Some reflections on No Gods Only Monsters, the second arc of the revived Sandy Version, along with Narrator is Missing, the first prose fic of the revived Sandy Version.
General thoughts
I came up with the broad strokes of No Gods Only Monsters fairly early and was able to weave the setup for those into A Tail of Two Youngsters. However... Originally I'd thought Emojiman was going to help Solveig create a mechanism to cure Protagonist (turns out that wasn't needed, and I think the method actually used is more dramatically interesting. And I prefer how I've built off of the throwaway line in If Wishes Were Fishes about strong emotional responses can cause a protagonist to lose their protagonist essence and with it the plot armour). I had no idea ending my "I'm reviving Sandy" announcement with a tilde would wind up being plot relevant - That's the tilde the older SVWebmaster was caught in by the younger, and I think that means that in universe the younger SVWebmaster made the announcement - but it's fun that it does.
I'm not sure when I decided that SVWebmaster had returned to Sandy for the reason that the Narrator has suddenly started referring to readers which it had never done in anyone's lifetimes, but it was by the time the Tildes started getting mentioned (not that I always write battles in chronological order these days)
Emojiman and Gym Owner Jim are in battles fairly early on in No Gods Only Monster specifically because I knew they were going to be in Narrator Is Missing - I'd actually written most of Day 1 of that before writing Iconic Sounds and In Rare Form, and I wanted to remind the audience they existed, although as it turns out, Emojiman isn't in Narrator is Missing that much. I thought Emojiman was going to be doing more, but couldn't actually think of a good arc for him. I also knew as soon as I introduced him and decided to keep him around that if I did a prose fic for Sandy, he'd need to have a role in it. Did enjoy having him render Feed Me Gossip in his specific voice after evolving into a Gosslord.
While with A Tail of Two Youngsters, it was mostly a very linear set of battles to place prior to Joey and Ben's journeys being in parallel with each other (which I basically only had to decide 'do I start with Ben and alternate ending with Joey, or do I start with Joey and alternate ending with Ben?') there were enough oddities and side tangents with the plot relevant battles for No Gods Only Monsters that I wound up needing to flowchart the battles after I'd written - or at least planned - what was going to happen in them in order to figure out what order they needed to go into.
Reflections on specific battles
The bulk of Battle 36 was written fairly early in the writing process of Sandy Version, and was the first battle involving Catherine I wrote, before Battle 7 - I forget if it was one of the 20 or so I'd written prior to launching or not. I think I was originally planning it for placing somewhere around Battle 10-15 or so, and just came about from the thought of "What does a date look like in this world?" - Which I both realized sounded like a Joanne battle, and also that I was a bit male heavy in the character skew when creating someone for her to be on a date with. Then, when I realized what the second arc was going to be, that Joanne, Solveig and Catherine were going to be heavily involved in it, and just how much was going to happen as part of the finale to the first arc, I moved it and made the slight changes needed to reflect where it was placed.
Battle 40 is where the plot of No Gods Only Monsters really starts to kick into gear for me. I really quite enjoy the trio deriving information from what the Narrator lets spill by accident and its reactions without giving answers to their questions.
I hadn't planned on Battles 42-44 being Halloween themed, but in the first week of October, I got inspired to write a couple of battles based on various spooky Pokédex entries for the season, meaning they were all written within a couple of weeks. I had two open slots in the schedule for battles that they slotted into, and then I pushed the battle I'd originally scheduled to put in as 44 back to 45 (Had I written two, I think I was planning on doing something else for 42, having what is now 45 as 43, and then straddling Halloween with one spookier battle either side of it). I think I wrote 43 first, then 42, and finally 44 but I might be misremembering the order. When arranging them I tried to place them in order of how comedy vs horror they were, so the closest to straight horror was at the end.
Battle 45 was originally scheduled as Battle 44 when I was trying to spread the plot relevant battles out to give a good flow without them taking up too concentrated a period, but got bumped due to Halloween. I like Solveig bypassing the Narrator refusing to let them knock following two jokes around knocking by just yelling loudly. And I think it works better having that be Solveig doing it than it would have done with either Catherine or Joanne.
Rereading it, I like that it's Joanne who's the one to agree with Ben that he shouldn't be involved. I hadn't figured out Joanne was a journalist when I wrote this, nor that she had a hobby of getting kids out of perilous situations yet, so that just neatly dovetails into those aspects of her personality, both of which become relevant by the end of the arc.
For all that happens in Battle 48, I think the only bit I needed to happen for the flow of the arc is in the first segment with Catherine Fennel in the player seat. The rest feels... Not filler, exactly, but if the battle ended with Catherine planting the bug on Red and Grant, the arc would have worked perfectly well.
Battle 50 has a cut gag, which would have served as an alternate bridge between Raticate mentioning that it's the Leafy River (Lethe River. Not a 100% match for the pronunciation but close enough for the pun to work for me), rather than the River Sticks (Styx, obviously) is what causes memory loss) and Raticate jumping across it.
What happens if Raticate falls into this one?
An intense ACHE and feelings of being ILL at EASE of hatred until it gets an INJURY in the HEEL!
RATICATE isn't that unfamiliar with the SENSATION!
...Yeah...
Took a surprisingly long amount of time for me to kill it, which I suspect was because while the pun is tortured and the surface meaning isn't really supported by the mythology (although the Greek word Styx means to hate or abhor), the River Styx is the river that Achilease is said to have been dipped in by Thetis to give him his invulnerability and I like that pun, tortured as it is.
The entire line of gags, including the other only slightly tormented pun on Lethe going to Leafy and being a river of potentially crunchy autumnal leaves, is entirely caused by my misconception prior to writing this battle, although in my defence I think a lot of pop culture conflates the memory loss effect of the Lethe into the Styx to simplify their depictions of Hades.
The lily fields are just there because lilies are associated with funerals, and it worked out out that lilies are poisonous to cats to keep the Leomon at bay from that area. Hiber thought they were based on spider lilies and... I wish I'd thought of that considering how much I enjoyed Digimon Survive, and how plot relevant spider lilies are to that game. The gag of the Land of the Dead primarily being occupied by Leomon and shorn beans is that Leomon pretty much always dies when he appears in Digimon anime, and the all too common observation that Sean Bean dies very frequently in his roles.
I wasn't originally planning on having Veemon or Dave appear in this battle, instead musing about making Joey fight Cerberus given I knew I was going with the River Sticks/Styx gag. But I did kind of want to use the opportunity to hint at why the Narrator couldn't see the blue tome, which I had always envisioned as being made of Veemon leather/flesh, and I wanted Joey to have an interaction with someone other than Raticate, so I stuck Veemon into the Lily Field, and once I'd done that it felt natural to have Dave be trying to return to life. Plus Cerberus felt a bit generic.
Veemon's colour code was fun to pick - Firstly I started trying to lighten up the old blue to a point its contrast was sensible, but that wound up looking a lot too purple than I wanted so I wound up using a colour selector on a picture of Veemon and then lightened that up until it was good contrast on a black background, making his font colour both better contrast and more accurate than it ever was in Classic Sandy, albeit at the cost of it being closer to the regular player colour.
Additional Veemon trivia - At one point during Battle 36 there was going to be a passing mention of a doomsday cult that worships him and think his return to Sandy Version will herald the destruction of it all, but that didn't really fit with my plans so I don't think that actually exists.
As for where Davis is? He's the only one of the characters who my head defines as the main trio of classic Sandy Version who's alive in this incarnation of Sandy, and if I ever manage to continue Digital Sands, you might find out what he's up to, though this Narrator hasn't met him.
Something will always amuse me about extended periods of untranslated Pokémon dialogue in PokéBattles, as per the conversation between both Raticate in Battle 51 and while I did this a lot more in Narrator is Missing, I'm glad it's here in a pure PokéBattles format. As for the Sand Reaper, what would a PokéBattles version be without a ludicrously strong entity? This one's not even a villain, more of a force of nature. Getting the line count accurate for Sand Reaper's appearances was surprisingly tricky. And I do enjoy the light joke of having the Narrator respond to Raticate not thinking it the time for jokes with "NARRATOR resents that!"
I don't think I originally intended Battle 52 and 53 to be a two parter, I think I was originally intending on just having this be what's in Battle 53, but with that setup at the start of 52?... How could I have the Narrator resist doing something that kind of forces it to be a two parter. I think at some point I mentioned that I don't do enough 'the battle is a Pokémon' meta gags, so I really appreciate that I did one with the battle turning into a Zubat and flying away at the end of this due to it being a 'cave hanger'.
I hadn't realized I was going to end the arc by evolving Nettlemouth Cave into a protagonist type trainer, so accidental foreshadowing with the Narrator thinking about animating the cave mouth for a novel battle. And Joanne being annoyed at being up against kids fits both how I characterized her before and after this battle.
Battle 54 is important for both Ben's actions at the end of No Gods Only Monsters, and the end of Narrator is Missing, and yet I have surprisingly little to say about it.
There were originally a bit more lines at the end of Battle 55 - Just a mild gag about the readers being impatient that nothing else is happening while Cecil and Sean enjoy each other's company and those readers being annoyed that there wasn't an actual battle - I think this is the first time this incarnation of Sandy hasn't actually had anything even resembling a battle - but it needed to be overly long to and it ruined the reflection between the first and final line of the battle while not being funny enough to make up for that, so I cut it.
The opportunity Battle 57 gave to write a (heavily exaggerated) version of myself yelling at a (heavily exaggerated) version of myself from 2001 is, I think, the reason this arc exists. And the worst part about the 'conversation about which Final Fantasy character is hottest' I referenced in the battle? It was on Gaia Online, the paper doll avatar forum.
I'd originally written Battle 59 before 56, and retroactively added the reference to there being RSACi cans floating around in the howling void. Also, Asshole was originally called Asswipe, but that led to a pun I wasn't comfortable with, so I changed the name and made the necessary adjustments to the Battle (Not all that many, although I think the flow to the battle taking place in a toilet made a bit more sense prior to that change)
While Battle 60 was written after all of the plot relevant battles had been, including Battle 61, I think the placement of Countdown to Impact's similar 'player is currently dying and is fighting against the very forces of nature that will inevitably kill them' setup is vital for If Wishes Were Fishes to have tension. While Poacher B is a third tier character at best, without it I'm not sure how much jeopardy Battle 61 has for Grant. Following it, I think a reader might think I'm going to kill Grant off - or worse, as happens to Poacher B - although having introduced the Land of the Dead there's still the possibility I bring him back after killing him off (And, to be fair, at one point I was going to, until I thought of the subtle 'Grant's wish was granted' pun. I also like the twist on the title, the nursery rhyme the title comes from is about the absurdity of wishes, while here I'm using it to foreshadow a Magikarp evolving into a shooting star - a wish granting mechanism - along with the Pokémon move wish (which here is acting more like wishes as interpreted in other works)
The reason Emojiman exists is that modern day internet has the technology to do something I'd been trying to do when I used to write a lot of PokéBattles - Player characters who don't speak in a PokéBattle. For every failed attempt back then convincing me it couldn't be done, to the point that I wanted to do it with Emoji early in this incarnation of Sandy Version, I actually think the pure version of it works in Battle 63, and having Red as the player in it is absolutely vital for the battle's ending, which is probably why it works here in a way it never did when I used to attempt to get it working with various inanimate objects.
I'm not sure if I originally conceived of Battle 65 having the time differential delay the impact for one of the SVWebmasters, but it made for a fun, and torturous, bit of writing to do with the Narrator in a call back to a bit of dialogue from Battle 57. And, yes, that song is real. And, yes, it was a Number 1 hit. I think everything else here is basically just the natural endpoint of everything that I'd set up going into this. Plus some gags such as Nettlemouth Cave's evolution.
Reflections on Narrator is Missing
At a little over 20,000 words, and around 4 distinct main plot strands, I believe Narrator is Missing is the longest and most complicated individual work I've ever written, despite cultivating something of a reputation for overly long battles and overly complicated plot arcs back in the day. But most of my prose writing is essentially a single scene or constrained scenario and rarely troubles even a thousand words. Also considering how much I hate, and am bad at, writing action scenes going with 'comedy zombie apocalypse' for such a piece was... Certainly a choice. (Though at least for now I'm happy with how the Shadow vs Gosslord fight turned out in particular. We'll see if that still applies in five years.)
I went into planning Narrator is Missing knowing how it was going to end and basically nothing else - Ben feeling like he had to send out Narrator. That was, I think, before I'd written any battles involving Gosslords, and definitely before I knew Joey was being hunted by the Sand Reaper. By the time I started writing it, I knew the Gosslord plotline was going to be the thing leading to the ending, and the Sand Reaper was going to be how Ben found the Narrator's comma. The dialogue between the Narrator and Ben basically wrote itself.
I started writing the plot relevant battles for No Gods Only Monsters while Sandy was up to the early 20s, and just before Battle 26 went up I started writing Narrator Is Missing. And my brain just kind of bluescreened from the first draft of the second paragraph of Day 1: "Raticate was having a walk alongside Raticate, chittering away to each other happily about cheese preferences - a favourite discussion topic of the two rodents, the Raticate who had killed Joey favoured danish blue, while the Raticate who had died and escaped the Land of the Dead preferred red fox - via the three syllables they were capable of saying - Rat, i, and cate - when the Narrator vanished."
The sheer casualness that the throwaway line about the two rats' favourite cheeses throws in that 'An 8 year old child was killed by a rodent,' and 'another rodent died and came back to life' simply because I wanted to let the audience know which Raticate was which since, you know, they share the same name and neither of them is really Joey's Raticate or Ben's Raticate at this point in Sandy Version just kind of caused the writing part of my brain to blue screen when rereading it.
While most of Day 1 and all of Day 5 were written around Battle 26, it wasn't until around Battle 49 and 50 were uploaded that I started working on the rest since it took me a while to figure out what exactly the other main strands of the would be (and falling into a better writing routine, managing to start getting something written or edited - not always Pokebattles related - each day, plus there were a lot of holes in Sandy's schedule where while I'd written all the plot relevant battles of No Gods Only Monsters leading up to Narrator is Missing there was a bulk of battles that I just hadn't written - The entire Halloween trilogy of standalones were written in October, for example.)
In December, after having finished writing Red's segments of Narrator is Missing, I went through adding all the recaps to all remaining battles up to Narrator Is Missing, and discovered that Red had captured Muk without my remembering, though it made sense for Red to not have sent Muk out at any point during the events of Narrator Is Missing with a couple of additional lines, so that didn't impact things too much.
It wasn't until January 26th that I finished writing Gym Owner Jim and Shadow's segments of Narrator is Missing, and I was starting to get anxious about if I'd finish Joanne's segments in time since, while the seven I thought I'd need to write had been blocked, it felt like I had a mental block around writing them even with my healthier writing routine, though I managed to finish those off by mid-February giving me a comfortable break before properly editing things together.
Is the Narrator devolving all Gosslord into 'whatever they were before' a reset button? I don't think it is. Not only are all of the main arcs of it in a vastly different place following Narrator Is Missing than they were prior - Catherine and Joanne are no longer together, at least temporarily (No clue if they're going to wind up getting back together or not as of writing these reflections), Gym Owner Jim is now leading an exploratory expedition into the Narratorless lands, Ben has run away into the Narratorless lands, splitting the Raticate up in the process, Red has been vanished by folding a net into a cube and is now trapped in the worst escape room ever (and doesn't even know the Gosslord are no longer on a rampage and the Narrator is back), but the core mainstream philosophical belief about the nature of the universe within Sandy has been undermined and while that's a background detail, that's likely to have some sort of consequence on how I write battles going forward. No one in Sandy doesn't know that the Narrator is unnecessary for things to happen any more.
The weirdest editing pass I did on Narrator is Missing was correctly stylizing phone (the inanimate object) vs Phone (a Pokémon that both Joanne and Jacob have. And who use them to make regular phone calls as well as as a Pokémon). I think I got them all, but... Hard to say. That was... Something. It was also less than a fortnight before I uploaded Narrator is Missing, meaning I consider myself to have been working on NIM while I was prepping Battle 65 for upload. Although I was also doing that sort of 'final editing passes' earlier on it than I do for most Battles, which I tend to the 'ok, run it through an actual spellchecking process' steps within the week prior to its upload.'
As a final note, the ASMR thing running through the news bulletins are all real, official, Pokémon ASMR videos, and are all available on one of the various official Pokémon youtube channels. And the Pikachu one really does have sounds of it breaking glass while playing, which... Why would you put that in an ASMR video? There's also one I'm aware of that I didn't have room to reference - a Muk walking over various surfaces.