true grey

that said, heidi still has some very strong feelings about team plasma and particularly those people who bought into their rhetoric and released their own pokémon—that they're fucking idiots. Okay, sure, rationally, she understands plasma was extremely emotionally manipulative. She knows that many people joined Plasma because they lacked other options. But in her mind, her knee-jerk reaction... the ones who actually took it to heart and abandoned their pokémon never really understood their pokémon in the first place. as you might expect, the experienced trainers who had spent years raising their pokémon weren't really the ones buying in to plasma's rhetoric, for the most part; it was young trainers, "failed" trainers, people whose experience with & understanding of pokémon was more limited. where heidi takes issue with them is that many of them were extremely careless with how they released/abandoned their pokémon. besides the obvious many of these pokémon were living healthy lives with their trainers and did not understand why they were suddenly being abandoned/released, there was also little regard for whether the pokémon could even reasonably fend for themselves, or if returning pokémon in large numbers to the wild would have any environmental impacts. It's no coincidence that many of these released pokémon ended up being collected by Team Plasma after the fact, either. so, basically... heidi has some strong words for the people who bought in and released their pokémon, having encountered several herself that were victims of this. not that she'd say those words to their faces.

i think ultimately one of the more facinating things abt heidi to me is that on a certain level, she's not actually all that ideologically opposed to team plasma. she can't express a lot of that sentiment publically because of the backlash she'd face, but the fact remains that broadly speaking, she doesn't really agree with the idea of catching pokémon, and that modern society at large does not actually desire or make any meaningful effort towards "living alongside" pokémon, despite what they may say. (Have I mentioned Heidi hates Lumiose?) Ideally, Heidi would have it so that catching an unwilling pokémon is not possible, at least not for average trainers. (There are situations where being able to contain a pokémon would render pokeball capture more justifed, like trying to rescue & provide medical care to pkmn affected by, say, natural disaster) Pokéballs should be used exclusively for pokémon that a trainer has already befriended, not to just capture and throw around willy nilly with no regards for the individual pokémon. Of course, she also recognizes that this is kind of logistically impossible, and that limiting the capture of pokémon to only a select few comes with its own set of problems (Ghetsis DNI). So, instead, she has to focus her efforts as champion on changing the dialogue and culture surrounding pokémon, battling, and pokéball usage. nbd.

I should like, reblog a meme or something to get my muse going again.

one of the bio ideas i've been playing around with is, in lieu of a "personality" section (literally the worst part of every character bio) where i just list traits, i want to instead have a selection of in-character statements expressing heidi's beliefs. thinking of maybe framing it as ideals/truths and having two versions? statements? on each one. idk.

anyway i've been pondering bios and how to write heidi's bio (and character bios in general) in a way that makes it, like, actually digestible and easy to reference while still providing meaningful information & also not being dry as fuck. I still don't have a solution but I do have ideas.

plot threads I want but know tumblr is too conflict averse to provide me: someone challenging the legitimacy of heidi's champion title and/or challenging her under the pretense that she's not a suitable champion