PokéBattles: Sandy Version

General thoughts

I came up with this entire arc - Glitches attacking Sandy - while writing Shattered Mirror, which must have been ahead of writing the end of the No Gods Only Monsters arc considering I backengineered a bit of foreshadowing for it into that into both Battle 62, and the glitched pixel within Narrator's Tower where SVWebmaster and SVWebmaster were fighting in Battle 66. There were a few weeks between me writing the alternate universe and flashbacks to before Battle 1 sections of that battle, and the future section which would have been written after Uknown Temple, when I decided on having Tex kidnapped by Unknown. It wasn't until later that I decided that this is where the Mystery Island stuff and Grant was going when I decided this was going to be the next major arc - After a period of relative quiet that turned into Shadow's arc, at which point I wrote the battle's before and after Shattered Mirror, and decided to do a different structure for the arc than I had been previously doing - instead of evenly distributing the arc battles do a mini trilogy of them towards the end of every ten battles within the arc. That I'd already done a gag about a character clipping through the ground before coming up with the idea I think helps things.

The intent was that the temporality of an older and younger version of SVWebmaster existing in the same space as each other for long enough caused the Glitches to start coming through more aggressively via what I eventually wound up calling the Elder Glitch, but I'm not sure (or how necessary such an explanation actually is if it doesn't)

Even then, I didn't quite know what was going to be behind the ominous door for Grant until quite late in the writing process and went with... Well, in my mind it's a subtle Babylon 5 reference (Which as a reference also plays into the order vs chaos thing I've got going on between the glitches and the alphabetical order thanks to the Vorlon vs Shadow conflict in that) - To the machine on the planet the station's orbiting - but I'm not entirely sure that comes across in the text. I do quite like how Grant going through it played into Pikachu inspiring Grant to escape the Wailord, with Grant insisting Pikachu doesn't mope on the island after Grant does what he thinks might be sacrificing his own life, just by having Pikachu and Grant interact in ways that felt right for their characters when depicting them on the island together.

There are a couple of Gen 1 glitches I think there might be a battle concept in that I didn't use in this arc - There's an arbitrary code execution glitch in Gen 1 that means that the major glitch speedrun of Red & Blue is less than 1m 20s because you can warp yourself to the hall of fame very quickly. And there's an invisible PC... Somewhere... in Gen 1, but I like that I've gotten two of the classic memorable glitches - Missingno and Glitch City - in there, and connected them together in the narrative, while also including one - fast text - that was discovered by accident by the speedrunning community.

Notes on selected battles

Interlude 2 is a scene that I had in my head pretty much from when I decided that it made sense for Kirk and Youngster Ben to both go into the Narratorless lands. I think it was originally going to be at the end of Shadows and Dark Creatures before I realized that while I liked having it present, it needed to be separated out from that because tonally it didn't quite work to have that immediately following Maria's death.

With Battle 92, I'm just a sucker for a werehouse/warehouse pun, while Battle 93 was following up from having reintroduced Jean into proceedings. And also written when I knew damn well that Joey was going to let himself get killed (again) and it was going to be Maria who made it out of the Land of the Dead in Battle 100.

Battle 94 purely exists as a reference to the 1980s into 1990s British children's gameshow Knightmare that I grew up with, though I did use it as an opportunity to foreshadow The Glitch Will Come's climax. The Pokémaths portion is a direct reference to an IRC trivia bot that used to exist, in the PokéBattles IRC channel, where one category that sometimes came up was... Doing maths with Pokémon.

Battle 95 continues to follow up on Shadow, Beth, and Tails's life via just... The most mundane of things. I don't know what it is about this incarnation of Sandy, but I've really enjoyed just doing 'regular activities in the PokeBattles format,' in a way that Sandy Version never really did back in the day, even dropping the need to crowbar a battle in there every time.

Battle 96 plays on one of my favourite things that people sometimes did with PokéBattles back in the day - messing with text colours, in this case, a straight up text colour swap between Horace and Narrator. I wrote it after writing Battle 97, so knew exactly where it was going, and justified the text colour swap in my head by it being a glitch about fast text, and so red shifted and blue shifted light being an effect of Doppler shifting. Which doesn't really make sense in this context, but... I don't think it has to for the justification to work.

Battle 97 was the first battle in the arc I wrote, and the entire arc was built around justifying this thing's existence. I think in my head the biggest conscious influence was the TNG episode Parallels, though obviously I also added two flashes of the past - One with Ben, one with Catherine, and the one that may or may not be the future with Tex. The last section I wrote for it was Dave at SVWebmaster's tower, which I think came after even the conclusion with the glitch taunting Narrator before going to the scene directly inside the Narrator's mind (by which point we've long since abandoned the Parallels inspiration). It also exists as a sort of reflection on the Narrator's character, and... While I tried to give all my many Narrators of Classic Sandy somewhat different personalities and subtly different styles of Narration, I don't think I ever had as much of a sense of them as a character while writing them as I do with this specific Narrator. This almost exists as a character study of the Narrator at this specific point in Sandy Version, and I don't think it would have been possible for me to do that with any of my prior Narrators. I do like the subtle gag I have with the glitch's record being -128-0-1 - The draw is from the only prior battle we saw it in, the -128 wins is a rollover error because apparently Sandy's records are stored as signed ints.

Battle 98, unlike 96, was a struggle to write. The section with Horace was easy, but it took me a long time to realize that the battle that needed to happen was with Grant rather than Horace, and I think deciding that the door on Mystery Isle related to the glitches.

Battle 99 was another early battle that I wrote for the arc, and almost certainly was written before I'd written Jean's stuff for Shadowstein. It was a very weird one to write, and at a certain point I was very tempted to delete a bunch of it and start over as Joey realized he was a fictional character, which is the opposite of the direction I actually wanted to take with this incarnation of Sandy, but I kind of like it for him specifically, considering he's the only character from this incarnation who's interacted with someone from Classic Sandy, who all knew they were fictional, on screen so left that weird reflection of what the process of writing can be like sometimes as a character realizes they're a work of fiction.

I'd written the first part of Battle 100 - Joey and Dave trying to work out how they were going to get past the palm tree husks without getting killed while dead by them - pretty early. As soon as I realized I wanted Maria to come back to life in Battle 100, I started writing the rest of this battle since the obvious funny way of doing that was for the focus to be on Joey and Dave vs the palm tree husks... And for Maria to sneak past the battle into the portal while the fight was going on.

Battles 101 through 103 were me dealing with the inevitable fallout of Battle 100, and I don't really have much to say about them aside from that - Though I do like the gag about the Narrator using frame rules to explain how the portal to the land of the dead works, rather than bus schedules like how frame rules are usually explained. Reviewing these battles for this commentary did reveal a small continuity error - The location of Tails' lab moving to the Shed as of 102 but still being in the basement by 118, but ah well. A second lab that he uses more rarely, perhaps?

With Battle 104 I think I was just wanting to write Cecil and Sean again, and felt it a fairly logical progression from when we last saw them to both of them wanting to propose to the other. And then led straight into Battle 105 and... Whatever the hell is going on between Scramble and Poacher A. And then Battle 106 also has a romantic theming to it, because I hadn't used Emojiman for a while, where I just played on the running gag of everyone but Narrator finding Emojiman easy to understand (and amplified it with Romeo, whose text was generated with a modern English to Shakespearean translation bot I found). Having three romantic or romantic aligned battles in a row was entirely unplanned, and I have no clue if I like that or wish they were spread out a bit more.

...I do like the gag in 106 that in this world Pokémon the Musical is a more esteemed play than Shakespeare's works, however.

For Battle 107 I needed to crowbar in a setup for the Narrator to make a save the animals gag. Hopefully it felt organic. The dialogue with Guard X is taken directly from the game. I also referenced Digital Sands in it. Hopefully, I'll find time to continue working on that sometime. I don't have big plans for it, but I do have a basic idea of what happens to them in my head.

With Battle 108, and the Narrator's (And Horace's) glitched speech, I very deliberately chose to not glitch capitalized text and only hit the first or last letter of words if they're two letters long, otherwise keeping them internal. This is an attempt to keep the text readable. I do not know if it succeeded or not.

Battle 109, meanwhile, mostly exists to establish the connection between the ominous metal door and the glitches, while also doing setup for how the arc ends. I think it largely succeeds at this but also establishes that Horace is a bit of an asshole.

Battle 110 is the first and so far only use of Pokémon speech translation in Sandy because the two approaches I've been using up to this point - Either directly rendering the Pokémon saying its name (funnier) or having the Narrator translate (needed when the audience has to understand what the Pokémon is saying as well as the character talking to it) weren't really going to work with a Pokémon as a player. At least this romantically themed battle wasn't in the same block as the 104-106.

I like that Lewis is just... There. Chilling in a ballpit with his Gastly and a bunch of Phantump, and I really enjoyed introducing a wood nymph to the energy drink mountain dew when writing the battle. It took a surprisingly long time for me to come up with Lavender Town's theme as the second, but once I had the orchestra playing Danse Macabre I knew I wanted nothing but death (or at least ghost) themed songs, and having established that there were children present, to end on the third song with Bright Eyes - An Art Garfunkle song written for Watership Down - and seeing the chaos that ensued from that.

I moved Interlude 3 from between 100 and 101 to between 110 and 111 where I'd originally placed it largely because it felt weird having it in between a battle to return to life and seeing Maria outside the portal, living again.

Battle 112 pretty much exists entirely as a setup for the end of the arc, but I do enjoy the dental records gag ("Teeth exist").

I had no idea before writing Battle 113 that Solveig had a fling with Blaine in college. That's always a fun thing to happen when either doing writing or roleplay, discovering things about your characters or the world as you create it.

Speaking of roleplay, and discovering things as you write them, Battle 114 was inspired by the adventure start of a PbP I was in earlier this year, and I wrote it fully intending to give Sam a dungeon crawl... And then instead it turned out Sam had been kidnapped by Bill due to Bill being sick of turning himself into Pokémon. And then got locked in a cell with Gengar just before he was able to talk his way out of the predicament.

Battle 115 exists entirely because I needed the Handy to be an Army before going into the final set of battles, and for that to actually have anything to it as a battle, wound up doing something that I never really did in Classic Sandy, though have done more in modern Sandy (particularly with silent protagonists, and the like) - Taking a look at an element of Pokemon as a game that we kind of take for granted as players, and going "OK, what the hell is going on here?" and for rare candy the only thing that would make sense for why candy would cause levelling up is if they're candied experiences or memories. Which allowed me to make them gradually worse for Horace, until... Joey's corpse remembering his own death.

As for the drowzee regurgitating memories into water - I looked up the process for candying stuff and I think putting the fruit into water was the first step. As a set of five battles, I think 115 works nicely with Battle 111, since both thematically wind up being about people using euphemisms to lie to themselves, Maria about what the thing she's doing is, Horace about the fact that he might die due to what he's about to do, and coming to terms with what it is they're not telling themselves before they do that thing makes the two battles feel like good bookends for this page of the archive, although that was entirely coincidental.

Battle 116 was incredibly tricky to write since I needed to make Gambler Rich not come across as horrifically irresponsible, while also... Making them complicit in helping an 8 year old run away to the equivalent of a different country, but also indicating that they're not someone who would willingly send a back into a bad situation. And keeping that comedic in tone. And I hope I managed to balance all that. Carol, by contrast, I was absolutely ok with making a jobsworth doing exactly the thing she's paid to do and not going any further.

Battle 117 has some... Pretty gross stuff... going on. Because my brain can't help ask "OK, so, this person who's been trapped in a room for a month... Where do they poop?" But I like that it sets up an actual plotline for Sam going forward.

For Battle 118, having the Narrator as a player while also doing narration, is always fun to write, and I just love the concept of the Narrator deliberately annoying another god that might be more powerful than it is under normal circumstances into diminishing itself by acting less like the embodiment of what it is.

Battle 119 is needed, but ultimately 'big huge battle with impact on the environment, ends on a cliffhanger' is all it is, and I think it does its job well enough.

Battle 120 I really like the personal interplay between Grant, Narrator, and Pikachu before Grant and Pikachu evolve. The resolution of the cliffhanger is fine, I think, and I do like Pikagrant being in a position where he's basically in mourning.