History Fanfic / AtTheFoodCourt

* AdaptationalJerkass: Canon Gary was a JerkWithAHeartOfGold who mellowed out over the years. Even in Cori's universe, Gary is consistently mature and rational (other than, like everyone else, hating Ash) and becomes a successful, functioning adult who ''isn't'' secretly a [[Film/BackToTheFuture Biff Tannen]] {{Expy}}. This Gary is a hellion who got Tracey fired from his job ForTheEvulz and has connections with Team Rocket.

* AdaptationalJerkass: Canon Gary was a JerkWithAHeartOfGold who mellowed out over the years. This Gary is a hellion who got Tracey fired from his job ForTheEvulz and has connections with Team Rocket.

''At The Food Court'' is a HateFic by guardians_song, [[RecursiveFanfiction written as a response to]] ''The Prodigal Parents'', a ''Anime/PokemonTheSeries'' fanfic by Cori Falls. In that fanfiction, Ash is left publicly humiliated after a NoHoldsBarredBeatdown, having lost both his mind and his trainer's license and being shown decades later as a FutureLoser who cannot live on his own without parental assistance. In ''At The Food Court'', the same events are retold from an outside, third-party perspective, and Ash is shown far more sympathetically while Team Rocket, the heroes of ''The Prodigal Parents'', are now the ones taking a villainous role.

* PsychopathicManchild: Played for tragedy. After having a dissociative episode in which he thought he was a Pikachu, Ash was eventually brought out of it through heavy-duty psychic therapy. Unfortunately, [[CameBackWrong his original personality was broken beyond repair]], and he lost his ability to function on his own and regressed to the maturity of a five-year-old, specifically, a [[SpoiledBrat barely disciplined five-year-old]]. Ash is now 27 and throws temper tantrums and screaming fits when he doesn't get his way.

* AdaptationExpansion: ZigZagged. The food court is only one, unimportant scene in ''The Prodigal Parents'', whose plot is about the [[OriginalCharacter children of Jessie and James]] getting to know their grandparents, and goes on for several chapters and several days that aren't depicted in this story. However, Tracey and [[OriginalCharacter Rhys]] visit Ash after the food-court scene and [[spoiler:try to help him by having a mock Pokemon battle with plush toys]], which obviously is not even hinted at in the original fanfiction.

* BittersweetEnding: Ash is permanently, irrecoverably insane, and not even [[spoiler:Rhys's mock Pokemon battle]] could get through to him, but at least [[spoiler:the monsters who did this to him are arrested at the very end]].
* CannotTellFictionFromReality: Ash thinks stuffed animals are living, breathing Pokemon, that he is still on a Pokemon journey, that fast-food mascots are either Team Rocket or undiscovered Pokemon, and that Jessie and James's children are miniature versions of them. These are all part of his delusions.

* GoodCannotComprehendEvil: It's clear that despite Jessie and James thinking [[UnreliableNarrator (and insisting)]] Ash has no redeeming qualities that he was just a kind and naive kid before they beat it out of him. Ash assumes that Team Rocket saved him from a Pokemon attack and healed him in the spring, and are fundamentally good people deep down. Even after Brock mentions the very strong evidence that it was Team Rocket themselves who beat him horribly, Ash refuses to believe it.

* HiddenDepths: Ash may have lost his sanity, but [[spoiler:he is still as good a strategist as ever. Unfortunately, he is no longer in any position to have real Pokemon battles]].
* IKnowYouAreInThereSomewhereFight: Rhys tries to break Ash out of his madness by [[spoiler:challenging him to a Pokemon battle, using stuffed toys instead of real Pokemon because Ash thinks they're real]]. Both Tracey and Delia tell him it won't work. [[spoiler:It doesn't]].

* InsaneEqualsViolent: Rhys initially worries that Ash might get violent if he doesn't get what he wants, before hearing Ash's backstory and learning that that is not the case. In fact, [[spoiler:Ash still enjoys Pokemon battles and tries to be as nice as he can under the circumstances]], thoroughly subverting the trope.

* KickTheDog: During Ash's hearing to determine whether he is still legally competent, Team Rocket replaced his trainer license with a forgery so obvious that every single word on it is spelled wrong. Not to mention that Giovanni, who knew what his underlings had done, lied to the Pokemon League that Ash didn't legitimately earn half his Kanto badges ''while Ash is in a fugue state''. And none of this affected the League's decision in any way, since Ash was already clearly catatonic. [[KickThemWhileTheyAreDown It was just to be a dick.]]

* MadeOfIron: Actually PlayedForHorror. Ash got an MRI scan after [[spoiler:his psychotic break]], and the test showed that [[NormallyIWouldBeDeadNow he suffered ubiquitous hematomas and inflammation of the brain, and large parts of his brain were]] ''[[WhoEvenNeedsABrain straight-up dead]]'' from blunt-force trauma. The doctors had no idea how he was even still alive, since the injuries would normally have been enough to kill him several times over. It is not clear whether the healing spring let him survive or whether this is a CerebusRetcon of Ash being able to survive Pikachu's and Charizard's attacks in canon. Either way, the damage is so great that [[spoiler:his original personality and maturity cannot be recovered]].

* MundaneUtility: Jigglypuff are used as therapy Pokemon for the completely psychotic, as they can sedate the patient in an emergency.

* RoomFullOfCrazy: Every inch of Ash's bedroom walls is covered with Pokemon posters, and every human in the photos is either Brock or Misty, showing that he still remembers them. And the floor is full of boxes overflowing with Pokemon plushies, which Ash thinks are real Pokemon. The author even [[LampshadeHanging calls it a Room Full of Crazy]] in the comments--and says that this is the best-case scenario.
* SanitySlippage: Ash's mental deterioration is recounted second-hand by Tracey.

* ThroughTheEyesOfMadness: The first part of the epilogue is in Ash's perspective. He thinks he really [[spoiler:beat the "Hoenn champion" Rhys in a Pokemon battle]] and, while he is aware that Pikachu has been silent for years, he doesn't know that that's because his "Pikachu" is a stuffed toy.

* PsychopathicManchild: After having a dissociative episode in which he thought he was a Pikachu, Ash was eventually brought out of it through heavy-duty psychic therapy. Unfortunately, [[CameBackWrong his original personality was broken beyond repair]], and he lost his ability to function on his own and regressed to the maturity of a five-year-old, specifically, a [[SpoiledBrat barely disciplined five-year-old]]. Ash is now 27 and throws temper tantrums and screaming fits when he doesn't get his way.

* AdaptationExpansion: ZigZagged. The food court is only one, unimportant scene in ''The Prodigal Parents'', whose plot is about the [[OriginalCharacter children of Jessie and James]] getting to know their grandparents, and goes on for several chapters and several days that aren't depicted in this story. However, Tracy and [[OriginalCharacter Rhys]] visit Ash after the food-court scene and [[spoiler:try to help him by having a mock Pokemon battle with plush toys]], which obviously is not even hinted at in the original fanfiction.
* AdaptationalSexuality: Tracy has a male partner in this, when he was depicted as straight by Cori. The author notes state that this was mainly done as a TakeThat to Cori’s homophobia.
* ArmedWithCanon: Unlike in Cori's stories, Tracy wasn't really a FatBastard and sexist prick. Instead, he had a thyroid condition that made him NotHimself, and he only lost his job because [[TeensAreMonsters Gary]] was a psychopath and framed him for destroying Oak's computers. Once Tracy got treatment for his illness, he returned to how the actual canon always portrayed him.
* AudienceSurrogate: Rhys, who prompts Tracey to explain to him (and thus, the audience) what happened to Ash all those years ago.

* IKnowYouAreInThereSomewhereFight: Rhys tries to break Ash out of his madness by [[spoiler:challenging him to a Pokemon battle, using stuffed toys instead of real Pokemon because Ash thinks they're real]]. Both Tracy and Delia tell him it won't work. [[spoiler:It doesn't]].

* ItsAllMyFault: Brock and Misty blame themselves for not noticing Ash's mental deterioration until it was too late to fix it, and Tracy blames himself for not being there at all.
* KarmaHoudiniWarranty: For fifteen years, Team Rocket got away with beating up a kid so bad that he became severely developmentally disabled, but thanks to Tracy [[ChekhovsGun actually paying attention to what Delia says earlier]], and thanks to Team Rocket [[HoistByHisOwnPetard not hiding any evidence of what they did]], [[spoiler:they get arrested and sent to jail at the end, and are implied to get life sentences]].

* MrExposition: The story starts with Tracy summarizing Cori Falls's fanfiction, letting Rhys know who Ash is and how he got into his sorry state. The ''real'' purpose of the scene is to establish that Jessie and James [[MoralMyopia are not heroes, but monsters]].

* NotHyperbole: Tracy mentions offhand that Jessie and James tried more than fifty times to steal Ash's Pikachu. Rhys thinks he must be exaggerating, but Tracy confirms that he is dead serious.

* PoliceAreUseless: Ash did indeed report Jessie and James to practically every Officer Jenny in the region. [[ForegoneConclusion It didn't help.]] Because of this, [[DeconstructedTrope Tracy no longer trusts in the police to accomplish anything]].

* WouldHurtAChild: Jessie and James '''in spades'''. Ash was only twelve when they [[spoiler:beat him up so bad he suffered irreversible damage]].

%%I am not sure quite how to write this description. The subject of this page is a Recursive Fanfiction, meaning that it is necessary for the readers to be aware of the original fanfiction the story is based on. If the opening paragraph is too harsh on Cori Falls, let me know and then we can try to rewrite it to be fairer. Please don't delete the page altogether, since "At the Food Court" is worth troping on its own merits.

In the early days of ''Anime/PokemonTheSeries'', there was a prolific fanfiction author called Cori Falls, who was obsessed with Team Rocket and wrote dozens of stories in which they were the main characters, [[AdaptationExpansion writing about what they did outside of their onscreen depiction]]. This started out all well and good, but slowly yet surely, she portrayed Ash Ketchum as [[RonTheDeathEater worse and worse]], out of a misguided belief that the writers were mistreating Team Rocket and letting Ash get away with everything. And in Cori's fanfiction, Team Rocket degenerated into her mouthpieces, eventually culminating in James and Meowth giving Ash a NoHoldsBarredBeatdown. Yet Cori was not done, and after that would portray Ash as a psychotic nutjob who would order his Pokemon to attack anyone with little provocation, before ultimately having a VillainousBreakdown, losing both his sanity and his trainer license. Ash is last seen decades later as a FutureLoser who cannot live on his own without parental assistance.

This severely troubled a reader called guardians_song.

She believed that Ash's fate in ''The Prodigal Parents'', the fanfiction in question, was absolutely horrifying and totally disproportionate to whatever he may have done, even more so since the narrative sides with those who [[ComeToGawk laugh at him in public]] and made him like that in the first place. So she decided to write what she called a [[DeconstructionFic spitefic]], retelling the story's events from an outside, third-party perspective. Then the characters meet Ash himself...

* HarmfulToMinors: In addition to what became of Ash, it's clear that the situation got so bad because Misty and Brock couldn't handle it either. The oldest of the party, Brock, was only seventeen, [[SurprisinglyRealisticOutcome making him unprepared for dealing with a friend being brutally assaulted]].

* GoodCannotComprehendEvil: It's clear that, despite Jessie and James thinking Ash has no redeeming qualities, he in fact was a kind and naive soul before his psychosis set in, who wrongly believed that everyone was fundamentally a good person deep down, because he assumes that Team Rocket saved him from a Pokemon attack and healed him in the spring, even after Brock mentions the very strong evidence that it was Team Rocket themselves who beat him horribly. Ash refuses to believe it.

* RoomFullOfCrazy: Every inch of Ash's bedroom walls is covered with Pokemon posters, and every human in the photos is either Brock or Misty, showing that he still remembers them. And the floor is full of boxes overflowing with Pokemon plushies, which Ash thinks are real Pokemon. The author even [[LampshadeHanging calls it a Room Full of Crazy]] in the comments--and says that this is the ''[[FridgeHorror best-case scenario]]''.

She believed that Ash's fate in ''The Prodigal Parents'', the fanfiction is question, was absolutely horrifying and totally disproportionate to whatever he may have done, even more so since the narrative sides with those who [[ComeToGawk laugh at him in public]] and made him like that in the first place. So she decided to write what she called a [[DeconstructionFic spitefic]], retelling the story's events from an outside, third-party perspective. Then the characters meet Ash himself...

* LogicalFallacies: The hasty generalization turned out to be Ash's downfall, since he assumed that, because he had always safely dealt with Team Rocket before, that they would never pose a threat in the future. So he was totally unprepared for [[spoiled:the Trio beating him within an inch of his life and inflicting permanent brain damage]].