The rise and fall of Parasitic Trio
Jun. 8th, 2016 08:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dmxratedSo, 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:
Pokemon:First and foremost, the mons themselves were unique, not least of all in form. Really, I could end up citing nearly all of them if I started to name any examples.
More importantly, though, I was impressed with how gen V seemed like it would start over by not utilizing any pre-existing mons for its main games or creating yet more new evolutions for any of them. It seemed like Unova, given how far away it was from the previous games' regions, was truly going to set itself apart like that (among other things, like resetting the numbers for routes)... at least until the already upcoming sequel pair came along to throw that out the window. (Thankfully, only one old Pokemon, Eevee, had since gotten a new evolved form, Sylveon, although I'm still not buying the prerequisite for that.)
Abilities: Upon coming home from Boston, I made a list of all the different existing Abilities (including the unused Cacophony) and created some of my own based on each mon's form, Pokedex entries, or other gimmicks, even assigning types to them. Based on what I read in certain PX entries, some mons should have had abilities other than the one or two (three if you count Hidden ones), and to begin with, I never really agreed with each mon wielding only one or another assigned to their species when they should naturally wield both. For example, why doesn't Caterpie have Stench, despite its entries in Yellow, Gold, Stadium 2, etc.? Intimidate is another good example, of something I'd picture more naturally causing an opponent to clam up (like Tracy's Marill against an oncoming Nidoking in the anime, even if the latter was simply staring the mains down instead of chasing them, and even though Nidoking normally wield Poison Point or Rivalry and that episode predated Abilities altogether) than reducing their attack power. (I'm sure Latias would also have that as per her PX entries, if only Abilities worked more naturally.) Others, such as Infiltrator, just left me wondering what made the devs decide one ability over another that a given mon can have just as easily, especially since those don't seem as natural as the likes of Poison Point and Liquid Ooze, although I did still find all of them interesting. Plus and Minus, for example, started out exclusively for Plusle and Minun respectively, but had also become both of those for Klink and were also assigned to Mareep and Electrike respectively as Hidden Abilities. (Speaking of which, Hidden Abilities, formerly invented for the Dream World, would here instead be activated by Hidden Power, since that's teachable to all Pokemon that can learn TMs.)
Some of the ones I created myself included Berry Blend (Shuckle's ability to turn berries into Berry Juice), Multitarget (since Exeggcute consists of six individual eggs that should logically carry one sixth each of its total HP), Cold (equivalent for Ice moves to Drought (Fire) and Drizzle (Water), wielded by Gastly and others as per the Pokedex), Deepfreeze (Kyurem's should-have-been equivalent Ability to Zekrom's Teravolt and Reshiram's Turboblaze, instead of Pressure), and Glitch (for Missingno, who would have been the reason for the Lake Trio's limited ability to fight until being exorcised out of them in the Distortion World, had Jake not objected to that). But, most noteworthy of all, would be ???, for Unown, since Hidden Power is the only move that those can learn ever; that ability would become a random one once HP is used, and then Unown could possibly attach itself to another Pokemon (since those can barely fight on their own) for that mon to wield the newly unlocked Ability. (It's possible in such a case that both Pokemon in question could legally count as one even in double or triple battles, although I never actually did finalize it.)
Other things:
While I didn't really keep track of the names of different cities, other places did come off as unique to me. Some of those included Nacrene Museum, the Cold Storage, the Desert Resort, Pinwheel Forest, Lostlorn Forest, Chargestone Cavern, Small Court, and Big Stadium. I also found the billionaire who buys artifacts from Relic Castle off of you pretty unique.
While I didn't really pay much attention to moves otherwise, the way TMs were listed, old ones mingled with new ones while still numbering a total of 95 (just slightly more than in gen IV), left an impression on me. At that time, I considered reverting Unova's TM roster, like Sinnoh's, back to 50 by excising almost everything from prior generations except Hidden Power (04). (Ironically, I read just the other day that only four would be changed between gens V and VI.)
But of course, there are some actual basic story ideas, although I didn't actually finalize these and didn't intend at the time to reveal anything until after Parasitic Trio's fabled completion. With Unova seeming like it would have been the first region introduced of its own whole country, this next ficseries would have started the girls I originally created to comprise the Beehive Brigade in Monster Collection Chronicles. Not sure what would have happened most of the time, but between the equivalent events to both pairs of games, the girls would eventually be turned to stone while also defeating the antagonists in another game, and would eventually be revived as Legendary Pokemon for Nate of the sequels to wield. While they still would maintain their human forms, they would be unable to wear clothes or to speak, given their purity and status as sub-human.
Five girls and one male Trainer to raise them also seemed to correspond to the six sages of Team Plasma. They, in turn, seemed to correspond to the six elements from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (here's something of interest about that), and from there, the story might have involved the six Sage Medallions from that game for all six mains to collect to restore the girls' humanity.
Having thought all that up also made me question the nature of canonical Legendaries, and particularly if various other Trainers really should be wielding mons that there should logically be only one of. Wrote an email to Jake about that, in which I had also cited Spiritomb (given its backstory) and Zorua and evolved form Zoroark (since you can only obtain those by migrating certain legendaries from the gen IV games first, although that was only the case in B/W).
-----
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:
Pokemon:First and foremost, the mons themselves were unique, not least of all in form. Really, I could end up citing nearly all of them if I started to name any examples.
More importantly, though, I was impressed with how gen V seemed like it would start over by not utilizing any pre-existing mons for its main games or creating yet more new evolutions for any of them. It seemed like Unova, given how far away it was from the previous games' regions, was truly going to set itself apart like that (among other things, like resetting the numbers for routes)... at least until the already upcoming sequel pair came along to throw that out the window. (Thankfully, only one old Pokemon, Eevee, had since gotten a new evolved form, Sylveon, although I'm still not buying the prerequisite for that.)
Abilities: Upon coming home from Boston, I made a list of all the different existing Abilities (including the unused Cacophony) and created some of my own based on each mon's form, Pokedex entries, or other gimmicks, even assigning types to them. Based on what I read in certain PX entries, some mons should have had abilities other than the one or two (three if you count Hidden ones), and to begin with, I never really agreed with each mon wielding only one or another assigned to their species when they should naturally wield both. For example, why doesn't Caterpie have Stench, despite its entries in Yellow, Gold, Stadium 2, etc.? Intimidate is another good example, of something I'd picture more naturally causing an opponent to clam up (like Tracy's Marill against an oncoming Nidoking in the anime, even if the latter was simply staring the mains down instead of chasing them, and even though Nidoking normally wield Poison Point or Rivalry and that episode predated Abilities altogether) than reducing their attack power. (I'm sure Latias would also have that as per her PX entries, if only Abilities worked more naturally.) Others, such as Infiltrator, just left me wondering what made the devs decide one ability over another that a given mon can have just as easily, especially since those don't seem as natural as the likes of Poison Point and Liquid Ooze, although I did still find all of them interesting. Plus and Minus, for example, started out exclusively for Plusle and Minun respectively, but had also become both of those for Klink and were also assigned to Mareep and Electrike respectively as Hidden Abilities. (Speaking of which, Hidden Abilities, formerly invented for the Dream World, would here instead be activated by Hidden Power, since that's teachable to all Pokemon that can learn TMs.)
Some of the ones I created myself included Berry Blend (Shuckle's ability to turn berries into Berry Juice), Multitarget (since Exeggcute consists of six individual eggs that should logically carry one sixth each of its total HP), Cold (equivalent for Ice moves to Drought (Fire) and Drizzle (Water), wielded by Gastly and others as per the Pokedex), Deepfreeze (Kyurem's should-have-been equivalent Ability to Zekrom's Teravolt and Reshiram's Turboblaze, instead of Pressure), and Glitch (for Missingno, who would have been the reason for the Lake Trio's limited ability to fight until being exorcised out of them in the Distortion World, had Jake not objected to that). But, most noteworthy of all, would be ???, for Unown, since Hidden Power is the only move that those can learn ever; that ability would become a random one once HP is used, and then Unown could possibly attach itself to another Pokemon (since those can barely fight on their own) for that mon to wield the newly unlocked Ability. (It's possible in such a case that both Pokemon in question could legally count as one even in double or triple battles, although I never actually did finalize it.)
Other things:
While I didn't really keep track of the names of different cities, other places did come off as unique to me. Some of those included Nacrene Museum, the Cold Storage, the Desert Resort, Pinwheel Forest, Lostlorn Forest, Chargestone Cavern, Small Court, and Big Stadium. I also found the billionaire who buys artifacts from Relic Castle off of you pretty unique.
While I didn't really pay much attention to moves otherwise, the way TMs were listed, old ones mingled with new ones while still numbering a total of 95 (just slightly more than in gen IV), left an impression on me. At that time, I considered reverting Unova's TM roster, like Sinnoh's, back to 50 by excising almost everything from prior generations except Hidden Power (04). (Ironically, I read just the other day that only four would be changed between gens V and VI.)
But of course, there are some actual basic story ideas, although I didn't actually finalize these and didn't intend at the time to reveal anything until after Parasitic Trio's fabled completion. With Unova seeming like it would have been the first region introduced of its own whole country, this next ficseries would have started the girls I originally created to comprise the Beehive Brigade in Monster Collection Chronicles. Not sure what would have happened most of the time, but between the equivalent events to both pairs of games, the girls would eventually be turned to stone while also defeating the antagonists in another game, and would eventually be revived as Legendary Pokemon for Nate of the sequels to wield. While they still would maintain their human forms, they would be unable to wear clothes or to speak, given their purity and status as sub-human.
Five girls and one male Trainer to raise them also seemed to correspond to the six sages of Team Plasma. They, in turn, seemed to correspond to the six elements from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (here's something of interest about that), and from there, the story might have involved the six Sage Medallions from that game for all six mains to collect to restore the girls' humanity.
Having thought all that up also made me question the nature of canonical Legendaries, and particularly if various other Trainers really should be wielding mons that there should logically be only one of. Wrote an email to Jake about that, in which I had also cited Spiritomb (given its backstory) and Zorua and evolved form Zoroark (since you can only obtain those by migrating certain legendaries from the gen IV games first, although that was only the case in B/W).
-----
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.