#spare protagonist

[oceandiagonale]

*Arvin, being a little shit, giving Spare a birthday card for a two year old.*

*Penny, minor existential crisis at "Oh Arceus I am technically dating a two year old*

*Nemona waiting to challenge her to a battle.*

Spare: Honestly, technically better than last year's. Nobody is on fire yet.

FJKHSDJKFHSD

team skull goes the opposite route:

also I guess I didn't post this and now seems as good a time as any?

[oceandiagonale]

June 23 came and went. Happy first existence anniversary Spare!

IMPORTANT

SENT IN LAST JUNE 23. HAPPY SECOND EXISTENCE DAY SPARE

[oceandiagonale]

Sooo...recently it has been very heavily implied that Penny's father is Peony, which would make Rose her uncle. Which would make her taking her girlfriend, Spare, to a family party even more awkward than normal for various reasons.

"Spare, this is my Uncle-"

"Rose, Ex-Chairman of the Pokemon League of Gallar."

"...of course you already know who he is. Anyway, please don't attack him. Uncle Rose, this is my girlfriend Spare DelRosa, a champion rank of Paldea and Ex-Hero of Arceus."

"...Ex?"

"Dad is an asshole so I quit. Still waiting on child support for Mom, the bum."

okay, I finally looked up where people were pulling that from and whoops, I should probably play the . team star backstory and mochi madness things sometime huh. 😳

anyways this is incredible tbh, can't believe Spare's not only following the Protagonist tradition of dating a former "villain" but also adding onto that by having one of them be her girlfriend's uncle FKJDSHFKJDS

(also this sent me down a thought rabbithole. Is Rose still allowed to stay in Galar? Did he get a trial even though Interpol/The United Regions Court doesn't have jurisdiction over stopping villains? Who decided his sentence? I'm so sorry I'm derailing this and rambling about Rose but it made me think a lot 😳)

I like the Star Trek concept of "jail" only being used as a last resort for people who are currently a danger to people around them and only as a temporary measure while working out some other supports, since the current prison systems all over the real world suck in unique and horrifying ways. But more importantly, I never ever saw that as a viable sentence for any of the villains anyways -- not even Lysandre, so certainly not Rose.

(................jury's still out on Ghetsis, but he's allowed to just wander around Pasio without much fuss so I guess he's fine too as long as someone's keeping an eye on him.)

More importantly, Gene was there to vouch for Rose's honesty about wanting to make it up to Galar. He definitely got community service, but what KIND? And were Archie and Maxie precedent, or did they even get a trial? None of the villains BEFORE them did, and Rose was the first one AFTER them to let himself be "caught."

When Guz first finds out that Archie and Maxie are undermining Lysandre, he says that Gene was happy that they stepped up to do environmental work, which means that the League was the organization taking responsibility for them, NOT Interpol.

But there's never any mention of paperwork regarding them, so I'm pretty sure Steven was just keeping an eye on them from there on out (especially since he was invited to their wedding later).

By the time Rose does his thing (checks watch) 6 years later, there ARE forms for each kind of incident. I'm pretty sure Gene wrote those himself.

So here's my thought: the League was still the organization that "caught" Rose. They were the ones that pressed criminal charges against him, mainly to set a precedent for future incidents (at Rose's request), and he met the same fate as Rose does in the Pieces AU: working in Hoenn as a scientist with Archie and Maxie's team on their environmental project. (Unfortunately, those two are too busy with Ultra Flare to be there much atm.)

After a while, he's able to go back to Galar to work on the energy crisis (with non-League personnel in the Villain Cleanup Division keeping an eye over his shoulder just in case and generally keeping him away from Leon so as not to distress him).

All that to say, yeah. Canon encounter.

[oceandiagonale]

The bit about Volo not knowing about Social Media made me realize that Spare doesn't know either.

Plumeria: What do you mean she doesn't know? Aren't you her girlfriend and a giant tech need?

Penny: I am not introducing someone who just recently decided that human beings have value to influencers and irony poisoned meme performances.

*in background*

Spare, talking to Skulls Grunts: Well, I suppose the walrein would be more surprising, but what does that have to do with vanilla extract?

the only memes the Skull Kids are allowed to tell her are a couple of the day-of-the-week ones (Tuesday again no problem, Sparkle on It's Wednesday, and Out of Touch Thursday) since those are pretty uplifting ones, and maybe some old classics like Rick Rolling and All Star that have been around for everrrrrrrr. and even then they're on thin ice.

[oceandiagonale]

So, for Spare the storylines had different impacts. Arven got her to like humans more because of his willingness to take on great risks to help his pokemon heal. That and he started to help her understand cooking and food more as he came to understand that her reluctance to eat stuff is a result of fear and uncertainty. With Penny and Team Star, she learned not to judge a book by its cover, and since she wasn't dealing with any sort of actual evil team, no serious violence happened. She also empathized with Penny's desire to stop the bullies and oppose injustice, but the idea of unintentional consequences...also like Penny Spare isn't good with people, so they vibe on that. Nemona... was there. She was powerful and skilled and was a good fight...but ultimately it didn't matter, Spare was already a champion by that point and fulfilling one of her primary purposes.

Then we get to the whole robot professor who has highly limited free will and has to follow plans of its creator, even if it came to disagree with them and considered it a catastrophe. Even though it wanted to stop the time machine, it couldn't, and even though it asked Spare to stop it, the robot also acknowledged that it would be forced to try and stop her. This was the big existential crisis because it got Spare to question how much free will she actually has, or if she has her own "Paradise Protection Protocol" that could be switched on. She confessed her status as artificial and her fears about what that could mean to Penny as, out of all of her friends, she was the one Spare considered the best at working out the logic of it and how to test this sort of stuff. After a small freak out, Penny agrees to help Spare figure out just how human she really is (the answer is 100%, they just didn't know it yet).

the hard part is figuring out how to test for humanity -- is it genetic? behavioral? are they just trying to see if Spare can go directly against what Arceus wants? they're going to have a hard time figuring that all out at first 😔

though frankly there's nothing quite as human as going through an emo phase when you're 12-13. Middle school years are sufferingggggg

[oceandiagonale]

May I propose Nemona's intense enthusiasm as a way to come to view battling and Pokemon as something that's done for the joy of it instead of as a means to an end? She's extremely strong and one of the best trainers in Paldea, and she fights that PC a lot, but it's not to Test Her Skills. It's because she wants desperately to share her love of battling in the hopes that the protagonist will also see why she loves it. And for a protagonist who just views battles as their duty, it would only be a more intense desire to help them experience battling as something more, I think.

Or: older student's secret mission to fix her underclassman's baked in burnout

@kriss-watches-stuff 🤔🤔🤔

very in character for nemona! knowing what we do about Spare, it'll probably take a while for that mission to take effect -- but she's such a determined character, I don't think she'll be too discouraged by a lack of progress?

[oceandiagonale]

So one of the things I decided on with Violet was that Spare can not talk to the future paradox pokemon. This is because 1) it adds to how bad the situation is when Arceus hero can't talk to pokemon, and 2) language evolves over time, and they are far enough removed from the present that they're incomprehensible.

Also, this is during the time when everyone thought that Spare could only talk to normal types, so they didn't get why her not understanding these new pokemon was freaking her out so much. That just means that they aren't normal type right? She should be used to not understanding most pokemon.

As for why Arceus doesn't give Spare the ability to speak with the paradox pokemon: they're the problem and talking to them won't solve anything, so why bother with a language patch?

Honestly, I've been thinking about Pokemon languages a lot too -- especially since I got this one ask from @do-not-go-gently-42:

and like, I wonder if the issue isn't even so much that their languages evolved over time (see: Fossil Pokemon, which presumably the protags can talk to as they're a constant throughout the Unown "base code" of Pokemon worlds) as the whole, "They might not even be real" thing (which gamefreak really did nothing with at the end there huh. Except making the player character complicit in some alternate timeline/universe's Arven's parent neglecting him. SMH)

Anyways it could just be me being stubborn, but as someone who's subscribed to the "No, ancient Pokemon were NOT all Rock-types, it's just the revival process that does that to them" school of thought, I absolutely REFUSE to believe in a world where Pokemon all become robots (even if they're not all Steel-types).

No, the Paradox Pokemon are purely a work of fiction that came directly out of Dr. Turo's very own head, and frankly, you think THAT guy knows how to talk to any Pokemon??? He doesn't even know how to talk to his own son! There's no way he knows enough about Pokemon language to create creatures that have one of their own.

That said, I think that the Paradox Pokemon will learn normal Pokemon languages over time from living in Area Zero, surrounded by similar beings to themselves. Eventually Spare (and Gene lol) will probably be able to understand them as well as they understand UBs (not perfectly, but well enough to get the point across).

(Not that it helps Spare during the events of the game though, RIP)

[oceandiagonale]

Spare: Wait, you don't hate me?

Gene: What? Of course I don't hate you, why do you think I would?

Spare: Because you should! Arceus created me to replace you because they believe that you will fail, and die, and place the world in danger and that you will need to be replaced. I was literally made because the creator of the universe decided that you suck. I am a living testament to how little faith Arceus has in you and how easily they think they can do better. I was literally made to be better than you and replace you! You should hate everything that I represent!

OUH,,,,,,,,, SPARE...... on the one hand middle schoolers are just Like That sometimes and on the other hand. after playing through Most of SV now I really hope that Penny and Arven's stories in particular help her sort out some existential dread and trauma 😭😭😭