I don’t know why but I suddenly can’t stop thinking about Irida and Her choices in Ounce of Prevention. Feel free to just ignore this if you’re still planning to update it someday, absolutely no pressure, but I’m just so curious as to where her arc would have taken her.
Thanks for infecting my brain btw, genuinely.
OH YEAH OK THIS IS FUN! uh. i don't wanna say i'm Not gonna update oop ever again but we are firmly in the malev mines rn and all my writing energy is going to other projects, lol. and yeah regardless of whether i do go back to it or not, it would probably still be fun to yap rn about the stuff i had plotted out!!
(contd. PLA character rambing + OOP spoilers(???) under the cut)
so irida's arc is, probably obviously, kind of inextricably tied up with adaman's. they both develop as mirrors of each other. like, they do not get along as people because they have been arguing nonstop for years, BUT, by the same token, they have been fighting for years & so know each other really well, on a surface "i can predict your next words with almost perfect accuracy" way. and the rift crisis in OOP is, even moreso than in canon, the impetus for them to finally work out their differences and bond and etc.
and in irida's case this means, like. she is someone who is and has been under enormous pressure to Be A Good Leader. not just for her people, but for The Pearl Clan as an entity, as a body of tradition and faith. she has to do everything right, make all the right calls, be wise and just and worthy of sinnoh's faith in her. as a consequence she second-guesses herself constantly, and tends to fall back on the guidance of those she views as more experienced than herself... whiiiich is what led directly to her agreeing to imprison ingo. rip. so her arc is abt her recognizing that actually, she can't be a perfect leader all on her own, that trying to force herself into this individualism just leads to her unconsciously trusting the wrong people and getting others hurt.
and like i said, this whole coming to terms with her flaws happens parallel to adaman's own arc, bc they were going to be traveling around together for the next solid chunk of the fic (i decided to split all the PLA fetchquests between parties, so adaman and irida were going to be plate collecting.) which also means that she's forced to recognize that while adaman is very bad at holding to formality and tradition, and weak on the spiritual side of leadership, he is legitimately very good at managing his people. (likewise, adaman has to recognize that despite irida's youth and lack of confidence, her knowledge of hisui and the clans is deep & she's good at managing that side of things.)
the ultimate resolution of this in the very sketchy outline i have that far was that it comes to light that the clans were formerly one single entity that underwent a fracturing in the last rift crisis, and after all the Character Growth™ (on the part of the leaders and also just sort of everyone in hisui generally), they decide to reunify the clans bc they've realized they are much better leaders as a pair than they are apart. BUT like i said that was a very sketchy outline so it could have changed along the way, who knows !
So I was just watching someone run through PLA and I noticed something. Laventon says the village has only been around 2 years. In OOP, ingos been there literally twice the amount of time as these guys!!!! The “outsiders” hypocrisy has it’s more obvious points but like come on kamado and Beni wtf. You’re not old enough to even be trying to run a HOA on hisui, telling the clans their oversized bidoof aren’t on the approved list of decorations.
LMFAO the phrasing on this is killing me
yeah the age of jubilife is one of those things that i feel like i have to retcon to some degree, bc the idea that a structure like galaxy hall went up two years after the first group landed is. ridiculous. i mean even more ridiculous than the existence of galaxy hall to start with. REGARDLESS THOUGH i do think ingo still predates them by a fairly decent length of time which, YEAH, they really do not have any leg to stand on complaining about outsiders or trying to decide how to do things whkwjhwjk. not that that's stopping them!!
Well about the perception of Volo vs Kamado thing, and why more people don’t hate Volo, I have my own reflections (pretty privilege is absolutely a factor tho let’s be real 😂)
Everyone growing up has at least one story of an adult being super unfair to you, even though you were doing everything right. Their own biases and experiences could be understood later once you were older and calmer reflecting back on the incident, like a teacher who snapped at you maybe had a super long day of wrangling hundreds of children. But we never forget how it feels in that moment to have those who should be guiding us be unfair and seemingly unreasonable. So naturally that’s gonna hurt when you get kamado being paranoid.
Volo on the other hand is just absolutely delightful I’m sorry maybe if Kamado put on a silly outfit and hair for his boss battle instead of plate mail he’d have more art. Like you said Volos betrayal is one and done really, he acts like a theater kid and then dips. You have to keep seeing kamado being in charge in the game after his blunders for a while which can rub people the wrong way. (Also this is maybe just me but I never trusted Volo just like I never trusted Cynthia as a kid, and finding out he was evil was a great moment of vindication I CANT be the only one who experienced this)
TLDR we see unfairness way more than we see someone betray us while making their hair like a god horse
well, you heard them, kamado. time to go get the jester outfit. cmon chop chop it's to redeem your image
yeah, the point abt getting burned by adults in authority is also very fair. most of us were not scarred for life by theater kid antics lol. the other thing abt it is that often those same adults never really face any consequences. you were always just expected to move on, suck it up etc. cause that's life as a kid right. sometimes ppl will use their power over you just to flex their limited authority, or to vent whatever's going on in their home life, and this doesn't really stop when you grow up it's just that when you're a kid basically every adult has that authority position. so it's just expected that there's nothing you can do. i mean unless you decide to be the karmic force of justice in your own life by being the most stubborn bitch of a child to walk the earth. not that i would know anything about that cough
uh anyway. the thing is the thing btwn you and kamado isn't about about child vs adult. you're more or less considered an adult yourself by jubilife, albeit a rather young and more importantly low ranking one. like we've said (a million times already lol) kamado's not doing it just to grasp at a sense of control, he's reacting to what he perceives as a very real threat to his village (and also because the writers clocked him in the face with the idiot ball for plot advancement reasons lbr).
and the thing is kamado DOES, kind of, face consequences and own up to his mistakes by the end of the game. also after the red sky event he's like, REALLY nice to you lol. not just briefly either! imo you can tell that he sincerely respects you and regrets his actions in the red sky. go look at his late game quotes-
"Perhaps you are a divine being yourself, sent to bring us gifts from above...
"I know I've no right to say this... But we are truly fortunate to have been able to count you among the Survey Corps' ranks. If you had not joined us, we would have fallen on Mount Coronet. We would have lost our home. We would have lost our future."
"I'm grateful to you for showing me what a heartening presence Pokémon can be. We must spar again sometime!"
"<player>, forgive me for taking so much of your time [telling you about the Galaxy name.] Please accept this as a sort of apology."
like he's trying to make up for the way they were treated earlier and give them the proper treatment they're owed for all their help.
idk i don't have a good way to conclude this i guess. i just think he's a cool character
If the new legends game is in the future and they throw a memory less emmet in there I’ll actually die.
I WAS LITERALLY JUST ABOUT TO MAKE THIS POST LMFAO imagine if we show up at Hotel Richimisse 2 or wherever and fucking. emmet or hall matron argenta or someone is just there no memories just shrugs at you like yeah idk either but where else am I gonna go. Anabel and ingo were just part of a Very widespread pattern of something abducting fucking every facility head in the entire Pokémon world to scatter them around all of time and space like skittles
So the funny news is that Irida and Adaman in masters ex mistake more people than Lucas and dawn for people they know, like the members of team galactic for coin and arezu.
The bad news is that there’s no ingo interactions. Yet. It would be an amazing payoff for at least one of the “lookalikes” to be the actual guy but alas, nothing yet.
i know it's so unlikely from these writers but i'm so desperate and starving... is there anything... Interesting... in the interactions. like showing their hand abt what they think of the people theyre mistaking them for. is it all "wait AREZU? oh haha nope oops" or are there any cases where they try to actually talk to them normally. u kno.
Ingo is indeed there. Both in his normal outfit and in his silly butler outfit. I don’t know if we’re gonna see interactions cause like Irida he’s a special unit not normally available to get while Dawn is, but I’m hopeful regardless.
i would LOVE to see some ingo irida interactions... unless they're bad in which case i'll pretend they don't exist. BUT.
Hey idk if you play Pokémon Masters EX or not but they’re adding Irida and Adaman into the game and the teasers show them mistaking Dawn and Lucas for Akari and Rei and that’s sure not gonna make the lore come even more into question on just what’s going on there.
They drop tomorrow, pretty hyped honestly.
wait isn't ingo also there?? like pre hisui normal ingo??
...what if they drop the real explanation for why ingo ended up in hisui and we were all wrong turns out it was masters timeline fuckery
