly the lights come on one by one above one of the crooks before his tv switches to various channels before going haywire. Cue our heroes’ entrance. Let’s tak ea good look at him

Static’s Costume is awesome. While I prefer the season 3 redesign, and clearly DC agrees as the redeisgn was used for both pre and post new-52 when they used him, and while he’s getting a fresh design for the reboot, said design takes a lot of cures from said outfit. As for how the outfit differs from the comics itself  this is the design he had in the comics

It didn’t change much from the first issue, with the exception of his now iconic big puffy jacket which was added pretty early into the character’s history but I was unaware of that and just assumed he had the bodysuit the whole time. The more you know. But as you can see outside of the cool puffy jacket over a costume the two couldn’t be more diffrent. While the Dakotaverse outfit is more a standard superhero outfit, with some regular clothes touches on top the first cartoon outfit comes off more realistic, looking fantastic, but still coming off as something two teenagers could realistically have thrown together with what clothes they could buy, while still looking awesomely superheroy. IN short it’s perfect and only topped by the season 3 onward look...

But the slicker look, with an even cooler jakcet and the new colors all fitting the lighting ascetic better, but fits: not only has Virgil come along farther since he started, but with Richie now having a genius brain as Gear, he can provide a far slicker, far more professional superhero outfit on the budget the two have.  This show is just great  at costume design. 

So getting back to the episode at hand, Static puts up a huge sign in elecrticy saying “Bad guys here”, PFFFT, and then hides away and narrates that a few days ago he’d be the last person anyone would’ve expected to be a hero. Cue Flashback. 

We meet Virgil Hawkins on an average day: rapping into his razor, getting into a petty argument with his older sister Sharon, as a younger brother myself I relate to this, and talking to his dad who tries to get them to cut that out. We find out his mom has passed via his sister making really terrible eggs and saying that’s how mom made them. Exposition! Though we do get a great bit through this as when his sister gets distracted by her boyfriend calling, he uses the opportunity of her leaving the room to dump the eggs.. after having earlier jokingly prayed to his mom for a way out of breakfast. “Thanks for looking out for me mom” That’s both very sweet and very hilarious. 

This is a change from the comics it turns out as I was utterly flored to find Virgil’s mom alive and well when reading the first issue of Static. Turns out this was a change made during development and one Dwane McDuffie admitted in the interview I got the tribute quote from to not liking as he had a good reason for having Virgil have a nuclear family, as most black families in media at the time were just one single parent and a kid or two with the other having either left or died. He wasn’t too bothered by it as while he preferred what he came up with in the first place, the show DID get some really good stories out of her being gone and didn’t just have her be absent because shut up. Virgil is still working over her death and the way HOW she died ends up playing an important role in this episode and gives Virgil a dislike of guns, as she died to gang violence. So the change wasn’t for stupid or racist reasons, but likely both to keep the character count down while giving them something to work with for storylines. Or it could’ve been for stupid reasons and the writers simpily made lemonade out of that very dumb lemon, either way it ended up working.  Virgil also plans to ask his friend Frieda out. Frieda was a bigger deal in the comics, being Virgil’s friend and confidante as well as his ocasional love intrest, but here while she was inteded to at least be his love intrest here, that sorta fizzled out. As for the best friend role we meet her replacement in Richie, which McDuffie conceded was the kind of change a studio would make swapping out a female character for a male one. That being said the crew made the best of it and Richie is awesome, a bit of an overcompensating dipstick at times, but a good sounding board and pal for virgil and funny as hell too. He was also gay, something only revealed post series by McDuffie.. but unlike say Dumbledore, it’s a bit easier to swallow here: The early 2000′s were an even worse time for gay characters in tv let alone cartoons, and if they couldn’t kiss or have sex scenes on regular tv, there was no way we were getting any representation in a children’s show. So it was largely just hinted at by Richie overcompensating in how “into girls” he was and i’m once again fine with this being word of god as it was literally the best they could do and his counterpart in the comics was also gay, if not as relevant.  Ritch encourages Virgil to work on his opening to ask her out as it’s awkward as heck, hits a bit close to home.. but I do appricate the show just .. having him try and ask her out from the first episode. They likely would’ve drug thigns out a bit granted had they used Frieda more, i’m not blind to the convetions of the time. .but as someone who got the very wrong idea from tv that just waiting around meant a girl would like you eventually, when no you need to actually try even if rejection happens, I honestly wish we had more of this in media than the other garbage morals at the time. 

So he prepares to , not helped by her mentioning guy after guy is asking her out.... but before he can F-Stop, the future hotstreak, shows up.  F-STOP

That being said...... it’s not as bad as the original gangster name for the comic’s version, Biz Money B. Yes BIZ MONEY B

So yeah while F-Stop is no more intimidating, it at least means I can stop laughing. Francis, because I can’t type F-Stop without laughing and this review is already behind, shoves Virgil out of the way and agressively hits on Frieda, even saying “you smell good”, the international sign your a douchebag and also to call the police. Virgil steps up to the guy and gets PAINFULLY slammed into the lockers, something I give the animation team a lot of credit for, as you can FEEL how fucking painful that was. Virgil is saved by Wade, another local gangbanger who in the comics was a close friend of Virgils but here saves him seemingly just because.. seemingly. 

On the way home though Virg’s problems don’t end as naturally, the giant sized asshole with nothing better to do has his goons corner virgil before VIOLENTLY beating him.. off screen but the noises, and the clear brusies including a black eye, on virgil afterwords.. just holy damn i’m suprsied they got away with this but it shows just how horrifing it was and that this is a step above regular bullying, which make no mistake is absoluttley terrible and the series would later do an episode on it and school shootings, into straight up gang violence. Wade shows up again and gets the bastards to flee.. but also makes it clear he can’t keep doing this.. and forces Virgil to meet him at his base under the bridge. And it’s a tense sequence, with Virgil KNOWING this is a bad idea but having no real choice and Wade making it abundantly clear that he wants Virgil to join his crew, and makes a chilling point: while Virgils dad RIGHTFULLY dosen’t want his son to join a gang as Virgil points out.. he can’t be there for him all the time and eventually one of those times, Francis will be around. And he may not surivive that. Virgil nods noncomittaly.  At home it gets even more grim as he dosen’t open up to his family, understandably as his dad would jsut say to call the police and well.. we’ve seen how the police treat black people. At best they’d just try and use Virgil as an informant and that likely wouldn’t end fucking well for Virgil. Ritchie points out he can’t join a gang, virgil’s mom died that way.. see told you it’d be important to the plot.. but I like how the story dosen’t offer an easy answer.. well okay he gets electric powers soon enough but without the fantastic element this is just an innocent kid caught between either joining the very thing his mom hated or hoping a system not built to protect him will keep him alive. It’s utterly saddening and chilling and holy shit is it amazing a cartoon in the early 2000′s was able to get away with.. ANY OF THIS, and they handle it great, paired down a bit from the comics but even then it’s still incredibly balsy they got THIS much in. 

Naturally Wade calls in his favor and our hero is forced to come running.. and soon finds out Wade’s brought him in for a massive gang war. Welcome to the big bang, baby. He hands Virgil a gun as things get started and Virgil.. drops the thing and tries to escape, in a harrowing sequence.. and runs into Francis because god apparently REALLY hates this kid today. As if to prove that the police show up and while that prevents a beating, they demand they disassemble. then release untested gas on them because of course they do. 

As a result the big bang truly begins, with the various gang members getting mutated.. and naturally so does virgil. Though he wakes up the next day seemingly fine. How’d he get home? Does his dad know where he was?

I don’t know and we’re not getting any answers, but Virgil soon finds weird stuff happening like his clock shorting out, change being attracted to him and his razor going wild. It’s only once he get sback to his room he gets an inkling of what’s going on and calls Ritchie to meet him at the Junk yard.. though it is a bit of a dick move as he dosen’t you know, tell him anything about Wade or Francis right away. He does at the yard though.. and that he has powers, having finally figured out how to use them to a point. And the series does provide a decent justification later as to why he’d get this so quickly: Virgil is a smart kid, gets great grades at school and apparnetly there’s even an episode later where he gets a scholarship to a fancy genius school. So him getting how elctromagntisim works or being a quick study on it makes perfect sense. 

Richie suggest the obvious.. to become a superhero. And the thought.. hadn’t occured to Virgil. It’s honestly a nice twist on the old trope. That he hadn’t thought of it, not because he’s selfish or any of that or needs to learn a hard lesson, those have been done.. simply because the rush of getting his powers, and implicitly of having a way out of his current predciament, a way to keep Francis off his back and keep Wade from pulling him in further. His own path. But once i’ts brought up.. he jumps on it. Part of it is being a nerd like you or I, of course he wants to.. and being a good intetioned one, he knows this is the right thing to do. It’s waht makes a superhero a hero: Anyone can get powers in a universe like this, esepcailly the dcau, but it takes true courage and heart to use them selflessly and knowing you’ll be in danger. It’s why I love surperheroes: they often didn’t ask for this but they do it anyway because somebody’s gotta. We also get an intresting wrinkle is superman is, at least I think in this episode I could’ve missed it or misremembered things, mentioned as a fictional character. That’s because originally like the comics this wasn’t part of the DCAU.. but eventually the crew decided it shared staff from it, shared a network, both first run and on reruns, why not just make it part of the DCAU proper. I fully support this decisionf: While i’m midly annoyed unlimited never really used anything from static shock outside of Static himself in the time travel episode, despite you know Static and Gear having BEEN to the tower and not being much younger than Kara and defintely older than Courtney, I chalk it up to weird rights issues or something like that. But having Batman, Batman Beyond, Superman, Green Lantern and the Justice League itself all guest star was a good idea, and expanded both static’s universe and gave the DCAU something differnt as most heroes in it were older and more experinced in contrast to the up and coming virgil. Again really would’ve been nice if he and gear could’ve been a part of the expanded league but production might of just been too far ahead or, given he had his own series, they might just have wanted to stick to toher characters. Also begs the question why Icon or Hardware wasn’t adapted for the expanded League but hey, questions for later and the tricky logisitics of the milestone rights might’ve been the issue. I don’t know I wasn’t in the room. 

So we get a costume montage, including Black Vulcan from Superfriends, who again ironically would be voiced by Lamarr not too long after this, though weirdly they DON’T use his outfit from the comics for this montage. I mean why not? It fits the gag and would’ve been a good second to last choice.But what could’ve been aside we get our winner and cut back to present day...

Thanks boys. Static finds out one of the things in the warehouse is a shipment of computers for the school and can’t help but show off, showing up to the school, where Frieda and Richie are setting up for the dance, and dropping off the computers, and even saying his catchphrase for the first time “I’ll put a shock to your system” (Which Richie chimes in with awesome line and I agree, great catcphrase), before helping set up and flirting with frieda. 

Though as Richtie says he’s a natural. He’s not wrong as he can work a crowd. .but back it up too as his first run out had him easily taking out the crooks, and as many teen superheros and fans of heroes of hte type, myself included will tell you, getting it right in one is not easy. Not even Miles MOrales was immune. All Static needs now is a villian. 

And the end of the episode provides one as we see, in horrifc and once again damn suprising detail most of hte new metas aren’t doing so good and are melting and other stuff and we catch up with Francis whose burning up.. and naturally given that hair, though given he named himself F-Stop it’s the least of his problems, he’s got fire powers and escapes to “Have me some fun”

So with that we end episode 1. And it’s excellent, a great way to introduce the hero and while the warehouse opening is a bit superflous, it is a decent addition, showing our heroes first outing in costume and giving us a bit of an action scene to get us through the very heavy rest of the episode. But the rest of the episode is no less grippping, telling the tale of a teen caught in an unwinnable scenario who suddenly finds a way out. And speaking of which waht of Wade? Will we see him again? Is he perhaps Ebon, the series big bad as I thought when I was a kid? What comes of the man who directly caused static’s origin?

Yeahhh that’s the one mistep I think the pilot makes. Frieda is understandable as that was likely a simple change in creative direction. This though? Why build this guy up if your not going to bring him back. I mean where he went was probably the grave, as he probably did due to his mutation, but it’s still VERY weird to spend a whole episode focusing on this guy, building him up as a big personal threat to our hero.. and NOT have him become the series big bad. And maybe he WAS supposed to be ebon and they just changed their mind. I don’t know but it bothers me it bothers me a lot. Otherwise though flawless. ONe more to go. 

Aftershock: We open outside an electronics store, as our heroes watch the news reacap what happened in the first episode, with the media dubbing it the Big Bang and revealing their could be hundreds of “Metahumans”, as Virgil dubs after deciding the media’s term “Mutant” dosen’t fit, a nice wink to the fact that that’s the term used in dc comics and I believe milestone but could be wrong there. Me I like the term, has a nice ring to it. 

At the store while Richie mulls over waht this means Static finds out he’s a human CD player.... this was before mp3 players and streaming on your phone made them horribly obsolete mind you and if you don’t know what one is congradualtions you live in some sort of bubble and you made me feel really old junior. 

Frieda happens to be there and Virgil quips “What’s the matter they run out of britney cds”. Dude she’s not bad. Also be careful what you wish for man. Nickeback returned the year after this. You have not truly suffered through bad music yet my young friend. They spot a kid looking feverish, and he soon turns into a purple werewolf, as you do. It’s a bang baby.. those are richie’s exact word and you may not want to start a panic there bud. Just saying your best friend is one. THeir not all like this. Our heroes book it only to run into Francis who naturally refuses to let them leave and only doesn’t try to beat up Virgil because Virgil points otu the werewolf and nonplussed, he goes to fight it, scarring it off by revealing his own powers. He’s now dubbed himself Hotstreak which points for getting an actually good name kid. No points for what happens next as unsuprisingly getting powers did NOT mak ehim a better person and he attacks Virgil who blocks with a garbage can lid and thankfully is blasted into an ally. Richie tries to guard frieda for damn obvious reasons but gets hsi shirt burnt up because shut up Thankfully Static shows up, and we get our firsdt full on superhuman fight as both fight each other with aplomb, and it’s a damn good fight.. and one that goes pear shaped for Virg as he’s caught off guard when he finds out Hotstreak can use his powers to fly, and tackles him and his previous trauma causes him to freeze up. Thankfully , as Frieda put in a call earlier, the fire department arrive and HOt streak has to retreat, though Virgil is bummed that he “Choked”. And I love this as it not only shows Virgil’s inepxerince, as this is his first time fighting a bad guy but that just because he HAS power now dosen’t mean trauma and his previous fear of Hotstreak goes away or you won’t freeze up from time to time. It dosen’t make him weak or anything like some assholes would call it .. it makes him human. Humans make mistakes, and it makes him all the more relatable that he’s not pefect and that he did freeze up as I know I certainly would at last once in the circumstances. 

Things don’t get better at dinner as Sharon and Pops argue over the bang babies with Pops calling them a meance and Sharon pointing out Static exists so they can’t all be bad. See assuming a group of superhumans are bad because a handful of them ar edick sis why the x-men had to get their own island nation. You can only save an ungreatful populous so many times before you say “fuck it i’m getting my own island, pay me for life saving drugs, save your damn selves and stop doing genocides on us. Kay thanks”. But he does bring up a valid point that rattles his son: We don’t know anything about the Bang Babies or their biological structures and it’s likely they might further mutate into monsters, Static included. 

Virgil, understandably, wants to check this and thus he and richie compare blood samples in science, to no real conclusion. She he checks out with his doctor who assumes he’s sexually active in a great getting crap past the radar bit and a bit of realisim, but he agrees to the test though if something came up he would have to tell Virgil’s dsad and is up front about this. Nice dose of realisim.

That night City Council has a meeting and the Mayor TRIES to deflect Papa Hawkins questions about the bang babies which again, while being a judgmental ass as not every person hit was a gang member (Virgil, and as we discover later some others), and not every gang member is there by choice, some by circumstnace some, like virgil almost was, because they HAD no other option. Again years of reading x-men may of just made me a bit touchy on assholes admitely assuming superpower people bad. But it’s clear the public is upset and while she says an investigation is underway... Virgil and Richie are not only not convinced, but figure she’s actively covering it up. And unlike everyone else there who probably suspects the same, they can do something about it and tail her.  It’s during this, and cleverly as I didn’t realie till writing this using similar skills to his human cd player act, Virgil listens in and discovers whose behind it: Edwin Alva, whose apparently richer than bill gates and a beloved phinarophist Alva, as it turns out, was actually the arch enemy of Hardware in the comics, taking advantage of the guy in his civiliian idtentiy and thus casuing him to launch a war on the asshole. He does transition into this series well though, being the one behind the gas that caused it and with the mayor agreeing to back off, planning to simply dump the info about the big bang on a disc then destroy everything for now till the heat dies down. Yup sounds like a corprate douchebag. 

Static tails him, finds the lab and infiltrates it, stealing the disc.. but getting caught by Alva’s goon, and trapped in a glass prison, forced to use ALL his power to escape and barely getting out alive, but not before bouncing off alva’s car. Still he now has the proof.. and meanwhile Hotstreak, who I was wrong did get captured, is forced to take pill sbut spits them out once the orderly is gone. Dude.. WHY DIDN’T YOU WATCH HIM. Make sure he swallows that shit especially since, as he has no powers right now and can’t harm you. 

Hotstreak escapes off screen and our heroes discuss the disc before he shows up, and we get a REALLY fucking amazing scene: Virgil ducks into an Alleway and ritchie is worried.. and Virgil disarms him with just one word responses Ritchie: Virg you can’t take him.  Virgil: Gotta. Ritchie: Well at least wait for the fire department Virgil: Can’t.  It’s simpile but it gets the point across: This is his fight, he can’t wait for help, and people need him. And this is what makes a true hero: It’s easy to be a hero when everythings going well.. but it’s the true ones who stick it out against the odds and fight anyway. And he’s going to.  So we get one hell of a fight, though naturally Hotstreak burns up the disc. And I do like this as it dosen’t feel contrived.. yes Static could’ve left it with ritchie.. but he wasn’t thinking in the moment and dind’t really have time to think abotu the disc, only that people were being hurt and he was all they had between them and Hotstreak. It was no choice at all. Still that pisses Virgil off that the last night’s work is now worthless, and he fully charges up and curbstomps francis who retreats into a clearing. Hostreak brags when static follows, as even he’s figured out Static needs to be around metal, as he’s usually on his disc or the street, and in the park there suppodsidly isn’t any. But he’s not THAT smart as Virgil points out two things: one, he hoped to do this on PURPOSE so they wouldn’t be around people and no on e would get hurt and 2).. this is a city, there’s metal everywhere.. and he awesomely and cleverly proves it by unlodging a sewage pipe with his powers and dousing his foe, winning and proving his stuff. I love this solution, it’s a clever spider-man type way to disarm him, using smarts and the einvroment instead of just brute forcing it. Though the sewage part wasn’t intetional our hero still won and gets praise from the people dumb enough to follow the fight. 

However at home Virgil points out it was  Pyrrhic Victory and shows off his smarts by telling the tale behind it, which I didn’t know,because tv tropes didn’t exist yet: king pyrhus fought the romans and WON.. but had so little armies left that he still lost overall. That’s what this feels like to Virgil: he beat hotstreak but any chance at a cure for Bang Babies and Alva going to jail for causing them is gone. His mood does get a boost though as the doctor calls and reveals he’s fine, he just has a bit too much elctrolytes and just needs to lay off teh salt. He celebrates, we get a quick gag and the episode ends

Aftershock is another stellar episoe, giving us Virgil’s first super foe and a personal one at that, while showing some growth. As richie tells him he’s not virgil anymore he’s static and he can’t let his past get to him.. and he does’nt going from cowering in fear to easily beating his foe with simple logic. It’s a good followup that answers questions you may have from the first ep, like what does this do to virgil’s body, who supplied the gas, and why has no one done anything about this, and sets up another villian for Static in Alva. Great stuff. I highly recommend these episodes and the show as a whole: it’s fast paced, grounded and enjoyable, having just enough levity to not be too dour but just enough tension and stakes to be intresting. A throughly fantastic superhero show and one that i’d certainly love to revisit on this blog If you have an episode of static or the dcau in general you’d want me to cover, my comissions are open and details are on a tab on my blog or can be gotten simply by asking me via ask or dm. Tommorow we’re going deeper underground, there’s too much damage in this town as the Lena Retrospective continues. So expect gay ducks, straight ducks and some terrfirmains. See you next rainbow. 

[worldburnrp]

“It was a maddening image —

Little by little, the rooftop space filled up with guests. It’s impossible for a rum-sponsored party not to turn lively; and certainly, it has. While some are happy with their drinks and stay in the venue, drinking and dancing their spirits away — others choose to venture out, either returning to their rooms or getting lost in the maze that are the corridors of The Mark hotel.

In either case, the night is light and young, and there’s not a worry in their minds.

Little do they know however, that in the shadows, the Syndicate awaits.

— and the only way to whip it was to hang on until dusk —

Although the night had been planned to exhaustion, it’d been all but a coincidence that the operation had fallen on the same date as the party launch. It’s a blessing, at the same time that it’s a curse; more people circulating the area isn’t ideal — but a sea of potential issues isn’t so much so, if they’re impaired to begin with.

130 million dollars, gone up in flames. But they ought to make their money back, somehow.

So here the Syndicate hides, and at around 10:30, they strike. Swift and professional as ever, they go completely unnoticed — and they will take all that they can.

A highly effective heist, right under their noses. Those 130 million earned back in just a night.

No wild cards, no action that isn’t necessary, were the instructions given. Money, jewelry, art, anything of true value — that’s what they’re after. Designed as a victimless crime as far as bloodshed goes, the Syndicate still accounts for all. No issue, lest you get in their way.

— and banish the ghosts with rum.”

Unfortunately however, some unlucky few have. As instructed, should anyone be a concern, be it that they’re found in their rooms or other areas in the midst of the operation — they should be neutralized, by whatever means necessary. All with still keeping their anonymity, and succeeding at their tasks.

The pairs that have crossed paths are:

Ludovica Malatesta and Rus Ralston

Nora Vidal and Lee Malkovich

Zafar and Mathias Cain

Vir Zafar and Ibrahim Ziani

Abel Rousseau and Nik Erykssen

Oliver Wright and Jin Yoo

Tima El-Masri and Audra Smythe-Priestley

Avi Grover and Samar Burman

Max Szczesny and Enzo Principe

Karolina Erykssen and Samar Burman

OOC Info:

Part Two out of Three.

Part two will run for a few days, to allow for everyone to comfortably write their interactions in time; an update will be made both on the blog and discord for subsequent parts.  

There is no requirement that people drop previous event threads set during Part 1 — but we encourage everyone to prioritize Part 2. This can be either through new fresh threads, or shifting your Part 1 thread into Part 2.

For characters not involved in the conflict, there are no restrictions to replying to starters (or continuing things) from Part 1, unless they were posted by someone, or are written with someone involved in the conflict. In that case, those starters may no longer be replied to. You’re also free to start any new things with other non-conflict characters as you wish.

If you wish to have any injuries (be them major or minor) or heavy impacting plots happen involving your character, please contact the admins so we can include it into the narrative.

Those in the conflict are encouraged to come up with scenarios where, mid-robbery, one would have the other held hostage. Be it at a hotel room, in some hidden office, or anywhere that is far from view and where there would be plenty to steal. They’re on a mission, after all. As always, if you have trouble coming up with ideas, the admins are always willing to help.

At the end of this post, we offer challenges to the guests. However, those are simply suggested interactions — and even if you choose to write it, your character is not limited to just writing those.

SYNDICATE CHARACTERS:

[ ALL SYNDICATE MEMBERS ARE WEARING NEUTRAL BLACK CLOTHING AND MASKS. IF THEIR CLOTHES WEREN’T NEUTRAL AT THE PARTY, THEN AT THIS POINT THEY WOULD HAVE CHANGED. NOTHING ABOUT THEIR APPEARANCE (THAT THEY CAN CONTROL) SHOULD BE RECOGNIZABLE. EVEN IF ENCOUNTERING SOMEONE THEY HAVE MET BEFORE, THEY ARE TOLD TO KEEP THEIR IDENTITIES SECRET TO THE BEST OF THEIR ABILITIES. ]

For Syndicate members especially, Part 2 should be prioritized so that plots can flow easily.

If you have Part 1 threads, we won’t ask that you drop them, but that you work your way into finishing them — with your characters, above all, keeping in mind that they have a job to do. It might be a night of fun for everyone else, but not them.

From now on, you can only interact with other Syndicate members, or the character you were paired with.

You can write as many mid-robbery threads with your fellow Syndicate members as your heart desires. Interactions amongst them are allowed, and absolutely encouraged!

As far as the rest of the party goes, you may only interact with the character yours was paired with, as one is the other’s hostage.

Your character should be focused in the robbery itself and collecting valuable goods. Anyone they’ve encountered is damage control.

Important: this is meant to be an incredibly secretive and smooth operation. Get in, get out, without causing disturbance. The main party should not have any inkling or knowledge that this is happening.

POINTS AND CHALLENGES:

Syndicate members and conflict volunteers will each earn 20 points for writing their paired threads. (It doesn’t matter if one character ‘wrote’ the starter; both members will be awarded points.)

All remaining characters will earn 20 points for completing the challenges prompted below. They are not mandatory, but we will reward you if you choose to go forth with them.

The points above will be awarded at the end of the event, to account for any starters going unanswered or quickly dropped, as we wish to be as fair as possible.

Surprise! We’re also rewarding conflict volunteers with 30 points for being wonderful team players and allowing us to use their characters for this plot. We adore you and appreciate you, so here’s a small gesture to reflect that!

CHALLENGES:

Jennifer Callaghan recognizes Izaak Walker from his internet presence, and attempts to strike an interview, or even a comment. Izaak knows it’s unadvisable to go forth with it, given all the rum ingested tonight.

Andrea Galán has been avoiding Aaron Keaton, until they cross paths. There’s an inkling or knowledge of her involvement with crime, and tensions rise.

Gideon Hayes is spotted by an off duty Joaquim Borges whilst trying to deal — be it to a random guest, or worst yet, the very detective himself.

Danvir Persaud thinks he recognizes Laith Hassan, from briefly crossing paths in the law-and-lawful world. There’s no reason for a sketch artist and a lawyer to engage however, until now — that they’re both trying to get a vending machine to work.

Renata Cervantes-Müller and Úrsula Villa are both powerful women in their own right — except that they share far different ideals, and defend different people. It’s been easy to avoid one another thus far, until the elevator doors fail, locking them in.

A dentist and the state’s most prominent politician walk into a... bathroom. It’s a classic, slightly awkward, run-in. Except this time, it involves Nicholas Bergeron — and Julian Berkeley.

Jakob Cervantes-Müller is a busy man, and the things keeping him busy aren’t the kindest. For prevention (and future endeavors), he needs a lawyer — and he’s heard Adam Starke is one of the best. What a coincidence, that their drinks just got mixed up at the bar.

Constance Romero, the Cartel’s informant manager, is always on the lookout for future contacts. Like some other select people, she’d heard of Lev Movska’s defection from The Brotherhood — and hell if she isn’t going to try and get all of that knowledge into archive for them. The enemy of my enemy, as they say.

With too much rum in their system, Lola Villarin and Diego Romero end up wandering — testing every other room for unlocked doors. Eventually, they make it into a suite; it’s all fun and games, until the lock won’t allow them back out.

Hazel Arthur and Ryan Fitzgerald barely look at each other, when touching up their make-up in the lobby’s bathroom. But they have to acknowledge each other’s presence when they realize they’re locked in — and Hazel hasn’t heard back from her partner in far too long.

They’d both had the same idea — the hotel’s fire escape as the perfect spot for a smoke break. Hans Starke and Zuleika Sandoval are now forced to share the space (that both claim to have found first).

Bob Bekker and Aera Paek, different positions at different publications. One man with success in his horizon, and a woman who can grant anyone it. It’s a throw-away conversation until the words fact checker come to rise. The best paper, after all, is the most accurate one — would this man do her the favor of failing, in exchange for a brighter future?

Araceli Aguilar suddenly stops Heather Hyeon Seo in the middle of the lobby, with an unwarranted prediction of her future. Even if Heather doesn’t believe in it, it’s intriguing enough that she must hear more.

Rahi Kumar is well known for his love of the sky, preferring to gaze upwards towards the heavens; it is this exact preference, that sends him careening into Andel Kenza, who scurries away from a main party room, clutching what appears to be an empty bottle of rum, a strange substance congealed on its base. The pair stare at another another - a stalemate. 

Erin Katz was never a woman to wait for opportunity to simply knock on her door - she prefers to kick it in herself, a stiletto crashing through wooden panels. JJ Baptiste is a man who can make or break you in this city, and with the intriguing wallet she’s just found on the floor, she thinks she’s got enough leverage to earn his ear as he lords over a table in the back of the bar.

Moon Subin is currently scouting the media world, looking for new voices to either support his agenda in the press — or to simply gain insight. It’s unclear which Maureen Keaton could be, yet... but it’s worth a try.

FINAL NOTES

1 — If by any chance your pairing partner, or your challenge partner doesn’t get back to you — please contact the main page and we will rearrange things so that you may still write it! No one will be left without some event fun, we promise.

2 — If you’ve missed the window to volunteer your character for conflict, or you have joined recently and didn’t know about it, you can shoot the main page a message and we will do our very best to include you into the action. Only main page messages, please — as Discord will be hard to keep track of.

3 — As always, the admins are only a message away should you have any questions.

Part 2 interactions are now open. Have fun!

[kationella]

Welcome to another episode where we tackle the lore of the Persona series. This time we have...

The Velvet Room

The Velvet Room is one if the few things that appear every Persona game. We all know the basics, so let's go deeper than that.

This place was created by Philemon as a way to help users on their journeys and give them an extra boost, so to speak. It is unknown when it was created, but with the help of facts I will mention later, we can guess it was way before P1.

It's location, like the Sea of Souls, changes constantly. However unlike the Sea, it is easier for a normal person to gain access to it. Well, as normal as a Persona user can get.

The Velvet Room has this ability to appear wherever a guest needs it. Usually in a set of different locations in the city/town where their journey takes place.

Formally, it serves as a bridge between the "human realm" and the Collective Unconscious, where the multiple pocket dimensions lie.

Due to its nature, a guest is able to visit the room in their sleep, mostly because their presence is required at the moment.

It's appearance is supposed to be a representation of the journey the current guest is going through. It's usually a mobile appearance like an elevator or a limousine.

However, if there is more than one guest at a time, it will default to a literal velvet room.

Keep in mind that a guest is not the same as a visitor. A visitor can't gain access to the room by normal means and can't use their services (It is possible for people with high spiritual sensitivity to see the door, though).

A guest is bound by a contract to complete their journey in exchange for the benefits the room entails.

What are those benefits? Game mechanics, mostly. Like managing Personas and Fusion. Ya know.

It's demon/shadow counterpart would be the Cathedral of Shadows.

To be granted entry as a guest of the Velvet Room you must either:

A) Have been granted your Persona by Philemon.

B) Own the power of the Wildcard. I will cover the Wildcards in a separate post.

The denizens of the Velvet Room can bring visitors whenever they want, though.

You can deny the contract the Velvet Room offers, though it is destined that you'll end up signing it anyways.

Despite having created the place, Philemon barely visits it. Let's talk then about the true denizens of the Velvet Room.

We can't talk about the Velvet Room without talking about Igor. He is the first face you'll see once you enter through that blue door.

Igor's creator is currently unknown. All that we know is that he started as a doll that was given life by unknown means. Like a weird Pinocchio.

He practically manages the Velvet Room, being in charge of fusions. However, Igor must always use some object in order to be able to use this ability. In P1 and P2 it was a bone telephone, while in the rest he uses a deck of cards.

This doesn't mean that Igor doesn't have personal abilities. He doesn't say it outloud, but it's obvious Igor has minor precognition. Mostly focused on his guests.

He does have full control over his retrocognitive abilities, which helps him to read the personalities of those around him based on their lifes. Not only that, but in one of the P3 dramas Igor is capable of sharing what he sees in the past with another person through a flashback of sorts.

Aside from this Igor can do minor spiritual healing, through so far we have only seen him dealing with curses.

Next in the list we have Belladonna. The singer of the Velvet Room with her masterpiece: the Aria of the Soul. Her voice is meant to enrich the soul and open your heart.

When you enter the room she will help to provide a calming sensation in the middle of your journey. Clear your mind.

But of course, the Aria of the Soul would be incomplete without Nameless, the piano player. Only he could play a song like that with his eyes covered. His role is the same as Belladonna, only he plays music instead of singing.

Nameless also has a minor job as a reminder to Igor of the costs of Personas since the old man always forgets.

Nameless mentions the following:

"That is why 90,000 and 155 nights have passed since I closed my own eyes."

If we do the math, those would be around 247 years. Persona 2, the game where he mentioned this, takes place in 1999.

With all of this information, we can say that Nameless has been playing his role since 1752. A probable date of origin? Who knows.

Both Belladonna and Nameless can sense the current status of the collective souls of humanity through their music.

Let's talk now about the Demon Painter. His most notable characteristic is that he is the only confirmed denizen to have been a human before, having lived in Sumaru City before his employment. Apparently his painting skills were so exceptional that he was offered immortality and a chance to reside in the Velvet Room. The Demon Painter skills actually remind me of Yusuke, so there's some food for thought.

The Demon Painter claims it has been decades since he became immortal. This would make the date of his employment between 1909 and 1979.

Belladonna and Nameless have been confirmed to still live in the Velvet Room (how big is it, anyways?) but nothing has been said of the Demon Painter.

Now we move onto the attendants. So far we have Margaret, Elizabeth, Theodore and Lavenza. Each attendant aids one guest at a time, making exceptions when it comes to their guest's party.

Only Lavenza has shown the ability to transform into a blue butterfly, so we can assume the others can do it too.

None of the attendants are human and have no knowledge of humans themselves. This leaves the possibility that they were created recently for the Persona protags in the open. How come Elizabeth hadn't tried to explore the human world before on her own?

Talking of Elizabeth, she's currently the only attendant that has basically abandonded her job to roam the human realm and search for a way to free Minato from the Great Seal. This may apply to Theodore on a minor scale with Minako.

From what we have been told, it is possible for Elizabeth to gain her own contract to start her own journey.

One last curious thing is that apparently the room uses a lot of spiritual energy to just exist. This is why a spiritual being must be constantly "powering" it so it works correctly. This being is usually Igor, explaining why whenever he isn't there, the room starts to malfunction.

As of the latest games it seems that the velvet siblings have learned how to control it without Igor's help.

Since it was inspired from a story from Edgar Allan Poe, I'll headcanon that he was a Persona user and you can't change my mind.

Questions I don't have the answers to:

- Where did the Velvet Room denizens come from?

- Did Philemon sense when Yaldabaoth took over the room?

- What happened to the Demon Painter?

- What will happen once Elizabeth completes her journey?

- What does the contract say exactly?

- Do you offer your services to the Velvet Room or are you recruited?

- Since Tamaki uses shadows instead of Personas, would she go to the Cathedral of Shadows instead?

- Where were the rest of the denizens when Yaldabaoth took over?

[twstarchives]

Star Send-Off Garments・Voice Lines

● Event: Wish Upon A Star (August 28 - Sept 14, 2020) ● Exclusive Cards: Deuce, Ortho, Idia, Trey

Ortho’s outfit is called “Stargazer Gear,” instead of “Star Send-Off Garments” like the others.

Trey Clover - R

Unlock Card “I feel tense wearing the Star Send-Off garments. I suppose this is the ‘weight’ a traditional costume carries.”

Groovy “Nothing’s wrong with having a realistic wish.”

Home Setting “They’re so fluttery... These clothes don’t feel that secure.”

Home Transitions “I once used my allowance to buy my little brother a ticket to a magift game so he could live out his wish of seeing one live.”

“You think this school has too many traditional events? Haha, don’t say that. This school has been around for a very long time, so it makes sense.”

“Next, you do a... there. I can’t get lazy with practicing. I haven’t danced in front of an audience since elementary school.”

Home Transition (Login Greeting) “A Stargazer, huh? Since they picked me to be one, I guess... I just have to do it.”

Home Taps “I never thought I’d get picked to be a Stargazer. The Headmaster said it’s based off astrology, but... is there really no other reason?”

“It’s really hard using an oven in the hot weather. I wish all the desserts for our tea parties could be ice cream...”

“They say the puppet boy’s nose would grow every time he told a lie. You’d be in trouble if you had that kind of curse on you, wouldn’t you?”

“Ortho is so honest and loveable. But then there comes a time where he’ll switch into trying to fire his laser beam...”

“Are you looking at my tassels? They’re supposed to look like shooting stars if you do the Star Send-Off dance correctly.”

Idia Shroud - SR

Unlock Card “Right, and now we’ll officially get to be the laughing stocks of the whole school. Good job everyone.”

Groovy “Wishing upon a star, huh...? I don’t believe my dream would come true anyway.”

Home Setting “This looks like something a loud person would wear... This is torture.”

Home Transitions “My wish is to vanish from this event along with the stardust... I’m kidding; I’m going. I swear I’m really doing it!”

“I’ve made wishes on stars with Ortho before, for things like having all the candy I want, or playing games as much as I want. How innocent this humble otaku was back then!”

“Sir Trey is so calm and mature. Well, sure he looks like that, but I dunno what he’s thinking deep down.”

Home Transition (Login Greeting) “I’m a... Stargazer...? Nonononono! Absolutely not, please!”

Home Transition (Groovy) “Could you take my place for me? I'm sure even someone of your caliber could handle banging a drum! ...Huh? ...Are you mad?”

Home Taps “There’s no way a wooden puppet could turn into a real human. Miracles only happen in fairy-tales for plot convenience.”

“S-Stop looking so curiously at me... I mean, I know these stick out compared to my usual clothes, but still.”

“Look at this traditional costume. It’s got all kinds of stars all over it! You can see how people in the old days were drawn so badly to space.”

“So, collecting Wishing Stars... Having to talk to everyone has been an impossible mission from the start. I’m tired.”

“Hey, you know... If you have enough time to keep annoying me, maybe you should be a Stargazer in my place.”

Home Tap (Groovy) “Hah? You want to post a picture of me looking like this on Magicam? It’ll just be sad without anyone reacting to it, so forget it.”

Ortho Shroud - SR

Unlock Card “I am calculating the optimal route for increasing the possibility of our wishes coming true.”

Groovy “Above the clouds, at the ends of the universe... I can fly anywhere at all!”

Home Setting “Now initiating preparations to break through the atmosphere.”

Home Transitions “You know, Big Brother and I used to count stars together in the past! Should I tell you how many stars there are?”

“I heard the puppet who came to life went on a big adventure that led him all the way to a whale’s stomach. I wish I had an attachment that would let me go underwater~”

“The number of trials you do is important when analyzing data. Deuce Spade told me it’s important to always think about your wishes too!”

Home Transition (Login Greeting) “Part change complete. I will now begin to operate from my attachment designed for breaking through the atmosphere, the Stargazer Gear.”

Home Transition (Groovy) “I wonder what everyone wished for… Would your wish be to go back to your original world?”

Home Taps “The Stargazer Gear was created with powerful heat-resistant material, so I’m able to get past the atmosphere without damaging my body.”

“It’s too bad Big Brother didn’t have one of the dancing roles. He’s always yelling and dancing around his room while looking at his tablet!”

“In the past, the alignment of the stars was considered very significant. Is that kind of like what they call horoscopes nowadays?”

“This gear is decorated with lots of stars! It looks just like everyone’s Star Send-Off garments, doesn’t it?”

“Request approved. Now launching a beam to obliterate space debris. 5... 4... 3... Hehe, just kidding!”

Home Tap (Groovy) “I might even be able to take you to the ends of the night sky! Don’t be shy! Ah... But it might be too dangerous for living people.”

Deuce Spade - SSR

Unlock Card “Wish upon a star... And trust that your dream will someday come true.”

“I’m going to try my hardest at every event we have. ‘Cause I’m striving to be an honors student!”

Groovy “Since I was given the important role of being a Stargazer, I have to take the responsibility to carry this out!”

Home Setting “Shah! I’m gonna make the Star Send-Off a success!”

Home Transitions “The puppet boy got himself into a horrible mess when he tried skipping school. Maybe you should tell this folk tale to Grim.”

“The Star Send-Off garments aren’t embarrassing to me, but I have one problem with them. The ends... are so easy to step on. It’s dangerous.”

“I keep stumbling over my feet when I practice the dance! And here I thought I had good reflexes...”

Home Transition (Login Greeting) “Have you been collecting Wishing Stars over there? Come let me know if you ever run into trouble.”

Home Transition (Groovy) “My dreams for the future... I’m definitely going to make them come true someday. So when that happens, come celebrate with me!”

Home Taps “Shroud’s vocabulary is full of words I’ve never heard before. Are they all technical PC terms?”

“I used to make wishes with my mom when I was in elementary school. This brings me back.”

“I heard my birthday is the luckiest day of the year this year. That’s why they gave me fancier accessories than my seniors.”

“All stars look the same to me, so I’m bad at astrology... What? ‘I’m also bad at all my other subjects’? Kgh...”

“Don’t come near me! ...When I was practicing my dance just now, I accidentally hit Clover and knocked him over...”

Home Tap (Groovy) “It's just childish to think that working hard is something to be ashamed of. If anyone tries to make fun of you for it, don’t listen to them.”

Duo Magic Deuce: Let’s actually start going now, Shroud! Idia: You don’t have to tell me, Deuce. I was already planning on it!

[itsclydebitches]

RWBY Recaps: Volume 8 “Divide”

Hello, everyone, and welcome back! It feels good to be doing some normal RWBY-ing in this strange world of ours. First, some supplementary materials.

Number One: In response to any (valid) questions along the lines of, “Hey Clyde, it’s now been a full year since Volume 7 was airing and you still haven’t answered my ask about it. Or the ones about Volume 6… what’s up with that?” I’ve created what I hope is an informative video detailing the problem:

(I assure you, the Earth, Wind & Fire was a happy accident during the screen recording.)

Needless to say, there’s a lot and I’ve known for some time now that I will LITERALLY never get through all my asks. Which doesn’t mean I don’t want you to send future thoughts in! Just know that as we head into Volume 8 territory I’ll most likely prioritize those, as well as any Volume 7 asks that aren’t woefully out of date. But I do want everyone to know that I read all the asks I receive, appreciate them immensely, and think too much about hypothetical answers, even if I don’t have time to actually write them out 💜

Number Two: There’s a bingo board this year!

Jury’s out on whether I’ll remember to update it, but at the very least this serves as a decent glimpse into my — and others’ — expectations going into this volume.

Number Three: I’ve collected a list of things I’ve heard about Volume 8 from what seem to be reputable sources. I did this because RT is developing a tendency to talk up certain points and then fail to deliver, either because something was taken out of a volume/moved to another, or because RT apparently has radically different ideas about what including something means. So this might be handy to keep on file and ask ourselves two months from now, “Did RT actually deliver on what they promised?”

Emphasis on Ruby’s leadership and how Summer’s death has impacted her

Insight into Ren and Nora’s flaws

May Merigold will supposedly have a larger part

More information about The Long Memory (Ozpin’s cane)

Theme of the volume is that you can respect someone but that doesn’t necessarily mean you agree with them

Very short timeline (supposedly just two days)

Yang in particular is very suspicious and distrustful

I was also going to include a list of all the threads that need to be continued/wrapped up, but honestly that would have taken too large a chunk off my life. Let’s just throw out the highlights:

Are we really going to have Qrow gunning for Ironwood?

Clover is dead regardless. Press ‘F’ to pay respects

Oscar bb you got shot please acknowledge this

Ozpin bb you got done dirty please acknowledge this

Penny is a Maiden now. I feel like the fandom has been sleeping on this (myself included)

Queer baiting, queer baiting… you’re on thin ice at this point, RWBY. Just skate on over to the queer snack bar before you fall straight into the lake.  

Ren spill your deep dark secret already and it had better be something more than just ‘Oh no Nora might someday die :( ’

Salem is here so how the actual fuck is the cast surviving this?

Will Ironwood likewise survive his descent into antagonism? Yes or please yes no?

I think that’s all the biggies. I strive to keep lists like this in mind while analyzing, but honestly RWBY has a hundred moving parts that are abandoned or changed or simply retconned at the drop of a hat. So an attempt will be made.

Number Four (last one I promise!): Normal disclaimers and reminders for Recaps apply:

Please don’t fill up the already full inbox with flames. It’s still 2020. No one has time for that nonsense.

There will absolutely be typos and wonky parts because I try to get these out the same day an episode premieres. I have now been working on this for ten hours, nearly straight, and have no more energy for edits. Apologies in advance and RIP to my Saturdays.

I reserve the right to use stupid GIFs and memes at my discretion.

I strive to keep my focus on recapping/analyzing but salt tends to worm its way in… If you’re a die-hard RWBY fan with little patience for criticism, let alone (at times) snarky criticism, please proceed with caution.

No wait I lied, this is the last thing:

Okay, got that out of my system LET’S DO THIS!

We start not with the episode itself but rather Rooster Teeth’s (RT’s) strange non-promotion of it. If you follow my blog you may have caught the post where I pointed out that there was nothing on RT’s website to suggest that one of their most popular shows—if not the most popular show—was premiering today. Nothing on the main page. Nothing on the RWBY page either, not unless you count the Volume 8 poster background (easily mistaken for the Volume 7 poster) and the trailer buried all the way down past Episodes, past Merch, in the Bonus Features section along with videos like Live From Remnant and the volume intros. RT… the promotion of your feature show is not a bonus. This should be front and center! Honest to god, five minutes before the episode dropped I was checking the website for a Volume 8 section, a countdown, anything that would tell me the episode was imminent without relying on fans on tumblr to keep me in the loop. We got nada, zilch. I’m not sure whether that speaks more to RT’s iffy management of the series or simply the website’s horrible design—RIP losing RWBY on Youtube—but I was surprised when I saw the episode a few minutes after 11:00am. At that point I honestly expected to hear about a dely.

So that’s the mood I entered the premiere in, but truly? We start off strong. Things take a pretty severe nosedive later on, we’ll get to that, but I was impressed with our beginning and that probably has a lot to do with the fact that we start with our villains.

We open on a Cinderella character, Cinder, and thus I’m immediately pleased that we’re getting something about her backstory after all this time. Seven years! She appeared in episode one, folks! To say we’re overdue is an understatement. There isn’t a whole lot to go on, just a younger Cinder sadly scrubbing the floor, poised under a spotlight. What we learn, or potentially learn, is based far more in cultural knowledge than this scene. We know Cinderella’s story, which includes the abusive family, the longing for more, the eventual escape, and thus we’re able to read all of that in this image, despite the image itself not telling us any of this overtly. That means we could be wrong in our interpretation, but if we’re not it’s an easy shorthand in an already packed story.

What I’m really impressed with is the sound bridge between the scrubbing and her nails on the back of Neo’s chair. Fantastic way to confirm that this is Cinder as well as showcasing just how far she’s come. The sound of her labor has been replaced with the sound of her power and given that Cinder’s power is stolen, tied to a grimm arm, the property of a genocidal maniac… that’s messed up. It’s a Cinderella story gone wrong.

So yeah, Cinder tells Neo to head straight into the creepy, grimm infested blood cloud to see Salem and Neo is like, ‘Uh… no thank you?’ lol.

RT does a good job this episode with her expressions, ensuring we know exactly what she’s thinking despite an unwillingness/inability to speak.

Poor Neo might be in too deep, but I quite like the overall atmosphere of this opening. Say what we will about Salem’s awful characterization, at least she has style. This woman knows how to make an entrance and, piggybacking off of the Apathy, RT knows how to infuse horror elements into their fantasy. The red and purple coloring of the clouds, spiked whale teeth peeking through, bright orange in the background looking like explosions… that’s all 👌 Including the intro card.

The only thing I want to gripe about is this:

I’m sorry, why does the whale grimm have landing pads? Or something like it?? The whale otherwise works because it’s poised between the natural and the fantasy synthetic. It looks like a real grimm whale on the outside, but is sporting a throne room, a control panel, and other unnatural elements on the inside. It’s a visual indicator of Salem’s ability to control and change grimm. Now though, the additions are wrong, infringing on the line between organic and tech, the line between what helps the grimm individually (giving monkeys wings) and what just helps Salem. Every other aspect of the whale straddles that line wonderfully, adding to the creep factor, like a grimm version of the Uncanny Valley: it’s not quite a whale anymore… but landing pads? That looks ridiculous. Why does Salem even have that? How many ships are her people feasibly using? Why are there five?

Take it away, please.

Cinder waltzes in like this is a normal home visit, but Neo has an appropriate ‘What the actual fuck?’ face going on.

They approach Salem on her throne where Cinder immediately kneels, greeting her with, “My queen.” I mentioned during my trailer breakdown that I think Cinder is lying her ass off here, and I still think that based on a line we’ll get in a minute, but now at least we have a sense of how she can pull this off. A woman who started out as a (presumed) servant is going to know how to mimic subservience, even if her heart isn’t in it. Salem is very good at playing the girl who will still kneel and scrub the floor for you. She will scrub the floor, she’ll do everything you want, she’ll just be plotting her own rise to power while she does it.

There’s quite a bit of interesting cinematography in this episode, not all of it good, and I think one of the mistakes is here when we get a closeup on Salem’s mouth as she greets Cinder. A closeup like that should be reserved for more significant dialogue—“Rosebud”—and yet we get this shot again when Cinder tells Emerald to be quiet. It’s awkward and coupled with the numerous eye closeups we got in the trailer, I think RT is playing a little fast and loose with the camera. Each shot should add something to the scene, not distract from it. If you don’t have a reason for including a technique like that then leave it be.

Back to the actual dialogue though. We knew that Salem knew Cinder was alive and now it seems that she just expected her to come back? I’m slightly lost. It feels like we’re missing something here. Cinder goes off to secure the lamp, fails, nearly dies, wanders on her own for months, and then randomly shows back up on Salem’s whale doorstep, yet Salem isn’t angry at all? Did she have faith that Cinder would return when she has something to offer? Did she just not care about Cinder, considering her return an unnecessary but otherwise welcome surprise? That would make the least sense given that she holds the key to accessing Beacon’s relic… but that circles right back around to why Salem is seemingly indifferent to Cinder’s comings and goings. Surely she can’t actually believe that Cinder is loyal?

“So I trust you wouldn’t return to me empty handed,” she says. Yeah, trust means nothing in this show, Salem, didn’t you watch Volumes 6 and 7? Again, I simply don’t know. I suppose I’ll just chalk it up to confidence, that if Cinder did bail Salem knew she could track her down again. Deciphering her motivations and beliefs is a lost cause when the show continually gives us so little.

The important thing now is that Cinder does indeed have an offering and you can see that Salem is somewhat surprised at being handed the relic.

Cinder, of course, takes credit for the victory and we’re given another wonderful shot of Neo. ‘YOU took it?’

Oh, Neo. Best get out while you still can.

Tyrian appears having obviously made his way to Salem’s ship sometime between her arrival and now. The exchange is pretty standard for this group. He insults Cinder for failing and needing this victory to make amends, talks about how any win against Ironwood says more about his lack of intelligence than her skill, and Cinder… doesn’t have a whole lot of comebacks, actually. I’d say Tyrian won that verbal spar, enhanced by a better use of the camera when we get his tail looming menacingly towards Cinder and Neo.

He goes on to say that Watts was a “necessary sacrifice” so, uh… I’m just going to toss out the ask I answered yesterday. Based on our intro I’d say Watts is still significant to the volume—hacking Penny is my guess—but by the end? He could be in trouble.

(As a side note: I plan to analyze the intro next week. It’s just easier when it comes first.)

Tyrian also calls Neo “little one” which I just found absolutely hilarious. In an on brand creepy manner, that is. Not that Neo couldn’t kick his ass, but there’s something wonderfully chilling about having the serial killer use an endearment towards a potential victim, one that comments on her size while he’s looming.

In contrast, Cinder refers to Neo as a “valuable asset” and we get our third mood of the episode.

Who’s going to start a Neo reaction image collection?

It’s true enough on the surface—who wouldn’t want an ally who can turn into anyone else?—but we’re still bumping up against question of why Salem needs this. She’s immortal! She has an endless army! Magic! This scene works well with a villain who needs a skillset like Neo’s to succeed, but Salem doesn’t. RT is doing a great job writing a story thus far, just not the story we’ve previously been given. This isn’t the story they set up.

This will come back up when we reach the RWBYJNOR group. Just wait.

Before that though, the gang’s all here as Emerald, Mercury, and Hazel show up, all in new outfits.

I think I like everything except for the weird Xs on Emerald’s jacket—it’s way too distracting and frankly makes an otherwise good look ugly—and the fact that she’s showing her midriff in Atlas. Hazel doesn’t have any sleeves! Oh my god, why doesn’t anyone dress for the weather in this show?

Frankly, I found their reunion to be kind of lackluster. I mean, there was nothing wrong with it. Emerald does sound briefly excited, she does run, and it’s in character for Cinder to cut her off… it just didn’t resonate with me emotionally. I thought after two volumes of thinking she’s dead, then working through the knowledge that she’s alive, that I would feel Emerald’s shock and relief more, but I didn’t. And I’m not entirely sure why. I don’t want to level any accusations at the voice acting because frankly I know next to nothing about that skill (and from what I’ve seen it’s usually praised in the fandom), but I will say that throughout the premiere I was noticing it more than I ever have before. The lack of emotion here and some awkward deliveries later, like when Yang goes, “Ruby, there is no way Ironwood will cooperate with us” and I immediately thought, “Wow, that came out stilted.” These observations stick with me because, as said, voice acting usually isn’t on my radar. It’s not something I’ve studied or had practice analyzing. If you’d never told me that Ren or Qrow’s VA changed then after a year hiatus I literally wouldn’t notice… but there’s something about this episode that didn’t sit right. Anyone else get that sense, or was it just me?

Regardless, the arrival of our other three villains really doesn’t amount to much, though I’m happy for all the Emerald and Mercury fans who get to see them in new outfits. The focus is still on Cinder as she delivers a line indicative of her true motivations: “That power will be mine.” Yeah, she’s not loyal to Salem, she’s just power hungry. Of course, Salem immediately takes note of this and raises her hand, in another nice use of the foreground, reminding her that she hasn’t given that order.

Cinder is shocked, angry even, but quickly covers it up with her “Without you I am nothing” line. If I caught it right I think she also calls Salem “Ma’am”? Hilarious. Again, skilled at playing the servant.

Also, before I forget, it’s worth noting that almost everything from our trailer appeared in this episode. Yeah, there are a few details like Nora attacking some tech and the group on their bikes, but on the whole we’ve already seen the majority of our promo material and will likely get most of the rest next week. It makes me both interested and nervous for what another twelve episodes are going to hold.

Salem opens her whale, or opens a portal type view in it, something that gives us a long-distance look at Atlas. I don’t know what exactly is going on here, but it’s pretty so I’ll take it.

She also delivers the frankly badass line, “Just because you’re more valuable to me than a pawn does not make you a player.”

She waves them all away with perfect ‘You mean nothing to me’ attitude and we sadly leave our villains.

Sad not because I don’t love my farm boy, but because things are about to get a whole lot messier.

Oscar has made his way to a camp of civilian survivors… all of whom are just hanging out in the supposedly deadly cold. Yeah, there’s a single fire, but at least four of them aren’t anywhere near it. Three of them also aren’t wearing gloves. What was that survival rate again?

A nice if gruff dude gives Oscar soup—water?—while showing off his… badger claws? I don’t know what kind of faunus he’s supposed to be, but he feels like the sort of two second, minor character who could easily become a meme lol.

Oscar thanks him (my polite son!) and hands the bowl back after a single sip. Which is impressive because I would have assumed the guy was giving me the whole bowl and just taken it. Hell, I’ve done that even when I didn’t assume it’s all for me. A Starbucks barista once approached me with a tray and a plate of samples, I knew I was supposed to take just one, yet for some reason my hand went to take the whole goddamn plate. He had to tell me off, then I was trying to explain that I didn’t actually want or think I should have eight shots of cappuccino all to myself, I don’t even like coffee, he clearly didn’t believe me… it was awkward. So good job, Oscar. You’re less awkward than me (though that’s not saying much).

Now a question, Oscar. Darling. Brilliant boy who has been through too much: why the fuck aren’t you talking to Ozpin? This will be A Thing later when he presents a lack of time to talk as justification for keeping more secrets (we’ll get to that too…) yet here is time! You’re just sitting there for who knows how long, with plenty of privacy to hide a supposedly one-sided conversation so the Mantle citizens don’t get weirded out or suspicious. Talk to Ozpin. Our headmaster gets two lines in this episode, utterly inconsequential lines like his airship scene, lines that feel like they exist to say, “See? He’s still included in the story!” even though he absolutely is not. Two volumes of mostly silence, a perfect setup to start the reconciliation process, but we’re going to put it off again?

Instead Ruby randomly and conveniently appears. I want to know how she found him. Oscar isn’t wearing a tracker. He clearly didn’t call them because he’s surprised when Ruby shows up. He fell alllllllll the way back down to Mantle and then wandered to a random part of the slums. You’re telling me they flew over the entire city—after beginning this search thinking he was in Atlas—and somehow managed to spot him from up in the air? C’mon. I would have rather had a beginning where Oscar makes his way back to the group himself, giving him and Ozpin time to hash things out.

“Need a lift?” Ruby says, eliminating that potential. Sigh.

Oscar immediately starts beating himself up when he gets onboard, saying that he “was stupid to think the General would listen.” Nah, you were stupid to buy into Ruby’s nonsensical confidence and for telling Ironwood he’s as bad as Salem. Sorry, Oscar, but everyone is written badly these days. I will, however, say that I am THRILLED at the group’s reaction to his return. Ruby says that she’s “just glad you’re alright.” Nora has a wonderfully tender moment where she hugs him gently rather than her usual glomp.

That? That added a year to my life. Everyone else seems relieved that he’s okay too, so kudos there. After four years of Oscar being an outsider in the group, this is one of the few moments that feel like he’s 100% accepted. Really glad to see it.

Now let’s see if it sticks after they learn Ozpin is back...

They fly to the Happy Huntresses’ base and I again feel like I’ve missed something crucial. When did they team up? I mean, RWBYJNOR was working directly under Ironwood up until the last hour and Robyn ran off to fight Tyrian/Clover in the last couple episodes. When did she have time to explain her (briefly) changed allegiance and why would the Happy Huntresses trust the group without that? Did Robyn share that Blake and Yang went behind Ironwood’s back for her? Do the Huntresses instinctively trust them because they’re now wanted by the military? How did they even run into each other?

Again, I think we would have been better served to have an episode before all this. Let Oscar make his way back and let the group struggle with the magnitude of their situation on the airship, before they find new allies. Transferring directly to, “They have help and a secret base and a plan in the works!” makes me feel like I missed the real premiere last week. You know, the one where Salem unexpectedly arrived and we left the group like this.

This is where we’ve ended up though. The group is cozy in this hideout, getting info from Joanna, and my only other thought is, “Why is she giving all this exposition?”  

Shouldn’t it be May? I mean, we were told that she was going to play more of a role this volume, a promise that’s pretty important imo given her status as a (so far off screen) trans character, so why not put her in the role of mediator between the Happy Huntresses and RWBYJNR? Giving her that setup as a leader among her people as well as lots of lines would be meaningful. A trans character just existing and being a part of this fight! May could obviously still fill that role—I’m well aware that we’re only one episode in—but it just seems like a missed opportunity to me. Out of all the undeveloped Happy Huntresses, our premiere focuses on the one who has the least importance to the fandom.

As said, Joanna talks a fair bit but what it basically boils down to is trying to get everyone to the crater below Atlas. It’s apparently not safe, but it’s warm, which is what matters right now.

So… let me get this straight. You want to gather everyone into a not safe crater, by leading them through an army of grimm, so that they can wait there in case someone moves the Staff, thus dropping an entire city on top of their heads? That’s the plan? Which admittedly isn’t Joanna’s fault. This is another instance of RWBYJNOR having information that a leader does not and they should really consider speaking up about it. But of course they don’t.

Also, how long does everyone have in regards to the cold? Shouldn’t there be dead civilians by now? The time it would take to find the Happy Huntresses, team up with them, get settled in the base, and find Oscar says that things should be pretty grim right now (pardon the pun), yet every non-aura user in this city seems content to just hang out in the snow. Either the cold is deadly enough to justify moving everyone to the crater, or it’s mild enough to let everyone survive this long, not both.

After hugs are given everyone obviously wants to know what happened to Oscar. His response?

“It’s a… long story. I get the feeling there’s been a few of those tonight.”

That’s a check for the bingo card! We’re halfway through the first episode and we’ve already got another secret. Yes, this is a secret. Oscar actively chooses not to tell anyone that Ozpin is back—something Ozpin himself comments on—and then skillfully draws attention away from himself with “I get the feeling there’s been a few of those tonight.” Indeed, all eyes go to Penny. Oscar’s plight is forgotten, which is what he wanted. His justification?

Ozpin: “You’re not going to tell them?”

Oscar: “You and I aren’t done talking yet.”

Along with this look.

Oscar no. There’s so much wrong with this I don’t even know where to begin. Let’s create a list.

As said, you had plenty of time to talk to Ozpin and chose not to. Miss me with this excuse.

You are now doing to your friends exactly what you and your friends did to Ironwood, which in turn is what Ozpin did to you! I can’t believe we’ve got Oscar critically side-eyeing him when they are still—still—repeating the behavior they drove Ozpin away for.

What is there to even talk about now? Oscar didn’t punch himself/Ozpin (lol) but he did steal Jinn’s name from Ozpin in the first place. You got what you wanted, drove him away, and have been lying and keeping secrets ever since. The only thing they should be talking about involves apologizing. Any further criticism—which is what Oscar’s expression and curt reply suggests—is beyond hypocritical.

Seriously, what needs to be discussed? There’s no reason not to tell the group unless Oscar wants to talk about whether they should tell them. There’s no good ending here...

Don’t you think it would be nice to know that Ozpin is back and you’ve got super magic powers while making plans to save the entire world?

This is all especially stupid given Oscar’s “Salem wants to divide us” reminder to Ruby in a moment. Oscar, you are doing the most to divide the group right now. By not forgiving Ozpin. By refusing to work with him. By keeping him secret from everyone else.

This is bad, friends, I worry for what the rest of the volume will bring…

The story is done with Ozpin for now so I guess I will be too. The group continues filling Oscar in and we get some shots of the base, including a rather prominent poster of what I assume are two Happy Huntresses. Did they die in battle perhaps?

It’s a little strange.

Oscar: “Where’s Qrow?”

Me: “Likely still making bad decisions.”

No one knows so they just drop it. Which I kind of get, only so much you can do to find him if he’s not out on the streets like Oscar, but it still reads as kind of iffy that two nieces look down at the ground for a hot second and then move on with their plans, content to leave Qrow to whatever fate befell him. In a minute we’ll see Yang firmly take Ren’s side regarding helping the people they can in Mantle, which frankly comes out of nowhere for her. I think an easy motivation would have been Qrow. Ruby wants to save the world, Yang wants to find and save their uncle, and that just happens to align with Ren’s desire to save the civilians who need immediate grimm and cold help. Don’t get me wrong, I like that there’s finally some division between the sisters, I just wish it hadn’t come about so abruptly. Ren had setup for standing up to Ruby. Yang did not.

But I’m getting a little ahead of myself. Joanna lists the grimm horde and no heat as the major threats to everyone. The group agrees.

Me: What about Salem?

Joanna says that this is all doubly dangerous because there’s “no more military protection.”

Me: Oh, so now you want the military?

This is all so disjointed. Even more-so when Joanna mentions that Ironwood has stopped all evacuations to Atlas, likely due to the “hard light shields” that are the only thing standing between Salem and the city. Thing is, the show never makes this connection, I just did it myself based on this scene and the one that comes later. The show presents Joanna’s line as a pure condemnation. Ironwood won’t let more evacuees in because… he’s just evil, I guess. Yet there is a justification here, namely that continuing the evacuations even while he’s stuck without Penny leaves him wide open to a Salem attack, the death of everyone currently safe, but that argument is never presented to the viewer. I don’t need people to agree with Ironwood’s perspective, I just wish that perspective was offered as an option. The show is very good about acting like RWBYJNOR’s opinion is the only justified opinion, or simply the only opinion at all.

After everything is laid out Weiss goes, “We’re never going to sleep again, I just know it.”

I could make a crack about the lack of continuity and how the group should be collapsing right now… but that was a funny line. It can stay.

What is far more of a problem is the fact that no one is talking about Salem. Okay, that’s a lie. They do talk about her, but in a roundabout way like her presence isn’t impacting every decision they make. That’s the real issue. They’re acting as if Salem isn’t here right now, like she’s off far away, maybe approaching slowly, and they’re arguing over how best to prep the world for her eventual attack. There’s no emotion here—let alone action—to reflect that the series’ Big Bad has arrived and is poised to murder them all. Literally what is this? Ruby is yelling about warning the world and, ignoring the continued question of why that’s a good thing when the world can do nothing to stop Salem and knowledge of her continually drives people to horrible acts, she has yet to acknowledge that… she’s the world? Ruby is the world in this conflict. She, Mantle, and Atlas. Salem is here for you all. Right now. You are, this instant, in the situation you want to warn others about, so why don’t you try to do something about it? Or at least acknowledge it. Ruby wants to warn the neighborhood about a potential fire while her house is actively ablaze, and the fire could have totally killed her by now but decided not to for… reasons.

“Ruby’s right,” Nora says. They have to tell the world so “they can prepare.” How? How are they supposed to prepare for this? The story cannot continue ignoring Salem’s immortality.

“Ruby’s right,” is all Blake says and I’m starting to thinks that’s why her character exists now, to agree with Ruby. It’s great that she’s getting a little distance from Yang, but man.

As Ruby asks whether Pietro can get Amity up and running despite it not being finished (called it) we start an incredibly odd sequence of flashforwards to their individual missions. I’ve seen a lot of praise for this already and though I agree that, in theory, it’s a good way to save time, I found the actual execution to be jarring. Upon thinking back through our timeline, it became clear they were flashforwards, but while watching I thought they might be flashbacks (especially since that’s more common).

Some of the shots, like Nora’s, just look awkward when you’ve got the exact expression and pose transplanted from one scene to another, like she’s a cardboard cutout behind a green screen. To say nothing of how the flashforwards ruin any suspense (I use that word loosely) in the conversation itself. If the question is, “Will they decide to go to the military compound?” then that question is answered when we see Ruby scoping out the compound, not when the group actually decides on the course of action.

It just made an already muddled scene worse for me, so I hope this trend doesn’t continue.

And of course, Amity can be used despite all the info last volume claiming that it wasn’t finished. Pietro suddenly acts like it is finished and the only thing standing in their way is Ironwood providing access. If that were the case, he would have used Amity weeks or days ago like he wanted to! When was it finished? Not after Watts commented on how incomplete it was. When did they get back the resources they needed from Robyn? It’s as ridiculous and retcon-y as I thought it would be.

Yang points out that Ironwood will never listen to them and Ruby counters that “he doesn’t have to.” They’ll just take the access from him. Because why wouldn’t they in a series where they’ve already stolen two airships? Stealing from the super evil military that Joanna wishes were helping them right now is just the group’s go-to plan nowadays.

Pietro isn’t sold on this plan though. He lists at least three obstacles they’d need to get through “and then… oh boy, I might need to think about this some more.” “And just to clarify,” Oscar says, “This is the easy option?” Um...no it’s not? We also know there’s an access point in Ironwood’s office so… why not go there instead? They really think the Academy is less guarded than the military base? There’s a potential justification here along the lines of, “After Neo and Cinder broke into his office Ironwood will have the place on high alert,” but unless I missed it the group doesn’t assume anything like that. They just listen to Pietro point out all the ways they can’t get into the military base and jump straight to that being the best option. It feels like a transparent way to create conflict for the group. We’ll just have them taking the most dangerous route despite an easy route being offered alongside it. Why bother mentioning his office at all? Just have the access in the military base. Boom, done.

It’s that conflict and the fact that Ruby tends to hear “You can’t” and digs in her heels. You can’t go to Atlas. I’ll just steal a ship then. You can’t defeat Salem. Watch me. You can’t break into this base. Guess what I’m doing! She’s dangerous in her fairy tale, meta-driven insistence that everything will turn out her way because she wants it to.

Speaking of, we finally—FINALLY—get someone challenging Ruby. Sort of. Not actually but it’s the closest we’ve ever gotten:

Yang: “Ruby, when we came here we said we’d follow your lead… but things haven’t exactly worked out.”

Now, there are two things to take away from this moment. The first is how utterly shocked Ruby and the others are. I mean, take a look at these expressions.

Ruby straight up can’t believe what she’s hearing. Weiss put her hand to her mouth like this is the most dramatic thing to ever happen to her. Oscar looks down in a ‘Yeah, I agree but please don’t look at me and make me admit that’ way. And Nora looks indifferent in the screenshot but animated she goes sort of stern, likely pissed that Yang would dare say that given her own agreement with Ruby. This not only reiterates that Yang’s challenge came out of nowhere—seriously, how did we move from following Ruby no matter what to this? Last volume she asked a single question along the lines of, ‘You sure?’ and when Ruby said ‘Yes’ Yang was entirely on board—but also demonstrates that no one has EVER said no to her before. Ruby is amazed that someone would challenge her. The act of challenging Ruby is, in and of itself, shocking. This group has gotten so used to following Ruby blindly that the teensiest little pushback is greeted with this.

Because it is teensy. This is the second takeaway: Yang barely challenges her and that challenge leads nowhere. She doesn’t accuse Ruby of anything, she doesn’t question her continued authority, she just broadly implies that things could be better. We followed you, now things are bad, take from that what you will. It’s incredibly mild as far as criticism goes, making the shock all the more, well, shocking, but it also amounts to—wait for it—nothing! Because Yang didn’t truly challenge Ruby’s leadership. She’s still in charge, she’s still calling the shots, and they’re still listening to her. We might have gotten some change if this division had been allowed to play out, but instead Jaune comes in with a, “Let’s go for both!” solution. It let’s both groups get what they want which, in turn, releases them from the need to grapple with whether they’ll listen to Ruby when she’s advocating for something they don’t agree with. We have now lost the chance to see whether, when push comes to shove, Ren and Yang will cave to Ruby’s will or stick by their own beliefs.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s more conflict than we’ve gotten in years, but that doesn’t mean it’s particularly compelling conflict. It’s good by RWBY’s standards, which doesn’t necessarily make it good. The actual issues at hand—Ruby’s dangerous arrogance, the group’s loyalty, her choices up until now—are just swept under the rug. For all the visuals we get insisting that there’s this great divide in the group… there’s really not. Not in any way that matters.

Also, Ruby is an idiot. Okay, that was mean, but she really is in this scene. She’s actually not an idiot overall because she was written as wonderfully intelligent in the early volumes, but now? Lately? She makes me want to bang my head against a wall.

“But that’s how Salem got this far,” she cries. “By dividing us!”

Ruby… oh my god, Ruby. No one should have to explain to you that dividing people means turning them against each other, not literally dividing your team to complete separate tasks. This girl honestly thought that because there was this teensy disagreement and that half the team would complete Plan A while she and the other half completed Plan B, both of which notably work towards the goal of, “Protect people from Salem,” that this was somehow what Salem wanted. That is was dangerous. Honestly, it’s a scary look at her view of leadership too: If everyone doesn’t 100% agree with me and do what I say, that’s an objectively bad thing that the grimm queen wants, right? Does Ruby think that unification means following a single person (her) without question or variation? That would explain a lot...

The fact that Oscar needs to explain the difference to her is not good. It really doesn’t say great things about this version of Ruby. Though he was comparing Ironwood to Salem last volume, so really they should all be wearing dunce hats.

Penny offers to take the relic directly to Salem in exchange for her leaving the kingdom alone. I honestly didn’t expect that. If anyone took that risk I would have put my money on Ozpin (but of course, during all this talk of the women he knows best, he’s kept quiet). Oscar is again the voice of wisdom, pointing out that they have no reassurance that Salem will keep her word. At least Penny is thinking about Salem as a threat though, so kudos for that. When this plan is shot down she volunteers to get Ruby past the military security instead and, uh, she’s a little intense about it.

I’m not entirely sure what is going on with Penny. She disagreed with Winter but then seemed to come around to her point of view, enough to help anyway. They had another (stupid) disagreement about the value of individual lives, so that helps to explain why she’s teaming up with RWBYJNOR (if you ignore that Ironwood is also trying to save individual lives...). Did watching Fria die shake her up? Is it being the Winter Maiden that’s not sitting right? Does Penny have lingering feelings about the framing that haven’t shown up until now? Her status as a ‘real girl’? We’ve got a lot of reasons that could definitely explain this sudden need to fight, but we’re not told which—if any of these—is the driving force.  

We’re then given a lot of little details. Someone points out that if Salem gets the staff and “create[s] anything else” then Atlas will fall (so yeah, let’s move the people underneath it). We still don’t know what exactly the Staff does because “creation” is kind of broad and “powering a city to float” doesn’t seem to sit within that category at all. Pietro gives Yang the keys to his lab so they can get the bikes. We see the group dividing in the flashforwards, something I do like, especially since the show has gone out of its way to break up most of the usual duos. Nora in particular is pissed at Ren for his choice.

“Oh, I’m saving Mantle because I actually believe we can do this.”

#yikes. Well, I did say I wanted a conflict other than ‘Oh no, one of us might die’ and it looks like I got it. But Nora, the only reason you can do this is because the plot is in your corner: none of you are collapsing from two major fights, you didn’t lose your aura so the cold isn’t a danger, the military is barely a threat all of a sudden, Salem is helpfully hanging out in her whale instead of killing you, and the story decided that Amity can function so long as you all are the ones who get to use it. That’s why you can do this. Ren, who follows in-world logic and doesn’t want to risk a whole kingdom’s worth of lives on a pipe dream, thinks differently, oddly enough.

As they leave though Penny gets a call from Ironwood. I know precisely what the fandom is going to say here: “This evil man is just trying to use Penny to open the vault!” Of course he is. He needs it open to save everyone he can, Penny included. Plus the concept of “using” her is a double-edged sword. What do we think the group is doing right now? Using her to get past the security. Penny’s power is a tool any way you slice it. Granted, Penny volunteers to help the group, but notably here Ruby speaks for her. Penny seems torn and Ruby takes the scroll away with, “She’s not going anywhere until you change your mind about Mantle.”

Sorry, Ruby, but coming from you that sounds less like a reassurance for Penny and more like just an order for Ironwood. Remember Harriet? We’ll stop attacking you provided you do what we want. Ruby has yet to learn about compromises, let alone acknowledge that she might be wrong. How about you let Penny decide where she goes, especially since by all logic she should have a lot of loyalty to Ironwood. She knew him before she ever met you. She’s worked with him since she was rebuild post-Volume 3. Despite what Penny has said, if the story would just let her think about his actions for a hot second—making her the protector of Mantle, sticking up for her after the framing, sending her to the party, teaming her up with Ruby, etc.—she might realize that the ‘He doesn’t want me to have friends’ and ‘He just treats me like a tool’ assumptions are just that, unfounded assumptions. But no, Ruby speaks for them both because Ironwood is evil now.

“If she makes it through our defenses,” Ironwood says, “everything that follows will be on your hands.”

That’s true! Kind of like how it’s own Qrow’s hands that Clover died. When you insist on making a bad situation worse you hold responsibility when the shit hits the fan. You know though that Salem won’t get through their defenses now, somehow, so that there’s no chance RWBYJNOR will be blamed for it. Or, by that point Ironwood will be so crazed that anything coming out of his mouth is dismissed, no matter how accurate it might be.

We then transfer to the Ace Ops who are, despite what the fandom theorized for many months, clearly upset about Clover. Also pissed. Which they have every right to be. Their friend and leader was killed. Imagine for a moment that Ruby had been murdered by Tyrian with an allies’ help. Exactly what do you think the group would do? Swallow it quietly and get over it? Ha.

I’ve already seen some speculation that Clover survived due to details like showing us the bandage and his room being listed as for a “Patient,” but he looks pretty dead to me.

He got gutted through the chest and left out in the snow for who knows how long. We saw him slip away. Qrow screamed over his dead body. He’s not breathing now. If RWBY suddenly claims he survived this, I’m calling BS.

Most of the other visuals we get here were already dropped in the trailer. Winter is pretty injured from her encounter with Cinder, likely permanently based on her new outfit. Ironwood had to replace his arm—and I am calling BS on that “Losing his arm is reflective of him losing his humanity” commentary from RT. Please go read up on a couple decades worth of ableism in media and then get back to me.

We get Ironwood’s line about the light shields and, notably, a whole lot of empathy. Regardless of what he might want Penny for, he still called her with compassion. He’s watching the Ace Ops mourn their friend. He’s talking about protecting his kingdom. The first thing he says to Winter is, “Thank you, Winter. I don’t know what I would do without you.” Ironwood has a heart! It’s always on display, which makes this scene utterly ridiculous.

I literally don’t know how to respond to this. The gunshot made me jump, both because it’s a gunshot and because, again, what the fuck? I know I said that next volume RT might just have Ironwood descend into full villainy, shooting whoever he pleases now that he’s shot Oscar, but I didn’t actually expect them to do it. Because he never should have shot Oscar in the first place! I wanted the story to let Oscar grapple with it a bit and then quietly backtrack, acknowledging it as the mistake it was. The concept that Ironwood, empathetic Ironwood, rational Ironwood, always thinks before he acts Ironwood, let’s kids yell at him Ironwood, tried to team up with Robyn Ironwood, did everything Ruby wanted Ironwood, won’t kill Watts after he destroyed his arm Ironwood would shoot this guy just to shut him up is absurd. It was absurd then, it’s absurd now.

That being said, there’s a possibility he didn’t actually shoot the council member, but rather just (“just”) gave a warning shot down the hallway. I say this because the reactions to this are pretty tame. Everyone looks startled, yeah, but after the initial shot there’s nothing that I would expect if there was now a guy bleeding out on the floor. The council woman doesn’t scream. Winter doesn’t seem overly shocked. No one is running to try and help him. Basically, if Ironwood had just killed a political figure in front of six witnesses, entirely unprovoked, I would expect a bit more of a reaction than this. This feels far more like a, “Damn he’s not joking around, letting off warning shots to get people to leave him alone” not “WOW, our general just killed someone in cold blood!”

What I really hate though—beyond just assassinating his character—is how many fans think my friends and I are delusional for calling it character assassination at all. I hopped onto the RWBY tag for five minutes this morning and was bombarded with posts about how Ironwood needs to be murdered horrifically, anyone who likes him is sick, the Ironwood stans are as bad as Adam stans, you’re an idiot if you want him redeemed… because apparently the concept of a story writing a character badly doesn’t compute. I’m not here to argue that Ironwood didn’t do these awful things (regardless of whether he actually killed the guy or not). I’m not here to argue that they’re not awful. I’m just here to say that we never should have gotten these scenes in the first place, or if we were going to get them, we deserved an actual descent into murder at the drop of a hat territory. I’ve already explained extensively on this blog how early Ironwood was not accurate foreshadowing for this, and Volume 7 certainly wasn’t setup, but it looks like the majority of fans aren’t interested in examining whether any of this adds up. Which makes my job, as someone trying to examine this series somewhat objectively—in as much as that’s possible for any single viewer—as well as simply enjoy it as a show, really hard. It’s bad enough when a story keeps taking the characters you love and villainizing them, and doing that badly, but then when you turn to the community and see them rallying around the idea that you’re awful for being dissatisfied—you’re the bootlicker, you’re the blind stan, you can’t see what’s ‘really’ going on here… that sucks. For those of you happy and satisfied with Ironwood’s arc, that’s great! I’ve also seen a lot of posts hyping up the complexity of his character now. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying what we’ve been given and I’d never want to imply that just because it’s not what I wanted it’s somehow wrong. I’m honestly thrilled that after a year of worry so many people have adored our premiere, including this scene. I just wish that I could say RWBY had given me something I didn’t want in a persuasive manner and that the fandom as a whole was a bit more welcoming of differing criticisms.

Not that I didn’t already know the RWBY fandom had its flaws, but still lol.

That’s basically it for our premiere. Nice note to end on, huh? Our final scene is of Salem using the lamp to set her bloodhound grimm on the city. Why doesn’t she just go herself? What was she planning to do here in Atlas in the first place, considering that getting the relic was a surprise? Who knows. Little about this holds together. But we do end with another awesome shot, so small favors.

It’s always strange concluding a recap, but even more-so when it’s a premiere, during a historical moment in the U.S., amidst all the nonsense that is 2020. So for now I’ll just conclude with three quick things:

The updated bingo board will be listed at the end of each recap, provided I don’t forget about it lol. Today I’m checking off tone (not nearly enough freaking out about Salem), the team keeping secrets (Oscar), and major plot point dropped (Amity is suddenly finished). I could also probably check off the cold not killing civilians and getting Amity up and running, but we’ll see if any changes with those.

I’m including my Ko-Fi link at the end of recaps now. Not with any expectations. Not with anything resembling pressure. I thought long and hard over whether to include it at all—let alone mention it here—because I love doing these and never want anyone to feel like it comes with strings attached. But life is a little harder and weirder than it was last year, so I figure it can’t hurt. Feel free to pass on by and I won’t be bringing it up past this note.

Far more importantly: thank you for reading! :D

(Bonus 4. Editing this was an absolute nightmare — damn you, tumblr!  — so I apologize if anything is super wonky when I finally post.)

See you next week! 💜

[Ko-Fi]

[trashcankitty12]

Tecna Headcanons

Tecna Mode, the Guardian Fairy of Zenith would like to make your acquaintance. 

She’s a tad sassy, a bit of a show-off when it comes to her projects, and a video game expert. 

(All headcanons are for my main au verses, “Balance/New Company of Light” and “Left”.)

-Tecna tends to be reserved in her emotions, but just as her family knows, her friends (and Timmy) quickly learned that Tecna can be rather affectionate when she feels safe and loved.

-As a Zenithian, Tecna has an easier time learning new technological systems and how to rewire electronics.

-She also tends to be able to see at night. Not better than nocturnal animals, but better than most Magical Dimension people.

-Tecna is also somewhat immune to being electrocuted. Somewhat. (Lightning attacks by storm harpies and Stormy aside, electricity doesn’t bother her. In fact it sort of wakes her up.)

-Tecna is really close to her parents, partially due to her being an only child, partially due to her curious nature putting her in the middle of her parents’ work because she was determined to help.

-(She didn’t necessarily want to be an only child, and her parents had wanted another… But Magnethia had had a hard enough time getting and staying pregnant, that they felt Tecna was more than enough.)

-Tecna may have been a bit of a spoiled child… Her parents made sure to get her the latest technology when it came out, and they gave her her own workspace when she got older.

-As close as she was to both of her parents, she’s closest to her mother. Magnethia loves having Tecna help out at her and Electronio’s workshop. They have created many new gadgets and gizmos together, including specialized robots to do household chores. (Which is why Tecna has no idea how ‘obsolete’ cleaning tech like brooms and vacuums and mops work.)

-Because of Zenith’s climate, most animals and plants do not live/thrive there. So Tecna has had minimal contact with non-robotic plants and animals. Which led to quite a shock when she came to Alfea and saw all the greenery and the birds. (And Kiko and Flora’s plants.)

-Tecna, as a Zenithian, isn’t as bothered by the cold climates as other people would be. In fact, it’s the heat that bothers her.

-Which is why she’s not a fan of the beach. She doesn’t mind going and hanging out with her friends, but the heat and the sand and weird feeling of the ocean just sort of… Bugs her. (Which is why she stays more on the actual beach and wears specialized shoes to keep sand away from her feet.)

-Tecna has a major sweet tooth and has ‘borrowed’ from Stella’s secret stash of chocolates before. (Please don’t tell Stella…)

-She doesn’t like veggie meals much. It’s the textures and slight tangy tastes that turn her away from them. (And as a Zenithian, she doesn’t need them as much.)

-Physically speaking, she’s not in the best shape. She’s like… Bare minimum shape to pass Griselda’s and Real Avalon’s classes. (She’s decent enough at running away and decent at feats of climbing, but trying to be acrobatic or trying to physically fight with her fists or feet is difficult without her winx/fairy forms).

-She’s not a strong swimmer either. But Layla has helped her get to be decent enough that she can make it to her destination without getting herself hurt or drowned.

-Layla has also helped Tecna get better at dancing, which has in turn helped Tecna with her rhythm and dance video games. (Take that Rubis!)

-Tecna is extremely competitive when it comes to games. Video or board or card games with Tecna can lead to arguments and a smug Zenithian fairy. (Bloom even brought some from Earth to try and trip Tecna up… Monopoly and Uno are no longer allowed on Alfea’s school grounds. Thanks, guys.)

-She may not have the best grades at Alfea, but it’s not her fault… Well, not entirely. Okay so she could stand to study more… But her projects just need a little more tweaking. (Please Ms. Faragonda, understand.)

-Tecna doesn’t have the best handwriting… But her typing skills are out of this world.

-Tecna doesn’t have a big appetite, but when she’s hungry, just hand over the plate. (She doesn’t just get hungry, she gets hangry.)

-Everything has to have a place. Tecna’s workshops/workrooms may be messy and unorganized due to everything always being used, but her actual room and desk? Spotless. Everything put away neatly. (And she tries not to look over to Musa’s side of the room when they were still sharing a dorm. That’s not her mess or her side, it’s not her problem.)

-Tecna is sort of a mom friend. But she’s the sort of mom friend who will be telling you why what you did was stupid while she’s bandaging you up. (“Dammit Layla, I told you this would happen. Why did you think you could jump from that height without your wings?” “Musa bet I couldn’t do it.” “Why do I even bother?”)

-(Yes, Tecna has swearing problem. But only around friends or on her own. She tries to tone it down around parents or those who are in charge.)

-Digit, despite being just as big a gamer and tech guru as Tecna is, is also more in touch with her emotions (thanks to having roomed with Amore for so long). Which is great, because Digit helps Tecna naturally learn more about her own emotions without pushing or pressing. (And damn does it feel good to see Tecna and Timmy being more open with each other.)

-Tecna is unabashedly an anime fan. (Or at least, the Magical Dimension’s version of anime.) And she loves comics. (Which shocked her when Stella showed her her own collection. They may have a few get-togethers just to talk about their favorite comics now.)

-Tecna first transformed at 12, after trying to protect a younger cousin from an incoming snowstorm they had gotten lost in. Thankfully it helped her boost her power to signal for her mother and aunt.

-At Alfea, Tecna is part of the STEM club, anime club, robotics, and gaming club. Thanks to her and a few other Zenithian fairies, Alfea’s robotics club finally beat out Red Fountain’s.

-Speaking of Red Fountain… Tecna may have borrowed Timmy’s badge to enter into Red Fountain’s weaponry.

-(She was always curious about how Red Fountain’s weapons and ships worked, and the best way to figure that out is to take it apart and put it back together… She may have even upgraded a few things… Please don’t tell Saladin.)

-Tecna didn’t thrive as well as she claimed while in Omega. She just didn’t want her friends to feel guilty about not coming for her sooner.

-She understood why it took so long. And it was lucky that she was used to Zenith’s frigid temperatures. But it just… She did her best.

-She had to fight like hell most days, trying to keep herself alive and safe.

-And once she was back at Alfea… She had nightmares. (Which she logged into her tablet to try and help herself with later.)

-Eventually, during spring break, she went home and talked it all out with her parents. They had a hard time letting her go back to Alfea after that, but they knew they couldn’t keep Tecna from her education or from her friends.

-(The nightmares eventually faded a bit. But they still haunt her from time to time.)

-Before the whole Earth mission, Tecna and Timmy were one of the first couples to move in-together without any of the other members of their teams.

-They got an apartment on Zenith near their university. (They still go to their classes, though they take them mostly online these days. And they still keep the apartment, though it’s mostly a glorified work space now.)

-Tecna surprisingly gets along really well with Riven. They help each other with their respective partners and they like to build and work on projects together. (And play video games. They’re both super competitive and watching them go at it is like watching a train wreck. It’s awful but you can’t look away.)

-Tecna finds Flora to be the hardest to converge with. Their personalities and feelings on different issues tend to clash and it makes it difficult to meld together.

-Surprisingly, Tecna finds Stella to be the easiest to converge with. It’s like they just complement each other on a new wavelength.

-Tecna didn’t have any interest in music until rooming with Musa. After a few months into their rooming situation, she asked if Musa would teach her how to play an instrument because she felt it’d be cool to come up with her own soundtrack (for a video game project she’s been working on since she was like 12). Musa got Tecna a keyboard and the rest is history.

-She doesn’t get emotional about a lot of things, keeping a cool and level head to focus on facts is a Zenithian trait after all, but when someone messes with her projects or belittles her work or comes after the people she loves? You’re gonna get fucked, and not in the good way. (She has a real temper when she blows up, and people tend to get electrocuted.)

-Once they started their Earth mission, Tecna had to mentally fight herself every day to not upgrade or complain about Earth tech. (“Bloom… How the fuck do these people live like this?!” “Tecna…” “Please. Just one computer. Let me upgrade one computer.” “People will notice and we have to keep a low profile.” “Dammit Bloom!”)

-Tecna has several projects going on any given day, and since dating Timmy and having been bonded to Digit, they’ve been included in helping her with them.

-Most are gadget-based projects, things that girls need immediately or things that can help them. Some are robotics or engineering/vehicle based. But the one she’s the most proud of is the video game she’s still working on. (It’s almost done and she hopes to be able to publish it soon! Maybe sooner than expected since she’s got backing from Sky, Stella, and Layla.)

-Tecna’s main goal, after all this craziness with being a Winx Girl is over, is to take over her parents’ business and to further the Mode Brand of tech. (And maybe even expand into the video game departments. Depending on how her video game goes when she finally releases it.)

[xhxhxhx]

I Know, I Know, I Know

In Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Kurt Vonnegut quotes David Irving for the death toll from the firebombing of Dresden: 135,000 dead. Irving happens to be a Holocaust denier. And that number happens to be a lie.

Towards the end of the book, Vonnegut quotes Irving by name:

One of the books that Lily had brought Rumfoord was The Destruction of Dresden, by an Englishman named David Irving. It was an American edition, published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston in 1964. What Rumfoord wanted from it were portions of the forewords by his friends Ira C. Eaker, Lieutenant General, U.S.A.F., retired, and British Air Marshal Sir Robert Saundby, K.C.B., K.B.E., M.C., D.F.C., A.F.C.

I find it difficult to understand Englishmen or Americans who weep about enemy civilians who were killed but who have not shed a tear for our gallant crews lost in combat with a cruel enemy, wrote his friend General Eaker in part. I think if would have been well for Mr. Irving to have remembered, when he was drawing the frightful picture of the civilians killed at Dresden, that V-1’s and V-2’s were at the very time falling on England, killing civilian men, women, and children indiscriminately, as they were designed and launched to do. It might be well to remember Buchenwald and Coventry, too.

Eaker’s foreword ended this way:

I deeply regret that British and U.S. bombers killed 135,000 people in the attack on Dresden, but I remember who started the last war and I regret even more the loss of more than 5,000,000 Allied lives in the necessary effort to completely defeat and utterly destroy nazism.

So it goes.

The figure is significant. It is more than Hiroshima, where 70,000 to 80,000 died in the initial bombing. “Not many Americans knew how much worse it had been than Hiroshima, for instance,” Vonnegut writes early in Slaughterhouse-Five. “I didn’t know that either.” Not until he read Irving. presumably.

That figure was significant to the press coverage, like the New York Times review of March 31, 1969:

Kurt Vonnegut Jr., an indescribable writer whose seven previous books are like nothing else on earth, was accorded the dubious pleasure of witnessing a 20th-century apocalypse. During World War II, at the age of 23, he was captured by the Germans and imprisoned beneath the city of Dresden, "the Florence of the Elbe." He was there on Feb. 13, 1945, when the Allies firebombed Dresden in a massive air attack that killed 130,000 people and destroyed a landmark of no military significance.

Or the Sunday review of April 6, 1969:

Kurt Vonnegut speaks with the voice of the “silent generation,” and his quiet words explain the quiescence of his contemporaries. This is especially true of his sixth novel, “Slaughterhouse-Five,” in which he looks back -- or tries to look back -- at his wartime experience. In the first chapter he tells us how for over 20 years he has been trying to re-create a single event, the bombing of Dresden by American and British pilots. Vonnegut had an unusual perspective on that event. Safe, as a prisoner of war in a deep cellar under the stockyards, he emerged to find 135,000 German civilians smoldering around him. Dresden had been an open city. We closed it. We.

They led with the figure. It was important. This was the above the headline in the Sunday review: “Like Lot’s wife, he looked back -- at the destruction of Dresden and 135,000 dead.”

As Richard Evans discovered in the 1990s, Irving more or less fabricated that figure. As he recounted in Lying About Hitler (2001):

How many people did Irving think had been killed in the raids, and on what evidence did he base his estimates? The first source he used was information supplied to him by Hans Voigt, who had been a local official in Dresden at the time of the raids. Four days after the attack, missing persons search bureau was set up in the Saxon Ministry of the Interior. Voigt, at the time an assistant school master. was put in charge of establishing a dead persons department for the bureau to collect the records and personal effects of those people already dead, and of those still buried in the ruins. Irving said that it was this department which was “responsible for the identification of the victims and for arriving at some final estimate of the death-roll.”

Voigt’s office had four different filing systems for different data. The first were garment cards, onto which samples of garments taken from unidentified bodies were pasted, together with date, location, and so on. Voigt told Irving that up to the time of the capitulation “we had almost twelve thousand of these cards completed.” The second list was of miscellaneous personal belongings of the unidentified. The third was an alphabetical list of bodies identified by personal papers. The fourth was a list of wedding rings recovered from bodies. With these four indices the dead persons department was “able to clear up the identity of some 40,000 of the dead.” Thus Irving arrived at an “absolute minimum” death toll of 40,000. This in turn tallied with the figure of 39,773 given by Georg Feydt, the first person to write a reasonably considered account of the attack in 1953.

However, Irving did not accept 40,000 as the actual figure because Voigt had told Irving that he himself “estimated that the final number would have been 135,000.” In 1963 Irving was reported to have explained: “The Germans simply struck off the first digit to make the figure more acceptable to the Russians, who contended that Bomber Command was not a powerful weapon.”” In other words, he apparently thought that the Russians wanted to reassure the citizens of the Eastern bloc that Western bombing was not very dangerous. There was no evidence for this supposition. Voigt wrote to Irving as early as September 1962, blaming the amendment on “Dresden officials” (especially the then mayor Walter Weidauer), who “reduced the figure out of fear of the ‘Big Four,’ so as not to speak ill of them.” This did not seem to me to be particularly strong motive. The Russians were not involved in the bombing of Dresden. At the height of the Cold War, they would have had every incentive for inflating the figure, so as to put the Western Allies in a bad light. Yet Irving repeated the claim in 1995.

There was no corroborative evidence of any kind about the missing digit. Moreover Voigt was apparently not a popular man with the communist authorities in Dresden. Weidauer decried him as a “virulent fascist” who had been rightfully thrown out of East Germany. This was typical of the language the Communists used for people who proved a nuisance to them. Still, Voigt, then living in West Germany, may have had a political motive in accusing the Soviet and East German authorities of falsifying the statistics. Weidauer added that the death register was still extant in the Dresden Town Hall with a highest card number of 31,102 for an unidentified body. In addition there were the so-called street books. The numbers in the street books, which were compiled according to the streets and houses where the dead were found, exactly matched those on the registration cards. Irving could only sustain the figure of 135,000, therefore, by relying on a postwar speculation which he must have known was shaky and was discounted by most other writers on the raid, with good reason. This did not say much for his claim that he based his work on careful research into contemporary documentation.

In later editions, Irving further falsified his numbers, and claimed higher death tolls, but the 135,000 always depended on that invention. He put a "1″ in front of “35,000″ and claimed that as the figure.

The probable death toll was lower than that 35,000, maybe 25,000 to 30,000. That came out in the judgment at Irving’s libel trial, David Irving v Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt, [2000] EWHC QB 115:

13.124 When asked what was the supporting evidence for these inflated claims, Irving relied on the estimates for the number of casualties made by Mehnert and Fetscher and on the recollection of Frau Grosse, which I have mentioned. He also testified that his claims had been based on estimates as high as 250,000 which he had received from a great many individuals. Irving neither identified the individuals nor disclosed the letters. He prayed in aid also the fact that there were in Dresden at the time an unquantified number of refugees fleeing before the advancing Russian army. Finally he relied on the estimate of Hans Voigt, summarised in paragraph 11.52 above, that 135,000 had been killed. But, as stated in paragraph 13.126 below, none of this material casts significant doubt on the accumulation of evidence that the true death toll was within the bracket of 25-30,000.

[...]

13.126 It appears to me that the evidence which I have summarised in paragraph 13.124 affords a very slender basis for the claims which Irving has made for the numbers killed in the raids. The evidence of Mehnert, Fetscher and Frau Grosse was secondhand and unverified. In the absence of any indication on what they were based, I do not consider the Irving should have given any credence to estimates in letters from unidentified individuals. His speculation about the number of refugees does little to cast doubt on the reliability of the figures quoted in the official reports. Voigt's evidence was uncorroborated and unlikely to be correct in the light of the number of deaths recorded on the official cards. In my view, Irving should not have quoted numbers based on this evidence. ... In my judgment the estimates of 100,000 and more deaths which Irving continued to put about in the 1990s lacked any evidential basis and were such as no responsible historian would have made.

For Irving, Dresden was a useful tool. If there were 135,000 or 250,000 dead at Dresden, it helped even the scales with the Allies. It was the mirror image of his Holocaust denial: German crimes were overstated and Allied crimes were understated.

Irving wanted his readers to see the bombing of Germany as the moral equivalent of the Holocaust. Evans again:

Irving wrote to Kimber in 1963 declaring his view that the crime of World War II had not been genocide but "innocentocide," the killing of civilians, and that therefore the Eastern and Western powers were just as guilty in his eyes as the Germans and the Japanese. For him Dresden was a crime. Nowhere in the earlier editions was there an explicit effort to draw the parallel. Instead, Irving allowed others to draw this obvious conclusion and then somewhat disingenuously congratulated them on their independence of mind. Thus he wrote to Sydney Silverman MP, who had reviewed the book in Tribune: "I am not someone who holds political views similar to your own, but I really must congratulate you— in spite of this—for having stuck your neck out so firmly and unmistakably by drawing a parallel between the Nazis' atrocities and what happened in Dresden; this is something I myself did not claim in my book.”

Three decades later, Irving was making the parallel explicit. In a speech delivered in Toronto on 8 November 1992, he estimated the numbers who died in Auschwitz (“most of them from epidemics,” he said) as 100,000. “Around one hundred thousand dead in that brutal slave labour camp.” Around 25,000 of these had been killed by shooting or hanging, according to German radio reports from Auschwitz received and decrypted by the British, he added. He continued:

Twenty-five thousand killed, if we take this grossly inflated figure to be on the safe side: That is a crime; there is no doubt. Killing twenty-five thousand in four years—1941, 1942, 1943, and 1944—that is a crime; there is no doubt. Let me show you a picture of twenty-five thousand people being killed in twenty-five minutes. Here it is, in my book, a vivid picture of twenty-five thousand people being killed in twenty-five minutes by the British (in February 1945) in Pforzheim, a little town where they make jewellery and watches in Baden, Germany. Twenty-five thousand people were being burned alive. ... That is what it looks like when twenty-five thousand civilians are being burned alive in twenty-five minutes. One person in four, in twenty-five minutes. One person in four in that town. As I said when I was speaking in Kitchener yesterday, it is as though somebody came to Kitchener, a town of about a hundred thousand people, and killed one person in four in twenty-five minutes. That too is a crime. Twenty-five minutes! In Auschwitz it was a crime committed over four years. You don't get it spelled out to you like that. Except by us, their opponents. When you put things into perspective like that, of course, it diminishes their Holocaust—that word with a capital letter.

Irvings almost incantatory repetition of the figures "twenty-five thousand" and "twenty-five minutes," mentioned in this passage respectively four times and five times, compared with his figure of twenty-five thousand for Auschwitz mentioned only twice, left no room for doubt about which crime he considered the greater.

That was what Dresden meant to Vonnegut, too:

I happened to tell a University of Chicago professor at a cocktail party about the raid as I had seen it, about the book I would write. He was a member of a thing called The Committee on Social Thought. And he told me about the concentration camps, and about how the Germans had made soap and candles out of the fat of dead Jews and so on. All I could say was, “I know, I know. I know.”

Vonnegut never amended Slaughterhouse-Five. So it goes.

[byteloading168]

Running Man Ep 278 English Sub

KMazing – Entering the year 2017 Running Man faced many problems. Such that, it was notified that the year 2017 will be the last year Running Man. Because of the issue of the dismissal of Song Jihyo and Kim Jongkook at the end of 2016 is horrendous and unacceptable. Finally, the PD and Member of Running Man agreed to end the program, Then before the end, the concept is built around a special episode where each member is given their own episode to be planned.

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Also read : Best Knowing Brothers Episodes of All Time (Up to 2018)

But in the end, Running Man continues on air after the dismissal of the “troublemaker PD”, the famous variety show even add 2 new members, namely Yang Sechan and Jeon Somin which turn out to be a huge improvement. Still, like in 2016 where Running Man’s rating is still not as good as in its heyday. Slowly but surely Running Man’s Rating improved once again, at the end of the year the program achieved 2 digit rating. Well, which episode is the best in 2017 and 2018 so far? Here are the 20 best Episodes, exclaimed as the funniest from Running Man of 2017-2018. Enjoy!

Running Man welcomes the comeback of SNSD in this episode. As the experienced girlband get involved, there are a lot of funny scenes presented here. Like when the member has to choose their partner where Yuri is the unlucky one to be the partner of Ji Sukjin. Not only that, we will also see the SNSD members show their dance skills and aegyo and you will be melted with the aegyo power by Sunny. For me, the funniest scene is where Haha is always being reprimanded by her partner Soo Young. The theme of this episode is actually looking for the Bad Girls throughout the mission. Who will be 3 girls that became the Spy?

The following Running Man Episode 278 English Sub has been released. Watch full episode of Running Man Series at Dramanice. Add to Favorites. To help maintain our system, we have to run popunder on player with very low frequency of 1 pop per 12 hour. Hope you will understand and support us.

Sinopsis Running Man Episode 278 X Man Collaboration Special. Lee Kwang Soo Siap Pimpin Tamu Tamu Tampan Running Man Episode Eng Sub Hd Running Man Kim Soo Hyun Ep.

Running Man is a reality-variety show that stars Yu Jae Seok, Kim Jong Kook, Haha, Jee Seok Jin, Song Ji Hyo, Lee Kwang Soo, Jeon So Min, and Yang Se Chan. In each episode, they must complete missions at various places to win the race. Each mission is action-packed and hilarious as each member tries to beat the others using their wits and skills. Each week, is filled with fun that includes.

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Episode 1 Running Man (2019) Korean Variety. Episode 1 Running Man (2018) Korean Variety. Episode 1 All the Butlers (2020) Korean Variety. Episode 1 Lie After Lie. Tags: Watch Running Man Episode 142 Engsub, Running Man Episode 142 full hd, download Running Man Episode 142, watch online, free Running Man Episode 142 kshowonline, dramacool, kissasian, youtube, dramanice, myasiantv, Running Man Episode 142 eng sub, Running Man Episode 142 English Subtitles.

The episode that took the Couple Race theme welcome the arrival of many beautiful and cute guest stars. One of them is Jeon Somin who will then become the latest member of Running Man. Just as in Episode 224 where Kwangsoo and Somin became a couple, this episode both of them also became it too. But as predicted, rather than a romantic moment this couple show a lot of betrayal moment that will make us laugh our *ss off. Kwangsoo who had been known as a good traitor and schemer got betrayed by Somin, twice.

Episode 334 is Kim Jongkook Week. Where the Running Man members have to help Jongkook while he is having a romantic date with a girl. They also perform various games that will help determine the fate of Jongkook blind date trip. The concept is really touching and easy to “digest” and such romance is needed for the vivid viewer of Running Man, since the Monday Couple have separated, the romance was so lacking throughout the episodes, this particular episode at least give us a break and add more dynamic toward the concept of member’s week.

In the episode of this new year’s edition, the Running Man members are getting their prediction about their lives in 2017. Not only that, their health is also checked through the condition of their eyes. This is the usual concept that has been repeated like two or three times before, the funny part of these New Year episodes is when the members get the answer about their luck for that year which of course varied. This is also the first time Song Jihyo and Kim Jongkook is coupled in a romantic way.

What I like the most from this episode is the adaptability of the members of Super Junior which make even a simple game hugely interesting. Super Junior and Red Velvet became Guest in episode 376. Not only they did come in complete personnel. It turns out that one of the members of Suju, Eunhyuk is a friend from the same elementary school as Jeon Somin. There are also a lot of funny stories between them. The closeness of Somin and Eunhyuk make Donghae jealous and this kind spark is what keeps this episode interesting.

Running Man once again took the theme of Couple Race but this time with much more guest. There’s even an extra 2 male guest, Jo Se-ho and Sung Hoon. Meaning there are 8 pairs in total. So do not be surprised if this episode took 2 episodes. Even for its opening alone spend half the episode. The guest stars are asked to show his or her talents. Sunmi is definitely featuring with the famous dance of Ganshina. Well, Jo Seho as always gets tricked by Yoo Jaesuk. Not only that Jo Seho who is paired with Song Jihyo always get scolded and even beaten.

This is one of the episode of Global Race where Jeon Somin and Kwangsoo have to undergo their punishment in Indonesia or precisely in Gunung Kidul Jogjakarta. They have to cross toward the fishing island using a cable car made by the coastal residents of Pantai Timang which is made with Wood and several strings connected to each other. This whole episode features Somin and Kwangsoo. The members have to guess what they are doing and the result of the action. Kwangmin couple’s moments will also make us laughed and melted here.

Cara install pcsx2 windows 10. In this episode Running Man welcome the arrival of special guest star Gary! Gary and his clone forces came into this episode to defeat the other members which come as a surprise since the member didn’t expect the appearance of their ex-member. The twist is there and presented professionally with good build up and tension. 7012!

Where Jae Suk became MC while the other Running Man member has a match against another team of entertainers. It’ss guaranteed a lolly moment when you watch this episode. Maybe for some, this episode is a bit bland and much more like the moment of revival for some entertainer, but the game was not blatantly simple, plus there is a twist at the end.

In this episode, the members were asked to collect items to fill a house which later will become their base camp. Starting from the sofa, carpet, mattress, to the toilet. They had to borrow or ask for many items from their fellow celebrities, from Cha Taehyun, Kim Dong Wook, to Park Bo Gum. This episode is really exciting for me because each member get their airtime almost equally and all of the moments created are super funny.

Continuing the theme of Global Race, this time Running Man visit Japan to get serve the sentence in the Ghost House. Unfortunately, Kwangsoo must serve the punishment by himself. While Somin went through it with Yoo Jae Suk and Ji Suk Jin served his “adventure” with Yang Se Chan. Lots of funny and thrilling scenes we go from this episode like VJ of Ji Sukjin who fled in fear and left his camera behind.

Well, Haha’s special episode is the best among the others. Haha has been known as a hesitant type of personality and wishy-washy with the choices available. In this episode, Haha will always be told to choose between two members who are prepared to undergo a punishment. Like Lee Kwangsoo or Ji Sukjin who will be thrown into the air with a giant ball. Or Kim Jongkook (eating high calories food) and Song Jihyo (touch insects). And the twist was Haha didn’t plan this episode but other members did this as the gift for Haha’s second child which had made Haha want to run away due to the shameful feeling.

Episode 372 can be categorized as to be one episode with the best Twist of 2017 or perhaps one of the best Twist in Running Man history. Early on, the member saw a video of Lee Kwangsoo who was talking with two mysterious people. Kwangsoo is upset about who he has takes to undergo the punishment in Australia. Well, you will be really shocked by what happened at the end. Usually, we’ll see Jeon Somin making a loveline with Kwangsoo or any male single guest but in this episode Jeon Somin create a romantic moment with Kim Jongkook. Like when somin act as a girlfriend of Kim Jongkook.

Last part of Global Race Project last of 2017 where Running Man members are divided into 2 groups. Lee Kwangsoo’s team which consist Jeon Somin, Ji Sukjin and Yoo Jaesuk flew to Australia and Kim Jongkook’s team consist of Haha, Song Jihyo, and Yang Sechan visited New Zealand. This is the second part because it has previously aired in Episode 378. If in the previous episode 378 (Team Australia) is stealing the attention, during this episode Team New Zealand became the star. Obviously, because this team offers cuteness and tension. Where Haha and Sechan had vomited before getting on the swing and the best moments when Song Jihyo and Kim Jongkook take on the Nevis Swing with the upside position.

Running Man’s blockbuster scenes frequently have a lot of rushes, chills and enough twist on the story to keep watchers oblivious until the last minute. This scene; highlighting apparitions from Running University, took the great Running Man blockbuster scene to another level with a sudden wind that left the individuals reeling, as well as the gathering of people. You wouldn’t have any desire to miss this scene, including incredible part science and collaborations, and a splendid storyline that will keep you snared until the finish of the race.

Still a continuation of episode 346, this 347 episode has three teams, namely Osaka team, Taipei team, and Jeju-do team. They have to buy souvenirs in those places. The team that has the heaviest souvenirs will win this mission. The scale of the mission is huge and Jang Do Yeon helps create smooth episode especially during the trip to Jeju-do. Overall this episode is a good one as the new member looks fluid enough to gel with the original member of Running Man.

This episode centers around the Running Man individuals gunning to be the beneficiary to Running Airline’s affluent director. As basic as it is an idea, the scene is made more troublesome by the beneficiaries; feisty and brimming with shocks. This present scene’s quality likewise originates from the last mission, an unofficial ID tearing mission in which the individuals need to battle against each other to be the beneficiary. There’s an immense twist towards the end which you presumably won’t see it coming either.

Special Christmas episode on Running Man, for the most part, have an amazing quality of esteem, however, to keep in accordance with the current year’s Running Man subject of wanders aimlessly, the PD have thought of yet another blockbuster scene including apparitions, vindictive spirits, and people. You’d most likely never observe Christmas similarly again. A note, the main portion of the scene tends to delay somewhat more, yet the real race is where the place of fun is.

This is the best and funniest Running Man episode in 2017 but not quite fundamental. Because this episode is special to celebrate 7 years Running Man. All Running Man members come to the show with their friends and family. Like Song Jihyo and Somin who brought their younger brother and Kim Jongkook who came with his older brother. Other members choose to take their friends. But before the guests come out they tell the habits of each member. Like Haha who once vent on and wanted to gang up Kim Jongkook. All agreed that the star in this episode is Haha’s friend Park Geun-shik and Jo Seho. Geunsik with his innocence often makes Haha angry while Jo Se Ho always gets teased by Yoo Jaesuk. But Tae Hang-ho (Friends of Kwangsoo) also take much of the airtime while trying the high voice game.

On episode 346, the new member Jeon So-min and Yang Se-chan start joining permanently as a cast member. Here we will be getting stomachache because of their hilarious behavior, especially from the new member! This time there are three teams that compete to win. They must successfully undergo a mission if not, the will be given a horrible penalty. It might not be the funniest, but this episode becomes the turning point of the new era of Running Man. Thus, we see this episode as the fundamental episode of Running Man in 2017.

5/5(7 votes )

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The Bridge

Two detectives from Malaysia and Singapore are assigned to work together on a double murder case. A body – split in half and made up of two different women – was found at the second link bridge that connects both countries. The killer later reveals that he will bring five issues to light that cause chaos in both Malaysia and Singapore – people are unequal before law, human trafficking, laundering, violence against women and children, and child labour. This politically charged and highly complex case leads the detective duo in discovering the close connection between the killer and those who are chasing him. Case by case, they learn about the killer’s hidden agenda.

Running Man Ep 515 Eng Sub

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[rwdestuffs]

There’s a lot of ironwood stans and a lot of ironwood haters out there. Now, to be fair, one’s opinion on the guy is likely dependent on that person’s view of the real-world military, as well as their own opinion of the writing in general.

Due to the… let’s be nice and use the phrase “lackluster writing”, ironwood is a very polarizing character. One can see his view on wanting to save people, but once a single chess price shows up, he loses it, and plans to abandon all of Remnant.

Keep in mind that the main characters have no reason to trust him. Not only has atlasian forces been around Mantle for a long time, causing distress and by extension, attracting Grimm, but ironwood seems to have no interest in using any atlas resources to build the communications tower. He only expends atlas military resources to protect it. Everything else comes from Mantle, including the time and energy of their best protector.

It took a submission post [here] to kinda spell it out:

The writing is so bad that we aren’t entirely sure if we should be sympathetic to ironprick or not. Given that I am calling him ironprick, you can probably tell where I lie on that whole thing.

Our own views of the US military has kinda skewed our view of ironwood and the atlasian military, so, let’s try to take a much more objective look at what they do, and how it either makes ironwood a tragic character, or a downright villainous one.

The discussion as to how the show has more or less demonized characters with prosthetics, has been done better in this post [here].

Our first introduction to Atlas in general is honestly… not that great. in this post [here], we see that right off the bat, Atlas is… well, sus. Their resident robot girl is “combat ready” and while this seems like an innocent line in this world, it makes one wonder “Why would she need to state that?”

In addition, with the SDC being a major point for resident racist turned un-racist off=screen, Weiss, the view of Atlas is already not that great. And as a quick tangent, but can we at least have mention of an apology? Like, just a random line of dialogue that tells us, yes, Weiss did in fact apologize? If these writers can’t resolve that conflict on-screen, the least they could do is give us the details of what happened off-screen.

With that rant done, it’s pretty clear that Atlas is either full of a bunch of trigger-happy gun-toting military personnel, or that they seem to be gearing up for a war with the rest of the world.

In Volume 2, we also get the reveal that Penny isn’t allowed to have social interaction, and that her status as an android is kept secret for unknown reasons. Had this show gone in the route of “Penny would absorb the Fall Maiden powers, but we run into the philosophical question of ‘She is also a living being, should she not also have a say in how her future is determined?’“, then that would have made sense.

In this Volume, and in Volume 3, we see that not only is the Ozluminati willing to sacrifice a young girl and rob her of her dreams, but that Atlas isn’t willing to expend any resources for her sake either.

With Volume 4, we kinda get a sort of insight into Ironwood and Jacques’ relationship. Jacques more or less tries to play the “I’m your friend” card with Ironwood. Given Jacques’ easily recognizable racism, it’s telling that Ironwood kept him as good company until he decided on an embargo, which, really only hurt the rest of the world. Ironwood wasn’t protecting anyone, he was trying to hold onto resources.

This is further exemplified in Volume 7, where, as mentioned earlier, he is taking Mantle’s resources to fuel his own pet project… And we later find out that that pet project was a total lie, as it turns out, it was just bait to lure out one of Shadow Queen’s minions.

We then see this all culminate in Volume 8, where Ironwood starts working with Watts to get payback on Penny for betraying him. His dialogue mirrors a lot of rhetoric that an abuser would use to try to coerce their victim to their side. And his casual discard of Penny is honestly something to take note of. Ironwood doesn’t value differing opinions. He never wanted anyone who would question him. He wanted loyalty. If he had his way, he would have installed Order 66 in all Atlasian troops to make them turn on any hunter that wasn’t loyal to him.

All of Volume 8 happened because he saw that his supposedly perfect defenses weren’t so perfect after all. And instead of resolving to try to do better once they expelled the intruder, he instead turns on the main heroes for not trusting him.

Now here comes the next question:

Should have team RWBY trusted ironwood from the start?

Now, we as the audience know that all of that stuff about Ironwood makes him look suspicious. But what do the characters know? Well, Weiss knows that they’re a bunch of militaristic assholes who refused to help her or her family escape from her abusive father even though one of their top specialists was her sister.

Ruby and Yang likely have a poor view on Atlas and Ironwood in general thanks to their conversations with Qrow.

And Blake knows that they’re basically the racism capital of the world.

As for team JNOR, their experiences likely come from how team rwby acts. With them being so close, and adding the fact that all of them got arrested for fighting grimm when they first arrived, their views are also negative.

On top of which, Ironwood is the headmaster of Atlas Academy. The last headmaster they trusted (Leo) stabbed them in the back, and the one before that (Oz) lied to them about their mission, so they have every right to be suspicious of Ironwood. They don’t exactly have a good track record with these headmasters.

So clearly, with what both the audience knows, and with what the characters know, their lack of trust in Ironwood was not misplaced.

With all that said and done, let’s dive into the final question of this post:

Is Ironwood a sympathetic villain?

As a blunt answer, yes. As an equally blunt answer, no.

Ironwood is a human character who is in charge of a military force. He hasn’t had to deal with racism like Ilia, Blake, or Velvet, but he also has been through a lot of battles if his large amount of prosthetics is to be seen.

Ironwood clearly has not had the world be kind to him, but by contrast, he hasn’t been kind to the world. As for which came first, is up to interpretation, but the point of the matter still stands: Ironwood was acting like a dictator.

Now, is his horribly described semblance Mettle to blame for this? Well, let’s think for a moment as to how it would have affected the story if we had known about it beforehand. Either in an interview, or because (in this hypothetical scenario) the writers were smart and had maybe Qrow try to talk him down by saying something like “James, calm down. You’re letting your semblance talk for you” really doesn’t matter. Let’s ask ourselves: How would knowing his semblance beforehand had affected our view of this?

Simply put, it would make us sympathetic to him, until we see his aura break and that he’s still going on his main goal of ditching all of Remnant and being selfish. It would have informed us that it wasn’t just Mettle driving Ironwood, Ironwood had that sort of thing in him the entire time, but he reached a breaking point. It’s been said that “people go from 0 to 60 over one little thing” but really, that’s not true. People don’t just go “from 0 to 60.″ People just don’t pay attention to how long a person has been at 59. And quite frankly, Ironwood was doing an admittedly good job at hiding how long he was at 59. He was constantly calm, cool, and collected in a lot of stressful situations, like when he had to confront the rest of the council.

But we also know that he was locking up dissenters. Labeling them as “traitors” and more or less, acting like he knew best. Plus, we know that he was doing a lot of questionable things in the past that makes a lot of his actions rather dubious at best.

But, once we view this with the view of the US Military, which Atlas is based on, intentionally or not, we kinda see something. Not some “grand protectors of the border and ideology of the country” but a bunch of power-hungry generals willing to throw bodies just to get their way, only for them to be unprepared when they are the ones who get invaded. And for them to basically be the fuel that gives their supposed enemies their power to cause so much destruction. Atlas was already at a breaking point. All Salem and her forces did was just add that one little extra bit of weight that caused it to all come crashing down.

In this case, literally.

[popculturebuffet]

Amphiba Reviewcaps Catchup Special: Lost In Newtopia/Sprig Gets Schooled/Little Frogtown/Hopping Mall

In a 4 episode marathon to make up for lost time: Hop Pop handcuffs Sprig to him because that’s not troubling and Polly And Anne head off on their own mostly uninteresting adventure. Sprig gets into college and regrets it  much like most college students. Hop Pop goes on a noir adventure while Anne harasses children and it all ends with a wacky mall adventure that ends in an utter tearjerker. Pitter Patter, let’s get at er after the cut. 

Whelp i’m behind. Over the last two weeks i’ve been busy moving into a new room in the house, and moving my stuff into said room and making it feel like home, and when i’ve had time I either had new coverage to start, or a series passing to honor, or in the case of yesterday had to have my wisdom tooth removed because it got so bad I couldn’t think out of nowhere. SO yeah been a pretty exausting few weeks... but with only one episode left before Amphibia likely goes on hiatus for the rest of the year, Halloween special excepted, I don’t really have the time to dawdle on this. So not much of an introduction let’s hop to it. 

Lost in Newtopia

This will be a quick one, but this one was.. eh. Not BAD, as the first, last and middle scenes are all really good. it’s just between theere it’s not much intresting.  The opening on the bus was pure gold as Hop Pop as usual gets fired up about something boring, then casually handcuffs his grandson because that’s normal. Then again this is the same man who also thought brainwashing his grandchildren was a minor slight so this is a step up somehow. Also he does have some logic for it after Sprig blew up a robot factory and , unbenowst to him, stole a powerful credit card for funsies. But .. get a dog leash or something.  The scene was also great as we got to see Anne’s mom for the first time! And the scene with her wanting to get out and try exotic food her tummy’s not ready for was really adorable and relatable as having a young nice, I understand them asking for things they really shoudln’t have and then holding a grudge over it.  But then the episode just sorta.. sputters for most of it’s run time. The bit with the tail shop is rfairly enjoyable, but the mishap with the vendor and the parade just aren’t all that funny and the basic conciet of tryign to do it up like locals hasn’t been done AS often as I’d think but frankly How I Met Your MOther, Back before it didn’t so much shoot itself in the foot as shoot both it’s legs off, did this slightly better with first time in new york, where the inverse happened, i.e. the locals pretending to be tourists.  The ending scene was great, from Hop Pop going from terror at “street weridos” to casual happiness at seeing his grandaughter and adopted grandaughter (And my heart flew to hear him call anne that. I mean it was obvious but i’ts still nice to hear. Like when Scrooge told webby to Call him uncle scrooge but without the horribly scarring assholery the next episode he still hasn’t properly apologized for to her. ) and Polly and Anne’s terrible names for each other.> It was good stuff it’s just overal an okay episode. Good enough to entertain but just ntohing really out of the ordinary for this show, but with funny enough bits to keep invested. Next. 

Sprig Gets Schooled Ehhhhh... this one HAD potetial, an intresting setting, Sprig getting in on his talent, plenty of fun college tropes, Hop Pop struggling with his grandson leaving the nest.. there was good stuff here, but like too many episodes this season it wasn’t used as well as it couldv’e been. 

The episode has the family come upon Newtopia University, where Sprig’s talent with stopping mantises and with a fiddle gets him a scholarship, which is one of Hop Pop’s dreams, but both quickly regret it: Sprig dosen’t fit in while Hop Pop misses his baby boy. It comes to a head with Sprig tryign to sneak in and Anne and Polly trying to sneak in for hyjinks. 

But overall it’s just.. eh. it has a few good gags, but the anne and polly plot has been done so many times by now, and while that alone isn’t enough to make it not all that fun the fact it isn’t funny or unique is when The Simpsons, Undergrads, Futrama , Solar Opposites and Bobs Burgers just off the top of my head have done fratboy hyjinks episodes way better.

 But what dosen’t help is while Hop Pop’s emotional part of the episode, missing his boy and wanting him to come bome, works, Sprig just.. get sbored. There’s nothing about how hard school is or him missing the others it’s just.. he dosen’t like it so he tries to leave. Instead of having an emotinal episode about him possibly fitting in there, or struggling to fit in there or some third thing it’s just.. an average 10 year old not liking college becuase of course he dosen’t. He’s too young to keger or really ond with his clasemates. It’s just an eh watch. Not as unpleasant as quarallers pass but without that episodes good parts to really help it be entertaining. Ugh.  And you might say “well every episode dosen’t have to have an emotinal core jackass” which.. yeah your right. But it has to be funny. Or entertaining or have something and not just be .. eh. You CAN be just a funny episode if you do that right. And amphibia USUALLY does that and has an emotional hook to make it even better. And the proof is in the next two episodes. 

Little Frogtown Now this.. this is more like it. After two less than memorable episodes, we get two classics in a row. Granted since I grew up on calvin and hobbes and thus grew up with the two tracer bullet arcs...

Well three techncially with the haircut thing but yeah, given one of them was in my first comic strip collection ever, the indespensible calvin and hobbes if your curious, I’ve always had a soft spot for noir episodes and to animations credit there have been some classics; The recurirng Numbah 2 detective stories in Kids Next Door, Venture Bros classic “everybody comes to hanks” and of all things, Garfield Babes and Bullets. Yes that happened and yes it IS actually good. 

Oh and if your wondering if Garfield solved something family friendly like a Lasanga Robbery, or his teddy bear going missing or odie being kidnapped for a dog fight nope! He’s hired by a college professors wife to find out who killed her husband since it looked like a simple accident, but unsuprisingly it wasn’t. Oh and did I mention that not only is this based on a story from the book garfield’s 9 lives, which got it’s own special for the rest of the stories it chose to adapt and a few new ones to replace those it didn’t, but in that story it’s about a chuch deacon. That’s right Garfield tackled corruption in the church. Your welcome. But i’ve talked about Garfield Babes and Bullets enough.. I mean for today. I clearly need to cover this and 9 lives as a whole at some point. Let’s get back to this episode. Point is noir parodies are great and gafield has done some weird and wonderful shit.  But my like of it aside this is a genuinely clever episode that has it’s own neat takes on the genre. The basic setup is simple: Hop Pop takes the kids to Sal’s, a restraunt owned by an old friend of his who got so sucessful with his delcious sandwitches and secret sauce he moved up to Newtopia.. but when Hop Pop finds the place he finds it in shambles, with no one there and Sal entirely missing. So while the kids head off for the arcade next door, Hop Pop goes into full noir mode to find his missing friend.  It’s that core that works. Sure lots of shows use the “friend we only just heard of” plot device but here it works because it’s so simply used here: They were friends years and years ago, sal moved away probably decades ago, and he simply hasn’t kept in touch. Both are busy: Sal with his restraunt and what we find out here, and Hop Pop with his family and later having to swoop in when his daughter or son and their spouse died. It’s perfectly acceptable. To me while i’ve bitched plenty about cliches it’s mostly been about HOW you use them. About using them right instead of just coasting on an old plot to fill out your episodes for the season. If you don’t have an intresting story to tell, then use the 11 minutes for something ELSE. And here.. they do and have a fun spin on noir by having hop pop’s narration talk to him. While that’s happened before with narration gags I haven’t seen it in a noir parody before and it’s just pure comedy gold, and Bill Farmer’s acting makes you genuinely invested in finding out what happened to this character you never met. Bill really sells how worried hop pop is without over doing it and how important this guy and his sammiches are to him. 

The final twist while not entirely suprising is intresting: Turns out , after Hop Pop finds people seemingly having stolen the recipie, Sal’s restraunt.. simply went belly up. Which sadly, makes sense: he had good ingredients but he’s in the world’s capital, where ther’es probably tons of mom and pop restraunts and giants of cuisine. It’s hard to start a buisness anywhere let alone the biggest city int he world. So Sal simply pivoted, sold his recipie and became a billionare. It’s a good solution that teaches hop pop a lessson: Change happens, things you really love like comfort food restraunts won’t last forever. I myself miss when this area I live in had a tgi fridays and it’s probably never coming back> Things change.. what matters more is people and moving on. Though he does send hop pop on with a bottle of sauce. It’s a good lesson for kids and a fine ribbon tied on one of the season, and hte series, best.  And of course before we move on we have the b plot which is funny as it is relatable as some little shit steps in line in front of anne and being anne she overreacts.. and gets tazed and gets everyone banned. Not a huge subplot but it’s funny as it is relatable as someone whose both stood in massive lines and had people cut in and felt it was massively unfair. Never got into a fistfight over it but tha’t sbecasuse arcades are rare and cornona probably wiped out the rest. Ha ha.. I hate this year. One more!

Hopping Mall

Last one. Another simple plot: Hop Pop forces the kids to use 2 coppers a piece to buy souviners instead of letting them use the card because it means more.. which is bullcrap. While using your own money for a present DOES mean a lot, my mom gave me money plenty of times to buy gifts and covered me plenty. The real meaning behind a gift for someone is that you picked it out yourself, that whatver thing you picked made you think of them and that you meant it for them. Weather it be a mug, a billy bass, or the great mighty poo on a t shirt, what matters is it comes from the heart. Though Hop Pop also buys himself an easy chair and sends it home and admits h’es a hypocrite so maybe we’re not supposed to take him seriously.  While this is there to make drama mostly for Anne it’s a plot device I like as it’s both the kind of nonsense an adult would make and then not follow, and it leads to a really good plot as our kids find their things; Hop Pop introduces the kids to haggling, which Polly mistakes for using tried and true mafia approved methods of intpmidation, leg breaking, arson and threats of all of the above andc omes back with her own snail and tiny cart. Sprig being sprig finds a gift for Ivy in seconds that’s a nice stick.. that also shooots lasers because I dunno. Also nice of the show to actually MENTION his girlfriend.... several episodes in.. with again NO goodbye to her or anyone else. And yes that’s still a sticking point this far in it wouldn’t of killed them to include that in one of the premire episodes.  Anyways that leaves Anne who finds a nice teapot for her mom, but soon has to do what all people who can’t afford a tea pot too: enter a demolition derby against a mother daughter team using shopping carts. It’s a neat set piece, as is Anne apparently knowing carts because her and her friends hung around the mall a lot, which given we saw her and sasha out and out steal one for hyjinks, it’s a nice continuity nod. Anyways our heroes win the race, but Sprig looses his stick saving polly and their rival has to ravage her tail to save polly again. I also love the return of the “not the baby!” cry from “Marcy at the Gates” which I also swear has been used before on this show but can’t remember specifically where.  It’s revealed their rival, and her daughter both of which are entertaining especially the daughter, wants the pot because it was one of her mom’s designs and it means a lot and that touches a nerve with Anne, so she lets her have it, but does get a lovely butterfly clip from the daughter. After the hop pop gag we get the most infamous, and best scene of the episode that ties the above together.

 Sprig wakes up to find Anne ruminating on the balcony.. and for the first time since she got here really, she breaks down a bit about how much she misses her. And my honest interpretation is she’s been holding how bad she feels for her mom, who she admits to not having the best relationship with but both loving each other dearly: That she likely blames herself for the theft, for listenting to sasha, for getting them all stranded, for destroying her friendship with Sasha and possibly not being able to bring her home with her. But mostly for causing her parents undo pain, having no idea how hurt they are or what they’ll feeel when she comes back, no idea if she’ll even be able to make it home and see them again.. it’s a lot to hold in and with all she’s had to deal with I feel she’s been holding it inside just so she dosen’t snap. She already has enought o deal with especially after “reunited. Thinking for amoment about how her parents are likely in utter misery desperatley looking for her when she’s not even on earth... it’d break her.. and it does. She admits missing her, regretting they fought all the time and sobbing a bit... and the scene only gets sadder when Sprig interjects.  He asks a simple question; What was she like. While we STILL don’t know the specifics we finally find out that his mom died when he and polly were really little, polly was probably a newborn... he never really knew her and wonders.. can you miss someone you never really knew? It’s a sad, sobering moment. We assumed sprig was fine with his parents being gone because like Anne and her parents he just never brought it up. But sometimes a person just burys something or is sad or upset in private, speaking from personal experince here. Sometimes you don’t talk about something beacuse you don’t know HOW and Sprig likely just dosen’t want to make hop pop more upset at reminding him his daughter and or son and daughter in law and or son in law are dead, something he likely deals with every day. It’s a powerfully acted scene and ends as the two cry softly together while the credits play over the newtopia night sky. Just a beautiful powerful scene that ties a mostly comedy episode together into something fantastic and like it’s partner episode, one of the series best. 

And with that catchup is done. Join me saturday for more of this, more loud house, and moe moe moe, how do you like me how do you like me, moe moe moe, why do you like me nobody likes me... if you want more subsuricbe, check the backlogs ont hea ssioated pages, and shoot me an ask for a suggestion or a dm to comission a full review. While Amphibia weekly coverage is wrapping up for a while after saturday i’ll be back for the halloween special and then whenever the show returns in full, Ducktales coverage restarts monday and Loud House Coverage that began with Schooled continues sometime this weekend along with a possible foruth thing. Until then, stay safe and GO TEAM VENTURE! 

[bewareofchris]

Writing advice on How to write an interesting antagonist, please?

sorry about the day-late reply.  I’d like to say that I was thinking up a really good answer but also my sinuses are trying to kill me.

OK, so there are a few key points that you should remember when it comes an interesting antagonist.  (These will be listed in no particular order.)

Purpose: what sort of antagonist do you need?  If you’re writing a rom-com you don’t need a supervillain.  

C o n v i c t i o n.  This means that whatever your antagonist is doing to hinder your story/protag it needs to come from the POV of a person who is trying to accomplish something.  Any antagonist who only exists to say mean things to your character without any sort of personal goal will fall flat in the long run.  Yes, it might really hurt if you get stabbed in the back by Laughing McMeanpants but if McMeanpants is just doing it to be a bother and gains nothing it just seems pointless.  

A fully developed Character.  I know this one seems almost obvious but here me out.  We spend a lot of time with our protagonists.  We love them.  We sometimes throw them into pits full of salt-covered razor blades but that comes from a place of love.  I’m not saying that you have to love your antagonist to successfully have one, but you should try it.  The most interesting antagonists are the ones that are only wrong by virtue of being on the losing side?  Like, they have SUCH A GOOD POINT and SUCH VALID reasons for doing what they are doing that you almost, a little bit, kind of want them to win.  (There are also the sort of antagonists that just want to watch the world burn and those you don’t want to win but you still sort of root for when nobody’s looking because they are a force of nature.)  Let your Antagonist has a life.  A history.  Loved ones.  Interests.  Hobbies.  Favorite foods.  A day job?  Petty rivalries.  Accomplishments.  Weaknesses that aren’t just used for destroying them.  Random skills like whistling and that weird tongue-folding thing people do.

A REASONABLE LEVEL OF POWER FOR YOUR STORY’S SETTING.  Look, as much as I love a good ol’team up for the win story, if you’ve given your antagonist the literal power of the gods, you’re not really making him work for it are you?  Maybe what’s interesting about your antagonist is that they did work their ass off to be where they are?  Maybe whatever power they had didn’t come naturally.  People are a lot more likely to defend something they had to scratch, claw, bite and kill to get then they are something that was just given to them?  And who doesn’t secretly want the guy who had to spend 20 years collecting gemstones while being laughed at by the village virgins and sleeping in shit to win when he’s up against The Golden Child who Happened To Find A Dragon Egg?  

Self Worth and Ego. Nobody considers themselves the villain of their own story.  They probably don’t sit around drinking their wine being like, whose such an evil boy?  I’m such an evil boy.  They’re out there being like: what the hell is wrong with Johnny Goodguy?  WHY IS HE SO ANNOYING.  And or they’re super stressed, forgetting to wash their hair in the shower, trying to figure out how to out think Johnny Goodguy.  If both your protag and antagonist aren’t literally furious about the other one always doing something wrong, you’re not being fair to one of them. 

Consistency.   Don’t fall into that trap where the antagonist twirls their mustache while talking about sawing James Bond in half but leaves him unattended because he’s squeamish I guess?  If your antagonist is the sort of person whose going to saw someone in half, he’s probably he sort of person whose going to stick around and make sure it gets done right.  If you do not want your antagonist to win, do not set up a practically inescapable trap and then have your protag escape because of negligence.  RESPECT YOUR ANTAGONIST.  They have a giant saw machine for a reason.  It’s because they use it.  They probably also have an incinerator in the basement!  If Jimmy wants to escape he better be the most clever person alive or JUST NOT GET CAUGHT.

Let’s repeat that last bit: Respect your antagonist.  Even if your protagonist hates him.  Even if antagonist is REVOLTING.  Even if he is a murderous baby killer out here eating newborn and puppy soup for breakfast while cheating on his taxes and cutting to the front of the Starbucks line, he is USELESS as a villain/antagonist if you aren’t taking him seriously.  If your antagonist is just there to make your protag feel bad with quippy insults, then your protag needs to feel bad when he sees them.  If your antagonist is out here destroying planets, people need to be afraid of him.  And not like, oh he’s so bad but I guess I’ll just kill him anyway because i”m the hero and I fear nothing.  Bravery is not the absence of fear.  Having your badass protagonist not care just undermines the worth of your antagonist.

Now, how to put these to use in the story very much depends on what sort of antagonist that you’re using, how important they are to the story and how much time you’re putting into it/how long it is.  A 2k rom-com with a one-off a-hole doesn’t really need as much devotion as a 200k epic sci-fi fantasy thriller.  

But some quick suggestions:

Gossip. A well placed bit of gossip about the antagonist of your choice is an excellent method of adding in a sprinkle of backstory without having to listen to a villain-ish monologue.  And it doesn’t even have to be outright backstory?  It can just be fun things like, “i bet he’s the kind of guy that eats baby turtles” “he eats oranges with he peels on.” “His ex-wife moved to Alaska to get away from him.” “Not even a blind dog would lick his hand.”  You know, general impressions of his character that indicate he is universally disliked.

Begrudging Compliments/Unintentional Acts of Kindness Think of “i hate that guy but you gotta admit he draws Lisa Frank tigers better than Lisa Frank.”  Or “everyone was going to get fired because nobody finished this work project but Asshole K Asshole showed up at the last minute and finished it so we’re all still here.”  MAKE YOUR PROTAG HAVE TO THANK YOUR ANTAGONIST AND IT’S ALL THE MORE REASON TO HATE THEM.

An acceptable level of villain, progressing from smallest to largest Remember the way to build dread/suspense/fear is to always leave room to get worse.  Do not, I BEG YOU, do NOT start off your antagonist by making them the most unreasonable/over the top/absolutely most violent thing you can imagine?  Do not show up to a casual drink party with a fire-starting child killer edgelord drinking blood out of a can while shouting slurs at minorities and proclaiming himself king of the universe.  Maybe he just shows up to the party looking arrogant, and belligerently dismisses your protag while effortlessly making everyone like him more?  And then later he starts setting things on fire.  Like at the end of the story.  Set a starting place (minimally shocking but morally unacceptable action) and an ending place (shocking but not surprising and morally reprehensible/repugnant/just like the worst action(s)).

He’s enjoying himself/but also it’s a hassle.  People like winning.  Everyone likes winning.  It doesn’t even matter what you’re winning.  A popularity contest?  Control over the universe?  Soccer?  You’re winning, it’s great, you like it.  It’s a high, you want to keep it, and while you’re there why not rub it in a little that you’re like FANTASTIC.  So Antagonist, whose on top because he’s a fucking winner?  He’s going to enjoy it, and he’s going to want to hang onto that sweet sweet winner kool-aid as long as he can.  But there’s a price to literally being driven to win/hang onto that and it’s exhaustion.  Constantly having to stay in power requires constantly having to mutate to fit the needs of being powerful.  It’s not one-and-done because as soon as you are winning someone’s offended by it and they are coming to take your throne.  Even the people who are riding your coattails are expecting something from you.  And if you’ve used fear to get where you are, you have to maintain that level of fear at all times which means constantly showing up being all threatening and unpleasant.  These things are exhausting.  A man’s got to sleep and he can’t sleep well when he’s having to cut off his lackey’s fingers every other day so people now he’s a Bad Dude.  And now he’s got Protag to deal with?  MY GOD WILL IT EVER END.  Balance your antagonist’s joy at succeeding with his very real physical and emotional limitations.  Don’t let him have effortless control over whatever power he has, let there be cracks all through the base of his empire.  Let just a smidgen of doubt sneak in.  (Maybe he’s on steroids.  I bet he cheats at cards.  Nobody’s that big of a dick all the time.  His Mom cannot be happy about him.)

Always, always, always maintain that your Antagonist COULD FAIL A lot of time is spent in stories building up your hero so he’s big enough to defeat whatever’s standing in his way.  One of the methods of doing that is by comparing him to the Bigger, Badder, usually Better/More Powerful Antagonist.  This creates a lovely structure for super heroes that gets very old very quick.  You don’t need to climb the oldest mountain in the world to retrieve the Pearl of Wisdom and Good Teeth to finally have enough Inner Peace to lose your braces after 11 years so you can defeat the high school bully.  Create an antagonist that is Bad and In Your Way but also human-enough (or equivalent) to be defeated.  You NEVER have to say this outright in the story.  You just have to remember in writing him that he isn’t the Most Powerful Thing To Live.  Even if people call him the Most Powerful Thing To Live, throw in the idea that he’s only the most powerful right now.  That he had to defeat someone to be the most powerful, and that shows that eventually something will defeat him.  If your antagonist isn’t having to work to stay where he’s at, he’s boring.

In summary:

Antagonist need character.  A full character with strengths/weaknesses/backstory/goals.  They need to fully want those goals and be willing to work as hard as your hero to get it.  They need to truly believe they have the right to their goal and/or that their goal is the RIGHT ONE.  You need to respect your antagonist as if he were your protagonist and not write him as a crazy-faced crazypants to make your Hero look good.  Antagonists have physical and emotional limitations.  They will react according to their developed Character.  Do not make them lazy/negligent at the last moment to save your hero.  And you should love them, just a little, not because they’re good people but because they’re your baby.

[crystalmaeson]

Official Readme by Maeson

Pokemon Crystal Maeson - Public Version 1.0 - Internal Version 15.0.3

IT IS RECOMMENDED TO READ THIS WITH NOTEPAD++, BUT YOU DO YOU.

o--------o |Sections| o--------o

[1]  Installation [2]  Introduction [3]  General List of Changes [4]  Patch Differences [5]  Pokémon Changes [6]  Type Changes [7]  Move Changes [8]  Stat Experience, Vitamins and Fruits [9]  Mechanic & Gameplay Changes [10] New Kurt Balls, new ways to obtain Apricorns [11] The New and Improved Battle Tower and Trainer House [12] Visual Changes [13] Credits

o-----------------o |[1]  Installation| o-----------------o

Patching a game is usually a very easy process, specially with IPS Patches.

There's a variety of programs that work with IPS files, but the most famous one is named Lunar IPS, also called LIPS.

This hack is to be patched on a Pokémon Crystal 1.1 ROM file.

More specifically, this rom: Pokemon - Crystal Version (UE) (V1.1) [C][!].gbc CRC-32 : 3358E30A

You open your patcher, and then point to it to the IPS patch and the original, unmodded ROM. It will apply it and inform you when it's finished, it should be quick.

Now, there's two versions of this hack, and each one has also two varieties.

CHOOSE ONLY ONE. To know which version you want, check the details at the not-surprisingly-named "Patch Differences" section.

And yes, the patch weights almost 75% of the original game.

o-----------------o |[2]  Introduction| o-----------------o

Hola, welcome to another ridiculously long readme of mine.

I go by the name Maeson and I made other hacks for a handful of other RPGs. For the most part what I usually aim for with these hacks is to create a different experience, tweaking what I can to give games that I've played time and time again a gameplay facelift to keep them fresh for me, sometimes also trying to improve aspects of a game that I think could make it more fun, varied, better paced or just more challenging after many playthroughs and knowing stuff by hand.

These hacks are made for me in first place, so they're shaped in a very personal manner and of course through my own tastes and ideas, but it should goewithout saying, I hope.

But anyway... What can I say about Pokémon?

My feelings toward the main series of Pokémon have changed a lot since its inception. Just like millions of other fans of video games, I lived the Pokémon craze back in the day, and I grew playing most of those games. I was there without fail up until the fifth Generation, then I started to get tired of the series gradually, and I sort of stop caring with time.

Thing is, I really didn't stop liking the Pokémon themselves, and I still enjoy spin-offs like the Trading Card Games or Mystery Dungeon games, and some like Pokémon Conquest and Pokken are quite cool crossovers, so there's still some appeal to me, even if it's waning with each day.

And hey, then you get things like Pokémon Snap, which it's one unique and very memorable game, one of the very, very few games about photography. it's a really chill, fun time overall.

...What it does not appeal to me all that much since a long time, though, is Game Freak and The Pokémon Company. The choices and "philosofies" they've been doing and following for several years now have been some of the most frustrating ones I've seen besides Square Enix, and their interviews equally leave some wonderfully baffling pearls of "wisdom".

They've done a remarkable job at making me wanting to distance myself more and more throughout this last decade, to the point that I lost pretty much all my appreciation for the franchise.

And it's not just with the main games, their choice of pushing aside console spin-offs for more and more mobile based Games As A Service (that usually failed and died quickly) also left us without many interesting games that could at least keep us somewhat happy.

And the less we talk about the lies, misinformation and the worrying use of younger audiences as a shield to deflect criticism from their business decisions, the better.

I... Just can't support or stand that anymore. I feel drained.

And I would have been completely away from this franchise, barring some old games, if not for one day finding that a collective of people were working on disassembly projects of older games.

I found them to be really interesting, and my mind kinda played with the idea of having a version of one of those old games with changes that I've been wanting and waiting to happen for many years. Who knows, I could even *attempt* to improve what was already there and even add more stuff to it.

Checking the available games with disassembly, I chose Pokémon Crystal, as it seemed the most complete and evolved project of all, in combination with also being one of the longer games thanks to the large post-game it originally had, plus being an earlier Generation game also gave me more room to do changes and improvements.

So little by little, with no idea of assembly, I kept hitting walls and messing around for a time, and what you downloaded is the result of spending the free time I had working in it... For quite some time. In fact it has been over 2 years of constant work, this started in 2018.

The aim of this hack is simple:

Create a new "balance", make the game more challenging, and iron out stuff I find could be improved, or I have the ability and knowledge to do while I add more value to certain aspects of the game. Make a version of Pokémon that I'd like to replay and have every monster be a fun addition to the team and a foe I just can't roll over with little to no thought, so I want to try all of them.

If you were expecting a new story, or a new region, or whatever pipe dream that most probably would end up incompleted and not stable, sorry to disappoint, but you won't find it here.

And no, I don't really care if this hack doesn't have an "epic" name. There's so many other more important things to care than that...

o----------------------------o |[3]  General List of Changes| o----------------------------o

Here you have a quick list with some of the biggest changes all around, but there are sections for most of them to talk more in detail.

· Attempt to reach a new balance. This has been said above, but what   it actually means is that elements as Types, Moves, Pokémon Stats and   such have been changed deeply to move away from the conventions of the   original games, making many species feel entirely different gameplay-wise.

  Among other things, this means no more disappointing creatures with bad   typing and many weaknesses, or low Base Stats filler. It also means parity   between the Types, with each one having the same number of Weaknesses and   Resistances. The intent is for every Fully Evolved Pokémon to feel useful   or, at the very, very least, usable in a way where you don't feel handicapping   yourself to the point you ask yourself if it is even worth doing it.

· Moves and TMS have been changed a lot in order to accomodate the Physical & Special Split,   each Type now has both Physical and Special moves of different Power tiers.

  Many old attacks have been removed and many others have been added. What moves each   evolutionary line learns also has been changed, in order to make all Pokémon have   decent movesets depending on what their archtype is.

· DVs (IVs on later generations) No longer matter on Stat Calculations. This means that   every member of the same species will have the same potential. This also means you can   have female Pokémon with good Attack, and Shiny Pokémon with good stats, what a novel concept.

  This way any monster you come across will be equal, so you can focus on having   fun, while still having to care of it by training, feeding him vitamins and fruits,   choosing the best moves for it in a given situation, making a balanced team, and   you know, the actual RPG bits instead of the RNG ones.

  If you liked the eugenics experiment experience the original games give you,   sorry but that's not here. I apologize for nothing.

· Trainers changed all around. Better AI than in the original game, more varied teams,     their Pokémon have Stat Exp, meaning that the further you go, the better trained their   Pokémon are, and better trained your own monsters should be. I also removed several   limitations imposed on NPC trainers to make them factually inferior to you. This is   made trying to make the game more challenging instead of the usual cake-walk.

  There's no ridiculous stuff like giving Hyper Beam to everything or illegal moves   for NPC trainer's Pokémon (although bear in mind, many Pokémon have changed types,   and many have changed movesets so their moves are the new "legal" moves, but   again, nothing impossible for you to have or to add fake difficulty).

  If you're asking yourself this, no, in this hack NPCs do not change Pokémon constantly,   that tends to drag the game too much. They still do it occasionally, but not at every   time Type matchups that go against them.

· Quite a few changes related to Items, from how strong some Healing Items are, to changing   Kurt Balls, changing the effect (or power of the effect) on several Held Items, new   types of berries, and others.

  Healing items are no longer useable in battle, neither for you or the NPC Trainers.   Battles must be won only with your Pokémon, their held items, and strategy.

  ...Or well, over-levelling through mind-numbing grinding.   We can't exactly get rid of that.

· Added a whole LOT of improvements here and there to make the game flow, feel and   play better.

  Things like changing how Item Storage works to have more space overall, much faster   egg hatching speeds, making every monster available in this hack, having the Pokédex   show you a bit of meaningful game information, as now it shows a species Base Stats   and also the Shiny variations, make saving a faster process, making TMs infinite   (but not abusable), improving the scrolling while moving around making the game   feel and look much better, large improvements on the Battle Tower, expanding the   Trainer House to be more interesting end-game stuff, adding Rematches, making   PokeGear rematches better, a way to change PC Boxes remotely, move tutors and   quite a few others.

There's many things more, but that's what the individual sections are for.

o-----------------------o |[4]  Patch Differences | o-----------------------o

Now, there are four patches, so let's explain this quickly.

First, we have the Original versions, and the Alternative versions, these last ones offer a tweaked experience in case you want to play this hack again with some differences.

In which ways it is different?

Well, the Starters have been swapped, so when you begin a new game, you get to choose between Bulbasaur, Charmander and Squirtle.

MUCH bigger difference, though, is that all the Gym trainers, the Leaders, other important NPCS and the Elite Four no longer have their teams limited to following the thematic "Type" standards.

Other trainers such as the Rival also have different teams, (and like the original patch, he develops a different team depending on the starter they steal).

Without that restriction each of those trainers have way more varied teams, making the game less predicable because you can no longer coast on the Type disadvantages most of the Pokémon of a Gym Leader share.

This of course changes how you make your teams. You no longer "have" to bring "this or that Type" because later on the road there's a Gym weak to it. It's more about making a team that you feel it can withstand anything it may come.

The order of certain Ingame Trades have also been changed.

There's other smaller changes to make the bigger ones sit well, such as small text edits or change the order of the Pokédex.

But Original and Alternative are divided in two too, one that I'll call "Intended Versions" and the other two are "Items in Battle" variations.

The "Intended Versions" disables healing Items in battle and it forces Set options, meaning you don't get free switches after knocking out a foe Pokémon. You can't change the option, because it's not even there anymore.

That's how I'd like people to play my hack, but knowing how some people can be, there's an extra patch, "Items in Battle", that gives you the possibility of using Items and to change the battle option, but there's a price to pay.

If you choose to play with enabled Items/Switch in battle, a few Items will be unavailable to you, the price of several Items will increase, and the HP they restore will be lowered. Also, NPC Trainers will also use Items.

That's simply because Items can be easily abused, and that is the opposite of what I wanted in this hack. If you choose the "right" to abuse Items during battle, then I have the right to make adjustments to annoy you with your choice.

It's not like Hyper Potions will heal 1 HP or anything crazy like that, but because in my hack you can't use Items in battles, they're more powerful than the usual vanilla items so you could recover better between battles.

The items you lose access to are all new, by the way. A set of consumable Held Items that raise a stat whenever the holder is attacked or under other circustances, similar to the berries in the Third Generation, albeit they're activated differently.

Another change is limited access to a team-healing item that I made, and restores all your Pokémon to perfect shape. Intended to be used in a pinch, like being lost in a cave, or between hard fights, but you can only have in small amounts. In the Original patch, you can carry 3 of them, but only 1 on the "Items in Battle" versions.

You're free to choose how to play. Of course, you only apply one patch.

If for some reason you started a game with one version, for example, with the patch for Items in Battle, and you later on want to go to the No Items in Battle version, you can actually use that save file and not start again.

But I recommend you to save first in a Pokémon Center before doing so. Once you did that, patch a clean ROM and rename the .SAV file into whatever the new patched rom is. Now you can continue with your game. Remember to always make backups before doing anything of this sort.

I do not recommend changing between the Original and Alternate versions.

Lastly, trading and battling with vanilla Pokémon Crystal is not going to work. Not only many of the fixes made already impossible to be compatible with Vanilla Pokémon Crystal, but the gigantic load of changes I made to the game would render any attempt become a glitchy mess.

But you can trade and battle with other copies of this hack, and the four versions of the patches should be compatible with each other for both trading and battling. I'd recommend using the No Items versions because it gives you access to those extra Held Items, though.

o--------------------o |[5]  Pokémon Changes| o--------------------o

Probably the most obvious and central change, these creatures are the core of the franchise after all.

As you may imagine, there have been changes to most aspects of them. While some of those have their sections to talk about, Base Stats are probably the most important one here.

That is because for the most part there is parity in Base Stat Total for all evolutionary lines in this game.

Pokémon to me has become a rather painful series of games to look back, because there has never been that much of an interest to improve or balance out their creations to make a more varied, balanced and fun experience, and when they try to do something is more on the lines of "adding" to fix instead of improving what's there already.

And don't get me wrong, trying to get "perfect balance" is impossible with such a large amount of creatures, but at the same time, Game Freak has done very, very little in this regard, most other developers would at least try something, specially if they had the decades of game releases Game Freak has had.  

But back on track. This is why in this hack, almost every non-Starter, non-Legendary fully evolved monster has a Base Stat Total of 650, making each all of them feel have the same potential overall.

This means there will be no "early useless Pokémon", nor so called "Filler".

And yes, this means your beloved Tyranitar, Dragonite, and such have the same potential as a Raticate or a Wigglytuff. On the other hand, this also means you don't need to train a Pupitar or Dragonair to ridiculous levels to have them evolve into their final forms.

If you ask yourself "why such high Base Stat Total", well, its simple: The higher the roof, the more space you have to scale stats. The more space you have to scale stats, the better you can "personalize" stats for the different species.

Besides, the Base Stat Total stops being important when everybody is at the same "level".

Now, that's for "normal Pokémon". The first two Generations had two trios of "pseudo-legendary" monsters, those being Articuno, Zapdos, and Moltres, and Raikou, Entei and Suicune. These critters have 660 Base Stat Total.

Starters also have a total of 660. This is mainly because starters are usually the back bone of most player's teams (although I usually roll without them), and I saw fitting for them to be slightly stronger. But fear not, because those extra points don't really make much difference, as they're used to make them more well rounded instead of just dumping them on their highest stats.

Finally, true Legendary Pokémon keep their 700 Base Stat Total of the original games. To this day I never used legendaries beyond wanting to see their back sprites, never cared about them, so they have the least number of changes, really.

Some other changes are:

·Many Pokémon had their overall archetypes changed besides their Stats improved.  Furret is now a Fast Special Attacker, for example.

·Almost every Pokémon now has a 50% Male/Female Ratio, except for the Nidorans,  Tauros and Miltank. Pokémon like Blissey, Chansey, or the Hitmon-family  now can be both male and female. Magnemite, Voltorb and such are still genderless.

·The two Legendary Trios have genders and can in fact breed, thus they can be  seen almost as normal Pokémon.

·The Pokédex had the entries for each Pokémon modified. This is because now it shows  actually useful information instead of the continuously repeated "scientific" info  that usually is full of lies and ridiculous stuff that could make an Indian Elephant  have a headache, but hey, it may not be the Pokédex info, it may just be a bit too  close to a Magcargo and it's experiencing how one feels being next to the Sun.

 Happens to us all sometimes.

 Now, the first page of each species shows its Weaknesses and Resistances while  the second page of each one now points out the Base Stat spreads it has,  which is a much, much more useful ingame data, specially when this hacks  aims to change heavily most things related to battling and "the RPG elements".

 Oh, and by the way, if you press Select while looking at a Pokémon's Data,  you'll activate "Shiny Mode", and every Pokémon shown will be seen with their  Shiny Colors!

·Talking about Shiny Pokémon, those are far more common. While I personally don't care  too much about them, specially nowadays when they've become so... Uneventful and common,  not to mention how much they've been related with hacking and cheating, Pokémon being  shiny lost appeal to me, yet they're still a big thing for many players, so why not make  them easier to obtain?

 The means for finding a Shiny Pokémon in Generation II were rough. REALLY rough. With  the way it works now, you should find quite a few of them throughout your adventure, and  also finding female shiny Pokémon should also be a more common occurrence than before.

 You're bound to find a fair share of them. This being a modded game, it doesn't really  matter if they're not as rare or hard to find.

 NPC trainers will have Shiny monsters here and there, so you should also have the chance!

·As you already know, wild Pokémon may be holding items. In the original game,  many species had nothing with them. Now, most species have them, and the variety  is much, much bigger. Not only that, the chances for finding Pokémon with items  has increased.

 Now there's a 50% of not having an item, 40% of having a "common" item, and  10% of holding a "rare" item. Better than the 2% on the original.

 Lastly, I've made another improvement in held items. Now, whenever you battle  with a wild monster that has an Item, an little icon (similar to the one in the party menu)  will appear on the enemy's HUD. Specifically between the Pokeball icon that appears  when you fight a monster that you already have in your Pokédex, and the Gender icon.

 Again, only for WILD creatures.  If monsters have items in trainer battles is a secret to everybody!

·A big one, already mentioned in the introduction:  DVs (or IVs, if you rather call them that) NO LONGER FACTOR INTO STAT CALCULATIONS!!

 This means that now only Base Stats and Stat Exp matter in each Pokémon statistics.  Oh, and by the way, the formula to calculate stats has changed very slightly.  Remember that +5 bonus at the end of the calculations? Now it's a 6.  That means that a 100 Base stat (Not HP) of a fully trained monster is 300 and not 299.

 This also means you can now have Female Pokémon with good Attack power, and Shiny  Pokémon no longer are weak, two rather big things for me at least.

 No more you will have to waste hours of your life breeding and abandoning  dozens if not hundreds of Pokémon for good DVs (what a great lesson!).  NPC Trainers also get good Pokémon too, making things better for everybody.

·Evolution has been streamlined and homogenized. This means that Pokémon that  evolved by trades, special events, and such have simpler, more direct ways  to do so now. But also, all Pokémon evolver on similar levels.

 After all, if they are supposed on equal footing in Power, they should  also be on the same level on this matter too.

 Here's a few examples:

 Pokémon with three stages evolve at levels 20 and 32.

 Pidgey evolves to Pidgeotto at level 20, and to Pidgeot at level 32.  Chikorita evolves to Bayleef at level 20, and to Meganium at level 32.  Dratini evolves to Dragonair at level 20, and to Dragonite at level 32.

 Pokémon with two stages evolve between levels 22 and 24.

 Rattata evolves into Raticate at level 23.  Venonat evolves into Venomoth at level 24.  Rhyhorn evolves into Rhydon at level 24.  Hoothoot evolves into Noctowl at level 22.

 Of course, there are a couple of exceptions. Caterpie and Weedle  are still the fastest evolving lines, and of course Pokémon that  evolve through stones can do so anytime you want.

 Oh, and by the way, in this hack, you WANT to evolve when Pokémon want to.  You won't get much from stopping an evolution, and with Pokémon that evolve  through stones and such, you should do it before too late.

 This is because many species learn better techniques at the same level they evolve,  and it would be a waste to not learn them.

 You can find at which levels are recommended Pokémon to evolve through stones in  the specific Pokémon Stat list txt. But if you want to make it easy:

 If the Pokémon has two evolutionary stages > Use the stone at Level 22 or 23.  If the Pokémon has three evolutionary stages > use the stone at level 30 or 32 (to reach the last stage).

 That said, if you feel like not evolving for whatever reason, you've not lost everything.  The game has a Move Reminder, and you'll be able to remember freely any move from a species  learnset.

 Oh, and the Time Capsule seems to work as long as you of course follow the rules.  But a few notes:

 Any Pokémon you bring from Generation 1 may have their moves changed upon  arriving your game. The moves may turn into a very uncharacteristic one for  the Pokémon, because I repurposed many moves into new ones.

 The stats of the Pokémon will change from Gen 1 to Gen 2, and most notably,  the HP of any Pokémon that reaches Gen 2 will not be fully healed, because  of the change in stats, but there's no problem at all as far as functionality,  just heal.  

 That said, have in mind there's NO NEED to use the Time Machine.  You do so under your responsibility.

o-----------------o |[6]  Type Changes| o-----------------o

Yet another big shake to the, in my personal point of view, rather badly balanced formula.

I'm not going to discuss or waste time with this. This is how it works here:

Defensive wise, each type now is weak to two other types, while resistant to three, one of them being itself. There are NO immunities. Every type is equal as far as weaknesses and resistances, except for Normal.

Normal has no weaknesses or resistances, period.

Offensive wise, each Type is effective against two Types, and is resisted by three, one it being itself. Normal does not hit for Super Effective damage nor does it get resisted.

So, among other things, Ghost will get hurt by Normal and Fighting moves, Normal will get hit by Ghost, Dragon is no longer weak to itself, and Ice is not such an awful and pathetic defensive Type that exists to be mocked.

Oh, the Fairy Type has been added too, but how it works doesn't exactly resemble the original game, just like the other Types.

Now, because I know how certain part of the community can act (and let's not kid ourselves pretending it doesn't happen), to make myself clear and blunt:

 I don't care if you think Type X should be weak/resistant to type Y.  I don't care if you don't want to learn new Type Matchups.  I don't care what Game Freak does with types now or in the future.

I'm not Game Freak and I have made this wanting to break away from their norm, I don't have to follow any rules, not theirs, not yours.

Making a more even ground for all types, trying to make each monster good, so I could play with all of them and have fun was one of the important things for me, and to reach that goal I made as many changes as I saw fit.

You're free to stop reading and go look for another hack if this will bother you that much.

End of the "serious" moment. Good? Great, let's continue!

With this change, every Pokémon will always have more good points than bad points, not to mention that the maximum number of weaknesses a Pokémon can have is 4, and if it has 4 weaknesses, to compensate it will have 6 resistances.

Another thing I want to point out is that the number of Normal Type Pokémon has been lowered. While there are still a bunch of them, it's a way lower number, making many of these previously Normal Pokémon have completely different Type Combinations. I mean, I'm sure you won't miss all the Normal/Flying types. I hope so at least.

If you think Normal Type not having weaknesses could be "broken", far from it, specially since, as I said, in this hack having *more good points* is a given for any non-Normal Pokémon. But of course that's just talking. They can make for great members, in one of my several test-playthroughs, a Furret was one of my best Pokémon all thoughout the game.

There is an image in the RAR file with a Type Table to show you how Types work now, but beyond that, in Violet City's Pokémon Academy, there are two books that teach you the differen Types and their strong and weak points.

And then, if you're so lazy to figure it out, the weaknesses and resistances for each individual species is listed on the Stats text file.

And theeen, if you're even lazier than that, you can also check the Pokedex Entry of a given *captured* Pokémon, as it gives you useful info such as this.

Basically what I'm trying to say is that you have a number of ways to find out how types work. Use them to your advantage.

Oh, lastly, in this hack there are NO Pokémon with double weaknesses. I've never liked them to be honest, and to me just show how unappealing some types were designed to be that they make such awful combinations.

I still remember how excited people were for Aurorus until they saw its typing, and then it all turned into either jokes at its weaknesses or pure disapppointment.

No fun.

o-----------------o |[7]  Move Changes| o-----------------o

Alongside the previous two changes, the Moves have been changed A LOT too.

Instead of just "copying" what Game Freak has done in later generations, this hack had in mind to actually modify moves in ways to make them more interesting based on the limitations of the GBC games, and also another little thing:

There is a Physical/Special Split in this hack, so one of the big changes of this hack was to give each Type a number of both, Physical and Special moves to cover different Power levels so Pokémon can have good STAB moves that go along with their stats.

After all, that was probably the best thing Generation IV did for me. While it took some toys from some Pokémon (like Elemental Punches from Alakazam), it really was a big change for the better for most species.

So for example, we have Rock Slide for Rock Pokémon with high Attack, and Rock Launch for Rock Pokémon with high Special Attack. For this, many old moves were removed and reworked into new moves, mostly moves that were redundant and exactly the same as other moves (Like Whirlwind and Roar, or Wrap and Bind, they're the exact same thing).

While this gives every type and every Pokémon solid Stab moves, the limitation of 254 moves makes it so I can't add many "wild" and unique moves, but oh well, it's already much, much better than what it was originally on Generation II.

...No, really, I forgot how rough and unfair the move list was in old Generations, with some Types having almost no good moves at all, or moves that Pokémon couldn't take advantage of because their Stats and their Types didn't match. Hoo boy...  

Another big change is that most attacks now have secondary effects, and very often, the lower the Power of a move, the higher is the chance to inflict those secondary effects.

For example, Fire Breath (New move) has a 15% Chance of causing Burn and 70 Power, but Flamethrower only has 10% chance of causing burn and 95 Power. This makes moves with lower Power a bit more useful.

As you may imagine, Pokémon Movesets have been changed tremendously, not only for those critters that had their Types and Stat distributions changed, but also to accomodate all the modifications related to Moves.

Movesets in this hack are in no way attempting to copy later generations of official games, specially since Generation 2 Movesets were incredibly sad to look back.

Instead, they're focused on attempting to give what that certain species needs. So no Pokémon will be let without good STAB moves, and you also won't see Pokémon that are obviously Physical attackers getting Special moves or viceversa.

A handful of moves also got their priority changed.

Safeguard, Haze, Mist, Transformation and Bide now go before other moves. This change actually shakes up battles a bit, it was fun to see the AI read my moves from time to time and prevent Status, and hey, with Transform having priority now Ditto is more usable too!

A list of the moves, what they do, and their other data is in its own TXT file, although with ingame descriptions, it is not necessary.

As far as TMs and HMs, things also have changed.

TMs no longer get consumed when used, so they have infinite uses. The Moves they teach have also changed for the majority of TMS, with most of them teaching both Physical and Special "end-game" moves. There's also a total of 55 TMS now.

None of them can be found in shops, you must find them by exploring or obtained from an NPC.

HMs have also changed a bit, making them more useful. Cut now is a 70 Power Normal move with a High Critical Ratio, and Fly is a strong move with 110 Power that causes Recoil damage. Flash causes damage and can lower Accuracy. Strength is now is Fighting type and causes Flinch. And Whirlpool is a bit more powerful and now takes more HP at the end of turns, so its a rather cool combo alongside Toxic on bulky Pokémon.

Also, HMs can be forgotten like normal attacks, so you can swap attacks easily in case you want, and unlike in Gen. 1, because you can't drop them, you can't get stuck.

Or rather, you wouldn't get stuck, because there's another change. These moves:

Headbutt Rock Smash Cut         Surf Strength Waterfall Whirlpool

Don't need to be known by a Pokémon to be used in the overworld! You only need a Pokémon capable of learning such move, and the needed Medal in the case of the HMs.

That only leaves Flash and Fly out of that list, right?

About Flash:

I also added an item that will let you light dark caves so you don't need to have a Pokémon with Flash, but you get it quite a bit later than the HM. Just look around Mahogany after things calmed down.

It can be assigned to Select for quick use, too!

About Fly:

There's a small sidequest you can do later in the game that will net you a special object. This item will let you use a different version of Fly. Mechanically, it's the same, you can fly to places you've explored. Animation-wise is different, though.

Because all of this, you no longer need to have any HM on any Pokémon unless you want it (because most of them are actually respectable attacking moves), which gives much more freedom to parties and movesets!

o----------------------------------------o |[8] Stat Experience, Vitamins and Fruits| o----------------------------------------o

TLDR VERSION: Use Vitamins, use Fruits. They improve your Pokemon's stats, and          you need to take care of your team to withstand other trainers          which have properly trained monsters. Use them intelligently,          don't waste them with Pokémon you don't want to have in your team,      at least early on when you have limited resources.

         Vitamins are no longer as limited in effect, or as expensive.          Fruits are new, and are twice as good as Vitamins.

Pokémon games have a system in which, through adquiring certain points through different means, a creature can improve its Stats. In Generations 1 and 2, these are called Stat Experience. This is a system Game Freak has never informed the players about at all, and the games never came even close to mention it in any trully useful detail, so bare with me if this is your first time with this stuff, although I doubt you found this hack knowing nothing about it.

Stat Experience points can range from 0 (Empty) to 65535 (Maximized). Unlike later generations, In Gen. I and II, you can maximize the experience of all the stats.

Stat Experience points are divided and exclusive for each stat. HP, Attack, Defense and Speed have their own Stat Exp Table. Special Attack and Special Defense share the same Stat Exp Table. So reaching 65535 Stat Exp in each Stat will make your Pokémon perfect stat-wise. Even Pokémon at Level 100 can get Stat Experience, but to gain the effects, they need to be stored on the PC so their real Stats can get updated with the current Stat Exp. they have at that moment.

The ways you get Stat Exp are these:

By battling -Each time one of your Pokémon defeats another, the Base Stats of the enemy's species          is added to your Stat Exp in each stat. This is the slowest way, but it's also free,          and will raise your stats by just playing through the game.

     If you defeat, let's say, a Caterpie, it has these Base Stats:

HP 75, Attack 60, Defense 70, Speed 95, Special Attack 90, Special Defense 70.      As I said, Special Attack and Defense use the same Stat Exp Table. The game takes      the Base Stat related to Special Attack, so in this case, your Pokémon will be      awarded 90 Special Stat Exp Points, alongside the rest.      Training only through battles is not only pointless when you have other means,      but also incredibly tedious. While in my hack Pokémon have higher stats that make      training this way faster, battling for Stat Exp should only be relied on when      you've already fed your Pokémon Vitamin and Fruits, to get those last Stat Exp Points      needed for a Perfect Stat.

     But of course, any Stat Exp gained through battles is benefitial, just don't battle      *only* for the Stat Exp unless, as I said it's to finish Stat Exp training!      By the way, there's a special condition named Pokerús, which is a benefitial virus      that will double the amount of Stat Exp you get from battles. This is very rare      to get, and you will be noticed by a PKMN Center Nurse. The games don't tell you  what it does exactly either...

     It can be very useful, and it propagates through your Pokémon team, and disappears      after some time. If you ever get Pokerús, try to keep a Pokémon with active Pokerús      on your PC so you can pass it to other Pokémon. But as I said, it's very rare!

By Vitamins -Vitamins in the original game were pretty useless. They raised very little, and they      could only be used up to some point, which is less than half way the Stat Exp total.

     In this hack, though, they're much better, and even necessary, as the people living      in Johto and Kanto have *actually* trained their Pokémon properly and they have Stat      Exp, so they'll be stronger and more challenging, and after a certain point, all      trainers you'll find will have maximized Pokémon, like any trainer worth their salt      would be doing.

     Each Vitamin gives 10.240 Stat Exp Points per use, and they can be used until the      Stat Exp of the Stat that you want to raise reaches 51.456, at which point, the      Pokémon wont get any benefit from it (it won't be wasted, so don't worry).

     To make it easier to understand, let's put it this way:

     An untrained (either just catched, or just hatched) Pokémon will have 0 Stat Exp on      everything. If you feed it HP UPs, it will be able to eat 6:

     10.240 1 HP Up      20.480 2 HP Up      30.720 3 HP Up      40.960 4 HP Up      51.200 5 HP Up > Doesn't go pass the limit so you can eat another one.      61.440 6 HP Up > Passed the limit, so you can't feed more, but it's almost Maximized!               You can get the rest by battling.

     If you're used to Effort Values from Gen 3 onwards, let's make it even easier:

     The way it works, each modern EV means 256 Stat Exp, so if it's easier for you, just      divide Stat Exp by 256:

     Each Vitamin gives 10.240 Stat Exp, that means 40 EV.      The limit of Stat Exp is 51.456, that means 201 EV.

     So with a Pokémon without EVs, you can go from 0 to 240 EV through vitamins.

     You can obviously give Vitamins to a Pokémon you've been battling with no problem,      but an untrained Pokémon is better to use as an example.

     Their price is much lower so you can keep up with enemy trainers, although they      cost enough to make each purchase a bit of an investment early into the game.

By Fruits   - Fruits are almost exactly the same as Vitamins, but they give twice the Stat Exp.

     Each one gives 20.480 Stat Exp (Or 80 EV if you want it that way), and the limit      is 41.216 Stat Points (or 161 EV). This means that your Pokémon can eat up to      three Fruits in a stat to jump for 0 Stat Exp to 61.440 (or 0 to 240 EV) and      almost maximize it. Let's again use an example of raising HP with Fruit now:

     20.480 1 Salty Fruit      40.960 2 Salty Fruit > Doesn't go pass the limit so you can eat another one      61.440 3 Salty Fruit > Passed the limit, so you can't feed more, but it's almost Maximized!

     Thus, fruits are much better overall than Vitamins, but they're scarce, and should      be better used for Pokémon you know they have little to no training in a certain Stat.

     You can combine Vitamins and Fruit without problem, but if you do, first use your      Fruits, then the Vitamins so you don't waste Fruits unnecessarily.

Why the limit - If you're asking why the limit is 51.456, or 240 EV for Vitamins, and 41.216 or 161 EVs for Fruits, it is simple to answer: If you feed a Vitamin/Fruit to a Pokémon in a way that would go over 65535, a bug would happen and the Stat Exp of that Pokémon would roll back to 0. I think it's obvious why that would suck. So, by putting these limits you're safe from that to happen, but you also get very close to maximize a stat. It's the best balance I could achieve.

o--------------------------------o |[9]  Mechanic & Gameplay Changes| o--------------------------------o

Already said that under the hood, there are many, many other changes. Some (not all of them, not by a long shot) changes are as follows:

· The Clock Reset function now has a much easier button combination to open it.  The combination is like this:

 1: Hold    Select + Down  2: Release Down while holding Reset.  3: With Reset Held, now hold Up too.  4: Release Select. The Reset Clock menu will open.

 It requires less buttons, making it easier to do, or able to do at all  depending where you are playing. You still need to input the password,  though, removing that would let you abuse certain things very easily.

· Prices for several things have been lowered on the "Intended" Versions of this hack.  Because you no longer can abuse Items to progress, I saw no real reason to  make you pay as much as usual. You're still going to need them, because the  need for healing between battles is still a thing.

 Another reason to do this is because you will also spend much more money than  usual on Vitamins and other stuff to properly train and prepare your team.  

· Catching Pokémon grants you Experience now! The Exp. is the same as if it was  defeated, and every Pokémon that fought in said battle will get a share of it.

· The Odd Egg will always give you a Shiny Pokémon between 7 ramdonly selected  species, and both genders. Each Species get a unique move, instead of all of  them getting the same (now non-existing) move.

· Talking about Eggs, Pokémon now hatch much, much faster, so there's less  walking up and down through Goldenrod. Not only that, but Egg Moves also  changed all around. Pokémon also lay Eggs faster, and Nidorina &  Nidoqueen can now breed, alongside both "legendary" trios.

 Now each basic species has between 3 or 4 Egg Moves for the most part  they are different from vanilla, and basic Starter Pokémon have 5 Egg Moves.

· Trainer AI has been much improved. Now they know much better what they do, and they  can priorize stuff like Status Effects, they take better advantage of weaknesses and  resistances.

 They also carry Items with them, if you play with the patch that lets you  items in Battle, of course.

 Trainers also have properly trained monsters, with Stat Exp increasing throughout  the game. Feeding your team vitamins and fruits is now important to stay on toes  with them. Of course, there is more variety in species of monsters used by NPCs,  their levels are higher, and team sizes have increased a bit.

 Making each trainer a full 6 Pokémon team would drag the game, though, and probably  couldn't fit, I already was suffering the lack of space with what I added, because  when adding Stat Exp, custom Movesets, and such the space gets used way too fast.

 Also, the game was very, very unfair to the NPC trainers.  Not only were they hard-coded to fail more often, have mediocre AI, and Low-Level Pokémon,  you also got your Stats and Types boosted as you got Badges, so they became completely  inferior and disappointing... At least, if you want to have any challenge.

 That's why any bonus that Badges give you was stripped down. No Stat Boost, no Type Boost.  This will make the game far more fair and chalenging, in turn making it more enjoyable if  you look for having to think and put a bit of effort, which is, you know, the point of  this entire hack.

 Another thing changed is the money that many types of trainers reward you by beating them.  In this hack you have many more things to buy as mentioned above, from Vitamins, to  Held Items, to Decorations, and more Healing Items because of the higher difficulty,  so a better income was needed.

 On the other hand, if you lose, which is much more plausible now, you won't get your money  halved. Instead, you lose money depending on the number of badges you have, like more recent  games. It's much more fair early on, specially in this hack since it is expected of you to  buy vitamins and held items for your monsters as you go through the game, besides all the  other items.

· Stat increase percentages have been changed.

 Stat-improving moves like Accelerate or Meditate, and Stat-decreasing moves like  Growl or Scary Face can go from Level 0 (normal stat), to Level +6 or -6,  depending if it increases or decreases a stat.

Before o-----------------------------------------------------------------------------o |Level -6   -5   -4   -3   -2   -1   0     1     2      3     4     5     6   | |Perc. 25%  28%  35%  45%  50%  66%  100%  150%  200%   250%  300%  350%  400%| o-----------------------------------------------------------------------------o Now o-----------------------------------------------------------------------------o |Level -6   -5   -4   -3   -2   -1   0     1     2      3     4     5     6   | |Perc. 25%  30%  35%  45%  60%  75%  100%  130%  160%   190%  220%  250%  300%| o-----------------------------------------------------------------------------o

 This has been changed for one main reason: to make better balance between critters,  Stats are now higher. With stats being higher, stat-increasing would get too broken,  specially with +1 bonus being a whole 50% increase. So bonuses are softer now, but  so is stat-reducing -1 Level, so it's not too harsh.

· Item Storing Changes

 For starters, there's two new pockets, one for Berries and Fruits in which 13 kinds of items go in it,  the already known berries, plus the new Fruits used for powering up your monsters. Fits all of them.

 The other new pocket is for Battle items, specifically Held Items. There are several dozen of them,  and having such type of items be mixed with consumable and healing items was a bit of a mess,  even more if you have an organization obsession and want everything neatly grouped.

 Every item of this type fits in this pocket, that's over 50 different types of Items!

 Apricorns are now stored in your Ball Pocket, and there's space to have every ball plus Apricorn,  so they will never become a nuissance to you by filling your bag like before.

 Item Pocket now can store 35 different objects instead of 20, and because Berries/Fruits, Apricorns,  and Held Items do not take space in this pocket anymore you have much more freedom.

 There's one catch, though, now you can only store 30 types of items in the PC, instead of 50.  It won't be much of a problem because you don't need to store any Berry, Fruit, Apricorn, Ball,  or Held Item, so I think it's a good compromise.

 Another change is, as mentioned above, about wild Pokémon. Now, many different species will  hold items. These range from Berries and Fruits, to sell-able Items, Apricorns and a few others.

 This not only will make getting new monsters more interesting, but will also make way, way  more useful the move Thief, and also the new Peck, which also has the effect of taking the  item the foe holds.

· The Pokegear Map has seen a huge facelift. Not only is a bit prettier to look at,  it's also more informative, with standout places or landmarks pointed out in the  map. I even added different little icons to quickly see which poblated areas are  Towns or Cities, just because why not.

· A new Building in Goldenrod has been opened. This place will sell to you all  the Decoration items you previously would get through Mystery Gift or through your Mom.

 Some of the dolls also have been changed, to offer something new, because the game  now is not limited to the original Pokémon icons for the Party Menu. This is also  true for the bigger dolls.

 Talking about that, your Mom will no longer buy you Decoration items, and the items  it buys are now much more useful and simply put, better than Super Potions and such.

· A Move Reminder has been added to the game, but unlike how Move Reminders work  in vanilla games, here it will let you remember moves from a species, as many times  as you want, for free.

 This is because this hack, having higher difficulty than your usual Pokémon game, may  require you to reshuffle your Movesets or try different strategies, and I WANT you to  do so, punishing you with constant farming of Items to change Movesets so you can try  different things sounds very counter-intuitive to me.

 To make this even more useful, each fully evolved creature can remember a number  of Moves from prior evolutionary forms too.

 The types of Moves they'll retain from earlier forms are usually moves related to  Stat changes, Status Effects, and Attacks that may have special traits or effects.

 Basically, Pidgeot won't be able to remember Wing Attack, which is a simple, straightforward  Attack move, but it will remember Quick Attack and Peck, the first one having Priority,  and the second one having the new effect of stealing Items from other Pokémon.

 You can find the Move Reminder in both Johto, and Kanto.  In Johto, he lives with the other useful NPCs, Name Rater and Move Deleter in Goldenrod.  In Kanto, you can find a similar group of NPCs in Lavender Town.

· Pokegear Rematches are now much stronger, they have more Pokémon and more varied,  and often enough their Pokémon have nicknames.

 To give you an idea, many Pokegear trainers will end up with teams of Lvl 80 Pokémon!  So be very careful when fighting again these trainers, they may surprise you!

 Also, a big change in how they work: Originally, if you didn't rematch a trainer  and you kept playing, when you came back to it, it would challenge you with a very  outdated team.

 This is because they only get better if you fight them earlier each time.  This is no how it works anymore. They upgrade their teams as you advance through  the game, and you could very well meet them for the first time after battling them  originally and find out they have a full team of very strong Pokémon.

 This makes Pokegear rematches far, far more interesting and better paced.

 Talking about rematches, I added end-game rematches to the game.    Once you beat Red for the first time, a whole bunch of new battles gets unlocked:  The Pokémon League levels get bumped, with some changes on their teams.  Counting your Rival's rematch, levels range from 80 to 85.

 All Gym Leaders end up their training, and they await you to fight in Lvl 100 Rematches.  If they didn't have originally, every Leader will have a full team, and all of them have  some changes to their teams.

 The default trainer in the Trainer's House in Viridian City also goes from Lvl 70, to Lvl 100.  And there's a few extra Lvl 100 battles that I'll let you discover, although they're  not precissely hidden!

 If you ask yourself why Lvl 100, well, that's to make sure you don't win by overlevelling them.  Once you beat Red, you also unlock a way to Level Up your Pokémon much faster.  Just check the Battle Tower once you do so, although be warned, it requires some effort!

· Buena's Password had its rewards changed, now it's more useful overall.

· Ingame Pokémon trades are different, and they ask for hard-to-get monsters, but give you  very nice ones in exchange, I hope you like them.

· Bill's grandfather has seen some neat changes. His time killer of seeing Pokémon you bring  to him stays, but not quite the same as it originally was. Now he'll tell you riddles that  talk about a certain Pokémon, and if you guess them correctly by showing him the right  species, he'll gift you some very neat Held Items for your pals!  He put quite of effort in those riddles, they even rhyme!

· Fishing has been tweaked a bit.

 Now the chances for Pokémon to bit are higher (who wants to press Select several times for nothing?)  and the Pokémon available by fishing are much more varied, yes, even the Old Rod.

 Levels are also higher. Old Rod ~10, Good Rod ~20, Super Rod ~40.  

 Talking about the Old Rod, now you can get it sooner, before even getting the first Medal.  The Fishing Guru has moved to the gate that connectes Route 31 with Violet City.  This expands which Pokémon you can get early on, and more options is better.

 ...Unless you're me, then it just makes it harder to choose which monsters you want to have.

· Fruit Trees now give 2 Berries/Fruits/Apricorns each day!

· On Violet, Azalea and Goldenrod cities you can find the new Berry Scouts.  These green-cladded folks will sell you the basic Status-Healing Berries,  in order to help accomodate you a bit on the higher difficulty of this hack  compared to the usual stuff.

 The price on the "Items in battle available" patches are a bit higher.

· While there's absolutely zero intention of creating a new "story" or "region", there  are new maps here and there. For Example, there's an actual Viridian Forest again,  with trainers, Items and such, even!

 Other maps got extended a bit here and there, maybe to hide something...!  Some areas also have changes made to look or feel better to explore.  Others have been extended to feel more like a full place.

 The Gyms also had changes. It's interesting how... "small", and simple most of them where.  I expanded most, give some light puzzles to most of the ones that didn't have anything  going on (I even rescued unused map movement for one of them!) to make them slightly  more interesting.

 Of course, please don't expect Zelda-level dungeons or anything like that.  ...Although that could be a pretty cool thing as its own game!

· Because I made quite a few changes in the Types of the Pokémon,  I reformatted Bill's PC a bit. Now when browsing around your monsters,  you can see their types on the upper left side of the screen.

· I changed a few textbox frames, some to fix them up a bit,  and two of them are entirely new. I like Frame 5 myself.

· The order of the Pockets in your Bag differs when youre outside  Battle and when you're in middle of one.

 This is to make the Poké Ball pocket right next to the default  Item pocket, instead of being 3 pushes away to the right.

· Status Effects no longer are shown with 3 letter "words".  Now they have their own little Icons, which make things cleaner  both in Battle and specially on the Party menu.

· Of course, I decapitalized all the text I found.  What a tedious thing...

· Smashable Rocks now can give stone-type Items alongside  being a way to find certain Pokémon.

· Once you heal Moo Moo, one of the twins opens up a  little shop!

 She'll be able to make Berry Juice for you, and  you have two ways of doing it, for convenience.

 Talking about Held-healing Items, RageCandyBar have  been also reworked to be eaten during battle.

 They're more powerful than Gold Berries, but less  than Berry Juice.

· Many things have been fixed. For example:

 Daisy's Haircut was buggy and could in fact reduce Happiness, has been fixed.  Magikarps in Lake of Rage were in fact smaller than normal and not bigger,  and other Magikarp related bugs also existed all around. Fixed.  A bug where Defense could be lowered by attacking a Substitute with a -Def move existed, now is fixed.  A bug where Mirror Coat and Counter would damage foe after they used an item existed, now is fixed.  A bug that made supposedly fleeing Pokémon not able to flee is fixed. Now Fast Balls are more useful.  A bug that made a foe under Nightmare's effect still be hurt if it was healed with items is fixed.  A bug where the HP Bar would deplete way slower than intended existed. Yes, you're reading right.  The speed at which the HP Bar emptied, specially at higher levels, was not intentional, making  high level battles way, way slower. This has been fixed and is much better, albeit not Gen. 3 "fast".

 Other bugs and stuff has been fixed too.

There's more things I could put here, but when you spend so long doing something you start to forget each individual thing...

o-------------------------------------------------o |[10] New Kurt Balls, new ways to obtain Apricorns| o-------------------------------------------------o

Yes, every Kurt Ball has been replaced. Why?

Well, actually, for the first year and a half of "development" of this hack, Kurt Balls were pretty much as they were originally, with exception of changing one for more utility, improving their effects to make them overall better and fixing the quite-a-few glitches related to them.

But during the many tests I (and a few friends) did, all the feedback I got is that they did not use them much, if at all, because how situational they are, and because you can only get them in limited amounts.

So I decided to create a new set of Balls with very simple yet very effective effects. Each of these new Poké Balls offer a x3 Catch Multiplier if used on a certain Type of Pokémon, with each new Ball being useful for 3 different Types each.

For example, the Poké Ball made with Red Apricorns (named Red Ball to simplify things), will work best while trying to catch Fire, Fighting or Ground Pokémon! Other example would be the Pink Ball will do so with Poison, Psychic, or Fairy ones.

There's no tricks, nor complexities. If the types match, you get a stronger effect than an Ultra Ball. This makes each one way more versatile, every Apricorn as useful as the rest.

Descriptions of each new Ball points to which types are most effective.

Now, because I want people to use these Balls more often, there are a few more ways to obtain these Items. The first and most simple is getting Apricorns from Trees, from which you get two for every one each day.

Pokémon themselves also carry Apricorns, as many species hold them randomly.

But I also added a new face to Johto, a traveling monk! He's easily recognizable thanks to his sandogasa (a traditional traveling hat). Because he travels around Johto, each day you'll find him in a different spot, and each day will offer to trade 5 Apricorn of a certain color for one specific Item. The Items he ask for can be obtained from wild Pokémon, and sometimes found somewhere lying on the floor.

For Red or Green Apricorns, he asks for a Tiny Mushroom. for Blue, Yellow or Pink Apricorns, he asks for a Pearl. For White or Black Apricorns, he asks for a Stardust.

Tiny Mushrooms can be held by Pokémon such as Paras, Ledyba, Oddish, Vulpix and others. Pearls can be held by Pokémon such as Shellder, Horsea, Seadra, Octillery and Corsola. Stardust can be held by Pokémon such as Geodude, Jigglypuff, Phanpy, Staryu and Tentacool.

Of course those are just a few examples, there are more. I hope with all this, Kurt's custom Poké Balls are more useful all around.

o--------------------------------------------------------o |[11] The New and Improved Battle Tower and Trainer House| o--------------------------------------------------------o

The Battle Tower was the first time Game Freak offered anything sort of similar to a Challenge Mode inside the main games. We got Pokémon Stadium 1 and 2, which were great little things, designed to be a battle simulator, with different rules and difficulties, among other things like mini-games.

But the Battle Tower was a bit... Lacking. And HARD.

This is because, for one, the trainers you met here had a quite low variety of Pokémon, so it kinda became a bit boring (I guess Game Freak knew most Pokémon had middling stats!).

On the other hand, the monsters here sported pretty much PERFECT stats, and with strong moves along with them.

This last sentence is worth noting because in older generations, training your Pokémon to their fullest potential, A.K.A. giving them the max Stat Exp. was a total pain and a ludicriously slow process. And trying to get good DVs (old IVs) was a much, much, much worse process than that.

You couldn't make use of ANY mechanic to get Pokémon with good DVs, they were random, and unlike more recent Generations, you could not improve a Pokémon DVs by using items or such. You had no control besides soft resetting ad nauseam. If it sounds bad it's because it is.

So to have a chance not only you needed High DV monsters (pretty much impossible by normal rules), but also fully trained and with the best moves possible.  And you only got ONE SINGLE TM for many moves, and Pokémon learnsets were for the most party pretty lacking if looking at them from a competitive point of view, so you were screwed there, as you may imagine.

All in all, it was often seen as unfair and just not very fun. And if you wanted to try it anyway, add to that that the rewards were laughable. Vitamins that you could buy, and didn't help you at all because they became useless quickly, they only helped for less than half of the Stat. Exp total!

But here's the thing: I love the concept! The idea of having 3 monsters each, with the same level, where only your strategy, knowdlege and adaptibility can take you out of trouble, sounds great!

Even more, maybe if you got something worth your time as a reward it could be even more fun!

That's why a good chunk of the effort of this hack was about trying to balance types, moves, Pokémon and such. And also why the Battle Tower got so many changes!

So let's list the changes:

For starters, each of the ten Levels of the Tower got their Pokémon changed, both to update the new stats, but also to give much, much needed variety to the types of monsters you would see, as originally the game sported just a small number of different species.

Instead of 7 battles per round, now you have quicker rounds of 3. This makes for a much more brisk pace, a far less frustrating event if you lose, and easier to pick up and play.

About difficulty, it should still be a good challenge, although this time, there is some balance, as now you can properly train your monsters through vitamins and fruits, TMs hold a good selection of high-Power moves and they're infinite and of course DVs/IVs are the same for everybody.

Oh, and you can remember old moves, too!

There's also two Shops available for players, in which you can buy a selection of Held Items so you can prepare yourself to challenge the Tower, or to progress through the game, as trainers will start using Held Items more and more once you reach this point in the game.

Up to that point is the basic stuff... But the Battle Tower has also opened several shops and services, and there's even a bit of a progression system built into it, too!

Whenever you participate in the Battle Tower and come out victorious, you'll be rewarded a new type of Item: Battle Medals!

You get three for each victiorous round (so each three battles).

These objects are, basically, the coin of exchange for almost any service inside the Battle Tower. They are stored in your Item Pocket and can be used in a variety of ways.

For one, they're pricey objects, each one sells for 12.000P, thus they can cover costs for training Pokémon. Selling all 3 you win nets you 36.000P, which is pretty good if you realize you can buy enough Vitamins to fully feed a Pokémon in three different Stats (or four if you use Special Atk/Def Vitamins!).

So two good rounds of Battle Tower lets you set up the Stat Exp. of a Pokémon really, really quickly! Or you can buy other stuff with it, too. But that's just a bonus compared to their real use!

In the Main Hall of the Battle Tower, a new Receptionist hangs out close to the Battle Tower's usual lady that takes you to the battles themselves. This new NPC can reward you with a Silver or Gold Trophy in exchange for a number of Battle Medals. They're shiny decorations for your room... And hold some use.

The Battle Tower has been expanded and now there are new rooms that host several services. One of them, and one I'm rather excited to manage to put in the game is a Reward Shop that exchanges Battle Medals for Special Eggs!

Do you remember the event Pokémon from the Stadium games?

They were gifted to you after accomplishing something, and in Stadium 2, they had moves they couldn't learn normally. It was a nice little thing, and always made me feel curious about Pokémon with Moves that couldn't learn normally. You know, what new strategies could I come up with and such.

This service is located in a room behind the Main Hall. There, a Receptionist will take one of your Battle Medals and will gift you an Egg with a special Pokémon that knows a unique move!

There's a total of 50 different species you can get through these Eggs, and the one you get for each medal is selected at random. And every species has the same chances, no dishonest stuff like 0.0001% to get a certain Pokémon, like a Gatcha game.

Oh, and if you're one of those, don't waste your time resetting trying to get Shiny Pokémon from these Eggs... Believe me, it won't work.

Another service is the inclusion of Move Tutors!

There are two Tutors and each one can teach 4 Moves each. Seven of those are unique to Tutors, with an Eighth Move being Toxic, a TM you get veeery late, so I added it for earlier access, as some Pokémon (like defensive ones) do benefit from it or need it to work well.

Tutor Moves can only be learnt by Fully Evolved Pokémon, and you can do so only in exchange for one Battle Medal.

The move selection is composed of Non-Damaging moves to give more utility and so they can be applied to all Pokémon in one way or another, unlike damaging moves, and I would have liked to have more, but I hit the limit before the entire game gets corrupt, so these will have to do!

Both of these features not only offer much, much better rewards for your victories in the Battle Tower, ones that not only can be enjoyed throughout the rest of the game making it more entertaining, but also give you a chance to get a few monsters earlier and gives new possibilites to make teams to challenge the Battle Tower too.

...And that's not all you can do here now!

Besides normal Move Tutors, the Battle Tower has also hired a very special NPC: The Egg Elder... Or in other words, an Egg Move Tutor!

Basically, in exchange for 3 Battle Medals, this old man can teach a Pokémon an Egg Move that its evolution line can learn through breeding with other Pokémon!

And yes, any member. Pidgeot and Pidgeotto can learn moves that a bred Pidgey could hinerit, so no worries on that front!

This way you won't longer feel like your early-game teammates (or any Pokémon for that matter) feel gimped or "lesser" because don't have this or that move only available through breeding.

In a way it's like every species has its own specific Tutor Moves!

But let's continue.

The receptionist in the main hall (the one who gives trophies) also offers a new Key Item: The Box Changer. It does what it says, it gives you the ability to switch the Box on Bill's PC anywhere you want. Just remember that you still save your game when changing boxes this way.

Once you reach the "endgame", meaning, after defeating Red, two other Receptionists will open up new services. And are neat ones!

The first one is a Rare Candy shop! You will be able to exchange one Battle Medal for 5 Rare Candies. This will let you manage the Levels of your Pokémon faster, either to battle the new Lvl 100 Rematches, or to Level up your monsters to reach the Levels required for Battle Tower Rooms.

The other, it's quite different but way more interesting too.

You see, a new group of candies capable of changing the Level of a Pokémon to a fixed one now exist! There's Candies for Levels 10, 30, 50 and 80!

No matter what Level the monster is, it will change into the Level of the Candy!

If you give a Level 30 Candy to a Level 4 Pokémon, it will become Level 30. And If you give a Level 30 Candy to a Level 82 Pokémon, it will also become Level 30!

This is mostly for a reason: To be able to use your favourite pals in any Level of the Battle Tower!

Once a Pokémon Level goes up, it no longer can access the Battle Rooms of lower Levels, and if you wanted to use a monster of a specific species you already raised, you were forced to train another one. But no longer you will need to do that!

Now any Pokémon can battle in any Battle Room by using these new Candies in combination with Rare Candies, and you can perfectly control the level of your team for this challenge while also needing a bit of a resource (Battle Medals) to make use of it.

Not to mention, Level 80 Candies can make HUGE time savers for training Pokémon for those Level 100 Rematches, specially if we're talking about bred Pokémon, or Pokémon from Battle Tower's Special Eggs!

Now, be warned, you CAN NOT make use of all these features from the beginning!

Remember those Trophies I talked about? Yeah, they do more than look nice in your room. Each one unlocks features of the Tower!

Once you win the Silver Trophy, you unlock: Move Tutors  (Accessible the moment you get the Trophy). Rare Candy Shop  (You need to beat Red too). Level 30 Candies (Accessible the moment you get the Trophy). Level 50 Candies (You need beat the Elite Four too).

Once you win the Gold Trophy, you unlock: Egg Move Tutor   (Accessible the moment you get the Trophy). Level 80 Candy   (You need to beat Red too).

So yeah, you must prove yourself and get the Trophies to use all the Battle Tower has to offer.

But don't fret! There's not really much grinding to do. You'll see that the number of Medals needed to obtain each is pretty reasonable for what they unlock.

The game does not ask for hundreds of them for each, not even close! I know how tedious is to collect Battle Points for an Item or one-time use TM back in Generation IV.

And hey, if for some reason you still need a bit of a push, you can win Battle Medals by participating on Buena's Password.

They cost 2 points, you can get one Medal every two days. It's a much slower pace than actually fighting, but it certainly adds up if you play often.

And you also get a handful of them in Kanto, a certain NPC will gift you a bunch if you manage to do something, and some Gym Leaders will gift you one too.

Lastly, also in Kanto, there's the Trainer House.

Originally it was a cool little feature in which you could battle the Pokémon Team that a friend had when you two did a Mistery Gift.

Because I don't expect people going around doing IR connections with a Romhack, the Trainer House has been changed around.

I really don't want to say much, but here's this:

Normally, you can battle a special Trainer daily in this building. But once you've beaten the strongest trainer in all the land, levels are raised, and you can take Lvl 100 battles... With the difference that the Pokémon used in these new battles change depending on the day of the week!

And if you win, you also obtain Battle Medals!

It's a little extra end-game thing alongside the other end-game additions.

o-------------------o |[12] Visual Changes| o-------------------o

Many, many visual changes have been made throughout the game to make the world a bit more cohesive, to make Pokémon look better, or to simple improve stuff here and there.

Pretty much every Pokémon not named Unown got their colors changed, for ones that look better, closer to the original colors of a particular species, and also got their sprites touched up and cleaned up.

Because the games were originally designed to be displayed on the tiny screen of a GB, the graphic artists would try and take advantage to use the 4 colors available to a Pokémon sprite to give it more details. With the advent of the GBC, now they could use colors too, and because the screen wasn't backlighted, they needed to use stronger, more saturated and often darker colors.

The issue is that nowadays these games are pretty much always played on backlighted screens that are also much, much bigger than the original Game Boy's screen, so these graphics that originally looked fine now I don't find they've aged as well with the ways we play them today.

Now, let's be fair here. This is not a criticism for the sprites or the artists. These sprites were made to be seen under a specific hardware, and they worked with what they had, and the gigantic jump in design quality from Generation 1 to Generation 2 is to be applauded.

But at the same time, I think it's fair to say that there's nothing that says they can not be revised and/or improved. That's why I took the horridly tedious job of cleaning up every single sprite (and each of their animated frames) to make them look more clean when played on bigger screens.

I also took the liberty to tweak many of the colors used for Shiny Pokémon. This is something I've seen many people point out throughout the years, and it's true that the use of color for Shiny palettes leaves quite a bit to be desired, with many Pokémon being painted with what I saw called "Puke Green", and others having really dark and simply not appealing combinations of colors that sometimes would make the sprites look worse.

Several of those examples could be Blastoise, Raichu, Aipom or Golbat, and this last one even gets its shading screwed up. Or something like Rhydon, that looks exactly like the official art, while its normal color is much darker; with Pokémon like Phanpy, Sunkern, Xatu, Scyther and others looking very similar to their default colors.

Just have in mind I'm working with the limitations of the GBC and 4 Colors per sprite, so I do what I can do, although it's surprising what nice colors the GBC can display compared to the ones they used, but of course, I'm not doing this to be seen on real hardware, so I do not have that limitation.

You can check a couple of examples in the pictures inside the RAR file for both, sprite improvements and Shiny changes.

I also improved all the Back Sprites too, to keep consistency. And some Pokémon got entirely different sprites, such as Mr. Mime, or Wigglytuff, as there was better designs elsewhere, like Mr. Mime's Silver sprite. It's so much better in my eyes. And yes, they have animations.

Oh, and a handful of Pokémon got redesigns here and there. Don't panic, the changes where made only to humanoid Pokémon to remove incoherent stuff like Machoke and Machamps' underwear or the boxing gear of Hitmonchan.

This is because as time has passed it "snowballed" into a gigantic ball of nonsense. Now, it's not that I hate Pokémon with human-made things on them, for example we could make logical arguments on why they have them in the first place.

Very early Pokémon (back when it was Capsule Monsters) had a lot of very... morally dubious stuff in it. Trainers had whips, the monsters were sold in cages and there was a pretty clear aura of animal abuse in it all. The artwork was intriguing... And a bit worrying.  

When you find out about that stuff it can make sense that humans would put things to restrict their Pokémon like the "strength-reducing" underwear for the Machop tree. Who knows, maybe that's why Pokémon such as Primeape have what looks like shackles on their limbs too.

And back in generation 1, there was only ONE Hitmonchan, given to you by a human. We can simply think the objects it wears are given to it by that person, and it would make sense. Jynx is also another Pokémon which can only be received once, also given by a human and looks like one, maybe there's something going on too.

And all those examples would be fine but then they're turned into nonsense when you can find these Pokémon living in nature with all that stuff on them, or they magically appear when evolving. It just feels... dumb to me, it is something that I could see other developers adress in different ways, but here they just where completely forgotten.

Because this thing is tailored-made for me, I decided to change it.  

And talking about Jynx, when the beta sprite leaked from Red & Green leaks among others, it was pretty exciting to see that this Pokémon once upon a time was very different, with more of a yeti-like design, which can be traced to  japanese Kaiju tv shows, like many early Pokémon designs such as Nidoking (look up Baragon). It apparently had a name that was a very easy to see nudge at Ultraman.

You can read about it here (and also see a bit of the darker Capsule Monsters stuff I mentioned above, but you can also search for early concept art):

https://helixchamber.com/2019/02/16/what-dreams-may-come/

During the development of the hack I went so far as to create sprites to change Jynx into this Yeti-thing, but as time went on I did not feel very satisfied, it felt like a random addition that felt out of place.

I thought of going back to the original Jynx, but I ended sending the entire evolutionary line away and substituting it with another Ice Pokémon from the third Generation.  

...Anyway, moving on from that, each species has its own unique icon on the menu and the overworld too, which is a great thing to give flavour to the game, and seems like a new standard for Pokémon Crystal hacks (with good reason).

The overworld also got some big changes to improve visually, and sometimes, gameplay wise. Besides visuals, some places also changed in design a bit, for a number of different reasons.

For example some Kanto cities had their design changed to look more on par with Johto, as if you compare maps between places, and Gen. 1 and 2, you'll see they kinda look off and weird, as if it didn't have the same time and effort put into it compared to Johto (they didn't).

Places like Celadon and Fuchsia City for example look rather different, although they keep their overall structure, they just got a bit more going for them.

Also there's a few improvements on sprites. For example, I drew new sprites for when you're surfing, similar to those in Gen 3 with your character over a undefined Pokémon. And yes, they're different for both the male and female player characters.

There's also HUGE CHANGES in how information is displayed in several points, with the biggest improvement being the Pokémon's Stats Page. It took me quite some time to get it to look nicer and more organized / easier to read, and I even expanded it by adding a fourth Stat Screen to show some extra "for fun" info.

The font was also changed for a thin yet wider one, to make it less empty between letters, and also more consistent with the different characters, like numbers.

Also, HUGE, HUGE thanks to HyperDriveGuy's amazing work and effort, a way of improving the scrolling and movement on the overworld to make it much more smooth and, to be blunt, less disgustingly choppy if you're used to smooth scrolls.

This change to me is like magic, it makes the game feel so much better! To be fair, finding this improvement refueled my interest in continuing this hack, so thanks again HyperDriveGuy, your work is not just great, it also really did drive this guy forward, pun no intended... Or maybe a bit.

That said, coding this introduced some bugs, some of them harmless, and others being progress-halting or even game-breaking. But fret not, as I managed to fix them all with a bit of work, some trial and error, an a lot of luck, but it was all worth it because the result is a much more fluid experience that translates into a more fun game.

Overall, the game uses much less aggressive colors too, because 99% of the people that may play this (which that would make a total of 4 to 5 individuals, probably) will do it on a lighted screen. Also there's little touches here and there.

Another tiny change that makes a bit of a difference in the long run is battle effects. Most of them on Gen 2 used the same palette: Gray tones! Well, that's not that way anymore.

Most of the effects now have color added to them, and make battles look a bit more fun. A few effects were changed visually, even. For example, Pokémon no longer see "chickens" when confused. Now Pidgeys fly around their poor heads!

The Trainer's card also got a bit prettier, specially the Badges section. Oh, I also added a third page to your Trainer's Card, showing your progress through Kanto's Gyms. You only need to press Right while on Johto's Badge screen when you get at least one Badge from Kanto!

Asymmetrical Badges also spin correctly. Funny enough, the game has coded that function in, but it is only assigned to a medal that was symetrical (Clair's badge). Sounds silly, but once you start seeing Game Freaks coding it's... Actually par for the course, in a way.

o-----------------------o |[13] Tips and Questions| o-----------------------o

Tips: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ What type of beginning you want? Each starter is going to change your early hours.

Taking in mind how things work in the Original version of this hack, Cyndaquil would make your first steps more easy than the other two, as his Fire/Rock typing would make him effective against the first two Gyms, while Chikorita's Grass/Ground typing would make it a bit harder than normal. Totodile, with its Water/Ice typing would be a medium difficulty.

But of course, the point of the game is to make more friends and balance your team! You could also ignore the starters and make your team without them. That's how I usually roll.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ You can get an Exp. Share very early on.

Once you brought the Egg to Prof. Elm, and you're ready to go away on your adventure, go back home and leave 2.000P with your mother. Once you battle once (With Youngster Joey on Route 30), she will call you, telling you she bought something for you. It can come in handy this early!

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Talking about saving with your mother, she will buy many useful items, so it's in your best interest to send her money from the beginning!

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ During your first few Gyms, look for people in green clothes near the towns and cities' main Sign. These people will sell to you Berries to heal Status Effects!

They will come in handy to prepare against the trainers and leaders there!

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Don't waste your Fruits and Vitamins without having in mind what team you want! This becomes more important the further you go, because NPC trainers will have trained Pokémon either you've raised your own properly or not.

As you get more money, or get more fruits you'll be able to quickly prepare Pokémon, but early on you need to think ahead.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Talking about team, while I tried to make all Pokémon good and be on the same Level, that doesn't change the fact that having a balanced team can make things smoother.

Making a team of only slow, defensive Pokémon, or only quick but frail monsters can make things harder for you at certain points. Although, of course, you could just play with your favourites and tough it up. That's what I usually do.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Take advantage of Pokémon such as Meowth or Spearow, capable of learning stealing moves! They will help you to get ahold of many items, that you can either use or sell to make a profit.

Also, be aware of said Pokémon, as they may steal something you have!

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Experiment! Because TMs are infinite, HM moves can be forgotten easily, and you have access to the Move Reminder freely, you're given the chance to try all sorts of combinations for a given species. Not to mention, the further you advance through the Battle Tower, the more options you'll have through Move Tutors and the Egg Elder to teach new moves, thus increasing the number of strategies for each species!

You'll only need to watch out for "Event" moves, such as the Odd Egg Pokémon, or the Special Eggs gifted in the Battle Tower, as each have a unique move and you cannot remind it if forgotten.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check the Game Corner on Goldenrod when you arrive!

They've expanded the number of prices you can get. For one, you can get HP restoring Berries there, with Golden Berries being really useful early on, and they're not that expensive.

Even more, new species of Pokémon have been added, and they're Pokémon hard to come by during the early parts of the adventure! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Can you get every single Pokémon in the game? How can I get Mew?

Yes, of course, what would be the point of a Pokémon Hack if you couldn't get every monster available in it by yourself?

There's a lot more variety early on, both so you can get your team-making juices boil sooner, and because different people like different monsters, and having a bigger variety helps with making more people happy.

Although for Mew, you'll have to buy my exclusive and new Park Ball Plus and send it to your game through my exclusive Park Ball Plus-To-GBC Link Cable(tm), or upload it to my exclusive service PokéMaeson Hostage Holdings, previous payment of course, and then you can connect your game magically to it through Infrared connection.

Really, it just works. Wait, are you going to play this on an emulator? Tough luck then, no Mew for you.

...Nah, it's somewhere in the game, you just have to find it, like the rest.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Are you going to do more Pokémon Hacks?

Niet. Nee. Ahneo. Tidak. Nej. Nope.

...What I mean is, don't count on that. The amount of time I put into this is so big that I could have made several other things, the testing has been killing me the most. I have   reached the point of burnout, I've been working on this almost on a daily basis for years. You can't imagine how many times this thing has been reworked and changed over time. Beyond that, my love for the franchise has pretty much being forced to disappear.

And even if I wanted to do more, I wouldn't be able to use any other disassembly project thanks to current DevkitPro versions being incompatible with 32 Bit systems; I'm not going to get a new computer only to do more of this, and going back to the older "Hacking Tools" is not a very welcoming idea, mostly because they're so much more limited and risky to use.  

So, sorry but no, I have no intention, I have no energy, I have no passion for it anymore. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

o------------o |[13] Credits| o------------o This wouldn't exist without a lot of people involved with the Pokémon Rom hacking community.  

Thanks and Credits to every single person on PRET, a community dealing with disassembly for many Pokémon games. These projects look like THE WAY going forward, how awesome they are.

Check it Here: https://github.com/pret -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Thanks and Credits to Rangi42, and all people on places like the Skeetendo and Pokecommunity forums, and many others that shared their findings and information about ASM, going so far to make great tutorials to teach stupid people like me how to do do a whole lot of things, fix several of the bugs in the game, and many other things.

Check it here: https://github.com/pret/pokecrystal   https://hax.iimarckus.org ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Oh, and of course, credits and thanks to Rangi42 again for Polished Map, an amazing utility for map editing, very complete and absolutely essential.

Check it here: https://github.com/Rangi42/polished-map -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Thanks and Credits to the TPP Anniversary Crystal 251 Project to create the code for the Move Reminder, which I adapted to my hack. I couldn't even have known where to start with it, and my hack is only better thanks to it. Also for giving me an idea of how to make Caught Data be shown in the Stats Page. My approach to how the information is displayed is different, but again, without TPP I couldn't have know where to start.

Check it Here: https://github.com/TwitchPlaysPokemon/tppcrystal251pub -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Thanks and Credits to HyperDriveGuy for its example and implementation of "60 Frames per second" project, which created a new way of programming a Run Button, but even more incredible, it made the scrolling of the game as you walk, run, and ride so, so much more smooth. It's amazing.

Check it here: https://github.com/hyperdriveguy/pokecrystal-60fps-example -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Thanks to Chamber, Soloo993, Blue Emerald, Lake, Neslug and Pikachu25 for their Pokemon Icons. While I did a number of them myself, I also used a good amount made by them, and also remade some of them from their initial work, so they deserve the credits!

You can see their work here: https://github.com/pret/pokecrystal/wiki/screenshots/minidex.gif https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wiki/pret/pokecrystal/screenshots/minidex.png

Also, if you play my hack and find any of the icons or tweaked sprites I made good enough to use it yourself, go right ahead. Just give credit and you're good to go, don't even ask. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Credits and Special thanks to Vice04 for helping me test my hack over the years. May you never be assaulted by Level 168 Slowbros ever again.  

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Music Credits:

Credits to FroggestSpirit for "Hoenn Wild Battle" and  "Hoenn Trainer Battle" themes.

You can find FroggestSpirit music in this Soundcloud link, check it out: https://soundcloud.com/froggestspirit -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Credits to Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm for "Hoenn Rival Battle", "Route 101", "Cipher Peon Battle", "X/Y Rival", "Hoenn Champion Battle" and "Shoal Cave" themes.

You can find Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm music in this Soundcloud link, check it out: https://soundcloud.com/mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm-1 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Credits to TriteHexagon for his Night Theme music for cities and his tutorial on how to implement them in the game. His ASM files and his Soundcloud can be found here:

https://pastebin.com/u/TriteHexagon https://soundcloud.com/user-930339535 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I hope I'm not forgetting anyone, it's way too much people hacking around the world!