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The rise and fall of Parasitic Trio
Jun. 8th, 2016 08:26 amSo, I've already mentioned my time playing Pokemon Pearl post-Elite Four during the summer of 2008 being the time at which I'd conceive the ficseries that would become known as Parasitic Trio. Just to be clear on one thing, I never started off with the intention to novelize and reconstruct the world that the games take place in, nor did I begin much earlier on with any intention to make a grand tradition out of anything, let alone Pokemon. People don't wake up one day and think "Let's start something to do every year or whatever, why don't we?" Such things are born from formerly mundane things that just so happen to snowball into importance. (I didn't have that many games back when I was playing Crystal in multiple playthroughs from Christmas of 2001 through '06, it was only months after Emerald was released here when I did beat it following my first, aborted playthrough of Sapphire, and the only other games out at that time until April '07 were FireRed and LeafGreen, albeit with Diamond and Pearl on the horizon.)
Furthermore, Parasitic Trio's purpose was not simply to novelize the games. The main gimmick was going to be three Trainers (who Jake and I just so happened to choose as the mains to sexualize in some stories that he never actually wrote*), who would find themselves appointed by the three legendary pixies of Sinnoh to help them in a rather... embarrassing way to fight against Teams Rocket, Magma, and Aqua, before all coming to Sinnoh itself to fight against Team Galactic. (Canonically, Jamie (known as Gold in the gen II games and Jimmy in The Legend of Thunder!) takes on Kanto, the region directly neighboring his own, while everything the mains in all the other games do is relatively minor.) Its immediate inspiration was a similarly-premised anime called Ultimate Girls (involving nudity-induced embarrassment as a form of Metaphysical Fuel), and the circumstances were ripe for it because I was already quite familiar with the games to that point and their overall setting, as well as because of the aforementioned, unrelated stories. The game-like side of things, as much more as it would interest me, only came afterwards as a while-I'm-at-it thing.
(*Technically, he had written the beginning of Ellen's standalone story and did eventually begin writing Jamie's, but the latter only as a role-play, and neither of those got past the beginning or found their way online.)
As for the whole Pal Park gimmick, along with how I considered gen III "the elemental generation" and later found out about the ill-fated SwordQuest promotion of old, I was pretty up-to-date with the Pokemon franchise at that time, courtesy of Bulbapedia, which was how I knew about various in-game events that had to be unlocked with Pokemon or items you could only obtain in real-life promotions. Corresponding with the five elements and the finale, there were exactly twelve items (including a certain Pokemon's egg) and six Pokemon at that time that carried such secondary purposes beyond battle in the games.
-----
With that all out of the way, here is how much I really took from the player's guide for Black and White all those years ago:
( Read more... )
Two years later, I bought the player's guides for Black/White 2 and X/Y, but neither of them inspired anything like all that in me. It does help that at least Parasitic Trio had some meat (the actual premise) for the sauce (random things fighting eachother and chances to win prizes or fail to) to go with, but that's exactly what I sought the potential for. Not necessarily to actually write anything eventually, but come X and Y, you can pretty much guess that my favorite things about it (at least if I were still playing the games) would be the Battle Chateau (writs and titles like those sure seem interesting) and the Battle Maison, both to be the big payoff at the very end but pointless without everything preceding them.
And, like I've realized, the only reason I didn't actually have to play my copy of White was because I was still enthused about both Parasitic Trio and Monster Collection Chronicles. This was months before I would turn my attention to Starbound, for which I wouldn't even bother with any would-be game mechanics (although I did lightly consider that several times early on since), since that's eventually going to be an actual game anyway. The fact that Parasitic Trio, though not scrapped altogether like MCC, has sat on the back burner ever since tells me that even the grand finale (i.e. the Battle Frontier) and everything else I had already played around with for that story fails to maintain my interest in it, let alone in a second ficseries.
Really. I don't want just straight novelizations of all the games since gen IV, nor do I want something that focuses entirely on battles with only an Excuse Plot at best. I want to actually appreciate everything the games have to offer, without having to play against their crooked A.I., but at this point, I'm not exactly optimistic about anything here.
Furthermore, Parasitic Trio's purpose was not simply to novelize the games. The main gimmick was going to be three Trainers (who Jake and I just so happened to choose as the mains to sexualize in some stories that he never actually wrote*), who would find themselves appointed by the three legendary pixies of Sinnoh to help them in a rather... embarrassing way to fight against Teams Rocket, Magma, and Aqua, before all coming to Sinnoh itself to fight against Team Galactic. (Canonically, Jamie (known as Gold in the gen II games and Jimmy in The Legend of Thunder!) takes on Kanto, the region directly neighboring his own, while everything the mains in all the other games do is relatively minor.) Its immediate inspiration was a similarly-premised anime called Ultimate Girls (involving nudity-induced embarrassment as a form of Metaphysical Fuel), and the circumstances were ripe for it because I was already quite familiar with the games to that point and their overall setting, as well as because of the aforementioned, unrelated stories. The game-like side of things, as much more as it would interest me, only came afterwards as a while-I'm-at-it thing.
(*Technically, he had written the beginning of Ellen's standalone story and did eventually begin writing Jamie's, but the latter only as a role-play, and neither of those got past the beginning or found their way online.)
As for the whole Pal Park gimmick, along with how I considered gen III "the elemental generation" and later found out about the ill-fated SwordQuest promotion of old, I was pretty up-to-date with the Pokemon franchise at that time, courtesy of Bulbapedia, which was how I knew about various in-game events that had to be unlocked with Pokemon or items you could only obtain in real-life promotions. Corresponding with the five elements and the finale, there were exactly twelve items (including a certain Pokemon's egg) and six Pokemon at that time that carried such secondary purposes beyond battle in the games.
-----
With that all out of the way, here is how much I really took from the player's guide for Black and White all those years ago:
( Read more... )
Two years later, I bought the player's guides for Black/White 2 and X/Y, but neither of them inspired anything like all that in me. It does help that at least Parasitic Trio had some meat (the actual premise) for the sauce (random things fighting eachother and chances to win prizes or fail to) to go with, but that's exactly what I sought the potential for. Not necessarily to actually write anything eventually, but come X and Y, you can pretty much guess that my favorite things about it (at least if I were still playing the games) would be the Battle Chateau (writs and titles like those sure seem interesting) and the Battle Maison, both to be the big payoff at the very end but pointless without everything preceding them.
And, like I've realized, the only reason I didn't actually have to play my copy of White was because I was still enthused about both Parasitic Trio and Monster Collection Chronicles. This was months before I would turn my attention to Starbound, for which I wouldn't even bother with any would-be game mechanics (although I did lightly consider that several times early on since), since that's eventually going to be an actual game anyway. The fact that Parasitic Trio, though not scrapped altogether like MCC, has sat on the back burner ever since tells me that even the grand finale (i.e. the Battle Frontier) and everything else I had already played around with for that story fails to maintain my interest in it, let alone in a second ficseries.
Really. I don't want just straight novelizations of all the games since gen IV, nor do I want something that focuses entirely on battles with only an Excuse Plot at best. I want to actually appreciate everything the games have to offer, without having to play against their crooked A.I., but at this point, I'm not exactly optimistic about anything here.