Trivia

This section applies to the ILCOE.

There are many interesting things about this fic that not everybody knows. This section is here to tell curious readers about some of my (thankfully) scrapped original plot ideas, changes that have been made during the rewriting process, the development of the fic over the course of the many revisions, what I was REALLY thinking when I made up all those things that seem to make so much sense now, and the horror that is Molzapart and Rainteicune.

Scrapped and Edited

Rewrites

(Also see the Revision History)

Origins

Molzapart and Rainteicune

While this could technically belong under "Origins", it deserves a whole subsection of its own. The fact is that the characters of Molzapart, Rainteicune and Alan all originated from the first piece of Pokémon fanfiction I ever wrote, which was also the first thing I ever wrote in English of my own free will (i.e. not a school assignment). Even after more than nine years (it was started on December 14th 2001), I think I have yet to read a worse piece of Pokémon fanfiction written by an author who is still writing - it was so bad that it's hilarious. It can be read in full here if you're interested, but if not, here goes a brief explanation of what happened in it.

It started out as less of a fanfic and more of an essay: specifically, it was an essay about Molzapart, the most powerful Pokémon in the world, and how awesome it was, going into bizarre detours and otherwise being generally ridiculous. After the Molzapart essay, I repeated it in Icelandic before going on to the Rainteicune essay, which was on a similar note except that the explanation of how it was discovered gradually became a story as I went into more and more irrelevant detail. The story is about Alan Ketchum, Ash's son, who receives a Master Ball and Charlie the Charmander from his father before heading out on his Pokémon journey. The first Pokémon he runs across is the super-powerful Rainteicune, which he catches with the Master Ball and brings it home to his father, where some research is done on it; he gets to keep it, and even by this point I continue going on about Alan's journey, although I did intend to return to the subject of the essay after I had finished writing about the release of Rainteicune - I just never did finish that, as then I had already started The Quest for the Legends and was more interested in that.

One of the many lovely little detours that the essay takes is about Alan's pet Arcanine, Aaron (then called "Aron" because I wasn't aware that the English version of the name had two A's; the Icelandic version doesn't). He was originally owned by some nameless trainer as a Growlithe, and that trainer traded him to a trainer called Peter. As Alan was bringing Pamela home from the pet shop where he bought her as a Meowth, he met Peter as he was using a Fire Stone on Aaron. Aaron chased Pamela around, but she evaded all his attacks and ended up beating him and evolving into a Persian. Peter then suddenly started crying and told Alan that he had evolved Aaron because as a Growlithe Aaron had hated him and missed his old trainer, but then Peter had realized that the old trainer might want him back and felt horrible for having evolved his Pokémon without asking ("I feel like a killer"). Then (and this is the most nonsensical of all) Alan said that he'd take Aaron because his old trainer would feel better without seeing him as an Arcanine, and he'd ask his father if there was any way to devolve Pokémon. In the end, the plan was to have Molzapart devolve Aaron and then presumably he would be returned to Peter, although I never got that far.

In the original chapter 22 (equivalent to the ILCOE's chapter 20, where Alan tells his story), amusingly enough, the entire detour about Alan in Molzapart and Rainteicune was pretty much retold with small tweaks, including all of this story except that it added that Alan was really just tricking Aaron out of Peter by saying that stuff about finding out how to devolve Pokémon, because he already knew it wasn't possible (or so he thought). He had just wanted an Arcanine.

Both Molzapart and Rainteicune also have quite ridiculous creation stories in their respective essays; Molzapart was created when Mew and the legendary birds were "playing" in Seafoam Islands, found a Mist Stone (a stone from various fake R/B/Y cheats that was supposed to evolve any Pokémon into some sort of a "Pokégod"), bizarrely thought it was a Geodude and then all attacked it at the same time with their most powerful attacks. For the HMMRCIG, that was changed so that Mew found the Mist Stone and intentionally called upon the legendary birds in order to destroy it so that it would not evolve an ordinary Pokémon into a scarily powerful creature, but when they attacked it, they found themselves facing the "evolved form" of their attacks, which was a new Pokémon that seemed to be a fusion of all of them. Rainteicune, on the other hand, was apparently born when Raikou, Entei and Suicune all crashed into one another with such force that they all died, with Raikou's last Thunder attack apparently containing a spark of life which caused a new creature to be born, and I came to the conclusion that this story was just so laughable I created a new one from scratch for the HMMRCIG, explaining it as Rainteicune being a failed experiment of Rick's that he mistakenly threw out when he thought it had died.

It really is quite entertaining in its awfulness, at least in my opinion, so by all means check out the real thing if you're curious.