Nationally Licensed Sparklemonger

Meant to do this earlier in the week but work schedule got in the way

I've been working on Shiroma for a while! Work's been rough so I kept having to work on this in exhausted one-hour bursts. Then got sidetracked by petsites (again) but I remembered to post her.

I've always been the type of person who avoids cheats in video games, especially when you had to buy a whole separate device to work them. Ultimately I don't care what other people do but there used to be a lot of kids on the playground who bragged about their GameShark antics like they actually accomplished something, and it always rubbed me the wrong way as a kid. That's why it's astounding that it took me so long to realize that Shiroma was a hacked Mew. Some kid, I don't even remember his face, was offering to give the kids in class free Mews and I said yes. We were an astonishingly trusting 6th grade class who apparently all brought our Game Boys to school at once and I don't even remember why. I was off talking to someone else and the kid handed me my stuff back with a Mew in battle for me to catch. I really should have figured out what was happening, and also shouldn't have let someone walk away with my Game Boy with the Pokemon cartridge in it. It's a miracle nothing was stolen that day.

Anyways that kid was clearly trying to give everyone a gift, but...having a fake Pokemon was deeply embarassing once I realized it. She's not a real Mew. I know it's unreasonable for any kid to have gotten a real one back in the day, but I did have the real Surfing Pikachu, it's not impossible. If I had known, I would've said no thanks to the GameShark kid. But I had her, and she was an important part of my team. I remember her strongly after all this time, so clearly she was special to me.

In my Virtual Console 3DS Yellow run she's been reincarnated as a Clefairy because that's close enough. It's pink, it has cat ears, it learns a lot of TMs, there we go. And this gave me a unique opportunity to do something weird with a cross-species design. Mew Shiroma is an almost plastic-looking rail-thin magical girl, but Clefairy Shiroma seems happier and more alive. And Clefable Shiroma is a wholly new person, but with her past held close because she's not ashamed.

In addition to a bullshit backstory, Shiroma's a whole reference character. My first Playstation game was Chocobo's Dungeon 2 and I really liked Shiroma, the white mage girl. I think it's just that there were only a few named characters in that game and the human girl is of course the most relatable. Anyways she's pink and Mew is pink so my Shiroma is pink. I had a lot of fun taking the design for her and adapting it into a Mew and a Clefairy, and then steering away to make Clefable Shiroma more of her own character. I mean, she's still definitely a Final Fantasy white mage but she's not a clone.

I actually did have a Nintendo Power surfing Pikachu! My mom's hobby was entering sweepstakes and she'd enter all the ones in the magazines we read. Apparently when she won the Pikachu, she bought Yellow and had my little brother get it to the point that you can do trades (going up to Viridian and back, getting the Pokedex). They mailed the cartridge in and it came back with PIKCHU on it. That was my birthday present in April the next year.

So anyways, PIKCHU is a little jerk. As a traded Pokemon he basically just never listened to me. We were in a constant cycle of disobedience, then I'd get a badge, then he'd level up past that badge's obedience limit, then I'd have to get the next badge. But of course he never left my party. I went through the whole game with two Pikachu that never left the party and never evolved.

Josh caught a new PIKCHU for me in VC Red on his own 3ds to trade to me in VC Yellow on mine. So PIKCHU is resurrected with all his attitude problems intact. If anything he's more surly and unmanageable because he doesn't have Surf anymore. He's maintained an enormous ego even though he's been stripped of the things that made him special, and that has been extremely funny for me. Deep down he's very frustrated but he's been a jackass for so long that he can't just say it. He is NOT a stupid normie Pikachu and he does NOT want headpats and a snack to comfort him when he's sad. He will NOT be friends with Satoshi, who is a loser, and he will NOT stop spamming Double Team when I told him to use Thunderbolt.

I realized while doing my virtual console Yellow playthrough that 'Pikachu' was a nebulous concept in the 90s. It's like Yoshi. They're clearly a species and nobody ever denies that but there's always the One Individual whose name is the species name and they're everywhere.

The Pikachu in Yellow is obviously Ash's Pikachu. But it's kind of unspoken that the Pikachu in Hey You! Pikachu is also that Pikachu, but not. Same design and personality, even if it's clearly just some other random Pikachu. Same with the Pikachu from the Pokemon Pikachu handheld virtual pet thingies. Same with the Pikachu in Smash, until the Pikachu Libre alt shows up in Ultimate. Logically they can't all be the same guy but it was understood that all Pikachus are Pikachu unless you actively created your own personality for yours.

That's what really pushed me to lean into the idea I had started, that my Yellow gijinkas were going to be fusion designs with other games from my childhood. Link is ALSO a pointy-eared Nintendo mascot who keeps showing up in illogical iterations that are clearly separate guys and yet all the same guy. He's simultaneously an audience surrogate that you relate to when you navigate a fantastical world, and a cute little gremlin you can just look at.

So the angle I'm going with in Satoshi is that he's experiencing some distress at the idea that he's a copy of someone else. Additionally there are a lot of extra systems and restrictions in Yellow that really bind that starter Pikachu to the game. He doesn't like the idea that he belongs to the game world, unlike every other Pokemon in my party who are personal companions to me specifically. But then again, his desire to be seen as one of MY little guys is at odds with his desire to be seen as his own fully realized person. He's kind of like Air Bud taking the newspaper away from the clown. He's declared his independence but he's still a dog.