Son...

Hullo all! Mun Donut here. 

There’s been a recent influx of people joining the Pokemon apprecation/Pokemon propaganda community and uhm. First of all as someone who was active at the height of this small subcommunity I’d like to say that seeing it starting to come back up again is AWESOME (I currently follow quite a few, but I’ve only seen a handful of propaganda blogs post semi-regularly)

I hope this doesn’t come across as pretentious or anything, but I think it would be nice to inform people of the origins of the subcommunity (at least, to my knowledge. I stay away from drama so there’s probably a few things I don’t know about)

Where did it come from?

Awhile back, a twitter user created an account that that went along the lines of a pokemon name + “propaganda”. They dedicated the account to anything and everything about the pokemon- basically spreading love for it (not unlike what we do today). I’m keeping the name private for reasons you’ll see later. 

Eventually, this trend spread to tumblr and a small community formed, with users making accounts dedicated to loving their own pokemon.

The trend later began to encompass poketrainers as well, which is where I come in. Trainerganda blogs generally followed the same vein as Pokeganda blogs, though roleplaying wasn’t uncommon among these blogs (some preferred to simply curate content of their favourite characters, though. It just boiled down to how an individual wanted to run their blog)

What do you do as an Appreciation/Propaganda account?

Anything you want, really! The only thing you need to become one is to add appreciation/propaganda to the end of your url. 

Along with reblogging relevant content, I’ve seen people form something similar to an ask blog and roleplay with these accounts (I do all three!). Though, for those people new in the community there really isn’t a “wrong” way to run a pokeprecation/pokeganda blog. Just do whatever suits you best 😊.

Why is it PokePreciation or PokeGanda?

Hooh boy. I’ll keep this one short since it involves some controversy. 

Back in 2020, the creator of the trend came under fire for saying some pretty racist things. As a result, some members of the community decided to switch their URLs from “propaganda” to “appreciation” to detach themselves from the original creator. Some people kept the propaganda url, but that doesn’t mean they don’t agree with the beliefs of the original. And honestly, I do still think the propaganda url is kinda cool.

I was one of the people who changed my url back then, though, which is why I’m named the way I am today! 

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With the exception of one blog that I believe was also run by the person who created the original pokeganda Twitter account, the earliest pokeganda blogs on Tumblr were created in mid-2018. There were only a handful of blogs during this time, and it didn’t really catch on as a “trend” until November 2018 (the period when I created this blog - hard to believe it’s already been three and a half years!). 

By the end of January 2019, there were already over a hundred pokeganda blogs created. I believe it was around this time that one brave soul, @pokegandadex, took on the task of maintaining a list of all the pokeganda blogs in existence to help us find each other, which I think helped foster the sense of community that had already been forming.

Not entirely sure when trainergandas became a thing; I’d stopped documenting every newly created blog by that point. Doing some quick searches, the earliest ones I can find were from May 2019, so the idea of trainer appreciation blogs may have started around then.

pokeganda/pokepreciation blogs don’t even strictly need to have “propaganda” or “appreciation” in the url! when the propaganda creator controversy happened, a lot of people chose to change the “propaganda” part of their urls to something more alliterative, such as leavanny-propaganda changing to @leavanny-loving! that’s the same reason my Hop and Leon appreciation blog is called postwick-palace instead of postwick-bros-appreciation or something. The key element of an appreciation blog is that they’re dedicated to appreciating their subject!

(for the requests ask thing)

grovyle! -art by me