Riku (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
islandshore) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
slowpoke_gif2012-12-10 09:40 am
islandshore) wrote in slowpoke_gif2012-12-10 09:40 am
The All-Purpose PokéMeme!
THE ALL PURPOSE POKéMEME
We've had plenty of memes about our characters in the past, so why not something a little different? After all, Pokémon is a huge part of what makes Route so special.
Feel free to use this meme to:
- Talk about your characters' teams!
- Plot for Pokémon CR
- Discuss any headcanon you have about certain species or Pokémon in general
- Discuss ideas for Pokémon related shenanigans
- Take suggestions if you're struggling with a Pokémon's personality, what Pokémon to get your character, or anything else!
The sky's the limit, folks, so have at it!
We've had plenty of memes about our characters in the past, so why not something a little different? After all, Pokémon is a huge part of what makes Route so special.
Feel free to use this meme to:
- Talk about your characters' teams!
- Plot for Pokémon CR
- Discuss any headcanon you have about certain species or Pokémon in general
- Discuss ideas for Pokémon related shenanigans
- Take suggestions if you're struggling with a Pokémon's personality, what Pokémon to get your character, or anything else!
The sky's the limit, folks, so have at it!
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Her most visible and probably best-known Pokemon is Zack the Porygon2, whom I love and adore; he started out as a plot device and sort of evolved into a hilarious supporting character in his own right, with a story arc and everything. Over the course of playing him he's made tons of friends, acquired a crush on a Pokemon not in his egg group (ROMANTIC TRAGEDY), developed a penchant for music and mixmastering (as DJ Zack Attack), and at least once committed identity fraud by "borrowing" Carmen's credit card to make some online purchases at the department store (WHOOPS).
The other ones who have the relatively highest amount of headcanon are Chief the Kadabra, Macavity the Liepard, Abbie the Deino, René the Smeargle, and Cliff the Metagross — though like I said, every one of them's got a story, and I always like making up new shenanigans for them, too.
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I'd definitely love to hear about Abbie, René, and Cliff. Especially the Smeargle, since I think Carmen's one of the only characters in the game to own one, and they're really neat little guys.
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With Abbie, I mostly wanted to play with the fact that Deino are born blind according to the Dex, because I like those little quirky factoids that sometimes get overlooked. The fact that she came with such an egregious moveset further established how Carmen approached her, because basically you've got this tiny blind disoriented baby born with its finger on the trigger of a bazooka, and it was nice because rather than seeing battling potential, Carmen was just like LORD ALMIGHTY, SOMEONE NEEDS TO DISARM THIS TIME BOMB, STAT. It also helps that she has a certain thing for kickass girls, and she's big on the idea that great power needs to be tempered with maturity. So Abbie is not allowed to be around the more aggressive members of Carmen's roster; she mostly hangs out in the care of Chief, who is a mellow bro and helps her to chill out, or with Zack, who is a key participant in her training regimen because he guides her through sound. Carmen's always treated her roster with this overarching idea that if something happens to her, they should be able to behave autonomously and take care of themselves and each other without her, which is why she's making sure there are at least a few people who can keep Abbie in line themselves. And then aside from that, Abbie is just kind of a happy loving sweetheart who likes to headbutt things and enjoys a simple life, and Carmen will probably never send her into battle because she's just too ridiculous.
René is the product of an incredibly stupid joke, in which I thought it'd be funny for Carmen to have a Smeargle and then make its acquired moveset nothing but terrible artist jokes. His first two moves were picked from movepools available among other Pokemon in the Ruins of Alph at the level when she acquired him, but since then, they've all been art jokes — Extreme Speed to make him a speed painter, Outrage to play on the easily-offended artist stereotype (YOU PHILISTINES, DO YOU NOT APPRECIATE ART?!), and then Pay Day because hurr, starving artists, YEAH BOY GET PAID. And I think his next one is going to be Swagger, because y'know. Swag. But basically, he and Cliff are part of her Artsy Duo, and every morning they regale her with their latest works, because she is a good patron and likes to encourage creativity whenever she sees it.
Cliff is what happened when I was like, "okay, so what is the most unlikely Pokemon ever to end up aspiring toward Shakespearean-level literary greatness? METAGROSS." Suffice to say, Cliff's running theme is incredibly bad poetry. He's that guy who will write verse about anything and everything he sees, and all of it is hilarious and terrible. Back during Thanksgiving, he regaled Carmen with this:
THERE ONCE WAS THANKSGIVING IN KANTO
THAT MADE TRAINER ALBERT SAY "OH NO"
BUT DESPITE HIS CHAGRIN
WE SURE DID PACK 'EM IN
ON THE PURE SIMPLE NOTION OF "YOLO"
and so basically he goes around composing sonnets and being really flamboyantly Shakespearean and I just picture him marauding around like a tank with metal clanking and thunking everywhere while he's like WHAT LIGHT THROUGH YONDER WINDOW BREAKS and so on. Also, in a few weeks Zack is going to publish some of his poetry to the network because it is time for him to be Discovered, okay.
These are the ways I amuse myself in Pokeymans Land.
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The way you've chosen those moves to fit artist stereotypes is incredibly creative, too. I never even made the connection for some of them, like Outrage and ExtremeSpeed, so A+ for that.
I also like what you've done with Abbie, since most trainers would take all those egg moves and be like, HECK YEAH, battles! That Carmen's taken a more cautionary approach makes a ton of sense, since Deino are blind (whether their evos are or not is... strangely ambiguous).
The way you choose to add Pokémon makes a ton of sense as well. I admit to going more along the lines of picking the type of Pokémon first based on what they would specifically look for and a little bit of Mario-themed irony for Bowser. It does make deciding personalities a lot harder, though, especially when you hit the point where your char has over forty beasts. +_+
As far as other Pokémon go, I find myself rather curious about Sly, Ringo, and Ivy. :o
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"A graceful swing! The club connects!
And as her father, sore, objects,
A growing lump upon his head
Is rapidly a-growing red."
Carmen applauds his artistic pursuits but concedes there is a certain amount of room for improvement, particularly in terms of vocabulary choice.
Yeah, honestly 90% of what I do boils down to either "would this be funny" or "is this a new twist on something I haven't seen yet". I know a lot of trainers, for example (Riku included!), have trained their rosters to respond to nonverbal commands, but I hadn't seen anybody yet who actually tried to train their roster to be outright autonomous, and for Carmen it seemed to make sense so I decided to give it a try. Which led me to breaking down the whole roster into groups and subgroups within an almost military-style hierarchy, such that I always know who answers to whom and what group will get deployed where depending on what special need requires it.
And details on Sly, Ringo, and Ivy are forthcoming!
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Ringo got picked up for two reasons: I couldn't find a Fire-type that suited Carmen, and like Shuckles, I have a stupid passion for the Pokemon that nobody seems to like because BY GOD, I WILL LOVE THEM SO THAT SOMEONE WILL. So nobody gives a fuck about Slugmas and therefore I decided to, so when Carmen went to Ecruteak, I had her go explore the Burned Tower, and then I needed an excuse for her to catch a Slugma and take it home with her, so somehow I arrived at the idea that she walked in the door and this one idiot Slugma was like "--ooo. red. ...Mom?" and started following her. And then there was something about y'know, slugs oozing around and stuff, and the sprite itself just looks like this tortoise-esque HYPERDETERMINED YET UTTERLY SLOW little guy, and eventually I just arrived at, "wouldn't it be funny if Ringo gave absolutely no fucks about anything and just cruised around being a Slugma with only enough mental capacity to hold a single thought at any given time?" So there was that juxtaposition there, of like HYPERFOCUSED ON ONE SINGLE THING but able to be distracted from thing to thing with relative ease.
There was a point, when Hiccup had seven eggs to hatch and he found out that Slugma could help them hatch faster, where he just put the seven eggs in a wide circle and dropped Ringo near one of them, and what ensued was Ringo going, "Oh, an egg. Snugglesnugglesnugglesnugglesnuggle — hey, what's that? (ooze over) Oh, an egg. Snugglesnugglesnugglesnugglesnuggle — hey, what's that? (ooze over)" around and around in a circle FOREVER. Until they all hatched. Yup.
Basically, I like Ringo because he is a dorky little fire slug who gives absolutely no fucks about anything and just cruises around occasionally looking for his mom, when he remembers that he's not entirely sure where she is.
Ivy doesn't get as much use anymore as she once did, but she was the original go-to fighter on Carmen's team; Chief could only have one attack up until he evolved and Zack's personality was that he didn't like to fight, which was intentional because it mirrors Zack and Ivy in canon — Ivy is the athlete with multiple martial arts disciplines under her belt, and Zack usually resorts to tripping people or throwing snowballs at them instead. But if Chief is the commander in chief of the Pokemon Assault Force and Zack is his intelligence division, then Ivy is his top general. She has authority over every other member of the roster save those two, and she primarily heads up the Pokemon who fight with special attacks rather than with brute force (which is more Eartha's specialty). Ivy's a lot like Carmen and a lot like her namesake, really; she's sassy and confident and in particular, she's creative — she figured out pretty early on that brute force isn't her specialty, so a lot of what she does revolves around unorthodox methods like using her vines in unexpected ways (to pull herself out of harm's way, for example) and making good use of her special attacks to garner advantage. She's sort of the original "fight smarter, not harder" roster member, and that's because she was the first fighter on the team in general.
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According to the Dex, Abra sleep eighteen hours a day, so part of Chief's really chill personality stemmed from that; also, given Carmen's independence, I sort of pictured her as just walking around exploring places and Chief floating along behind her, fast asleep but keeping pace, and it was such a cute mental image that I rolled with it. She also used to cuddle with him at night back when he was small enough to do it, because Abra are cute and hugs forever. But then he evolved and now he's big and he's not as huggable anymore, which is sad but she deals with it. And he will never evolve into an Alakazam because then he would lose his tail, which would make him decidedly less cute still.
The other thing about Chief is that he very much runs the team. I have a mental hierarchy of how her whole roster breaks down (who's subordinate to who, who answers to whom, who works together under whose direction), and Chief stands at the very top; in the event that something were to happen to Carmen, Chief has been trained to immediately step in and continue managing the team, with Zack's help. Frankly, she's confident enough in him that she'd be willing to initiate a battle and then walk away and just let him command it in her place. And that exists for two reasons — one because, like I mentioned above to Mega, that if she disappears she wants the team to be able to take care of itself, but also because when you're commanding henchmen (and she does treat her team like her henchmen back home), you need to have a definite chain of command. Chief has been taught how to keep the family together and what to do if god forbid Johto sends her back home. And she finds that reassuring because more than anything, she wants to know her roster is going to be okay, regardless of whether she's there to watch out for them or not.
Also, she likes to play chess against him. He's perfectly welcome to read her mind, but she still usually beats him anyway. Part of how she treats her roster in general is on the overarching theory that it's her job to help make them the best they can be, and that's not just in the sense of training them to battle. She actually teaches them (hence why she plays Trivial Pursuit with Zack and lets him make friends on the network and so on), and part of Chief's education is learning how to deal with people as well as with Pokemon.
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But I really love all this Chief backstory and how he would be at the top of the mental hierarchy I do not even have enough adequate text to convey that, but I just. Have to say it.
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tl;dr they are ADORABLE.
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/random factoid
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