The Quest for the Legends

This is an author's commentary intended for readers who have already read the entire ILCOE. My retrospective comments on the chapter are in bold below, with some remarks within the text and then some overall thoughts at the bottom. The commentary will contain significant spoilers! Do not read the commentary on your first read-through!

This chapter was published just after midnight on September 22nd 2004, only a bit more than two days after the previous. It's the fastest chapter of the ILCOE I ever wrote (barring the fake chapter 53, which I wrote in a day, although I didn't release it until April 1st). I managed this because school was out thanks to a teachers' strike, and I spent those days on a furious writing spree. That and, unfortunately, it was pretty rushed and my standards weren't very high.

This paragraph is so cute. Things will only get more complicated from here, Mark.

Still managing to talk weirdly about the whole May and Charmeleon situation. No, she's not his rightful trainer unless Charmeleon wants her to be! We've already established this! (Also note the use of owned. I haven't been remarking on it so far, but the language of ownership I've been using about Pokémon a fair bit is definitely something I wouldn't use today. It seemed normal at the time, but in a world where Pokémon are supposed to have rights, nnnnnno. I don't think even the games use that word specifically.)

That's very dramatic of you, Mark. Somehow I don't think beating Rick in a routine gym battle is going to do much to make him pay for anything.

Why, though? Isn't it kind of ridiculously unfair that most trainers are supposed to battle four junior trainers before Rick but then sometimes they just leave and let you straight through? Obviously the real reason was just that I'd managed to establish that you have to rebattle the junior trainers if you leave, but didn't actually want to write all these battles for the third time. In the previous revisions, things happened in a different order - Mark fought Rick on his second visit to the gym, immediately after the junior trainers, but on the later visit where he discovered the lab, everyone was on break and challengers were just supposed to come back later - something that makes a lot more sense than just the junior trainers going on break and letting everyone straight through to Rick in the meantime. I'm guessing I simply didn't notice the issue when I was shifting things around in the ILCOE, then got to this part, realized that wait what about the junior trainers, and just hastily put them all on break regardless of sense.

Kind of like that detail about the key being taped to the note, though.

In the previous revisions, Rick used all six of the Pokémon he had, but here I decided to do a proper X-on-X system, probably based on the anime.

I am kind of pleased that I'm already having Mark's Pokémon show a bit of original initiative in battles.

This battle is so half-hearted, though. One exchange of attacks and then they go down. It was somewhat more excusable when it was just junior trainers, but this is a gym leader using legendaries and it's taking mere seconds to knock out each of them! Even the junior trainers' Pokémon lasted a bit longer than this.

What do you mean, he seemed to remember reading it? Back in chapter six he sure seemed very clear on it: Sending out a Gyarados against an Electric Pokémon? He had to be going crazy. (Besides that he seems to know his type chart just fine absolutely everywhere else.)

Technobabble time! Another reason to reinterpret Earthquake: why would the ground physically shaking affect Electric Pokémon more than others? With the more mystical version I could easily assert that it disrupts the ions and therefore it's super effective. Later in the fic I'll also show this affecting Magnemite's ability to levitate, explaining how they can be hit by it despite physically floating.

I didn't remember how much mileage I got out of Sandshrew's Poison Sting in these early chapters. Props for not just spamming Earthquake, I guess.

I kind of like this thought! Comparing it to his own experience being coddled and not allowed to go out and have adventures is a nice way to get him to finally try letting Eevee battle. He could've picked a better time for Eevee's very first battle than against the legendary gym leader, though... and it's still a bit alarming that this is all happening when Eevee is in fact explicitly supposed to be too young to be battling.

Also: Mark's comparing it to his parents refusing to let him be a trainer even though he desperately wanted to - but Eevee hasn't actually expressed wanting to battle, which is kind of a crucial difference. Ultimately, I'm treating this like Eevee's feelings aren't relevant, only Mark's. It still bugs me that I kept doing this sort of thing when I genuinely thought I was writing the Pokémon as equal characters.

Also, Mark, come on, pay attention to Sandshrew!

This is really cute, though.

Don't worry, Eevee, I'm pretty confused about what just happened too. I think what I was going for was Return's positive energy getting through to Mew and letting her resist the Clone Ball more strongly for just a moment, allowing her to intentionally make herself faint? But it's not remotely clear that that's what happened, and it's bizarre that Mark isn't even wondering about it.

(By the way, in keeping with the fic's canon, the pronouns I use for Mew in this commentary will be arbitrary. In practice, I'll probably default to 'him', since it's the one used in the fic most of the time, but go with 'her' when it'd reduce the potential for ambiguity. I'll always stick with the same pronoun within a given comment chunk to avoid confusion.)

I did not need to imagine Rick's tempting voice.

Hi there, TCG type symbols. I made a pixel art version of this badge in 2005.

The Ouen badges all being engraved silver coins was new here. In the previous revisions, the Element Badge was a lot more garish: Rick handed him a cool badge, with clouds, lightnings, fire, grass, snow and water surrounding a purple eye. I attempted to draw it in October 2002, then a sprite-based version in August 2003. Both of the old versions would make any graphic designer cry.

In the previous versions, Mew battled normally and was knocked out by Sandshrew. Mark reacted much more strongly when Rick gave Mew to him and tried to take her over to the nurse immediately, only for Rick to not let him until they finished the battle. Here I was going for him being kind of numb, but it just feels like he's barely reacting to something that should be a huge deal.

Nice infodump there. I like how Mark has to stand in front of the screen to cover up the Mew silhouette, though. Apparently the machines are cheerfully programmed with the silhouettes of legendary Pokémon.

Originally this line about Mark keeping the Clone Ball was a throwaway; then somebody commented that this was definitely going to be important later, and I went "...oh. Um, yeah. Yeah, definitely! It's definitely going to be important later!", scrambled to think of something, and eventually came up with the bit where the Mew Hunter would steal the ball in what ended up being chapter 74, years and years later. So that whole thing was a total accident stemming from this one person who commented on a Chekhov's Gun I never intended to fire. I definitely owe something to all the readers who commented on the story as I was posting it - it would've turned out quite differently without them.

Does Mark really not want May to just hang on a minute while he goes and releases Mew? It might be best over with, but handling this seems like it should be pretty urgent, y'know? Especially for someone to whom rescuing (what he thinks is) a Mew clone from Rick should be a pretty big deal.

It's also just structurally so weird to have this mundane detour here in the middle of the Mew situation. I've just gotten you on your toes (and probably wary and/or angry) with this sudden acquisition of a legendary, and the first thing I do is have May pop up and drag Mark off to the lake to do something entirely unrelated. It could work as a tension-building thing if it were actually about Mark internally freaking out about Mew while trying to act normal, but nope, I'm about to spend this scene acting like the Mew thing never happened. This is another thing where the reordering of events in this revision accidentally kind of makes things worse - in the original, Mark had already released Mew by the time he went fishing with May.

One must wonder why she wasn't more suspicious of the strange Pikachu, since it's a very strange Pikachu. It really shouldn't pass for just a Pikachu that's kind of funny-looking - it's got prominent balls on its ears, its tail is completely different, it's got huge blue claws. You don't look at that and shrug and go "Well, it's a Pikachu" - at least, if she wouldn't think of it being a superclone, she should have been seriously wondering what the hell it was, not just filing it away as a kind of funny Pikachu.

So: in a funny, not super-consistent way, May's Johtoan dialect is represented in the fic as somewhat more British-flavored English than Mark's. I was not actually doing it deliberately at this stage - the way it happened was at some point I became aware that I'd accidentally written her using a bit more British English, thought it was actually kind of fun since she's from another region, and started to do it consciously a bit - but it's something we can keep an eye on as we read on. Don't expect it to ever actually read as a remotely perfect British/American split, though; I'm terrible with dialects myself because I learned most of my English from the internet, where I have no idea if the person whose words I'm reading is British or American or something else, and it routinely surprises me when I learn some word is actually dialect-specific when I've been using it indiscriminately for years. Just take it as fantasy Pokémon dialects that happen to share some similarities.

In the previous versions, Mark actually did jump in, nearly drowned, and May had to save him - only to be witnessed by a couple of May's bullying schoolmates, whom they'd also encountered on the way to the lake (it was not explained why these boys who were presumably from New Bark Town were now in Ouen), who started to make jokes about him being her boyfriend. After driving them off, May, incensed about the bullies, swore she'd never save Mark from drowning again.

The whole bully thing was an over-the-top, ridiculous comedy bit, one of her biggest early character-establishing moments back then, and intensely cringeworthy, perhaps especially because of how transparently personal it was. Obviously, I was writing about bullies hounding my then-self-insert because I was being bullied myself, and in the Pokémon fanfic I'd started a few months earlier I could exact some sweet fictional vengeance upon some abstract cardboard-cutout stand-ins for my tormentors. Even within this fictional environment I could completely control, though, the way in which I went about it managed to be deeply unflattering. I could have written May being cool and above it all, rolling her eyes at the bullies' pathetic, biteless insults, teaching them a lesson and getting a groveling apology - but I didn't.

Instead, May took their exaggerated, tiresome, stereotypical shtick intensely personally. She was angry and ranting and violent. She made graphic threats about breaking every bone in their bodies. She had her Pikachu electrocute them. She punched Mark in the face when he tried to calm her down. Perhaps most tellingly, the bullies didn't even go away after all that - next chapter they were right back again, laughing, taunting her, and they might easily have popped up yet again later if I'd happened to feel like it.

There's almost a strange self-awareness to it, as if I knew that of course the bullies just thought her over-the-top reactions were hilarious and made her fun to provoke, even though this wasn't something I actually understood until years later. In real life, I wasn't anywhere near that extreme, of course, but it's achingly clear to me today that the way I reacted to some of the bullying didn't help me one bit, and reading these scenes and May's helpless, ugly, impotent rage failing to deter her bullies at all is just really sad to me now. It's so obvious that none of this is helping, even within the story that I was writing, but she can't see it, because I couldn't. And in the process of building up these terrible, useless defenses, she's just rendered herself deeply unpleasant, violent and hostile even to innocent bystanders. It's like rewatching my own personal trainwreck in slow motion.

By the time I started the HMMRCIG I'd rightly realized the bullies didn't belong in the fic. But May still was almost definitely bullied back in New Bark. She never talks about it, but her aversion to showing weakness or fallibility, her cultivated outward confidence and arrogance, her violent fantasies and her general default coldness and hostility towards people are all pretty much the bullying symptoms that I went through in my teens. At the time, I didn't quite like to think of myself as a victim of bullying exactly; whenever we were taught about bullying, the victims were perfect obvious helpless victims, rendered depressed and broken and suicidal through a campaign of arbitrary malice by a nebulous cabal of sinister kids. I wasn't a victim, I felt; I was tough and I fought back, and the bullies were just some stupid kids not worth my time anyway, and I'd never give in by being sad or broken; I was better. May probably doesn't think she was bullied either; in chapter 74 she says the kids in New Bark never liked her, but she figured it was just because they were idiots.

May's not a self-insert anymore, but she was originally shaped as one, and that means I accidentally wrote in a load of personal issues that I wouldn't actually understand until years later, when I'd become a very different person with a lot more capacity for self-reflection. Her main arc, about her treatment of her Pokémon, Tyranitar and Taylor's murder, thankfully has nothing to do with me, but all of this background baggage is intensely, painfully relatable, and May is probably still ultimately the character I'm most emotionally attached to in this story.

This is extremely hasty and, of course, another instance of Mark having no consideration for what the Pokémon wants or interest in talking to it before hauling it off with him whatsoever (remember, Dratini was just examining the Pokéball, and for all Mark knows he has no interest in being caught). In chapter 74, where I reference this again, I explain it as them just being kids too excited about sudden pseudo-legendaries, but let's be real, in reality it was just poor writing on my part.

This sequence was a lot more elaborate (and ridiculous) in the previous versions. May didn't just carry a handy magnet for some reason there; instead, she... carried some handy wire for some reason, wrapped it around the fishhook, and then had her Pikachu electrify the wire, turning it into an electromagnet. Even with this, there were several complications from there - all in all, the problem of retrieving Dratini's Pokéball was a puzzle that was the subject of most of the chapter, whereas here it's used mostly as a brief point of tension between Mark and May and to establish her character.

This facepalm-worthy insertion is obviously me being self-conscious about having given my characters pseudo-legendaries so easily and early, so I added a handwave about how actually this wasn't that lucky, they just happened to be in the exact right place and time for Pokémon being released from a convenient conservation program, and also in my fic they totally aren't even that strong anyway, so there. Needless to say, this comes across very clearly as a handwaved excuse and not as genuine, reasonable worldbuilding, particularly since I make it happen through a TV program Mark just happens to overhear after the fact - it might've been kind of passable if instead I'd had Mark already know about pseudo-legendary conservation programs and remark on them when he sees Dratini (and thus actually act like seeing a Dratini isn't actually that remarkable), but that would've involved Mark actually acting like a native of the region who knows what's going on in it, which was apparently too much for fourteen-year-old me.

I already had a plan for how I was going to approach this in the IALCOTN, and it's probably my favorite of those plans - it's definitely how I'd still do it in the next revision. Instead of Mark and May just happening to be there, May snuck a peek at some documents about wild Pokémon conservation when she was working at Elm's lab back in Johto, learned about planned releases of pseudo-legendaries, and then she deliberately goes off-route to one of these locations to catch one, inviting Mark along without explaining exactly where she's going or why. Mark is naïvely amazed when they bump into a Dratini and Larvitar, but doesn't realize there's anything off about it until later, when Dratini mentions to him that they'd been told there wouldn't be trainers where they were going. This is the reason Larvitar is so young (they were supposed to be able to grow up in peace outside the official route system and then venture closer to the routes when they were ready to take on trainers if they wanted); Dratini only happened to be a bit older and curious about trainers. This makes for an interesting early character-establishing moment for her and directly serves to set up the Tyranitar subplot better - the fact May catches Larvitar so young isn't mere unfortunate happenstance, but a direct consequence of her attempt to get stronger Pokémon without true regard for the ethics and consequences of what she's doing. Mark, meanwhile, gets something of a character-establishing moment of his own as he shrugs off his vague discomfort and doesn't do anything about it.

It's bizarre that Mark doesn't react more to this.

It's Mew's first proper scene outside the prologue! ...And it's weird and melodramatic and bad. Mew's not acting at all like he was just saved from three years of brainwashing or otherwise showing any believable emotions, and his speech is pretty stilted even for the tone I was going for. All in all there's no sense that he's grateful for being freed, or relieved, or traumatized, or anything; he's just there, being a Serious Important Legendary. To boot, this is from when I used way too many ellipses and thought they were a great way to make things dramatic, when really they just sound like someone trying very hard to be dramatic.

The reference to Mew's home being in Rainbow Woods, of course, will come up again in chapter 74.

In the previous revisions, this scene was very different in tone:

Mark couldn't think of anything to say now and started watching Mew, who was floating around in the air. It was fully healed. It looked curiously at a lamp on the table and poked it carefully. Then poked it again and again, always faster and less carefully, until the lamp fell down from the table and broke. Mew looked apologizingly at Mark, used Psychic to make the lamp stick itself back together and then put it on the table again. Mark laughed.

"Mew, stop playing with things here! I will have to pay for it if you don't stop!"

"Meww," said Mew, still glancing at the lamp every now and then like to see if it would fall apart again, and flew up to Mark.

That's actually pretty cute, and in character for the playful portrayals of Mew in canon. But it was also a pretty strange scene given its context in the story; Mew's just there cheerfully playing in the hotel room immediately after being freed from mind-control, and then immediately after this Mark decides Mew should be free, as if it was up to him and he could just have decided Mew belonged to him now. Even though in practice I was still writing that way about regular Pokémon a lot of the time, by the time I was writing the ILCOE I at least had the sense not to do it with legendaries.

The Mew Hunter! And Scyther! I'll save talking about them for the next chapter, though.

The main event here is Rick giving Mew to Mark, of course - a pretty audacious event all by itself. Originally, he did this straightforwardly because Mew kept losing and he thought she was useless because he was a stereotypical fanfic villain, so he just handed her off to the random kid who happened to be in the room at the time:

“Poor thing!” said Mark and walked up to the battered Mew, bent down and examined it carefully. He then heard Rick mutter something like: “I knew I shouldn’t use those originals, they’re much too weak...”

“What? This is the original? The original Mew?” Mark asked, now standing up.

“Yes, but it’s useless! You can have it if you like,” said Rick.

“Can I... just take it?” Mark asked.

“Why not? It’s useless, and it’s even fainted! I have nothing to do with it! Here, take that!” And Rick threw a pokéball to Mark – Mew’s pokéball.

Much later, when I actually started to think about Rick as a character, though, he became a lot more complex than that. The idea in the ILCOE is that he's developed a deep paranoia and obsession with security through power and control. He uses Mew in the gym as a sort of way to prove to himself that he can, but it's always kind of put him on edge as he compulsively imagines what might happen if he loses that control. When Mew successfully resists the Clone Ball just well enough to instantly faint here, it terrifies him. So in order to just get rid of her, he hands her to Mark. I don't remember exactly how far along this line of thought I'd gotten when I actually wrote this; I didn't write Rick well at all here and his dialogue is really bad, so I suspect not very far. But for the purposes of the story, assume that's what's going on here.

In the IALCOTN, I meant to have Rick still use Mew for the same reason, but secretly: Mew is always transformed into an Arcanine. Mew would similarly deliberately lose, and Rick would give her to Mark under the assumption that he'd probably never learn of her true nature, because in the Clone Ball she'd simply stay transformed - and then, if Mew ever did break completely free and transform back into her true self, Mew's vengeance would probably be directed towards Mark, or whomever else had her at the time, instead. Mark, though, has heard rumours about Rick's mind-controlling Pokéballs, and he transfers Mew into a normal ball first, allowing him to immediately discover when he sends out the "Arcanine" that it's actually Mew.

Today, I think the idea of Rick battling with Mew in the gym in the first place is a bit shaky. For one, the original Mew isn't low-leveled at all; she's been weakening her attacks, but Rick would hardly have accounted for that resistance in his initial decision to start using Mew in the gym, so it's hard to imagine how it ever occurred to him to do this. Additionally, obviously the whole trophy explanation was originally just retrofitted to what he was already doing, but examined on its own merits it isn't exactly super-reasonable - surely there are other, better ways to feel secure in his control than using the real actual 2000-year-old Mew to fight beginning trainers. So I'd probably change that one way or another. Perhaps he's got a pet Arcanine that obediently follows him everywhere, but starts behaving oddly as it watches their battle from the sidelines, and Rick suddenly hands it off to Mark. Or maybe I come up with something entirely different that doesn't involve Rick giving Mew to Mark at all - I always kind of enjoyed the idea of him just wanting to have someone take Mew far away from him, but it's not exactly vital and it may be more trouble than it's worth to try to justify it sensibly. (Maybe the reworked lab scene is Mark trying to rescue Mew from Rick after somehow learning he's holding the original Mew captive. Hmmm.)

The battle against Rick itself is really short and bad and anticlimactic, just careless, rushed-through buildup to the moment he sends out Mew. It's especially bad since all in all we spend four chapters on Mark callenging the Cleanwater Gym, and then the actual gym leader battle is this half-assed afterthought. All in all, I didn't execute anything about this gym well, and I'm glad we're done with it.

Then there's the weird detour about Dratini and Larvitar, the remnants of what was once a pretty involved chapter about fishing a Pokéball out of a lake. My efforts here feel pretty lazy in retrospect; while the original chapter was pretty ludicrous in several ways, here it doesn't feel like Mark has to work very hard for Dratini at all, which I'm now inclined to think only adds to the feeling that rare Pokémon are being handed to him. The incredibly handwavy TV broadcast doesn't help. I do enjoy May's part here, though; she just wants a pseudo-legendary, and all in all she's delightfully herself here (not 100%, but definitely recognizeable).