Rebornverse Art & Writing

Sylveon’s Reflect cracks against the force of a tyrant’s blade. Nancy has decided to die for her child, for the person she loves most in the world. But as Sylveon’s protection fails and her imminent death becomes a near certainty, her natural drive to live screams in protest. She realises that she doesn’t want to die for her child, she just wants her child to live, and she wants to live on with them.

She attempts a desperate escape, sprinting along the dark stone tiles of the pier. She wants to be with her child, she wants to be safe with them, she wants to finally be family with them in a way that feels real. Because it wasn’t meant to be real. This was only a role assigned to her, for some women motherhood is pushed on them by society, for Nancy it was supposed to have been literally programmed into her.

Melia instructs her Togekiss Hapi to fire a volley of Aura Spheres at Madame X, none of them meet their mark but they slow her down. Nancy half thinks that maybe a few extra seconds of fleeing can deliver her from the horrible, imposing castle that imprisoned her for months. But it can’t. The blade finds her back just as safety was within reach, blood erupts from her body and puddles around her, and Nancy knows she’s dead.

In the end, she understands the reason she did this. The love was real, it was meant to be just a function she fulfilled but it grew into something more. Blood relative or not, human or not, Nancy is their mother. Even though Nancy is gone she prays her child will find new friends. New opportunities, new love.

In canon Pokémon games the domestic sphere is of little importance. Mothers feature at the start of every game, but they don’t matter. In Gen 1 the protagonist’s mother never even leaves her house. In future games they would get to do a little bit more at the start of the story. They would be given some more individual personality and lore as the pokemon series developed, especially in the anime. But overall the mother is just a symbol that exists to prove the protagonist was raised with love and she invites the player to imagine that their character has lived a whole life in this world before the story began.

In almost every game the father is absent, there are exceptions such as Gym Leader Norman of Hoenn, but just as Pokémon’s mothers are rarely seen out of the home he is rarely seen within it. He’s there to immerse the player in their life of battles and adventure by showing that they have family ties to it. Canon Pokémon games are about friendship and adventure, but never about the family or home. But what if on your adventure you couldn’t escape the experience of both those things? This is Pokémon Rejuvenation.

In this story there are many named families. The Theolias, the Blakeorys, the Von Brandts, the Altairs, the Rhaelas, the Grevilleas and a number of less prominent names I’ll bring up when relevant. The first character we see in Rejuvenation is Maria, apparently the only daughter of the Theolia family. Almost every Pokémon story has a focus on children, but she’s clearly too young to start her journey. We meet her parents Anathea and Vitus, we have the option to look at their family portrait that hangs on the wall. In Rejuvenation a number of important moments are illustrated by lead artist Zumi, this painting is the earliest of Zumi’s illustrations you can see in a playthrough. This family is so important to Rejuvenation as a text that not only is it the first illustration, but it’s gone through multiple iterations to ensure it’s consistent with the artstyle and quality of the rest of the game. See the images below.

The current iteration of the Family Portrait taken from the Pokémon Rejuvenation Wiki. 

An older iteration of the Family Portrait from V13. This screenshot is from SoraBell's let’s play on YouTube.

During this prologue normalcy, continuity and the overall sense of this being a normal reality breaks down. Near the end a masked woman in black and red armour says to Maria “Please, no matter what happens. Don't you dare lose hope. Don't lose who you are, and don't you dare forget what's about to happen... Do you understand? Don't lose hope, Maria!” These are the exact words that Maria’s older sister Erin says to her before being banished to the Unknown Dimension. Maria was unconscious and on the floor next to Erin while this was happening, which implies that the prologue may have been a dream. Maria does not remember Erin or her two other siblings after this event as Vitus erases her memory. This is not the last instance of a child being erased by a family member. Even if “family” is held up as an extremely important concept in Rejuvenation that does not stop some characters from harming, exiling or even killing their family members when it suits them. Vitus, otherwise called Indriad, is possibly the most evil person in this story. He has been set up as one of the most powerful characters who has brought disaster to all parts of Aevium and he has consistently done so as a cruel family patriarch. The harm he caused other characters as an abusive husband or father gets more focus in the narrative than his grand scale fantastical acts of evil. The implication is that treating children as he does is the worst thing a person can do. None of his children call themselves Theolias. In Chapter 15 his eldest daughter Erin writes in her diary that she has no last name. Melia uses the last name “Jenner” and thinks of the Professor as her real father. Alice and Allen also seem to go without last names, although they haven’t stated that explicitly in game like Erin has. It seems then that the name ‘Theolia’ is a burden and curse to those that bear it.

The Theolias lived together in Aevium about 40 years before Chapter 1 of Rejuvenation begins during a time when the region was newly discovered and settlers were only starting to build its first cities. This was the perfect time for a budding entrepreneur to prove themself and potentially establish a monopoly. Thomas Blakeory Sr. was a man who seized this opportunity by usurping the Grand Dream City construction project by framing the one who originally started it. He even married a woman called Hazuki who was a hero protecting Aevium and the daughter of a lucrative mining business. Together these things consolidated his power as he became Aevium’s earliest oligarch. 

Decades later he had a granddaughter called Saki Blakeory who grew up privileged and sheltered thanks to her family’s position. She wasn’t a bad person by any means but she had poor social skills. Blakeory Sr. did everything possible to make her life easy. If she wanted the chance to catch strong Pokémon or have her own battle arena then she would have it, if she wanted to participate in her prestigious school’s invention competition then you better believe that he would blackmail the judges so as to rig it in Saki’s favour, whether Saki asked for this or not. 

The prize for this competition was funding for the winning invention. Funding which Saki realistically didn’t even need. 

The resentment of those who were cheated, the pain of those who were threatened and the overall culmination of decades of abusing his power finally blew up in Blakeory Sr. 's face. Saki learned that day that much of her life had been a lie, so much of what her family gave her was bought by the suffering of others. The whole story arc was a very necessary wake up call for Saki that shows how a family name can be used as a tool to secure resources and power through a line of succession. The real life practice of arranging marriages and pressuring couples to reproduce is designed specifically so that the wealthy can keep their wealth for life, in this context a ‘family’ is something built to satisfy material concerns. Therefore the Blakeory name is power and luxury that comes at a cost.

The Altairs are similar to the Blakeorys in that their family is burdened by intrigue and a focus on increasing their affluence. Narcissa Altair is the ghost type Gym Leader of Goldenleaf Town. After retiring from her career as a world famous actress she married a man called Sirius, who brought along his adoptive stepson Gregory, better known in the story as future Team Xen Admin Geara. Narcissa learns during Rejuv’s story that Sirius was only using her, his ulterior motive was to get her support as Leader of Goldenleaf Town so that he could build Wispy Tower and secretly use it to research Giratina and the Den of Souls. Further into the story the player can learn that ‘Sirius’ was just an alias for Vitus, their family of three was simply his means. As awful as it was for Narcissa to learn that her marriage meant nothing, this was not the last painful revelation she would experience. In the sidequest Narcissa’s Hauntings we learn that when Narcissa was a young child her sister Celesia died in an accident. Her family was more concerned with how the incident would impact their reputation rather than the dignity of the child they just lost. Narcissa’s Grandmother Loria said the following:

These screenshots were taken from ThumsRipa Gaming's let’s play of Pokemon Rejuvenation.

In this speech Loria marks three families as the most powerful in Pre-Calamity Aevium and espouses values that are held by all of them. The family name doesn’t only secure material wealth, it preserves reputation. If the name is known then any person who carries it can receive respect or at least recognition from others without proving themself individually. Loria is punished by the narrative immediately after this speech and senior members of the other two notable families are cast in antagonistic roles in this story, so the message in Rejuvenation is that using a family name in these ways is wrong. The Altairs, Blakeorys and Theolias are names that once meant power in Aevium. Their legacy and sins that define the current state of Aevium are the backdrop to Rejuvenation’s story, but by Chapter 15 even the Blakeorys’ regime had collapsed.

So what is left? In Rejuvenation what is the right way to be a family? To get a better understanding of Janichroma’s authorial intent I decided to ask him personally.

You can find the original Tumblr post here.

Due to the size this tumblr post had to be split into two screenshots. You can find the original Tumblr post here.

The main takeaways from these answers is that: 

1. Jan didn’t plan all of these themes, instead they occurred naturally.

2. Family dynamics are used to explore neglect, love and sacrifice through the important ties characters have to each other. 

In this story many characters yearn for close, loving bonds with others as though it’s a psychological need. ‘Family’ or ‘friends’ are the words used to name people who satisfy that need in a character’s life. In some important moments characters call each other family even when they aren’t related. In Chapter 6 Nimpossible Predicament there’s an extended scene where the player, Aelita, Saki, Valarie, Adam and Delpha all try to comfort Melia after she expresses how she feels overwhelmed by the scale of the threat they’re facing and how she’s inadequate to deal with it. This is when Melia says “I just want you guys to know that each and every one of you feels like family to me.” Again in Chapter 13 Conflicting Ren-union when Melia is about to participate in a tournament in Grand Dream Stadium she tells Erin about how she’s going to fight for “the family name”. She does not refer to the name ‘Jenner’ she’s referring to her found family of friends who don’t actually share a name. The search for a place where she feels she belongs, or a ‘family’ is a notable feature of Melia’s character arc. She didn’t know it when she was speaking to Erin in that scene, but Erin is actually her sister. One of the friends she called family actually was. Yet she doesn’t put Erin above her other friends, by .karmafiles the Xen Raid Squad might as well be her family. It consists of her three siblings, her closest friends and their allies Alexandra and Damien of the Aevium League. It is very likely that the protagonist, who likewise only had one now dead parent, feels the same way. The player character’s entire journey was driven by love and a desire for belonging in the world, for the entire first act they are fighting to rescue their mother. For every arc in Act 2 they are fighting for one or more friends. In many ways the player and Melia are two sides of the same coin, a subject that’s worth its own essay, but for now I’ll leave you with this:

The young Interceptor stood in the otherworldly plane of Zeight that simultaneously felt small and secure yet infinite and mysterious. They watched the memory of Crescent bringing her friend back from the dead, the friend who looked just like themself. They saw Crescent give Nancy her mandate. Be loving. Protect them. When the time comes, die for them. A part of them had refused to acknowledge the truth, so before showing them that vision Nancy had stated it plainly. “I thought you would think less of me if I did tell you. But I’m sure it’s painfully obvious that we are not related in any way.”

“...I know.” They had replied. It wasn’t fair. Why couldn’t they have childhood? Why couldn’t they remember a time in their life when it felt okay to be weak, okay to rely on their mother for protection? Even when they stared death in the face and defied that tyrant by pushing back their Legendary Pokémon, they still felt weak. They still felt weak because it wasn’t enough to stop their mother from being killed right afterwards. Their friend Melia had lost her parent too, but at least she still had memories of a childhood with him. To the young Interceptor the earliest time they spent with their mother was just a blur in their mind suddenly cut into painful clarity by that terrifying attack which tore her away from them. Melia and Erin got to learn that they were sisters all along and just didn’t know it. The young Interceptor gets to learn that their mother was just a black box that was forced to love them. 

No. They know that’s not true. Nancy is here, their mother loves them and it wasn’t fake or forced. They felt it. They lived with her and loved her, the experience being short didn’t make it any less precious. As they continued to watch the vision, as they continued to find themself gradually getting one step closer to learning the full truth of their own birth, they realise that they don’t care if it wasn’t real. They don’t even care if one day they learn that THEY aren’t real. No matter what, they are Nancy’s child, and she’s their mother.

Nancy told them to start a new life with friends, opportunities and love. Even as they feel the cruel eye of fate upon them, demanding pain, demanding sacrifice, the young Interceptor persists. They can persist because both the resolve of Nancy and the compassion of a kind Terajuma woman called Tesla has inspired them.