Robin Riverstone

This section applies to the ILCOE.

Robin Riverstone is the daughter of Martha Riverstone, the warden of the Ouen Safari, and is a talented Pokémon trainer. Her Pokémon are Charizard, Cacturne, Gastrodon, Froslass, Machamp and Luxray.

Appearance

Age (current)
11
Stature
Fairly short.
Eyes
Green.
Hair
Thick, unruly and blond.
Clothes
Mostly green and brown colors.
Handedness
Right-handed.
Images
None yet.

Pre-Story Biography

Robin was raised by her single mother to be quite independent and look on the bright side of life. She has never known her father, who her mother rarely mentions; when she was younger she vividly imagined discovering her father was someone amazing and important, but as she matured she let go of these fantasies and today she rarely thinks about her father.

She started her Pokémon journey in Ouen at the age of ten like most trainers, picking a Charmander as her starter, and eventually registered for participation in the same Ouen League as Mark and May.

Character Rambles

Robin was a very spontaneous addition to the story. The first time she was mentioned, as an unnamed trainer with a Charizard and a Cacturne whose preliminary battle May dragged Mark to watch, she was only meant to be a throwaway background character. However, when he read the chapter, my friend and long-time beta-reader opaltiger made some comment along the lines of hoping this throwaway trainer would turn out to be important, and that made me decide it might be fun to have that be the trainer May would battle in the semifinals. Then, because I like to try to fight my internalized tendency to make characters male by default by experimentally genderswapping them before I properly write them in, I decided I liked her better as a girl, which obviously raised the question of why Mark and May had already referred to her with masculine pronouns. Immediately I began imagining her as a very androgynous girl, and that made me like her even more, to the point where by the time I'd actually written chapter 51, I kind of wanted there to be more of her.

Her maternity was even more spontaneous. It literally came to light that the Safari warden was her mom when I was in the process of writing her dialogue in chapter 56 where she was commenting on the League and realized how much my mental image of her looked like Robin. This further enhanced my ideas about her personality. At this point I still didn't intend on having her join the main cast, but as I wrote the next few chapters I realized by this point it was downright silly to keep on bringing up this inconsequential trainer unless she was going to be significant somehow, and so (in true Quest for the Legends style) I decided this had all secretly been setting up for her to reappear.

I don't quite remember how Mark being injured when they fought the female Color Dragons for the second time and Robin and her mother coming to the rescue came about. Nothing of the kind happened in the original chapter plan; they were simply meant to straightforwardly fight and catch the dragons and then decide on their own to go to the Acaria mountains and finally conclude the dragons weren't there and head to the Scorpion mountains instead. I don't think I came up with Mark's injury until at some point while writing chapter 62. Given how dull the original plan was, I guess my brain went the extra mile to steer the fic somewhere more interesting - and as a result, we got a perfect opportunity for all that setup about Robin to lead somewhere major as Mark was put out of commission and Robin would inevitably offer to come along in his stead.

And as it turned out, this was a great idea, because Robin immediately had a really interesting dynamic with May that would form the core of chapter 64. Robin thinks May is awesome; going with her to save the world is pretty much the coolest thing she can imagine. And at first, May also has a lot of respect for Robin and is quite happy to have her along. However, as it turns out Robin's very existence digs deeply at May's insecurities: Robin is just as good as she is at battling, but she also regards her Pokémon as friends and companions without even thinking about it, would clearly have noticed and worked on Tyranitar's problems from the beginning, and unlike May she seems genuinely confident and self-assured. This quickly leads May to start hating her for being so apparently perfect.

Additionally, May has a somewhat paradoxical relationship with other people's perceptions of her. On the one hand, she hides her insecurities behind a carefully cultivated image of who she wants to be, and the idea of people seeing her flaws beneath that mask is terrifying to her; on the other hand, she tends to internally be her own worst critic, and when she believes she's failed to live up to that self-image, being praised or admired only reminds her of her failure. Thus, she hates Robin's admiration of her prior to learning how Taylor died, because it tears that barely-healed wound wide open again, but also desperately dreads the idea of Robin finding out and realizing her flaws.

As a result of all this (topped with Chaletwo being in her head where she can't as easily control the image she projects, which puts her even more on edge than usual), May spends most of chapter 64 feeling increasingly trapped and vulnerable, desperate to just get out of this situation, which fuels a furious impatience in the initial days of the search and culminates in a pointless act of violence by proxy against an innocent Beartic that got her hopes up.

Meanwhile, poor Robin has no idea what is going on - May seemed to think she was pretty cool back at her house when they were talking to Dragoreen, but right on their first day out hunting for the dragons she's started acting cold and snappy for no apparent reason. Robin dejectedly takes it to mean May just didn't actually think much of her after all, which couldn't be further from the truth, and in her current state May just takes her probing attempt to ask about it as some kind of mock-humble fishing for compliments that only forces her to think more about how much better Robin is at everything.

After the Beartic incident, though, May is shaken enough to decide to get it over with and tell her Tyranitar killed Taylor. For now Robin is still digesting that information, but I have more fun things in store for their relationship and look forward to getting to those chapters.