At The Food Court is a Hate Fic by guardians_song, written as a response to The Prodigal Parents, a Pokémon: The Series fanfic by Cori Falls. In that fanfiction, Ash is left publicly humiliated after a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown, having lost both his mind and his trainer's license and being shown decades later as a Future Loser 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.
The story can be read on the author's old LiveJournal account here
, with the second part here.
Provides examples of the following:
- Adaptational Jerkass: Canon Gary was a Jerk with a Heart of Gold 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 Biff Tannen Expy. This Gary is a hellion who got Tracey fired from his job For the Evulz and has connections with Team Rocket.
- Adaptational Sexuality: Tracey 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 Take That! to Cori’s homophobia.
- Adaptational Sympathy: The original story upon which this one was based considers Ash to be deserving of what he got. This story treats him the way any twelve-year-old who was beaten so badly he suffered permanent brain damage would be treated - as a tragic figure worthy of sympathy.
- Adaptation Expansion: Zig-Zagged. The food court is only one, unimportant scene in The Prodigal Parents, whose plot is about the 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 Rhys visit Ash after the food-court scene and try to help him by having a mock Pokémon battle with plush toys, which obviously is not even hinted at in the original fanfiction.
- Armed with Canon: Unlike in Cori's stories, Tracey wasn't really a Fat Bastard and sexist prick. Instead, he had a thyroid condition that made him Not Himself, and he only lost his job because Gary was a psychopath and framed him for destroying Oak's computers. Once Tracey got treatment for his illness, he returned to how the actual canon always portrayed him.
- Audience Surrogate: Rhys, who prompts Tracey to explain to him (and thus, the audience) what happened to Ash all those years ago.
- Beware the Silly Ones: Team Rocket's general incompetence caused Ash to dismiss them completely as threats, which cost him dearly.
- Big Eater: Ash regularly eats ten Mighty Kids Meals and an unspecified number of McFlurries for a single meal.
- Bittersweet Ending: Ash is permanently, irrecoverably insane, and not even Rhys's mock Pokémon battle could get through to him, but at least the monsters who did this to him are arrested at the very end.
- Cannot Tell Fiction from Reality: Ash thinks stuffed animals are living, breathing Pokémon, that he is still on a Pokémon journey, that fast-food mascots are either Team Rocket or undiscovered Pokémon, and that Jessie and James's children are miniature versions of them. These are all part of his delusions.
- Deconstruction Fic: The whole story is a Take That! to the fanfiction that it was spun off from, showing that Ash was once a normal kid whose life was ruined by criminals who beat him up so severely, he had to be hospitalized, and permanently regressed to the cognitive level of a kindergartener due to massive brain damage. It doesn't shy away from showing how horrible a fate Ash suffers and that no one could possibly inflict that on someone and remain sympathetic.
- Detrimental Determination: It's noted that after countless attempts to steal Pikachu, Jessie and James really should have given up.
- Distant Finale: Takes place fifteen years after the anime.
- Dying Moment of Awesome: Ash's father bought his coworkers just enough time to evacuate the power plant they worked in during a meltdown, but at the cost of his life. It is unclear how much the loss of his father affected Ash, since he was a baby at the time. However, Team Rocket spreads Malicious Slander about his death.
- Feeling Oppressed by Their Existence: It is made abundantly clear that Jessie and James felt this way about Ash during Cori's "What You Didn't See" series, being convinced that Ash ruined their lives for having the temerity to not just hand over his Pikachu without a fight.
- Fix Fic: Though it doesn't fix Ash's predicament, it nonetheless acts as this to Cori Falls's fanfiction-universe, since the story ends with Jessie and James being arrested for their crimes as Team Rocket agents and for what they did to Ash.
- Freak Out: After numerous horrible beatings delivered on a regular basis, Ash completely snapped after James told him he was a Pikachu, and came to actually believe it. This started a dissociative delusion from which he never recovered.
- Good Cannot Comprehend Evil: It's clear that despite Jessie and James thinking (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 Pokémon 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.
- Harmful to Minors: 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, making him unprepared for dealing with a friend being brutally assaulted.
- Heroic Sacrifice: Ash's father laid down his life so that the rest of his research team could escape a power plant meltdown.
- Hidden Depths: Ash may have lost his sanity, but he is still as good a strategist as ever. Unfortunately, he is no longer in any position to have real Pokémon battles.
- Hope Spot: Ash has a brief moment of lucidity when he remembers that he wanted to travel to Hoenn after finishing up in Johto. Unfortunately, it's not enough to fully break him out of his insanity.
- "I Know You Are in There Somewhere" Fight: Rhys tries to break Ash out of his madness by challenging him to a Pokémon battle, using stuffed toys instead of real Pokémon because Ash thinks they're real. Both Tracey and Delia tell him it won't work. It doesn't.
- I Need a Freaking Drink: Rhys assumes that Delia feels this way, since she has to care for her adult son who has become a Psychopathic Manchild.
- Insane Equals Violent: 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, Ash still enjoys Pokémon battles and tries to be as nice as he can under the circumstances, thoroughly subverting the trope.
- In the Blood: Played with. Ash's father suffered from ADHD and psychosis, but eventually got effective treatment and lived a normal life before he died a hero. Ash did not directly inherit his father's madness, but he did inherit a genetic predisposition to it that would have gone undetected if it hadn't been for the trauma of being brutally assaulted by Team Rocket. This made him develop a far worse disorder than anything his father suffered.
- It's All My Fault: Brock and Misty blame themselves for not noticing Ash's mental deterioration until it was too late to fix it, and Tracey blames himself for not being there at all.
- Karma Houdini Warranty: For fifteen years, Team Rocket got away with beating up a kid so bad that he became severely developmentally disabled, but thanks to Tracey actually paying attention to what Delia says earlier, and thanks to Team Rocket not hiding any evidence of what they did, they get arrested and sent to jail at the end, and are implied to get life sentences.
- Kick the Dog: 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 Pokémon 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. It was just to be a dick.
- Kid Hero: Discussed. It's noted that Ash was twelve, Misty fourteen, and Brock seventeen at the time of the incident - none of them had enough life experience to recognize the warning signs of Ash's mental deterioration or react appropriately until it was far too late for him.
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Rhys describes Ash's meltdown at McDonalds as "like some sort of horrible parody of entitled fans at a convention or irate creeps complaining they couldn't get dates". Little does he know that Ash's personality has been deliberately twisted to provoke just this sort of association in the readership.
- Limited Wardrobe: Subverted. Ash has trouble recognizing Tracey as an adult because Tracey isn't wearing the headband and shorts he wore during their Pokémon journey, and Tracey has to claim they're in the wash to convince him.
- Logical Fallacies: 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 the Trio beating him within an inch of his life and inflicting permanent brain damage.
- Made of Iron: Actually Played for Horror. Ash got an MRI scan after his psychotic break, and the test showed that he suffered ubiquitous hematomas and inflammation of the brain, and large parts of his brain were straight-up dead from blunt-force trauma. The doctors had no idea how he was even still alive, never mind able to walk, speak, and put up a Mask of Sanity, 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 Cerebus Retcon of Ash being able to survive Pikachu's and Charizard's attacks in canon. Either way, the damage is so great that his original personality and maturity cannot be recovered.
- Manchild: 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, 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 barely disciplined five-year-old. Ash is now 27 and throws temper tantrums and screaming fits when he doesn't get his way.
- Mr. Exposition: The story starts with Tracey 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 are not heroes, but monsters.
- Mundane Utility:
- Sabrina's psychic powers were used to conduct mental therapy on Ash after the incident.
- Jigglypuff are used as therapy Pokémon for the completely psychotic, as they can sedate the patient in an emergency.
- No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: Ash suffered this at Team Rocket's hands, getting broken bones and bleeding all over, not to mention irreversible brain damage. But there isn't enough evidence to convict them since he lost all memory of the event and they had thrown him into the spring from the fourth movie that healed all his injuries (which is strongly implied that they only did specifically to get rid of the evidence). Later on, it's mentioned that James beat him with brass knuckles.
- Not Hyperbole: Tracey mentions offhand that Jessie and James tried more than fifty times to steal Ash's Pikachu. Rhys thinks he must be exaggerating, but Tracey confirms that he is dead serious.
- Not-So-Harmless Villain: For the first two years of Ash's journey, Team Rocket were not remotely threatening. Then they cornered him and beat him senseless.
- Police Are Useless: Ash did indeed report Jessie and James to practically every Officer Jenny in the region. It didn't help. Because of this, Tracey no longer trusts in the police to accomplish anything.
- Recursive Fanfiction: Based on an earlier fanfiction called The Prodigal Parents, written more than a decade earlier.
- Room Full of Crazy: Every inch of Ash's bedroom walls is covered with Pokémon 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 Pokémon plushies, which Ash thinks are real Pokémon. The author even calls it a Room Full of Crazy in the comments—and says that this is the best-case scenario.
- Sanity Slippage: Ash's mental deterioration is recounted second-hand by Tracey. After the first beating, Misty and Brock noticed that he was becoming increasingly impulsive and violent, but the last straw was when James convinced him he was a Pikachu, sending him into a fugue state from which he never fully recovered.
- Sophisticated as Hell: The narration remarks on the contrast of Ash calling Team Rocket "a bunch of evil bastards" when the rest of his dialogue is what a five-year-old would say. This is, of course, a Take That! at Cori's Obligatory Swearing in her stories.
- Suddenly Shouting: Ash does this on a regular basis now that he has regressed to a kindergartener's intelligence and maturity.
- Through the Eyes of Madness: The first part of the epilogue is in Ash's perspective. He thinks he really beat the "Hoenn champion" Rhys in a Pokémon 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.
- Unfortunate Names: Gary's wife is named Arwen, which the narration mocks.
- We Used to Be Friends: Downplayed by Misty and Brock, who drifted apart from Ash after it became clear that he was never going to recover from what happened. However, they still remember him as fondly as they can under the circumstances, and Misty's first instinct when learning Team Rocket has finally been arrested is to call Ash and tell him the good news, only changing her mind because he wouldn't be able to comprehend it.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: What became of Ash's Pokémon beyond Professor Oak taking custody of them is never explained. The author raises a couple of possibilities for Pikachu in particular in the comments: either waiting patiently in a Poké Ball for his master to return, or being released back into the wild to start a family with the Pikachu herd from "Pikachu's Goodbye" (although he still spends some nights reminiscing about his beloved partner with a melancholy look on his face).
- When All You Have Is a Hammer…: In the Cori-verse, Ash's Pikachu only ever knew Thundershock. This isn't the case in actual canon even in Kanto, so this story lampshades the oddity.
- Would Hurt a Child: Jessie and James in spades. Ash was only twelve when they beat him up so bad he suffered irreversible damage.
