THE DEGENERATION OF THE POKEMON FANFIC OF CORI FALLS Now, if you -- again, like me -- have followed the Pokemon fanfic by Cori Falls (or perhaps, more correctly, the Team Rocket fanfics by Cori Falls) from the start, you'll probably have noticed that over time they take a steady turn for the worse. The first stories are... well, they're not good, but they're much more skilled than the later stories at pretending they're good, in a kind of amusing "what if Team Rocket tried writing the stories of their lives after having read one Harlequin romance too many" way. The last stories... well. Looking more closely at this "development" of Cori's fics, and reading through them in chronological order, we find -- curiously enough -- that the development (or degeneration) can easily be sorted into four "stages," each representing a fundamental change in the author's views, attitudes, and approach to writing. STAGE ONE: Here's Why Everyone Should Love Team Rocket! And Jessie And James Are The Best Couple EVER! (Canon counterpart: The first season arc of the Pokemon show.) This earliest stage of Cori's writing is, of course, also by far the best -- or, like I said earlier, it's by far the most skilled at pretending it's good. At this stage, Cori's main goal is simply to write stories about her beloved Team Rocket, looking at the series from their point of view, and hopefully convince everyone in the world just why these three characters are the coolest ever, oh, and that Jessie and James should totally get together, because they make the most adorable couple. Cori's favorite story technique at this point is the so-called WYDS (What You Didn't See), wherein she takes an episode and writes it from the viewpoint of Team Rocket, showing what they were up to while the canon episode focused on the twerps; a sort of Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead! to the canon episode's Hamlet. Except, uh, not as good, or anywhere near as funny. Now, this technique isn't actually a bad idea; in the hands of a skilled writer it can bring interesting new perspectives on the original scenes, and since the technique more or less demands that all canon must be followed for the story to make sense, the characterizations and stories can't stray too far off. In Cori's case, however, the technique is mainly used to show how Jessie and James are secretly pining for each other whenever they're not on-screen in the actual episode, so it's a bit of a waste... but the ever-present canon helps the quality of the stories immensely. It's not a coincidence that the further Cori moves away from canon, the worse her stories get... and here, we even get some small sense that the twerps aren't the Spawn From Hell that they appear as in later stories. If anything, they're portrayed more as "those stupid little kids who don't get anything," which is kind of forgiveable, since the story's told from TR's POV anyway. If Cori Falls had stayed at this stage for her entire fanfiction career, or stopped writing Pokemon fanfic before the Orange Islands arc began, she would have been thought of quite differently today, maybe even remembered with some small degree of fondness. For even though both Jessie and James have some massive OOC moments here (James especially; there's not much left of the loveable, childish, whiny goofball when Cori is writing him), they are at least presented as somewhat human. Overly sappy and angsty, but human. And Meowth is probably as IC as we'll ever see him in a Cori-fic... but then, he's the sidekick and comedy relief of the stories, not a romantic hero or anything. Not yet. And even though her author's notes are little more than rants on what "darlings" and "sweethearts" TR are, and how everyone who don't think they're the kindest, sweetest, most mature, cleverest, bravest and awesomest characters in the anime just doesn't understand them (this also goes for the scriptwriters on the show), the actual stories don't have much ranting... not yet. Things are about to take a drastic turn for the worse, though... STAGE TWO: Poor, Poor Team Rocket! They Never Get A Break! (Canon counterpart: The Orange Islands arc.) After Jessie and James have spent several stories dancing around the subject, and after they finally confessed their love (but for some stupid reason or other decided to keep it a secret -- as if the twerps would really care one way or the other) in the WYDS of Bad to the Bone, the romance is more or less a given. Now that they don't have that to angst about anymore, they turn their attentions to the outside world and find that there are plenty of other things to angst about. In other words, they're becoming whiners and complainers. While the Team Rocket of Stage One often grumbled about their lousy deal in life and how the twerps are so mean to them (somehow managing to ignore the fact that people generally aren't very inclined to listen to a trio of thieves who constantly try stealing their pets), they seldom did it with such intensity and so much undiluted self-pity as they do here. It's a frustrated Cori Falls who writes these stories. Her darlings keep getting the short end of the stick in canon, and she just has to write happier endings for them... after having written how they cry and wallow in self-pity for pages upon pages. Meowth gets a fair deal of "woe-is-us" comments here ("Life's a shit sammich, and every day we take a big bite!"), which marks the fact that the last of the TR members has succumbed to the OOC disease. Jessie has already become weepy, and James manly, and can't go ten minutes without patting each other on the back and telling each other how wonderful and beautiful they are both on the inside and the outside... now Meowth becomes a pitiful sobber. I mean, I can't be the only one here who thinks that if there's one single Pokemon character who would never just sit around and feel sorry for himself, it's Meowth?! But I digress. The WYDS technique is changing as well -- now most of the extra scenes are mainly there to "repair the damage" done by canon and make sure that TR gets some much-needed happiness. Many of these episodes seem to end on a "maybe this day wasn't so bad after all" note, after TR have finished worshipping each other... er, I mean, after they've finished strengthening their love and friendship and... stuff. The twerp-bashing is getting harsher, and it gets harder and harder to accept that this is just TR's POV... it becomes clearer and clearer that every single negative word said about them is Cori's heartfelt opinions. In fact, it becomes clearer than ever that every single world Team Rocket says are Cori's heartfelt opinions. They're not yet quite the "author's mouthpieces" they will eventually become -- but they're getting there. Ash is meaner and stupider than ever, Misty is a bitch... and even though Brock doesn't get much spite from TR or author (mostly because he doesn't appear in these stories), his replacement Tracey quickly becomes Cori's most hated character, when he during one episode sends his Scyther out to give Jessie and James mohawk haircuts -- an event so horribly traumatizing for Cori that she had to write a loooong fic about how very, very mean that was. It's all leading up to the next stage... STAGE THREE: Let's BASH everyone who's mean to Team Rocket! BWAHAHAHAHA! (Canon counterpart: The Johto Journeys arc, and up to the fourth movie) Right. Now Cori has had enough. She's spent an entire season complaining about how mean the world is to TR, she's mollycoddled them as much as she could in her WYDS series, while announcing loudly the unfairness of canon and twerps and scriptwriters. Since canon and twerps and scriptwriters for some strange reason have not listened to her, or started worshipping TR, Cori decides that enough is enough. The gloves are off. From now on, she'll viscously attack anyone and everyone who even looks at her darlings the wrong way! The good news is that thanks to this, Jessie, James and Meowth tone down on the whining and self-pity parties. The bad news is that now they scream and rave and rant, shouting up a storm against anyone who says anything against them -- except for the twerps, because canon is desperately trying to cling onto the series, and TR never do shout out Cori's opinions in canon. This doesn't stop them from ranting about the twerps to everyone who listens, though... mostly this happens after the actual episode is over, and TR returns to the one-shot character of the episode and tell him/her how everything really is, and how horrible the twerps are, and how they shouldn't listen to Ash. And the worst part is that it works: Everyone that TR has ranted at for a while (except the characters that Cori doesn't like) immediately "see the light" and become worshippers... I mean, uh, friends of TR and start bashing the twerps as well. This is also the stage in which you can definitely no longer view TR as characters with their own opinions on anything... I've given them the benefit of the doubt in the two earlier stages, but here their transformation to "author's mouthpieces" is complete. While there has been hints before that TR -- surprise, surprise! -- share many of Cori's own interests, this stage is where it really takes off, and TR are sharing all of Cori's interests, and Tolkien and C. S. Lewis and D&D and even hatred for George W. Bush take center-stage in many stories, even becoming plot points in their own right.(Who can forget the story in which TR prove how much cooler they are than Ash because they're better than him at Dungeons and Dragons?) More original characters show up as well, all very much fans and friends of TR, and all of them ready to make fun of, scream at, chastise and even beat up anyone who doesn't like TR... because anyone who doesn't like TR is either grossly misinformed (in which case they'll eventually change their minds and, after having been ranted at for a while, will be reborn in the Holy Name Of Rocketship...uh, I mean, become friends). As for the twerps -- Brock is mostly in the background and Misty swings between being bitchier than ever and slightly more sympathetic... and Tracey, whenever he appears (because now there's no canon to hinder Cori's bashing) shows his "true self" as a fat, lazy slob and pervert with no redeeming qualities. And Ash, of course, shows more and more that he's not only a mean-spirited, selfish and mind-bogglingly stupid arrogant jerk, he's also delusional, violent and with tendencies to Pokemon abuse. Now is also the time when Cori goes back to edit and re-write some of her older fics (as well as include some flashbacks to other points in the past) to show that Ash and Tracey have always been like that, and the redeeming qualities she might accidentally have portrayed Ash with before were just flukes, and now you all see how things really were. The WYDS technique is still used (and abused), but now it's slowly being replaced by another technique, WRH (What Really Happened), which mostly consists of Cori screaming at the episodes: "No! NO! THAT WASN'T WHAT HAPPENED! That's just MEAN-SPIRITED ANTI-TR PROPAGANDA! I'll tell you the TRUE story!" Jessie and James, in between their ranting sessions, are just the most cutest and loving couple ever, and they have a lot of sex now; which is always perfect and always lasts for hours and is always so dull that I skip all the sex scenes because I fall asleep if I try to read them. It doesn't help that Meowth makes a lot of sex jokes, none of which are funny... or that Giovanni (who until recently have been just skulking in the background) emerges as a true-blue Rocketshipper and the nicest guy ever. The only character in this who doesn't annoy the hell out of me is Wobbuffet, who is getting bigger and bigger parts... but even he very quickly succumbs to Cori's determination to warp every single canon character to her own means. Stage Three is what really starts earning Cori her infamy -- Stage One and Two did, after all, have some redeeming qualities, but Stage Three throws them all to the wind and replace them with much more of all the bad things. As this stag ends, most of Cori's original fans have run away, screaming, which means that they miss the final, and absolute worst stage... STAGE FOUR The Adventures of Mary Sue, Gary Stu, Meowthy Stu and Gary! (Canon counterpart: Canon? What's that? Some kind of disease?) Here, Cori bids farewell to the WYDS technique and concentrates fully on WRH, because canon is stupid anyway -- and what's more, it's just a delusion in Ash's head! Yeah! What we see on the show is the twisted interpretation he has of the real events, because in reality TR are the coolest and nobody likes Ash! Free of all canon, Cori is free to really concentrate on what's important: The awesomeness of TR, the perfect lives they can now lead, the story of Jessie's perfect parents and James's perfect grandparents, James getting a baby Articuno as his Pokemon and gaining magical powers at some point because of, uh, Wicca or something... hell if I know, it didn't make sense the first time I read it and I'm not in the mood to go read it again. And of course, Tolkien and D&D and all that other stuff that are admittedly fun on their own, but really don't belong in a Pokemon fanfic... But that's just it, really. This is no longer Pokemon fanfic. It's Cori's own little world, in which her darlings are always correct, because they always think the same as she does, and nothing else is important or worthwhile. This is the stage in which Gary enters the stage and becomes good friends with TR, quickly turning into a major character and major Gary Stu (only surpassed by James, whom I'm definitely suspecting of being Cori's very favorite character) Tolkien fan and all that... and courtesy of Cori's friend Shigeru1313, he gets a girlfriend and eventually a wife, whose name iiiiis.... get ready for this... ARWEN! Which is, like, so totally a coincidence! We get some stories that somehow manage to be both utterly boring and horribly offensive to anyone who isn't Cori or Shigeru1313, ending up in the future where Jessie and James are a happily married couple with 2.4 adorable children, whose main function in the story is to assure the reader that Cori doesn't know the first thing about children, and Gary and (grrr) Arwen are married and stuff, and Meowsie comes back to Meowth because why should he be the only one without a love interest, and James's parents suddenly change their minds for no good reason and suddenly adore James, and of course he forgives them because everyone knows that it's perfectly okay to abuse your child long as you're really sorry about it afterwards. The only character I'm willing to give a slight chance is Meowth's daughter Charms --mainly because she's the only one left in the series by now whose wisecracks are occasionally marginally funny (she's certainly the only one who remembers how to make a joke that doesn't involve Jessie and James's sex life or how much Ash sucks). The incredible monotony of these frustratingly perfect people's lives is only broken by the World's Biggest Loser, Ash -- who by this time has become literally retarded and mentally ill, he's that bad. He thinks rocks and leaves and Happy Meal toys are Pokemon, calls Jessie, James and Gary's kids "Mini-Jessie," "Mini-James" and "Mini-Gary" and can't figure out where they came from (because he doesn't know what children are, apparently), and eats Candyland cards because he thinks they're real candy. Oh, and he can't string two sentences together without including the word "AAAAUUUGH!" and spends half his time asking people why they're so MEEEEEAAAAAN to him. But in Cori's world, the mentally ill don't get help or treatment -- they get hatred and ridicule and five-page-long rants on how much they suck every time someone mentions their name. Because everyone who's cool knows that people like that don't have any redeeming qualities, so they should just be flattered that they can get to be at least amusing to us when we laugh about how much they suck -- it's not like they could ever be of any other use. I don't recall exactly what happens to Tracey, but he was sacked by Professor Oak and is the fattest, biggest slob and pervert on the planet, and I think he tries to hit on Jessie at one point, only to wet himself when she blows up in his face and gives him the proper treatment (screaming and raving and ranting) for being fat. Because fat people aren't human and have no right to be treated with decency, because they're all perverted slobs anyway, everyone knows that. And there we have it... The Degeneration of Cori Falls's Pokemon stories. It started out as almost promising... and ended up as total dreck. Cori Falls is one of the few fanfiction authors whose revisions of earlier stuff always ends up in a much worse story. And her hypocricy is enough to give anyone a foul taste in the mouth -- if I like you, you can do absolutely anything, and it's all good or at least defendable. If I don't like you, and you step one toe out of line, you deserve nothing but pain, humiliation and, oh, I'll laugh at you when you nearly die as a result of my antics too, you asshole. Hell, why wait until you step out of line? I'll gladly inflict pain and humiliation on you right away. This is the main reasoning behind her stories... and it's also the exact same reasoning she accuses canon of having, citing it as the main reason why she's now a pure AU writer... except she doesn't call it AU, she calls it WRH and claims that her version is what's true and canon is the much poorer AU, done by people who don't know or respect their characters and settings properly. Yeah.