The Quest for the Legends

I just thought of something… What were the Ouen Route numbers in the original? Was the change the the 300's the first numbering change?

I didn't actually make an Ouen map or start mentioning route numbers until after R/S were out, so I first started it with the 200s. I wouldn't have mentioned them at all if Hoenn hadn't given a very convenient reason to believe that we knew how region routes would be numbered in the future, unlike what happened when G/S/C were out.

Do you participate in online text-based RPGs?

No. I never really got into it.

Do you, personally, play ROMs on emulators? What about ROM hacks?

Occasionally, when it's a game I can't seem to get my hands on otherwise or if I need to get screenshots. Hacks, never actually played one although I wouldn't have anything against it if there were one that I was very interested in.

Are you a huge fan of other fics? Any in particular you'd want to list?

I don't read a lot of fics, but some of my very favorites are:

- The Ties that Bind by Saffire Persian, a really sad one-shot that manages to make me cry every time I read it.
- Me and My Flame, a 53-chapter completed epic about wild Charizard, a snarky Vulpix/Ninetales and oh-so-much more.
- Tangled Web, an eight-chapter beginning of a trainer fic that in this space managed to be made of pure, unadulterated awesome thanks to the author's BEST WRITING STYLE EVER and the original plot. Can only be found on TPM now.
- The Last of Its Kind, a horror one-shot by the same author.

I am also currently following elyvorg's fic, Lost Evolution, which is pretty awesome as well.

Did you also fall in love with The God Delusion?

Eh, not really; it's his worst book in my opinion and its central argument struck me as the kind that makes perfect sense as an argument for not starting to believe in God but really doesn't work as an argument for somebody to stop believing in God, which is what it was presented as. It still makes a lot of good points, mind, and his writing is always great, and I actually liked it more on the second read, but if you're going to read Dawkins, go read The Selfish Gene and The Ancestor's Tale, which are both utterly brilliant and fascinating books. It also helps against the irritating misconception that he's a bitter old man obsessed with his own atheism.

Mind, by the time I read The God Delusion I was already in love with his books on evolution, so there was no need to fall in love with it. :P

…And where does the alias, antialiasis, come from/mean?

The word "anti-alias", which is a computer graphics term referring to the use of, for instance, gray pixels to portray an area that in a higher pixel resolution would be partly white and partly black, such as on the edge of a solid shape on a background or in a pattern that is too small for the resolution to capture it accurately. Not that the definition matters; I just liked the sound of the word after noticing it in Photoshop and ImageReady, and when I decided to make myself a unique username (i.e. something that would not be taken on Neopets), I figured it was as good an idea to start with as any. Just "antialias" was taken, so I decided to add another syllable at the end; "-is" both worked smoothly with the general flow of the name and is an ending that makes it into a process (just like "photosynthesis"), which I thought was pretty cool. And it was just fun to say (with an Icelandic pronunciation, anyway).

I might note that at the time I did not actually know what the word "alias" generally meant, so the fact this created an alias that sounds like it is against the very idea of aliases was completely lost on me, but now I think it's kind of fun, so. :P

I'll change your name after the new year; apparently my Buffy and Angel torrents exceeded our bandwidth limit for the month and therefore my Internet is a slug right now and I don't trust it to keep up a connection with the server for long enough to change your name.

I assume you mean the Lucki incident, correct? That was pretty cool. I never read it until after she'd posted the end, so I will never know if the actual story would have fooled me, but the icemew persona did. And it was a pretty good point she proved, too.

Her LiveJournal is here.

Could you make a link in the sidebar for this site? Its kinda tedious having to go through three pages to get where i want, especially on my PSP where things take a little while to load up.

Um, there already is one. It's in the other sidebar.

…Who is/are your favorite author/s?

Michael Ende, Jim Butcher, Douglas Adams, Andri Snær Magnason, Richard Dawkins if nonfiction counts. J.K. Rowling too, I guess, though that's a "boring" answer. :P

How did you select the names for your charecters? Random ones you liked?

The general rule is "the first name that flies into my head", which is sometimes vaguely relevant and sometimes not.

Random: I like Christopher Paolini as an Author because he wrote Eragon when he was 11-13, and it is an incredible book, especially to be finished when he was 13.

…um, no. He started it when he was fifteen and it was published when he was nineteen. Seriously, what the hell? Eragon fans often love to report it as if it was written in its entirety when he was fifteen or published then, but this is the first time I've seen anyone claim he was even younger than that. o_O What's with people aging him down?

Not going to touch the "incredible book" bit. Just know that your mileage may vary widely on that.

…according to that biography, it was self-published when he was eighteen (November 2001, with him born in '83) and republished when he was nearly twenty (August 2003).

I was responding to sreservoir, who was saying it was self-published when he was sixteen, not you.

I read half of Eragon, lost the book somewhere (probably in Denmark) and never bothered to get it again since I found it rather generic anyway. I've since seen the movie, made fun of the ancient language (which sounds like badly mispronounced fangirl Icelandic and is really rather hilarious) and read several Internet essays about how bad it is. I only have a very rough idea of what happens in the next books and probably not a very accurate one since it all comes from snarky synopses and comparisons to Star Wars, so.

Very probably The Neverending Story and Momo by Michael Ende, fiction-wise, and The Ancestor's Tale by Richard Dawkins, non-fiction-wise.

Normally when I start reading books and find myself really not liking them, I just don't continue (the exception to this would be a particular fanfic I've for some reason taken the strangest morbid interest in, but that's another story), so I haven't actually read a lot of particularly bad books. :/ The only candidates I can think of are Icelandic anyway (forced reading for Icelandic class at some point), so you wouldn't know them.

Judging by the title of your LiveJournal, you're a Harry Potter fan. (No shit, Sherlock.)

Um, what? "Butterfree's Coughing Cupboard" has nothing to do with Harry Potter; it's a reference to the ranting forum at my forums, which in turn is a translation of "hóstaskápur", an inside joke in my family about the need for such a place to put my mom into when she was having one of her at-the-time-very-frequent coughing fits. The only thing vaguely related I can think of in Harry Potter is the cupboard under the stairs, but that doesn't involve coughing as far as I know. o.O

That said, I do enjoy the Harry Potter books, and yes, odds are I'd be in Ravenclaw.

Have you ever considered making a page for The Quest for the Legends on Tv Tropes?

I'd never make a page for my own work; it feels wrong and egocentric to me. If somebody else wants to, though, be my guest (somebody made one for Morphic the other day).

A while back (and I mean, a long while back) you mentioned a fanfic called Tangled Web, by Chicrocketjames. Do you know where I could read it? I found the first three chapters somewhere, but nothing more.

I'm pretty sure the only place all the chapters he wrote are still available is here. Still got abandoned a tragically short way in, but it's quite a bit more than what you found.

Hey Butterfree, I took a Mary Sue Limitus Pokemon test on Mark and I got:

61+ Points : Irredeemable Sue. Did you base your character off Ash or what?

What do you think of this? I doubt you did base him completely off of Ash.

That wouldn't happen to be the one that makes you tick a box for every legendary the character comes into contact with, would it? Because I've run him through plenty of Mary-Sue litmus tests, and that's the only one where he didn't get graded as something between a normal, healthy character and an outright anti-Sue. And that is not a coincidence.

Mary-Sue litmus tests are inherently flawed because they can't test what actually matters, namely the mindset of the author. They can be nice clues that something could be going on behind the scenes, but for this fic, that particular question simply isn't indicative of anything at all. Sure, sometimes I guess seeing a bunch of legendaries is done to make the character more special, but the whole point of the plot here is seeking out many, many legendaries and, yes, catching them. It simply has nothing to do with the characters who are doing it, and exponentially less so with each subsequent legendary box the test forces you to check after the first one, because how in the world can the precise number of legendaries that haven't already been caught by the other kids magically affect Mark as a character?

But really, to be honest, I don't need a litmus test to tell me that no, Mark is not a Stu, because as I said, Sueism is about the mindset of the author, and the fact is I simply do not have the mindset that would make him one. Compared to the characters I find interesting in this story, I really don't give a damn about him, I don't expect you to give a damn, he's emphatically ordinary and not special in any way whatsoever except that he happened to be there when Chaletwo was looking for recruits, and as far as I'm concerned his most fun moments are usually when he's being pathetically passive and failing to do the right/noble thing. The only things vaguely Stuish about him are his Pokémon team, which is a silly artifact from the past, and the fact he's out catching legendaries to save the world, where it's made abundantly clear that he's nowhere near the most useful person involved and the basis on which he was picked was terribly flimsy and had little to do with his ability at anything. I delight in Mark's sheer unremarkableness and lack of outstanding or heroic qualities. If any character in this fic is a Sue or Stu, it's most definitely not him.

I'm not offended and all valid points to be made about the characterization in this fic are gratefully welcomed, but I think I have very good reasons to consider this test result simply inaccurate. If you would like to argue otherwise, do so by all means.

How often do you venture into the Your Own Fanfiction forum?

Not really ever. If somebody post something rule-breaking, I just trust somebody else will notice and alert me here. Maybe I shouldn't, but I'm lazy like that.

Difficult in the attachment-to-the-old-silly-idea sense, or difficult in the already-wrote-this-in sense?

It was a Charizard that died in The Ties that Bind, at the hands of a Venusaur, so the situation for May's dad's Meganium was reversed. I did think of that fic, but I was trying not to make it too similar, beyond the starter-dying-battling-another-starter thing.

Chaletwo: No. Well, we know of some old classics from over there, but they aren't very widely read.

Yeah, that too. It stretches credulity enough that Spirit and Gyarados's trainers happen to travel together.

(Although there is this hidden piece of random headcanon of mine that says that the Electrike whose mother they killed in chapter 34 was one of Raikou's potentials, which, if it had accepted Alan's offer to take it and train it, would have resulted in a perfect trinity of potentials for the three main characters. Which, of course, meant I specifically didn't make that happen.)

Who's your favorite author? What's your favorite book by them? Is it a well known book in Iceland?

I don't really have a single favorite author (of fiction, anyway); there are a lot of books I love. Michael Ende and both Momo and The Neverending Story have to go pretty high, though, and I recognize that while there are other books I really love, those two are better as literature. They do have Icelandic translations, but I don't think I've actually met anybody here besides my best friend (who introduced me to them) who's read them.

If you could have any superpower, what would you choose? How would you use these powers?

Flying, preferably if coupled with super-endurance (which would also be pretty good on its own). Just for the sheer fun of it, seriously. Being able to fly places under one's own power is pretty much the ultimate freedom, or maybe after teleportation (which would also be very cool, but not as fun as flying).

If you could exist in the universe of any piece of fiction / time in history, where would you choose?

Pokémon, of course! Who wouldn't want a bunch of cuddly, badass, powerful, awesome creatures as friends you can go on adventures with? Also, some of them can fly.

Though magic of the less restrained kind, such as in Harry Potter, would also be very cool to have. (Plus, flying!)

What do you read in general, either online or offline?

Not as much as I'd like. :P Primarily fantasy and nonfiction offline, and a select few pieces of Pokémon fanfiction online with the occasional spur-of-the-moment extra getting taken on once in a blue moon.

Never heard of them. :/ I Googled the name and found their Pokémon Tower profile, but I hope that's some old version of the fic because it's eleven chapters of huge impossible-to-read block paragraphs.

I feel like you ignored my post about checking the pokegym forums for the other fanfic (Remember? The one by Burninating Torchic?), but maybe you just didn't see it. Coincidentally your fanfic's birthday is on the same day Ocarina of Time 3D is released in America, which I find interesting.

I have a crazy number of fanfics on my intending-to-read-this-sometime list, so actually it was a real rarity that after you made that post I did in fact Google the Pokégym forums, spend ages searching for the threads in question (it would have been a lot more convenient if you'd just given a link in the first place when I asked) and then actually read the first seven chapters of Daieoskail. I can't say I was overly impressed, though, to be honest; you can't spend the first five chapters on slice-of-life for fifteen billion different characters the reader has no reason to care about or be interested in beforehand, and a large part of my motivation to read on ended up being "I wonder just how many chapters will pass before something actually happens." I still have a tab open with it (both it and Elemental Legacies, actually) and might continue at some point since I've started, but currently my fanfic-of-choice is Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which is seventy-something chapters so I might be a while.

what kind of pokemon fics DO you like to read and stick with and if i reccomended one would you read it?

There isn't really a "kind" of fics I like to read and stick with. If it's good (or intriguingly bad) and I happen to be in a reading mood and bother to actually read it, I might if I don't happen to get distracted by something else before I finish. That's about it.

You can recommend something if you like, but it's very unlikely I'll actually read it. I have about fifteen tabs open with fanfics right now, and that's just the ones I've actually opened and started to read, not including all the ones I really want to read someday.