#sage-striaton

[zoruascanbetrainerstoo]

The Team Plasma sages were about to attack me, but then the Unova gym leaders showed up and stopped them!

Ghetsis is missing, though, and so are the three gym leaders from Striaton. That's reallyreally weird.

[swiftbluelightning]

[An audio file is attached.

"...Undella Town, here, has some pretty nice beaches, doesn't it?" The sound of someone tapping against paper. "Might be nice to take a trip there some day."

"Well, I've been thinking..." More rustling. "The most sensible way, I would think, to find the Sages, would be to sweep around the way I went on my journey. Head to Nimbasa, then clockwise around." Tapping again. "On the way to Nimbasa, the Relic Castle's been excavated now..."

"Ooh, spelunking..."

"And then, once we've reached Opelucid, instead of heading north to Route 10 and Victory Road, we can peel off from the route of my journey and keep going around the ring, which will eventually take us to Undella." Astra's voice takes a slightly nervous tone. "How does that sound?"

"I think it's a good plan," Lillian agrees. "I get to spend time with you, you can take in the sights slower this go around with someone to show it all too..."

"And once we reach Route 11, we'll both be experiencing the sights together." Paper folding up. "So, head back home for today, prepare to leave tomorrow? We can reach Striaton fairly quickly, maybe Nacrene in one day if we hurry, but... I mean... we don't have to rush..."

"You're adorable when you're thinking," Lillian says fondly. "Look, we'll take it at whatever pace we're comfortable with when we're going. We don't have to plan every detail. Take it as it comes, yeah? There's no one here to ruin things for you."

"...Right. Yes." Astra's voice sounds slightly shaky. "There isn't. There's not. He's not... he's not here."

"And I am," Lillian reminds her. "Any time you want to talk, Astra."

The audio ends there.]

[boss-the-goofball]

I think my favorite bits for that Pokemon Fic will be the transcripts of the Xtransceiver Calls between Agent 104 and other members of Team Plasma because there's the standard work talk but also all the gossip

Especially gossip about other grunts, the Seven Sages, and N

Agent 402 (Kricketune): Why do I have to be stuck with Agent 545?? That brute is always going straight to violence to get whatever he wants!

Agent 333 (Swablu): Will you at least bring me pictures of cute Pokemon? I know when the new world order happens and Humans are separated from Pokemon I may never see them ever again, but I need the pictures of Munna because they're just the cutest!

Agent 402: Hopefully I can, depends on if 545 can hold his temper back long enough to not attack a Munna because it won't give him Dream Mist fast enough

Agent 104 (Cubone): Well I'm sure you'll have better luck than me, I couldn't convince the Striaton Brothers to release their Pokemon after I beat Cilan!

[wandering-lane]

how do you feel about the theory that the shadow triad are actually the striation city gym leaders?

There's the natural bit that they're both sets of triplets, but also every single other unova gym leader has major story relevance at least in the first games- except for these three. And when the gym leaders are fighting the sages at the plasma castle at the climax, who are the only ones missing?

And then who do you encounter as you leave?

Much to think about

Hmmm.... I haven't thought about that much, actually! I mostly just think they've got really neat designs and story potential lmao

But. On that note, I personally don't think I'd make that connection, but I like that idea a lot actually. The striaton city trio are so silly. For an actual reason they don't have much plot relevance, it's probably just because they're early gym leaders, and therefore are still setting up the "here's how the game works" everything. Though that doesn't really explain why they aren't at the castle, either..

Either way. I like them a lot and am rotating them in my head

[the-suns-a-miasma]

maybe you could use the sages! Just inform them that it’s, “come to your attention” or something that a couple of grunts acted out of line and pre-emptively damaged Team Plasma’s reputation! Then they’d be forced to help you find them!

That's something. I'm also thinking maybe I could ask about if anyone in Striaton City has been acting weird?

The grunts run away before Musharna takes away the illusion, too, so no one knows I wasn't at the Dreamyard...

[pkmn-aide-mel]

["Haha, if you say so!"

Melanie climbs onto Sage's back, makes herself comfortable, and says, "In that case, let's not delay any longer. Striaton's an hour or so away via flight."]

@pkmn-aide-mel

A boy is standing outside Mistralton airport. He has fluffy grey hair framing his pale, expressionless face and blank, round indigo eyes, covered by a lighter grey hood, a pair of blue and white, oddly shaped headphones around his neck. He is wearing shorts a bit darker than his hood, as the weather is hot, with large pockets, and white knee-high socks, as well as white and dark blue sneakers. He has a white and blue backpack with Espurr and Meowstic plush keychains on it. A short fluffy tail can be seen coming from his lower back when he turns to the side to speak to his Pokémon, moving a bit.

Next to him are three Espurr and two Meowstic, a male and female. One of the Espurr seems normal but has a little "deaf" card around her neck, another has patches of light pink in his grey fur, and is pushing the wheelchair of the last Espurr who is missing his left leg. The male Meowstic has a walking aid similar to a toddler to let him stand up, albeit unsteadily, and the female Meowstic seems to be watching over the whole group, she looks older than the rest. She's speaking with the boy with a worried look, despite his expressionless face he seems to be quite stressed from the plane and amount of people in an unfamiliar place, stimming with a small cube with small, erratic movements.

The Meowstic's ear twitches and she looks into the crowd, looking for something or someone, before patting the boy's leg; the person they were waiting for is here. She floats a bit higher, waving her paw to make sure they are seen.

[shihalyfie]

@sage-striaton replied to your post:

Idk how people can say Frontier has characters that lack depth. Imo it’s a very psychological season. The whole adventure thing is aimed to making them grown in their behaviours and feelings, it’s a big metaphor of their development

I’m sorry for hijacking your response to my post to segue this into another rant of mine, but I want to emphasize that one of my goals with this blog (if I can be said to have any) is that I really, really, really want people to re-examine whether they actually believe in the rhetoric that’s been dominating this fanbase for two decades, or whether there’s more to it. This is especially in regards to the fact that we’re talking a series deliberately written in such a way that it’ll change meaning and nuance as you get older, so it can “grow up” with you in a sense, and yet it seems like -- especially in regards to Adventure through Frontier, due to their position as the oldest series that the majority of the fanbase was elementary or preteen age during -- people are still regurgitating the same rehashed twenty-year-old ideas like they’re undeniable law. It’s one thing if they’re saying it because the series didn’t sit well with them the first time and they don’t want to watch it again, but we’re reaching a recurring problem where it’s sort of “brainwashing” even people who don’t actually believe it but feel compelled to go along with it, or wouldn’t feel that way if it weren’t for peer pressure. Obviously, there are dissenting opinions, and ones that are even very loud about that, but that pressure remains.

The mainstream opinion in the fanbase is that Adventure is untouchable and impervious to any criticism, 02 is its inferior sequel with half-baked characters, Tamers is an auteur work that’s the “deepest” of the original tetralogy due to being dark, and Frontier is devoid of much substance at all. Even those who don’t really believe in this will still be pressured to go alongside it, those who like 02 or Frontier will be pressured to consider it a “guilty pleasure”, and it’s only very recently when certain events revealed that the idea of 02 actually having quite its own fervent and passionate fanbase that likes it on its own merits became properly recognized. (I have actually noticed a huge uptick in 02 fans, especially casual ones, being more shameless in talking about liking it in the last two years; you’re still going to get the obnoxious person “reminding” you how bad it apparently is if you bring it up, but it’s not nearly as prevalent as it used to be.) I’m not talking about whether something is a “good” or “bad” series -- that concept doesn’t really exist to me as much as whether it’s “to one’s tastes” or not, and I think one of the joys of this franchise is that it has things that cater to people with vastly different preferences -- as much as a lot of potential for analysis and intimate thought about these very fascinating series. Even if 02 and Frontier were as shallow or half-baked as they were accused of, I wouldn’t think it’d be shameful to like them for one’s own reasons anyway, but what frustrates me is that I just don’t think that’s true in the first place!!

Not helping is that there’s still a refusal among the fanbase to admit that there were substantial differences in American English dubbing (especially in regards to Adventure and 02), which I don’t mean as a bad thing in the sense that some people prefer to stick only with that dub and consider that version what they want to work with, but in the sense that the treatment of them as “the same thing” has been horribly detrimental when two people, one coming from that dub and one coming from the Japanese version (or a dub more closely based on it), will end up often having an argument doomed to go nowhere because they were never talking about the same thing to begin with. Recently, a friend admitted to me that although they’d switched to the Japanese version a long time ago, they still couldn’t get the image of Daisuke and Takeru having an inherently hostile relationship (they don’t) out of their head due to the influence of that dub, and although they consciously knew better -- at least enough to admit this to me -- it wasn’t helped by the fact that the fanbase itself continues to reinforce this image because of how normalized it is to treat the dub version and the Japanese version as “virtually the same” and for Western fanbase discourse to assume you should be projecting those takes into the Japanese version. If you’re hanging out in English-speaking circles but are working from the Japanese version or a dub directly based off of it, you do actually have to filter out a lot of takes you’re hearing because they won’t actually apply to the version you’re watching, but not a lot of people realize this.

All four of Adventure through Frontier share tons of key staff, especially Seki, known for her focus on wanting the kids in the audience to be able to empathize with and relate to the characters on screen. All four share some of the best character work I’ve seen not only in this franchise, but also in kids’ media in general, and I also stress that a lot of this has a ton of nuance that isn’t always apparent unless you read between the lines. I do understand that a lot of this probably went over our heads as kids, and I won’t say that the choice to execute it this way should be impervious to criticism, but nevertheless, I think it’s important to call attention to the fact it is there, and much of it becomes recognizable once you see it that way; for instance, so much of "it's contradictory character writing!" comes from the fact that the series tries to represent humans in their inconsistent, messy ways, and while it'll feel "messy" from a writing trope perspective, when you think about it as "since this person has this mentality, does it make sense to approach this with this mindset?", suddenly it becomes very consistent. The supposedly “shallow” 02 and Frontier characters will act in ways that match existing psychological profiles meant for actual humans��to terrifying degrees, in ways that you might actually recognize even better once you’ve hit adulthood and start intimately understanding things like depression or anxiety in ways you might not have before. Shockingly, “having heart, important themes, and kindness towards the human condition” are completely valid reasons to uplift a creative work in ways distinct from technical writing or cerebrality or how many tropes they subvert or whatever.

On the flip side, people praise Adventure and Tamers for being the naturally “superior” works with better writing, but when it comes to talking about why the writing is supposedly better, a good chunk of the reasons stated don’t actually explain anything substantial, or go back to actually being passive-aggressive dunks on the other series in some form -- it’s because 02 and Frontier’s character writing sucks that badly, or because Adventure had the “best plot” (which may be true if by “best” you mean “easiest to understand”, but that doesn’t mean much to someone who might not be very happy about how its story progression is just a boss rush), or because Tamers is the “deepest” when by “deep” they actually mean “cerebral, dark, and unsubtle about it” without any further meaning (as if Adventure and 02 were idealistic series that never went into anything nuanced and not, say, the fact they went very viciously deep into societal issues between parents and children, psychological horror, and intimate takes on the human condition). I’m personally saying this as someone who does think Adventure and Tamers have a lot to praise in terms of their approaches to realism and the unique aspects each bring to the table, and I feel that people like this are doing them more of a disservice by not bothering to uplift them for any reason that isn’t actually just inherently condescending. I mean, even taking this outside of the original tetralogy for a bit, when I was plugging Appmon earlier, there’s a reason I focused more on its theme and character writing and the use of “dark” writing to convey its sheer range, rather than trying to boil it down to a shallow “it looks cheery but gets really messed up later!”, which is unfortunately an argument I’ve been seeing about it lately.

In the end, when I write my meta, I write it "making a case" for my point of view, and I welcome others to disagree, but if you disagree, I really hope it'll be because you personally disagree, and not because the entire fanbase has been saying otherwise for twenty years and I sound like a radical. I’m not saying that everyone’s consensus takes are completely unfounded, but frankly speaking, this fanbase has some really bad takes, and in the past few years I’ve found it freeing to not only “say what you feel without worrying what others think”, but actually go out of my way to outright try and purge all the preconceived notions and pick only the ones I agree with because I actually agree with them. I encourage you to do it too! And if you do, you might find things about something you like that you didn’t realize before.

[aquillis-main]

sage-striaton replied to this post:

Do you like Frontier too?💕

Indeed I do! I like Frontier, even if it isn’t done all that well in comparison to the earlier shows. i like the idea of the Beast and Human Spirits, and I really like the idea of Sentai Digimon. I wish there was more Child-level variants beyond Flamon/Flamemon and Strabimon, and I would have liked to see more varity in the evolutions beyond another use of Greymon/Garurumon hype. But other than those gripes with the show in general, I really enjoy the whole ‘traveling around the Digital World that has civilization’ and seeing what prejudices Digimon could come up with. I just wish it was a bit more out front, but the series is interesting from the get-go.

[my-fankid-daycare]

YOUR FANKIDS ARE SO CUTE

Thank you so much!!!

[pkmn-aide-mel]

[As soon as they reach the ground, Melanie hops down, and gives Sage s light pat on the head. Taking out the Net Ball, she says, "Good job, bud. You can rest now, if you want."

Sage gently nudges the hand holding the Pokéball, and Melanie takes the hint, recalling the Swanna back.

"Okay, so," she says, in the process of retrieving Scarlet's Pokéball, "The daycare's this way, just on Route 3, but if there's anything you need in Striaton, like a Pokécenter or a general store, we can make a pit stop."]

@edelspurr

[An hour or so of flight passes in relative silence, the group taking small pit stops every once in a while. For the most part, it's too windy for proper conversation.

Eventually, Melanie looks down and grins. Pointing downwards, she says, voice carrying over the wind, "We're almost there!"

Far below, the bright lights of Striaton City are just coming into view.]

[bettysimovitch]

Your Sims are so ❤️❤️❤️❤️

💕💕💕💕 thank you!!

[digimonarethechampions]

It's so beautiful seeing reblogs about Jenruki and Jurato

OMG it was so nice to look them up! These two ships were my Tamers otp as a child and it was nice seeing content for them. 

[tumblestones-archive]

you guys my impulse control can’t handle an influx of unova muses without adding more

[digijosify]

sage-striaton replied to your photo “I can’t find a source on this other than an unsourced TVTropes page,...”

Wait, who is Yakuza Lol?��

Not ‘who’, ‘what’; The Yakuza is essentially the Japanese mafia, a collective of organized crime syndicates originating in Japan but stretching out to many other countries as well.

[starspatter]

Tagged by @all-seeing-ifer​

rules: Tag nine people you want to get to know better.

three ships: Itsuki Koizumi x Haruhi Suzumiya from The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, DCAU Tim Drake x Stephanie Brown from Batman (the Animated Series), and Shintaro Kisaragi x Ayaki from Kagerou Project (also lately gushing over Gilgamesh x Enkidu/Kingu x Siduri since my friend just finished the Babylonia chapter of Fate Grand Order *shot*)

last song: "Is There Still Anything Love Can Do?” by Radwimps

last movie: The “Kara no Kyoukai” films or a rewatch of “Hotarubi no Mori e” (also Agatha Christie’s “And Then There Were None” mini-series if that counts)

currently reading: Started/caught up on a lot of manga since quarantine started lol.  The main ones I’m following now are Kaguya-sama: Love is War, Spy x Family, and Hamefura.

currently watching: Fruits Basket

currently consuming: Some strawberries and nuts earlier

currently craving: Nothing atm Tagging @astrologista​, @blindfolded-already​, @cryptoriawebb​, @ghousuu​, @good7luck​, @ibmiller​, @kurobiya​, @legendcallerl​, @sage-striaton​

[pkmncoordinators]

Honestly the new girl (Makoto) is the most horrible thing I've ever seen in the Pokemon Company. Not only because she is replacing Misty and has a Piplup like Dawn; she looks so childish, like a nine year old, and her design is so ugly: wtf is that ponytail. I swear: the boy is cute and is ok, I can accept him replacing Lucas, but if she is going to replace Dawn in the next Dp remake...I'm done

Boy is cute, but I agree that the girl’s design is... in need. I’m willing to give them a chance, because Pokemon generally does a good job creating likeable characters, WHICH IS WHY I’M SO FUCKING MAD THAT THEY DISREGARDED TWO OF ITS MOST WELL-LIKED CHARACTERS FOR THIS BULLSHIT.