PokéBattles: Sandy Version

General thoughts

When I first decided to revive Sandy Version one of the first ideas I jotted down was that I could use Youngster Joey and his top percentage Rattata to depict a "normal pokémon journey, pokébattles style." By the time I started writing the first battle - Which was the same as was published as Battle 1, I already knew his journey was going to go sideways with him becoming Sandy Version's first villain, although at the time I hadn't decided to make it conquering Johto rather than the entire version, with the turning point being him choosing not to release a trainer he accidentally caught.

It wasn't until I finished writing the first Battle that I knew his Rattata - Raticate at the time, but only barely, was going to die at his command. All because of a simple pun on 'nail' that happened to help provide motivation for why he'd choose not to release a random trainer he caught. This made writing most of his stuff, especially the goofier stuff, weird on an emotional level.

Once I realized that I figured that I'd need a hero to contrast Joey, ideally they'd be a youngster, and the only real candidates for that were Youngster Mikey who's kinda sorta hinted to be Joey's rival in the Johto games and which I did actually decide to run with, though mainly as simple jokes, or Youngster Ben who people actually remember - Albeit as 'the shorts kid' - He wasn't actually named until Gen III's Fire Red, so I borrowed from Gen III for the dialogue I was borrowing for his first battle, hence 'they're delightfully comfy and easy to wear.' - When I wrote Ben's first battle I'm not sure I was intending him on becoming the arc's hero or a second attempt at doing 'an ordinary pokemon journey', but it wasn't long after I finished writing it that I realized I'd be making Ben the hero - Just more humour potential than a character who barely gets talked about, even in memes.

That's when I came up with the idea for Jacob. Because Ben's from a different region and is a small child - I think I thought I needed to give Ben some motivation to be the hero. Jacob's Grindstone was purely for the purpose of evolving Rattata, and I backfilled a pun in place for it as part of Jacob's backstory. The reason I was removed last minute. I'd also considered making a Pokémon Go 'grinding up pokemon for candy' gag, but it didn't feel like it quite fit the tone I wound up with. A lot of weird tone balancing I had to do here where I was trying to balance writing things that were inherently ridiculous without undercutting the drama, but also without giving the audience emotional whiplash during scenes bouncing between the two.

I then had a Covid booster scheduled, and on that day I both realized how ludicrously large my buffer was already - I think I'd written 10 or so battles at that point (although with the knowledge even at that point that that wasn't the first 10 battles) - and walking back my brain just started coming up with the premise of both Ben's Promise and Joey's Lament, which I then wrote the bulk of both when I got back under the influence of booster jab. That combined with the idea that my buffer size gave me the opportunity to burn off 5 battles in one week if I made all of them plot-relevant which is how the idea of the Battle Fest formed. At that point, I worked out how many battles I needed to fill in so I knew if that was going to be putting the songs between 30 and 31 or 40 and 41, and then buckled down on just writing plot-relevant battles (I was mainly unsure how many battles between what became 22 and the Battle Festival Opening Ceremony there needed to be on that front, I think I was also kind of hoping I'd write something that derailed Joey's plotline so I could keep writing the goofball who'd argue with a Narrator about his official records). And then, realizing it was 4 rather than the 6-8 I was expecting, felt comfortable making that between Battle 30 and 31, and came up with a schedule for the plotline that both felt reasonable split between stuff related to this arc and stuff unrelated to it while also feeling like it accelerated to make the updates very focused on Ben and Joey once that plotline actually kicked into gear. I debated for a long time with myself if I wanted Ben or Joey's final battle in the lead-up to the battle fest to be 30. Went with Ben's in the end just because it gave a bit more 'real world' time between battles for Joey to bend Johto into his vision of it.

It was when writing these battles that I worked out how I wanted Mikey to be involved - I wanted there to be something in between Joey and taking over Johto, but I also wanted it to be comically weak (Although since almost nobody else in Sandy Version knows people are Pokémon, it means that regular Pokéballs will work basically 100% of the time on most trainers simply due to the surprise factor, so pretty much any trainer was going to be a pushover for Joey at that point), and Mikey allowed me a little bit of emotional pathos, so I put Mikey into what wound up being Battle 28 while I was writing it, and that worked out really well. What would being friends - or 'kindasortafriends' as Mikey put it - with Joey be like. At least one 2am phone call to update you on your friend's pet's grooming habits seemed like a natural fit. But I then needed to properly introduce him rather than having him be an entirely off-screen agent earlier. Which I was going to do by writing an extra battle to slot in between what wound up being battle 11 and what wound up being battle 20, closer to 11 than 20, but due to a lack of ideas for what I could do with the battle aside from an intro to the battle with him worrying about Joey but... That also felt more like an outro with how it actually ended, which lead me to decide to just make it a little epilogue to Battle 11. Which lead me to add those epilogues to every Joey battle between 11 and 28. On reflection, I particularly liked doing the epilogues with Mikey, and in particular, think it helped the joke about Joey being really bad at tidying up in 24.

I also had a fairly good idea of what was going to happen in Battles 31 through 34 after writing 'provisional' lyrics for the Battle Fest Intro - Battle preparations, making his way to Joey, and a two-part battle with Part 1 ending with a cliffhanger of Ben being captured inside a Master Ball - Not the only reason I gave him snag balls at the end of Battle 30, but a cliffhanger that became viable after that point. This... Probably does mean that Ben is immune to pokéballs except for ones designed to work on already owned Pokémon since I don't think Ben ever thought to release himself from his own control. So that's a thing.

For an idea of how much I'd pre-written prior to launching - I decided to give reviving it a go around the 8th of December, although expecting it to wind up just generating a few battles for Foxfire's Phantom Version. I felt I had enough battles that it wasn't going to fall flat on its face 5 weeks after reviving it on the 11th of December. By the 22nd of December, I'd written everything in A Tail up to the Battle Fest intro, although not every battle leading up to that - The buffer on the 22nd of December consisted of battles 1 through 6, and a bunch of battles sprinkled up to 36, both within the A Tail of Two Youngsters plotline and assorted battles that for various reasons didn't feel right going in as Battle 7.

Excluding mild edits, and bearing in mind there was a lot of battles missing not relating to the arc, I finished writing Battle 35 on the 26th of January - Before writing Battle 19 which doesn't really relate to this arc but is worth mentioning since Ekans evolves into Arbok during it.

Emotionally, My biggest issue with writing it is that Joey, prior to him catching Jacob, was ridiculously fun to write, and I kind of knew that following Battle 27, I was not going to be able to write Joey again. At least, not Youngster Joey. Obviously, I've set up a way for him to appear again despite him dying in Battle 35, but... Does arguing with the Narrator about his record still make sense for him, as a character? I don't think it does, whatever direction he goes from this point, be that for one battle or a hundred more... but there was still an opportunity to write him as the same goofball who argued about his record standings in battle 6 right up until the end of Battle 28 which I decided to embrace as much as I could.

Actually, speaking of Joey dying in Battle 35 - I was really unsure if that's what I was going to be doing until a couple of days before I finished writing Battle 35 on the 26th. That was one of four segments of the battle I left to be added later. At that point, in my head, he was irredeemable. And I'm still not sure he's properly redeemable (I'm writing this with no clue how battle 50 is actually going to go, no danger of spoilers - I don't know either at this point), but... Neither of the options I was considering - Ben's Raticate killing him outright without choosing that I was doing the 'every 50 battles' thing, and Raticate capturing him until I came up with a gag for how to present the land of the dead and decided "You know, I enjoy the PokéBattles thing of death being a revolving door but a very specific one." at which point I added an indication that this is the thing he found cool but didn't want to get sidetracked by back in Battle 24 because as a character his action doesn't make sense unless he knows about the portal back from the land of the dead every 50 battles. When I came up with that, his death felt right, until then neither him getting caught by Ben's Raticate nor Ben's Raticate killing him really felt... Right... to me? Even with specific ideas of how to follow up the former option.

Earlier to deciding between those options and going with something else instead, I was considering having him surrounded by a hoard of Rattata he'd been mistreating and "Hoard of Rattata want to fight" with it implied to be killed off camera, which also felt like a dramatically appropriate ending to his story, but I eventually realized him acquiring a hoard of Rattata to mistreat to even set that up wasn't something I really had room for.

I think some of Ben's attitude towards winding up raiding Team Rocket to rescue his Ekans (Arbok by the time he rescued it) and then to Johto to take down Joey and rescue Jacob came out of my frustrations of the way children's media often puts the fate of the world - or even just some kids - into the hands of kids with adults being disinterested (as opposed to 'not present' - It's fundamentally an issue with trying to do 'world' scale stakes with child - including teen - protagonists, that you can work around by removing adults from the situation or remove their ability to act - Digimon is usually, but not always, great for managing this).

Battle by Battle notes

Battle 1 - This was the first battle I wrote for the Sandy revival. I'd already decided that Joey was going to be the villain of the first arc, and take over at the time it was going to be the Version rather than Johto as a sort of reflection of Red Version's initial Lord Sloth arc. Plus I'd never really done a human-level villain in PB before. What caught me off guard in it was him falling out with Raticate, but as soon as I wrote that I pretty much knew that Joey was going to kill the rat at some point.

Battle 6 - This was just a fun battle to write, particularly the stuff with Joey arguing with the Narrator over his record and the Record Keeper updating it in real-time with the argument. An important stepping stone for moving Joey to where he needed to be for his next appearance, but doesn't do much more than that.

Battle 11 - Another battle that basically exists just to move pieces around the board to get Joey into position for the plot to actually happen. I like the emotional stuff with Jean realizing something's wrong when Joey and the stuff impacting Joey while he wasn't on the battlefield was also fun. The ending with the glass feels a bit weak to me, but I do enjoy Mikey bribing the Narrator in the epilogue.

Battle 14 - This was written as a deliberate parallel to Joey's first battle in order to introduce Ben, the hero of the arc - A similarly memetic youngster to Joey. I don't think I'd planned on having Red be part of Team Rocket when I started writing it, but the Robin puns kind of wrote themselves and having Red steal Ben's Ekans helped give Ben something to do while Joey was conquering Johto.

Battle 17 - This exists entirely to introduce Jacob so that Ben could have the motivation to travel to a different region to confront Joey, but also Grindstone was written here in order to both have Joey evolve Rattata into Raticate and then kill Raticate with the same attack. The interference between Jacob and the battle was also fun to write, although while I had every line in my head with what was missing I do not recall what most of it was now.

Battle 19 - I don't really consider this part of the arc, but I wrote it after writing the bulk of the arc because it felt like I should show Ben's Ekans into an Arbok while Red had it so it's worth mentioning here.

Battle 20 - Before I decided to make Ben the hero of the arc - Before I wrote Battle 1 - I knew Joey was going to accidentally capture another trainer, and that would convince him that to be a Pokémon Master he needed to conquer either the version or the region. Once I knew Ben was going to be the hero giving Ben a brother to be captured by Joey became an obvious choice, and the rest just kind of fell into place.

Battle 22 - This was incredibly hard to find a good balance between the fact that this is meant to be a comedic work, and the emotional heart-to-heart between Ben and his mother, though a rewatch of One Foot In The Grave - and the miscarriage scene in the second Christmas special specifically - did do something to reassure me that it's ok for a comedy to just... Drop all but the lightest of jokes... when tackling a heavy subject, and the light jokes I think were needed in order to not give the reader emotional whiplash when we got to the utter farce at the end of Ben fighting his front door.

Battle 24 - I put the faint reference to the Land of the Dead stuff came after I'd decided how I was going to deal with Joey during 35. Earl Dervish's voice felt extremely weird to capture outside of the lines I was directly lifting from Gold/Silver's dialogue. I really think having Mikey doing the epilogues of this set of battles helps land the joke about Joey being bad at tidying up, honestly.

Battle 26 - I was getting nervous before it was released, wondering if loot boxes were really still a thing outside of EA's sports titles, with a lot of the industry shifting towards battle passes outside of EA's Ultimate Team. But Diablo Immortal was released about a month before publishing it with its notoriously ungenerous legendary rifts, so... Yeah. I enjoyed how Looney Toons the intro to the battle wound up being with Ben floating over to the loot box drooling kicking it off. I think my idea with evolving Rattata into Raticate at the end of the battle was to make the battle with Red between evolved versions of Ben's Pokémon in the game/in Battle 14.

Battle 28 - I had a lot of fun writing Joey before the location change in this one, as my last opportunity to write Joey as a goofball. I decided to make Mikey for a bit of emotional pathos and then went back to write the epilogues (after first trying to add Mikey deciding to follow Joey as its own battle but that felt like more of an ending without a way of making anything lead naturally into it, so I instead added Mikey's epilogues to the Joey battles from Battle 11. It was surprisingly hard to write the ending of this one not from a technical perspective but because even in this context writing Joey murdering Raticate just felt bad to write. I think it worked for the arc overall and was where Joey and Raticate's arc had been building from Battle 1, but there's a difference between "Oh he's going to kill the rat, isn't he?" and actually writing him killing the rat.

Battle 30 - If in Battle 14 I wanted to establish similarities between Ben and Joey this is the one I really wanted to cement them being different - Hence Ben accidentally capturing Red during his battle here. I think the idea of Ben stealing snag balls came to me while writing the battle, and I'm not sure how I was going to handle the encounter between Ben and Joey before doing that, although once I wrote Ben getting hold of Snag Balls having Joey capture Ben in a Master Ball as a cliffhanger was basically a requirement.

Ben's Promise & Joey's Lament - These were mostly written under the influence of Covid booster. The weakest part of both is probably the line "What's rocket up to? I don't care" which is singable to the Indigo League theme but it's awkward - It goes to the "Pokémon! Oh you're my best friend" line of the original which... Yeah. I also wound up listening to the Johto Journeys theme way too much even after finishing writing them because I was absolutely sure I'd miscounted either how many Do's per line or how many lines of Dos. It is also disturbingly easy to turn the Johto Journeys theme into a villain song.

Battle 31 - The 'Ben does preparations' battle. Also, the Battle where I finally did the 'someone buying something and the checkout wanting to fight' that I had previously attempted to do in Battles 8, 9, and 10 before a different joke sent each of those off course. It was nice to finally get that out of my system.

Battle 32 - Joey hiring guards made a lot of logical sense to me, and while I wasn't planning on writing a riff on Who's On First as soon as I realized that was what I was writing I kind of leaned into it. And then struggled to write myself out of it. Really enjoyed writing this one, both the riff on JRPG enemy naming conventions and Who's On First with Guard IAN and then writing a three-on-three. Plus the "Narrator doesn't like commas" line really helped me out with 35.

Battle 33 - The drinking Tizer from a glass thing was always to set up the "What is a mon" pun/Symphony of the Night reference, but originally going to be the skull of Joey's Raticate rather than a glass. While this version of the battle isn't as 'tidy,' I prefer what I changed it to - A taxidermy Raticate is funnier to me, and I think works better with why Joey had kept his dead Raticate around in some form. Plus having Joey drink out of a glass makes the SotN reference more direct as a bonus. I always planned to end this on a cliffhanger, and Ben acquiring the snag balls allowed me to make it Ben getting caught in a Master Ball which felt logical for Joey to have.

Battle 34 - I seriously had no clue how I was going to represent Ben having captured himself in the Sandy Dex until I prepped the Sandy Dex updates for the Battle Fest. Making it a recursion error felt like a neat solution. Aside from that, it was mostly trying to work as many jokes into a battle I was making darn sure every one of the two trainer's pokemon was used, while Ben spent half the time stealing and releasing Joey's Pokémon. It was always going to come down to a one-on-one between trainers, though having them both in critical condition and using moves that could be interpreted as grapples, and the Narrator not being sure which fainted came to me while writing.

Battle 35 - This started out as a cute idea 'oh a series of epilogues with various players as we trace Ben's journey home' and turned into a behemoth - the HTML of Battle 35 alone is 31KB. This makes it larger than the HTML for some of the archive pages - The archive of 11-15 is 30KB, 6-10 is 25KB, and 1-5 is 24KB, despite them having 5 battles each and the navigation and general layout HTML rather than just being a bit of HTML that's part of one of the archive pages.

Joey's epiphany that Ben was right about him was a combination of things he's already that the proverbial slap in the face Ben gave him helped him realize just how far over the line he'd gone. It's also something that I thought of very late in the day. My original plan was Joey getting torn apart by a bunch of Raticate he'd been torturing, then after dropping that part of the arc I wasn't sure if Ben's Raticate was going to kill Joey or capture him (If it'd have captured him I was thinking I'd be able to do a series of battles where Raticate took on the Johto Gym challenge), but neither of those options really felt right to me until I realized that I'd left myself enough room for Joey having regrets with some of the lines in Joey's Lament ("But it's lonely in this victory circle; there's no rat when the music starts" plus the "Is/Was this the best that I could be" lines) for Joey to actively want to dive into the bowels of the Land of the Dead in order to try and correct what he views as his biggest mistake.

I knew Ben was going to write himself out of being the hero for the next arc, despite the Narrator trying to turn him into a chosen one for it - Including gifting him the book that it had run away in Battle 24, but I'm not sure how well it would have worked without the Narrator pointing out that it doesn't like commas - From just the contents of that book alone. Youngster Mikey's segment is mostly there for the pacing of the battle - I wanted to specifically alternate between Ben and other characters in it and needed a scene between Ben getting home and reading the book.