ok go ahead chief, talk to us about /that/ one verse 👀
OH SHIT BERRY YES I’LL TELL YOU BUT FIRST I GOTTA
A—
Because holy shit I’ve been dying for someone to ask but at the same time I’m like holy shit no Chief shut up this is self-indulgent BUT.
AA—
Okay, ok we good. SO first off let’s just say Pokémon timelines are even more confusing than Zelda timelines so I’m not even gonna dip my toes into looking what happens first/etc. ALSO SECOND THIS MIGHT END UP BEING A LONG-ASS WORD-VOMIT ALL OVER DASH BUT LET’S FUCKING GO.
SO. ROCKET, RIGHT.
We know what happened between Jay and them. But we also know that Jay is just One Dude. When Aqua was disbanded (read: when Jay fled Hoenn because shit hit the fan and he didn’t want to get caught in the crossfire), Jay returned to his hometown of Goldenrod city, Johto, which is also one of Rocket’s main playgrounds. And while he’s just One Dude, he has other friends that are also fed up with the Big Red R and how it’s got fingers in nearly every pie. Corrupt judges, public servants, cops and TV providers, to name only a few, are a few of the things that makes that one crime syndicate so untouchable. And that’s where a few fed up people decided to hit first. Personal information and receipts were released to the public. Acts of vandalism were performed. Everything to start getting a rise out of the greater Johtonese population.
At first, it was a nameless movement. Just people deciding to take action, without much direction. Rallies, walks, unorganized action. Sure, it’s good to see people getting together to try and change things, but it needed... More.
Now, Jay is not a public person by any means, but he actually spoke up at one of those smaller rallies, and sharing part of his experience and views touched something within the crowd. Sure, from the beginning of this, he was just another anonymous rioter wearing a mask to hide his identity, but slowly, people started looking up to him, to the point where a group actually took form and named itself, and him too. Jay picked neither names, ‘Wildfire’ and ‘Fox’ being something that spread on its own after being thrown around a few times. And it’s at that moment that it started to gain traction.
Being thrust at the forefront of the movement, Jay and a few trusted friends had to start giving shape to it. Wildfire, unlike the ‘teams’ you meet in the Pokémon world, is not an overly organized movement. People who joined it come from all walks of life, and there’s no uniform, no membership, no pay and no secret base. Every single call to rally is a text message sent through a burner phone, within a few minutes to a couple of hours from the event. Everything is made so it is unpredictable and hard to track. It’s a group that’s scattered and hidden in plain sight, a group of ruffians, misfits, activists, anarchists, dreamers, vigilantes and people hungry for justice and revolution, ready to fight the power. Stirring trouble, encouraging civilians not to let Rocket get their way, giving the means of self-defense back to the people who felt wronged by the criminal syndicate that infiltrated the various power structures in Johto and Kanto. Graffiti, hacking, arson, theft, damage to property, releasing classified information to the media, even assault sometimes, but no casualties caused by them, no innocent harmed by them. Exposing people, dragging them out into the public eye. Everything to give Rocket a hard time and retake what belongs to the people — going as far as to admit that if they have to, they’re ready to actually topple more than just a criminal syndicate to get rid of it. Even if there has to be a stock market crash or if the socio-economic climate has to change.
With something this big, Jay has to keep his identity hidden for sure. Fox is an entirely different entity: it’s a symbol that people rally under. The Arsonist that lit the Wildfire, someone even say. Something that big is intimidating, and he makes sure that his identity is entirely secret and protected. Only a few people know of it, one of them even being some kind of Second Fox to make sure that Jay himself has alibies and can be seen somewhere while Fox is somewhere else.
In this verse, the fight takes place not only in Goldenrod city, but in Johto and Kanto. The climate is especially tense in Goldenrod city, where people know the movement originated, but the point of being scattered and mostly anonymous is that it can hit anywhere at the same time. And at some point, three-four-ish years down the road, because things like that need time to gain traction and enough manpower, and it takes time to clean trash out of some systems, the fight will be taken to a higher level. Because you can’t kill a hydra unless you go for the whole body—cutting off the heads is just a way of stalling for time.
And does Jay live for it? On one side, yes, he’s feeling like he’s accomplishing what he was always meant to do. On the other hand? Holy shit dude that’s some STRESS, he needs a break, he wants a break, can this be over please? Because we’re not excluding the thought that while Wildfire does its best not to cause casualties, Rocket doesn’t tend to have these principles.
GOD I SKIMMED OVER A LOT BUT THAT’S BASICALLY THE BIG BRAIN STUFF I’M DYING TO RP MORE OF AAAA—
