#ncpm

It's easier to deal with companions Cori never mentioned due to the timeframe in which she generally left the Pokemon fandom in this AU where I have to speculate what she'd decide to do with them and thus have a great degree of artistic license.

It's also easy to deal with characters she significantly touched (both among her favorite characters and her... not favorite characters) because I know how to handle them, partially because I have plenty of references to Cori's dislike of them.

Unfortunately, this leaves me in a sticky situation with May. Because of this (note that Cori had a strong preference for Japanese names for Hoenn-era proper nouns):

This implies that May is friendly with Jessie, James, Meowth, Gary and other friends, and is explicitly unfriendly with Ash, even beating him up.

This strikes me as... very unlike the May we know. She's capable of getting mad of course, but I don't think we've ever seen her beat anyone up.

So I'm not sure how to reconcile it. Maybe she was having a bad day?

Not that it really matters as I'm going to go the same route that guardians_song went and have Ash never go to Hoenn, so May won't meet Ash for many years in my timeline. They also decided to make Ash closer to canon.