The completely NOT-OBLIGATORY Introduction Thread

Yeah, welcome! We need all the new members we can get and you seem cool.

Hi, you might remember me! I've been busy with my game design course at my university and my job. Sorry I haven't been on for a while! 

Heh, true!  I need to get get on this site more often!

Now I can add this site to the ever-growing list of places my purple hide can be found.

I am Ryusei Taylor, a longtime fan of Pokemon, a franchise I'm surprised hasn't branded me a traitor when I spent my later elementary schools on Digimon instead. Not that I regret that, mind you. But despite that, I still held onto Pokemon, up until Kids WB let of of the show. But now that the Internet is a widely available thing, I can finally catch up on what I missed, in both English and Japanese.

Oh, that reminds me: I'm a kind of fan that's rare to see online (and to be honest, a type of fan I'd like to see more of); a dub lover (get your mind outta the gutter). Now, that doesn't mean I exclusively watch it. It just means I like it better than the original Japanese version. Why is that? Well, if by some miracle I get to write an episode guide (personally, I have my eyes on the Pokeball factory episode, but I'll be fine if my dibs aren't the first), I'll reveal why. Until then, wait.

I'm also currently writing a PMD fanfic (just like many thousands already have) on another site.

And that concludes my introduction.

Well welcome.

Hello, folks! (Assuming anyone reads this, since it looks like I'm the first new bloke here since last year...!)

I have been having something of a Pokémon resurgeance of late. While I have never stopped playing the games (at a glacial rate!), the last time I watched the show was Advanced Battle. The voice-cast change put me off, and missed the entireity of Diamond & Pearl, and the few episodes of Best Wishes I caught never seemed to gel with me.

And them a month or so ago, I caught some clips of XY on yuotube and went "when the hell did Pokémon get that awesome again!" I watched two episodes online and trhen immediately ordered the whole series. I then started going back and watching the other series online, starting with DP, which, as I say I had missed the first time around.

Partway through doing that, on a whim, I did a google search for reviews of Solid as a Solrock (one of my personal favourite moments of the best, most awesome and hilarious "what the actual fuckery" in the entire series - and discovered this site. And the review of that episode had me in tears of laughter.

Since then, as I have gone through all of DP (which I very much enjoyed), dropped back to Battle Frontier (eeh...) and am now catching up on BW (it has its moments), after each episode, I've been back to read the reviews here in lockstep. (And you have already stained me forever, since now I can't unthink Dawn/Zoey/Candice...!)

I am also - at a more sedate pace than the online stuff - going through XY on DVD (and it is... probably the most amazing beautiful and awesome show I've seen in a long, long while - albeit I'm not exactly an anime buff). But, horror of horrors, I am now one episode shy of the point where the main guides end! I gather that guides are still being written on the forums, but what I'm not clear on is if there a) a central link location and/or b) whether all the episodes have been done yet. So, I figured I may as well pop my head into the community proper and ask them as what knows if they could oblige me!

(On that first issue, I would be prepared, if links can be pointed out, to attempt to compile a thread with links; if I'm going to be going to and reading all of them anyway, may as well make myself useful, right!)

Also, Pikachu is Best Pokémon (always, though there's some stiff competition!) and Ash is Best Trainer.

(I am now convinced his full name is Ash Motherfucking Ketchum and I am so glad XY seems to agree with me...)

(And bugger what the dub said about Ash being 10 in BW, that's physically impossible in day count alone - for rare occasion I'mma go with the original Japanese on this one; and in XY he really does look and feel like he's sixteen like he should be!)

I will now cause everyone on the site to hate me when I say I'm not so much a fan of Team Rocket. Well, James I have time for, to be fair, but Jessie I always found grating (the voice especially - no denigration to either voice actress (to their credit, I can barely tell the difference nowadays anyway), it's the character's voice that wears on me.)

That said, I was astonished to find myself quite unexpectedly finding their early BW appearances entirely jarring. I was expcting to find competant!Team Rocket more interesting... But even once they got back more towards character (after the never-aired twoi-parter dammit), not having them blasting off each appearance feels... Wrong. (Though I do appreciate them much more when used sparingly and not the sole source of trouble for an episode.)


As you can tell, I blather a lot.

Interesting, since I was informed that in the Japanese version it said he was 15.

It's bollocks anyway, of course, since sheer dint of the fact Pokémon episodes take place over at least one and often two days mean it is categorically impossible, even if you counted only the days in the show, there'd be way more than 365. (Pokémon is... a bit extensive to go through the entire series and count up the number of days, and implied days from dialogue it actually has... (I did it (for my sins) once with My Little Pony Friendship is Magic (because I didn't believe that the first five season took place in under a year, but that was actually within the projected estimated time limits...)) I'm not quite bloody minded enough to do it for Pokémon and actually go and attempt to count with hundreds of episodes I'd have to watch again!

And it's not like the show gets things wrong all the time. While DP, I think only made ONE type error (and actually three times was correct when I was wrong), BW is a lot more lax, with the amount of shadowballs being fired at should-be-totally-immune normal types being the most glaring error. And let's not forget that classis "Arbok evolves into Seviper," which I am not sure can be entirely placed at the feet of the dub translation...

(XY, fortuantely, seems to have ignored the idiotic bits of BW and gone with "Ash is older now," if only through implication and obvious physical growth.)



I had a quick look through the forum guides, but without cross-referencing, for a newcomer, it's not clear what episodes have guides at what don't (and I could only seem to go back four pages). I couldn't, for example, see anything pertaining to the episodes immediately post-Mega-Mega Meowth Madness! A master listing would be helpful (I suspect to everyone, if not all the episodes have guides!) As I say, I'd be prepared to help compile one myself if necessary.



I went into BW with very low expectations (I was half-convinced it was going to be excruciating) but as it happens, it's actually not too bad when binged (I'm watching, like three to nine episodes per day!). So, I will stick through it; it has enough moments to be worthwhile. I mean, it's definitely not the best of the series, but, watching it in context, it's not as bad as I feared. (Unless it gets worse later on!)

The contrast between BW and XY is staggeringly sharp though.