Roleplay / We Have All Become Pokémon

...and, boy, were we not prepared for what was to come.

ITT: We Have All Become Pokémon is a Play By Post Game on the TV Tropes forums started by Caliburn Absolute EX on April 5th, 2017 and was ended in June 2022. The premise is simple: all the players play themselves (in theory), having become Pokémon through mysterious circumstances as they find themselves thrust into a strange new world without any humans.

The roleplay is set in the same universe as the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon series, albeit many years in the future, and takes place mostly in and around an island region called the Dejara Archipelago. Broad Strokes are taken with the mechanics and history of the Pokémon world, with the ground rule being "whatever works best for the roleplay format". While created by Caliburn, every player is encouraged to create their own NPCs, plots, and/or settings if they feel up to the task.

As of June 2022, this iteration of We Have All Become Pokémon has been ended due to insurmountable writing difficulties, and has since been rebooted as an off-site Discord RP.

Be warned, any and all spoilers below are completely unmarked.

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We Have All Become Pokémon provides examples of:

Tropes A-M

• Aborted Arc:
  • The post-vector portion of the Hoard, where Serris and the Pawniarmy "captured" the humanmons, was resolved somewhat unusually — it was actually meant to last more than two in-game minutes.
  • The music competition in Gleamscape was cut short, which also necessitated the postponement of the Right-Paw Killer (B-plot) resolution.
  • The Groudon/Moltres storyline, which was foreshadowed in Jani's dreams for almost two in-game weeks, has officially been cancelled. It sputtered beforehand with increasingly absurd excuses to shove the dreams aside in a given night only to be aborted in the face of having no real long-term plan for it and not wanting to waste a spot in the arc queue for something without much lasting impact.
  • During the Slak Rock arc, Marlon was briefly tasked with training a rambunctious young Meinfoo named Sho. This development ended the very next in-game day, with Marlon abruptly being relieved of his duty of training Sho by the same people who first assigned the task to him.
  • Slak Rock itself wound up becoming this due to its GM abandoning their own arc and going through a breakdown that ended with their removal from the RP, putting the answer of whom among the potential heirs eventually succeeded the deceased King Raleigh on indefinite hold. The main characters never really found the answers to other major questions raised during the arc, either, such as who poisoned and murdered the king, how the town reacted to the king's death, and who the vector of this town was. A side effect of this was the circumstances behind the reason the party went from Slak Rock to Foxfell, the location of the next arc, being changed completely; originally, at the end of the arc, Finley/Autumn (the kingdom's Rebellious Princess) was going to be abducted by three hired thugs from Foxfell and taken back to her kingdom, with the rest of the party setting out to find her and eventually ending up in Foxfell. This plot and the kidnappers were set up over the course of Slak Rock, but when the Slak Rock arc was cancelled, the circumstances for what took the party to Foxfell were changed completely, with Autumn voluntarily returning to Foxfell out of concern for her parents. As a result, the kidnappers and their plot was rendered moot and they disappeared from the arc entirely before reappearing at the beginning of the L'Arachel arc.
  • Jani and the sisters' becoming a Dugtrio has been pushed back indefinitely. Reasons include the author finding writing Digletts in general to be somewhat awkward due to having to constantly handwave (and reinforce the handwaving of) various mobility concerns, liking Sarah as a Purrloin, and concerns that the Diglett line is too alien or unrelatable for the reader to be usable for any serious interaction.
  • The Eluant Canyon sidequest ended up being quietly truncated and having its ending improvised/Hand Waved after going several months without posts^note (due to its GM going on a hard indefinite hiatus from the RP midway through and the rest of the players not knowing how to and/or not having sufficient remaining interest in resolving the plot), the players involved in the sidequest losing interest in the plot itself, and characters that players wanted to (or needed to, in some cases) use elsewhere being stuck in the hung-up plot.
  • There was a minor sub-plot during the L'Arachel arc involving Marlon having a series of visions that seemed to involve him being a Swampert (like Marsha, incidentally). Writing complications with said sub-plot forced it to be put on hold indefinitely before the main arc's end.
• Accidental Misnaming: Eliot does this twice to Marlon, first calling him Larson^note part of Marlon's player's handle, and an honest mistake on the part of Eliot's player and then Marvin.
• Accidental Pun: While pondering how easily he's gotten used to his new body, the Bug-type PJ says that the only thing that bugs him is how tiny he is. He then realises what he's said, and chuckles to himself.
• Adaptation Deviation: The mechanics of the Escape Orb may have been, depending on the game or how it's interpreted. In the original PMD games, the party ended up back at their base upon using one — and as such, Jani being hit by one caused the party to end up at Milly's house. Of course, one could also interpret that in the games, they simply appear outside the dungeon and wander home, unseen by the player.
  • Unlike the original games, Four-Moveslot Syndrome, levels, and PP are not present. The combat is more akin to the anime in terms of narrative.
• Aerith and Bob:
  • On one hand, you’ve got the likes of Eliot and PJ; on the other, there’s Spooks and Yalta.
  • As far as location names go, on the first island you have places and points of interest such as Orichalum, Hoard, Milklett, and...Madison Creek. It's implied, however, that this particular location was named by Andy.
• After the End: The story takes place centuries after human civilization has crumbled.
• All There in the Manual: Despite his various appearances, Perigo is never directly called "Perigo." He's always referred to as "the cat" or "the Delcatty."
• American Kirby Is Hardcore: Offscreen (but author confirmed) it was Jani's idea to use more hardcore graphics/language when marketing the Wonder Cart to the Dragon children of Hoard. Whether or not it works remains to be seen.
• Amusing Injuries: Hilarity Ensues after Nyquil sneezes out a SmokeScreen during the Ruffian arc.
• And I Must Scream: The Wonder Orbs arc sees Finley being turned into a mute Metapod via a Transfer Orb. Rendered unable to speak and barely able to move, it's clearly a very horrific experience for her. At first she's freed from a sudden Reset Orb, but then it happens to her again.
• Animal Talk: As with the Mystery Dungeon games, all the characters are able to understand each other despite how different each Pokémon species can get.
• Apocalyptic Log: The fate of the Hate Plague-stricken village of Milklett is revealed by a number of old newspaper headlines, starting with the murder of a few Miltanks and only going downhill from there.
• Applied Phlebotinum: The Viral Aggression has become a fountain from which any number of events foreign to the Pokémon extended universe have flowed.
• The Artifact: The fact that it's "We Have All Become Pokémon" in the first place, as many recent humanmons have not only not been affiliated with TV Tropes before becoming Pokémon, but there have now been humanmons who are implied if not outright stated to be from worlds and universes other than the "real world", such as Noriaki, Grigori, and Dieter. Additionally, some primary characters have even been native Pokémon rather than humans-turned Pokémon, such as Milo. Generally speaking, its roots as a simple ITT thread are gradually disappearing.
• Artistic License – Physics: The melting point for steel is around 1400-1500 degrees Celsius, which probably would have cooked Cam from her insides if her Flamethrower could reach those temperatures. This was purposely overlooked in the Fallo Ter sidestory so as not to pigeonhole the flame cutter's species to one of few who could plausibly pull it off, such as Magcargo or other lava-based mons.
• Asshole Victim: An ill-tempered (and heavily implied to be drunk) Tangrowth (whose name is eventually revealed to be Vince) at the Salty Spittoon in Silversand nearly force-feeds Goobert to his Victreebel friend over a petty slight on Goobert's part. He angrily storms out of the bar when Goobert escapes and the Victreebel prevents him from going after Goobert again, whereupon he promptly gets decked alongside a Conkeldurr bouncer by Lars.
• Author Avatar: Given the nature of the game, many of the player characters serve as representatives for the people who write for them.
• Being Watched: Neiti is introduced when the party becomes aware that she's staring at them, as is common for Natu.
• Big Bad Ensemble: Most of the RP's antagonists have little-to-no relation to each other, yet pose significant threats in their own rights and take turns being considered the threat of most prominence. As of the Hoard Arc, Belladonna, Chairgon Merqury, Kapitani Khmalidze, Perigo, L'Arachel and her associates, Winifred, Phoebe, Umberto, and Nyquil^*During the L'Arachel arc are all established antagonists.
• Big Little Sister: Mandy the Sylveon is thrice F’s height despite being their younger sister, due to the respective sizes of their species.
• Big, Screwed-Up Family: Merqury's family; Merqury himself is a paranoid, short-tempered, alcoholic wreck who has to be kept in check by his butler, his son Lars is an incredibly insecure Arrogant Kung-Fu Guy who doesn't get along with his father but nonetheless is desperate to impress him, and his mother is missing in circumstances implied to be a direct cause of Merqury's distrust in some way.
• Bland-Name Product: Zig-Zagged. There is a lengthy discussion on whether a certain forum was known as “TV Tropes” or “TV Quotes”. Brief mention is also made of websites called California Roll, OurTube, and Stumblr, as well as a show called Top Cogwheels.
• Blood from the Mouth: Subverted. When Eliot ends up puking up paint, he at first thinks it's blood, but it ends up being much like the paint from his tail when, ironically, he inadvertently makes the paint turn blood red.
• Body Horror:
  • Eliot's first attempt to use Transform after sketching the move initially results in him becoming an Tetsuo-esqse mass of writhing Pokémon body parts for an extended period of time before eventually subsiding into a large non-descript blob.
  • Whereas the magic L'Arachel uses to turn her victims into Combee is described as feeling almost painless (but still involving characters growing extra faces); the similar magic Phoebe the Gorebyss uses to turn her victims into Clamperls is described as being quite painful and involving characters' limbs, tails, and even heads wasting away as they shrink into Clamperl forms. (Though this is due to Phoebe having her own spin on this particular transformation that also involves a serum she invented.)
• The Bus Came Back:
  • Charizard and Osie are two Pokémon introduced early on, who then either leave the party or fade into the background due to the high posting speed. They both come back roughly forty pages after they disappear, Charizard having finished with his exploration, and Osie hand-waving it by saying they were quietly following behind the party.
  • Ocie would later disappear entirely again before showing up again as the L'Arachel arc was getting started well over 1000 pages later. Philly the Voltorb (now an Electrode) would do so as well after having disappeared following the Hoard arc.
  • Nyquil is another member of the main group who isn't seen for a while, but as the party goes to take out the ruffians in Woodfall Mansion as per Morbitesse's request, he is found stumbling around in the woods, having spent the night out in the wild on his own.
  • Sushi and Cyk are absent for a long period of time before popping back up during the events of day three.
  • Spooks reappeared after a long absence lasting over 100 pages.
• Butt-Monkey:
  • Next to nothing seems to go Eliot's way; he takes being separated from his old life the worst out of all the other cast members, every use of Sketch results in sudden and horrific Power Incontinence, the act of Sketching Transform seems to have had an adverse effect on his mental state, and his stats are very low since he's a Smeargle. One of the few good things to come his way was learning that he knew PJ and Rei from when they were humans.
  • Mila doesn't have it very well either. She experienced a Gender Bender in addition to becoming a Raichu, she has significant trouble controlling her electricity, and she's prone to making accidents, causing her to feel like a major liability to the group.
  • Goobert also has some poor luck. He winds up being mistaken for a looter and nearly imprisoned alongside Benji and some others, falls victim to multiple transformations beyond his initial transformation into a Goodra, nearly eaten by a Victreebel, worfed by Merq and Anastasia and has trouble controlling his powers at times, all within the first three weeks that the party is there. The main difference here is that he bounces back from these incidents fairly easily for the most part.
• Call-Back:
  • Teller tries to negotiate with Lars regarding "trade tariffs" making Orichalcum <—> Hoard trade strained. Lars later brings it up while ranting to Jani about his father's marriage to his work.
  • Goodra goo being a good lubricant is brought up when Hevea and Jani are seeking decent tire lubricant for their cart. This becomes relevant around 10000 posts later when Goobert is trying to make his Sludge Wave attack more palatable, to which Jani suggests Goobert use his own goo to make it sail on through. It worked.
• The Cameo: The humanmons' Dream Sequences often give way to brief appearances from characters and people from other media (for obvious reasons, this never happens in the waking world), with folks such as Bowser, Luigi, Waluigi, Darth Vader, Lex Luthor, Larry the Cucumber, Filthy Frank, and Segata Sanshiro being among characters and people who have appeared this way.
• Cats Are Mean: As of page 962, the two major cat characters, Sushi and Perigo, are both serial killers. Another minor one, Elm the Announcer, is a snarky, dispassionate The Spock type. While micro instances of "good" cats exist, this roleplay as a whole has not improved cats' terrible fictional reputation. Incidentally, the character of Tronne the Skitty was conceived to be an intentional aversion of this trope.
• Cerebus Rollercoaster: Although the RP is still noticeably Darker and Edgier than the canon Pokémon games, the dark tone isn't a constant and there are a fair share of lighter moments that balance out the darker moments. One moment the characters may be getting into heated arguments, caught up in Pokémon political affairs, or fighting for their lives against a VA vector, the next they may be getting their bodies swapped around, relaxing at the beach or a carnival, or taking part in a singing contest.
• Cerebus Syndrome: On the other hand, though, following Gleamscape, the RP saw four consecutive Darker and Edgier arcs in a row, with only a little levity between the four of them; one starting out fairly light but turning into a Wham Episode midway through (Foxfell), two being very dramatic arc with very high stakes involved (L'Arachel and Danjor Island), and the last ending on an outright Downer Ending (Slak Rock).
• Characterisation Marches On:
  • The humanmons:
    • Beldum is more expressive and human in the early pages, using exclamation marks and coarse language in their speech. It's not until the group starts moving that their stoic characterisation fully sets in.
    • Cyk was originally a male Gardevior before later being established as a female one.
    • Autumn seemed to explicitly be a humanmon rather than being a native Pokémon who merely received the memories of one and was a male Fennekin (before evolving into and remaining as a female Braixen). This was explained away as Autumn having run away from her kingdom and pretending to be a humanmon in order to not lose some of her first real friends in the humanmons (while her evolution-induced sex change is a genetic quirk that runs in her family).
    • Goobert was a bit more child-like, cowardly, and Pollyanna-like in his earliest appearances before gradually falling more into more of a slightly ditzy and somewhat braver Big Fun goof who could be serious when necessary. (Though this may be justified as legit character development he's been through over time.)
    • Noriaki seemed to know about TVTropes and other elements from the "real world" before it would be established that he was from another world entirely without the internet and other such things. This was later acknowledged during the L'Arachel arc where Noriaki admitted that he was only pretending to know what the website was in order to try and fit in with the other humanmons.
    • Jack debuted with a bizarre curse of some sort on his eye that enabled him to show visions of strange non-Pokémon monsters and the like through it. This was very quickly scrapped by his player.
  • Recurring NPCs:
    • Teller goes from being a relatively ordinary (albeit overqualified) barkeep who tends a dive bar in the beginning, to a complex information broker who aids the humans, Lars' crew, and the largest guild in the world. May intersect with flanderization as the whole reason he let the humanmons eat for free was to probe their minds.
    • There seemed to be slight hints towards Delilah being a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing in her earliest appearances, but this was based on a early villainous concept for her that her player quickly scrapped. Her overly nice personality did still end up as a facade of sorts, but it was instead hiding a fiery and battle-loving (but still nice and friendly) side of herself that she had been repressing since injuring her mother in a Mega Evolution-related accident.
    • Benji seemed more mature in his earliest appearances before becoming a less mature and somewhat mischievous prankster. He also hinted at knowing what his past was like rather than him having no clue about it.
    • Audrey the Victreebel susurrated her words as she spoke in her debut appearance at the Salty Spittoon in Silversand. In all future appearances, she spoke clearly without any sort of Verbal Tic. Her player says that she was drunk at the time.
• Chekhov's Gag: Nyquil gets separated from the group and spends the time headbutting trees due to his irrational hatred of them. It's originally presented as a joke, but ends up biting the party in the ass later, when it draws the attention of an out-of-control Trevenant.
• Chekhov's Gun: Eliot paints some of the group members while they're busy trying to figure out where to go next. Later on it's revealed that this is what allowed him to copy Oz's Octazooka move.
• Chronic Hero Syndrome: The humanmons' tendency to set out to fix problems they end up learning about gets increasingly deconstructed as time goes on, and comes to a head following the Danjor Island arc where Mila and Autumn urge the party to stop seeking out problems to solve, as at the end of the day, they are all still former humans or native Pokémon who have barely any idea what they have gotten themselves into and keep risking their lives in situations that they could avoid getting involved in. Marlon, in particular, struggles with this the most out of all the party due to never seeming to want to settle down until all problems are solved and all of his friends are safe, to the point of sometimes coming off as outright reckless.
• Commuting on a Bus:
  • Serris is the first commuter among the main cast, due to his business interests occupying most of his time.
  • Sushi has had two brief returns, with more expected, living mostly as a roaming serial killer.
  • Jani being wounded in Silversand along with being infected by the Viral Aggression has turned her into a commuter as well, disappearing for dozens of pages at a time and never staying all that long.
  • Goobert dips in and out of the party on a semi-regular basis.
• Connected All Along: PJ, Eliot, and Rei realize this about the group while spending the night in Morbitesse's mansion. Outside of giving them relief after time spent angsting over home, not much has come of it, presumably to limit metagaming.
• Crapsaccharine World:
  • The setting of the RP as a whole is far from a completely hopeless setting, and it's suggested that Pokémon who don't get involved in the adventures of the humanmons live relatively normal and even happy lives when there isn't a world-threatening event or a villainous Pokémon knocking on their door. However, the Pokémon (be them the humanmons or native Pokémon) do have to deal with problems (many realistic) such as Pokémon who are murderous (i.e. Perigo, Priscilla, etc.) or are just terrible people in general, political strife (Hoard), and urban segregation (Silversand) among others, preventing the setting from being completely sunshine and roses.
  • As far as specific places and locations in the RP go, many of the towns and places the characters visit tend to be this way on certain levels, with the only settings to have had little to no trouble going on (either obviously or behind the scenes) so far being the carnival outside Hoard, the Castle of Coral, and Gleamscape^*Granted, Gleamscape marked the beginning of the Priscilla arc (and was originally meant to take place in it wholesale before its conclusion was moved elsewhere), but the setting as a whole was largely Lighter and Softer than immediately preceding and succeeding arcs. Additionally, there is also Manaphy's emotional issues that often wreak havoc on the community around the Castle of Coral, possibly lessening this depending on how one looks at it.. Likewise, the only genuinely crapsack settings so far have been those of Hoard (which was rife with political upheaval that ultimately upended the town) and Slak Rock (which was the bleakest and most hostile setting in the RP yet, and has been implied several times to have gotten even worse since then).
• Curse Escape Clause: The spring on Danjor Island, which is capable of eliminating curses placed upon Pokémon by Ninetales (or another Pokémon capable of doing so). Recurring characters Maran, Cortez, Rich, and Sunny are currently seeking it out, and cursed humanmon Dieter desires to get there at some point as well.
• Cut Short: While some Aborted Arcs were able to at least conclude in some manner, a fair few weren't as lucky:
  • While an in-universe reason was given, the Gleamscape music contest was cut short before it could be concluded in the intended manner.^*Out of universe, the reason for this was the fact the GM needed to take a short hiatus from the thread and simply decided to conclude the plot so as not to hold things up.
  • The Eluant Canyon side-arc ultimately ended in the middle of an action scene with no ending or conclusion whatsoever to its plot beyond a Hand Waved explanation from Stellan to Benji when Stellan later resurfaced in Gleamscape.^*While there was a clear "out" from the notoriously aborted Slak Rock for example (due to their higher-ups severing ties with the humanmons and leaving the humanmons with nothing else to do but shrug their shoulders and leave once the first opportunity arose), Eluant Canyon came to an abrupt halt with no clear way to leave the plot in a way that wasn't going to be unceremonious (which wasn't helped by the fact that the point of the arc had been mostly forgotten by that point, none of the other players involved had a clue how to satisfyingly conclude the plot, and interest in the plot had considerably deteriorated after months of no progress).
• Darker and Edgier: The RP portrays the Pokemon world as far more realistic and brutal than the games, with larger-scale fights often resulting in property damage and serious injury, serial killers (some of which are cannibals), and deeper political and economic issues than the main franchise would ever touch upon established and explored.
• Death of a Child:
  • The Fletchling Sushi killed on day one couldn’t have been too far into their teenage years at most.
  • Autumn's younger brother has been stated to have passed away from an illness an unknown period of time before the start of the RP.
  • Subverted when Autumn smashes an egg thought to have been produced by Goobert and Delilah, as it turns out that said egg was an unfertilized egg that Delilah simply passed during the previous night (something Autumn doesn't state to the party until after the fact).
• Denser and Wackier: Despite being a Wham Episode of the highest order otherwise, the Foxfell arc features some sillier goings-on at the same time, such as having a seriously wacky villain capable of borderline reality-warping, Goobert being turned into a jar of jam for a few seconds, and June discovering a Totodile in a full-body Zoroark suit. Justified as most of the goofier bits are the results of illusions.
• Desperation Attack: When Perigo bites down hard on Jani during the Silversand arc, she (via her body's primal instincts) releases a powerful earthquake, but then passes out.
• Do Not Call Me "Paul": Yalta doesn't appreciate being referred to as Type: Null.
• A Dog Named "Dog":
  • The Beldum of the group decides not to go with a proper name, instead just referring to themselves as Beldum. PJ then attempts to defy this by giving Beldum the nickname 'Ringabel', as does Eliot by calling them 'Bel'.
  • The Natu that guides the group to Orichalcum is called Neiti, which is 'Natu' in Korean.
  • Morbitesse is named the same way, her name being the name for Gothitelle in German.
• Downer Ending: The Slak Rock arc, due in part to how suddenly it ended. The party's efforts to figure out how to cure King Raleigh's VA wind up being for nothing as he is murdered anyway, the people who hired the party to do this in the first place more or less tell the party to bug off, the vector of the town is never discovered, and not only is there little hope of anything in the kingdom improving by the time the party leaves, but it's heavily implied that things in the kingdom are going to take (and have been taking) a turn for the worse.
• Drama Queen: Serris. He shows signs of this as early as his first appearance, with his formal speech pattern compared to the rest of the cast, his exaggerated gestures and his tendency to break out into lengthy, slightly overblown speeches, but his penchant for drama is fully displayed when he goes to Frau Morbitesse's later. When Uryu the Espeon tells him he'll need to wait to see her, how does he respond? By spontaneously reciting Phil Collins lyrics.
• Dramatic Irony: Used to incredible effect during the L'Arachel arc where Dana and Nephenee the Whirlipede discuss Nyquil and wonder where he's headed off to...right as Nyquil is currently undergoing a Face–Heel Turn courtesy of L'Arachel.
• Dungeon Master: This torch has been passed around from area to area and from arc to arc:
  • Arcs:
    • Origins: CaliburnAbsoluteEX
    • LARPers: Beverly and Weirdguy149
    • The First Vector: whizzerd
    • Yamaropu: sarysa
    • The Two Vectors: CaliburnAbsoluteEX and PresidentStalkeyes
    • Carnival: Cabe_Bedlam and Beverly
    • Orbs: kablammin45 and Team42Larson
    • Agarthan Kidnappers: Cabe_Bedlam
    • L'Arachel: SamuraiKonk
    • Phoebe: kablammin45
  • Areas:
    • Yalta's Ruins: CaliburnAbsoluteEX
    • Orichalcum: whizzerd
    • Dras-Il's Woods: whizzerd
    • Silversand and Road: sarysa (layout, some backstory) and others (buildings, add'l backstory).
    • Manaphy's Castle: kablammin45
    • Hoard: PresidentStalkeyes
    • Bedsheets: TacoBadger
    • Carnival: Cabe_Bedlam and Beverly
    • Agartha: sarysa^note Includes worldbuilding done in the tunnels during the Kidnappers' arc
    • Gleamscape: kablammin45
    • Holstown and Narcia: SamuraiKonk
    • Danjor Island: kablammin45
• Early-Installment Weirdness: To be expected as the thread initially started off as a relatively plot-less goof-off thread before expanding into the serious odyssey that it ultimately ballooned into:
  • Some odd things that otherwise wouldn't exist in the pre-industrial-level setting of the RP appeared in it before the exact nature of said setting could be firmly established, such as graphic t-shirts and backpacks, things that nowadays would never fly within the setting as it is now. A rock band with functional electric/synth music instruments was also (infamously) featured in one early arc, but the main Pokémon franchise eventually made a rock band less implausible for the setting of the RP due to the debut of Toxtricity and Rillaboom in Pokémon Sword and Shield.
  • The Token Evil Teammates in the party like Sushi (who flagrantly killed bird-mons left and right) and Andy (who ended up committing a mass-murder, blew off killing a child's parents in the process upon finding out he did so, and nearly killed Nyquil) would likely never be allowed to stay in the party nowadays due to the party having a strict Thou Shalt Not Kill rule. Subtly lampshaded shortly after Rainmaker the Bronzong appears during the L'Arachel arc and Mila notifies him of the humanmons' no-killing rule when it seems that Rainmaker is reckless enough to do so.
• Elemental Embodiment: The Digletts and Dugtrio that sarysa plays are this — able to manipulate the dirt around them in complex ways to get around basic accessibility problems caused by their anatomy.
• Enemy Mine: The party briefly teams up with semi-recurring antagonist Kapitani Khmalidze during the Hoard arc, as part of a plan to take down two Viral Aggression vectors at once.
• Extremely Short Timespan: Despite what the length of the RP may suggest, little over two weeks have passed in-game by the time of the 25000th post.
• Face–Heel Turn:
  • J seems to want nothing to do with the party after the Dras-Il, damn well nearly attacking them on the road to Hoard, claiming that the party is holding him back.
  • PJ seems to turn against the party, though he's being brainwashed by Belladonna — and his actual grudges are few.
  • Jani also seems to have her own agenda that conflicts with the party's during the Hoard arc, but her motivation seems to be out of paranoia, and a desire to have everyone on equal footing as far as the VA is concerned.
  • The party quickly discovers that Serris is not on their side either by the end of the Hoard arc. (Though it's implied that he was never on their side to begin with and were simply playing into his own agenda from the minute they met him.)
  • During the L'Arachel arc, Nyquil decides to ally himself with the eponymous Vespiquen and is turned evil (and then later simply Brainwashed and Crazy) in the process. He gets better after the arc.
• Ferris Wheel Date Moment: Several during the carnival arc, involving Nyquil and Dana, Goobert and Delilah, and Marlon and Marsha (the last of whom weren't officially a couple at the time but the seeds were being planted).
• Forced Transformation:
  • The entire story revolves around the characters being suddenly transformed into Pokémon against their will.
  • It applies to them again in the Wonder Orbs arc, where some of the party is shifted into different Pokémon.
  • Two different antagonists' respective MOs have been forcibly transforming Pokémon into their minions to do their bidding (brainwashed Combees for L'Arachel and amnesiac Clamperls for Phoebe).
• Foreshadowing:
  • Many players have written long posts to set up arcs well into the future. Enough so that there's a dedicated section on the bottom of the recap page devoted to it.
  • Voxno mentioned to Jani around the time she fled the hospital that it would resign if the guild did something it considered repugnant. While Voxno hasn't resigned, it pulled a Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right! when it feared some other guildie might end up putting the VA infected humanmons in quarantine, since the guild has draconian policies toward the infected.
• "Freaky Friday" Flip:
  • It's heavily suggested that Jani entered the world of the RP by switching bodies with a Diglett known as Milly.
  • A series of events while he's away with Benji results in Goobert switching bodies with a Primarina named Belle, thanks to a Manaphy throwing a tantrum. It's heavily implied that a number of other swaps happened at the same time he swapped.
  • Later, an attempt to get Manaphy to switch Goobert and Belle back to normal goes awry, resulting in Goobert-as-Belle, Finley, Eliot, and Belle's other family members (Primarina husband Bryce, Brionne daughter Mauveine, and Popplio son Speedy) all rapidly entering and leaving each other's bodies via an out-of-control Heart Swap. The fracas ends with Goobert-as-Belle switching with Finley, Eliot switching with Bryce, and Mauveine and Speedy switching with each other. Fortunately, this series of swaps is resolved quickly.
  • If a letter sent to the party in Hoard is any indication, Goobert spent some time swapped with a Wailord and his two friends Marsha and Delilah swapped bodies as well.
  • Goobert experiences this trope yet a third time during the Orbs arc, which sees him swapping bodies with a hyperactive Zoroark named June.
  • The party meets up with Manaphy again in Gleamscape, and all hell proceeds to break loose: In order, Marlon, Goobert, and Benji all switch bodies with their respective beaus Marsha, Delilah and Dinah, Eliot switches with Lucy the Riolu, and Jani switches with PJ. Complicating matters is the fact that Manaphy is called away before he can switch everyone back, leaving everyone except Goobert, Marlon, Marsha, and Delilah stuck for a while.
• Fourth Wall Psych: During the Foxfell arc and Eluant sidequest, Milo at one point comments to the party he's with that he suddenly feels that "something significant happened, somewhere! Something relating to our entire world!". The post in which Milo says this happened to fall on the day of the RP's first anniversary, but it's implied that Milo's hunch relates to the appearance of a new Pokémon (Draz the Salandit) somewhere else.
• Future Imperfect: In the ages since the extinction of humanity, some of the local Pokemon seem to have started misinterpreting the 'humans are destroying the planet' symbolism of past fiction, now seeing them as having attempted to literally destroy the planet by attacking the ground beneath their feet, either by punching it or shooting lasers from their 'robot hearts', depending on who you ask. This has earned them a reputation as in-universe Memetic Badasses for some.
• Gameplay and Story Integration:
  • J's arena battles are straight up literal Pokémon battles as you might see them on the 3DS. A lot of Jani's one-player battles are not far off, at least with a little drama added.
  • Doug uses the fact the party teleported with "Milly" via Escape Orb to realize that they must be in the same party, and likely friends. This, of course, is how the real Escape Orb works.
• Gender Bender:
  • Mila goes through this, going from a male human to a female Raichu.
  • Finley/Autumn goes through this when he evolves into a Braixen, turning into a girl in the process.
  • Maran, a Flygon in Hoard, was cursed by a Ninetails to experience this via contact with water.
  • Since sketching Transform, Eliot has transformed into two female Pokémon: A Salazzle during the Hoard arc and the second stop in Orichalcum, and Marsha during the carnival arc.
  • Nyquil is changed from a male Quilava to a female Leafeon via a Transfer Orb during the Orbs arc.
  • Much to his chagrin, PJ ultimately discovers that this wound up happening to him when he originally became a Pokémon as well, making the discovery in Hoard during his fling with Belladonna, but being too embarrassed about it to tell anyone until he finally tells Finley after the party reaches Gleamscape. He chooses to still consider himself as his original gender (effectively making him a trans man), and he is quite unamused with having a female body.
• Gratuitous German: Morbitesse speaks with a German accent and tends to pepper her speech with German words.
• Guest-Star Party Member:
  • Voxno, an Unown who is an agent of the guild, leads the party to Silversand Town and tags along with them during the arc.
  • Digda and then Koss both become party members for awhile after the Hoard arc.
  • Incidentally, all of Agartha's guest star party members (June, Dinah, Tilly, and Lilly) start out this way before becoming permanent (or semi-permanent) party members.
  • The captain of Foxfell's guard, one of Foxfell's elite army members, and Snaptooth during the Foxfell arc.
  • A whole host of them in the L'Arachel arc. Justified as many Pokémon are needed to take down the eponymous main threat of the arc.
• Hates Being Touched: F does not like having their ears touched. Justified that they don’t want to risk accidentally killing everyone within a 300 feet radius.
• Heel–Face Turn:
  • Max and Bash, minor antagonists from early on in the RP, eventually help the party by training with some of their members for the tournament.
  • While still a Jerkass, Cortez has begun turning over a new leaf since his defeat during the Hoard arc.
  • Out of all of L'Arachel's associates, Montresor, Notte, Zelgius, and Yukari all turn against her either midway or at the end of her eponymous arc (Montresor through him finally acknowledging that his relationship with L'Arachel is a toxic one and making amends with Noriaki, Notte after Montresor and Noriaki's reconciliation with each other gives him a Heel Realization, Yukari after having her own Heel Realization in the vein of Montresor's; Zelgius was arguably a Minion with an F in Evil to begin with and took little coercing into turning against L'Arachel).
• Heroic BSoD: Happens to Mila after she accidentally injures the group. While she initially seems mostly functional, continued interaction with the others leads to a total shutdown by the time they return to Orichalcum.
• Hidden Elf Village: Orichalcum is this — a village full of psychics who have erected a barrier to confound outsiders and generally mask the town's presence. Non-psychics can, however, be "sponsored" by one of the residents, making either one or all of its structures visible to that person.
• Hold Your Hippogriffs: Common in this roleplay. Expletives like Arcsdamn, as well as other less blasphemous references to Arceus, Groudon, and other legendaries. "Mon" replacing "man" or "person", "paws" instead of "hands", the list goes on...and any expression not uttered by the humanmons are liable to get this treatment.
• How Do I Shot Web?:
  • PJ and Sedmi initially struggle with how to use their newfound bodies to levitate. PJ eventually manages it through practise, while Sedmi achieves it by not focusing so hard on trying to float.
  • Eliot has to spend a while using his biological paint in order to fully suss out how it works.
  • J practises flying while on the way to Orichalcum. He doesn't quite get it figured out, but he does manage to make a start.
  • Goobert seems to have some trouble whenever he first attempts to use certain moves. His first attempt at using Dragon Pulse results in him accidentally blasting himself backwards into a stream. More seriously, when he uses Sludge Wave for the first time, he winds up accidentally poisoning himself and sending himself to the hospital.
  • Jani does a ton of experimentation, mostly via purely physical means, to figure out how her body does attacks. On one hand, she manages to learn Rock Slide (a TM move) naturally, albeit executing it poorly due to mistaking it for a Ground move. On the other hand, she can only make extremely localized sandstorms (or pebble sprays, depending on the environment) and sometimes just makes completely harmless moves.
  • Vassago the Metagross confides with the party about having to get used to his new-found psychic abilities and wildly different biology, including having four brains, mentioning getting a crushing headache and shutting down after overexerting his psychic abilities to move something psychically.
  • Rainmaker the Bronzong ends up exhausting himself trying to create a Rain Dance-induced thunderstorm and is exhausted the rest of the day during the L'Arachel arc.
• Humans Are Special: Seeped into the RP in a number of ways. Obviously they are a novelty to figures like Yalta, Khmalidze, and Merqury. Their knowledge of foreign technology factors in with figures like Merqury and Hevea. Then we get to the tournament arc, where the humanmons dominate an amateur tournament in spite of being familiar with their bodies for under two weeks. Two of those humanmons don't even have the encyclopedic knowledge of game mechanics that the others have.
• I Choose to Stay: While no option has been presented to the humanmons to return home yet (and it's not likely that a way ever will, given that something like that would surely end the RP), several of the humanmons, to some extent, have stated that they either don't mind or are outright okay with staying in the Pokémon world. (Or, at the very least, have come to terms with the fact that they may remain Pokémon for the rest of their lives.)
• I Have Many Names: PJ introduces himself to the group by listing off a few names he’s apparently known by.
• I Just Want to Be Normal: Zig-zagged. The group of humans-turned-Pokémon is pretty evenly split between those who want to become human again, those who like being a Pokémon but miss their human form, and those who are perfectly happy with what they now are.
• Imagine Spot: Goobert is prone to these, fantasizing about the crew re-entering town carrying Eliot's disembodied head as his headless body wanders aimlessly around behind them and Andy evolving into a female Galvantula on two different occasions.
• In-Series Nickname: "Bel" for Beldum from Eliot, "El" for Eliot from PJ, and "Niles" for Nyquil from just about everyone.
• It's Personal: Serris is implied to have a personal grudge against Dras-Il for having allegedly destroyed his berry farm before the events of the main story.
• Jade-Colored Glasses: Serris wears these, due to having arrived in the Pokémon World before everyone else and having to survive on his own in the wilds. The first thing he does after his introduction is speculate that Dras-Il was lying about the Hate Plague and was instead using it as a pretext to lash out against whoever she chose, and later tells Beldum that 'there's no such thing as trust where she's from, just useful and useless'.
• Klatchian Coffee: Serris' Authentic R-Soda - based on Rare Soda from the games - especially when a sizable amount is consumed very quickly. It provides the drinker with a temporary level boost, makes them unable to feel pain for a short time, and makes them hyper-aware of everything that's happening around them. The downside being that they become extremely twitchy and easily distracted, and find it very hard to go to sleep afterwards.
• Knight of Cerebus:
  • While still having the gray morality of the Ruffians at Woodfall Mansion, Dras-Il the Trevenant is a genuine threat to the party, injuring Nyquil and J, cracking Guy's ribs, and very nearly killing Oz. She does start to calm down once she sees the severity of Oz's injury and eventually stops fighting, but afterwards, she warns the party of a Pokémon terrorizing the woods and spreading a Hate Plague among its inhabitants.
  • Perigo also qualifies, as while he lacks Dras-Il's raw strength, he makes up for it with deadly cunning and subtlety, having covertly provoked an entire Viral Aggression-stricken village into depopulating itself. And unlike Dras-Il before him and Yamaropu after him, he doesn't even have the excuse of being driven crazy by a Hate Plague; he's that evil by default.
  • Despite being a largely comical villain in speech and mannerisms, Anastasia is heavily implied to have a sizable body-count (directly or indirectly), and turns out to be responsible for all of the vectors seen or heard of by the party up to that point...and she's not even the True Final Boss, either; she merely hints at them.
  • L'Arachel and her associates provide their own very real, non-Viral Agression-related threat to the setting. L'Arachel herself has very megalomaniac motives and plans to make everyone subservient to her while all of her associates fight very viciously, making stopping them an extremely urgent matter.
• Lame Pun Reaction: At one point Oz calls Beldum 'Pal-dum'. It earns him a long, silent stare in response.
• Law Enforcement, Inc.: Hoard's permanent - i.e. Dragon-type - population is too low for them to maintain a standard police service, so Merqury instead hired the Pawniarmy to act as the city's security force. Deconstructed somewhat, as it's implied that one of their other clients is paying them even more money to act against Merqury's wishes in their favour. Merqury accuses them of engaging in a conflict of interests - amongst other things - but his hands are tied as he cannot terminate their contract without leaving Hoard completely defenceless.
• Line-of-Sight Name:
  • While not quite line-of-sight, Eliot takes his name from T.S. Eliot, whose works he was reading before being transported to the world of Pokémon.
  • An OOC example, sarysa spent maybe 5 seconds coming up for the farming village of Milklett, which is a portmanteau of the first two farming Pokémon she could think of: Miltank and Diglett. Unexpectedly, it became the most plot important locale that the humanmons never visit, and it evolved into kind of a Running Gag and/or inside joke.
• Lower-Deck Episode: Some side-arcs have been this, focusing on a completely different cast of characters with (at most) only one or two of the humanmons involved:
  • The Eluant Canyon side-arc running alongside Foxfell and the early part of L'Arachel, focusing on a separate cast of characters discovering an ancient underground shelter in the eponymous canyon, (the arc, however, was never finished). The only humanmons involved were Jani and Milo.
  • The Blissparce side-arc running alongside L'Arachel, involving Goobert and Dieter and some of the locals investigating a series of murders in the small village.
  • The Bell side-arc running alongside Glastone, involving two separate groups of Pokémon racing to find a bell with strange properties before the other can use (or destroy) it. No humanmons are actively involved in the plot barring some plotline crossovers.
• Masquerade: The full town of Orichalcum is hidden behind a psychic barrier that makes it appear as another part of the forest. Hence why the group couldn't seem to find the town until Neiti used her powers to dispel the barrier.
• Meaningful Name:
  • Dras-Il the Trevenant is a tree Pokémon that serves as a protector for her forest. Her name is a corruption of 'drasil', which in turn comes from Yggdrasil, the Norse version of the world tree.
  • Perigo is a dangerous killer the party faces various times in their journeys. His name is Portuguese for "danger."
  • Hoard is a dragon-type-dominated city known for its wealth, in a nod to the Dragon Hoard trope.
• The Mind Is a Plaything of the Body: Some of the characters find that their personalities and quirks change after they're transformed into their new Pokémon forms.
  • Sushi and J become more carnivorous, Beldum, Sedmi, and Vassago lose their emotions, Weird Guy is more sleepy and tired, Goobert is more jolly, etc.
  • Beldum speculates this to be the case with Serris, who admits he enjoys being outside far more than he did as a human. It's then brought into question when he says it may actually be a reaction to the environment instead.
• Mind over Manners: Crops up when the party visit Orichalcum, a town full of Psychic Pokémon. The first Pokémon they met is Neiti, who freely reads their minds. The second they meet is Barry, who doesn't, and calls Neiti out for being rude.
• Mood Whiplash: A frequent occurrence:
  • The group discover that humanity is extinct, and no-one knows how they were wiped out. While they're coming to terms with the revelation, Spooks appears and cheerily greets the party.
  • A similar example occurs right afterwards. Sushi kills three Pokémon, which causes them and the rest of the group to freak out about murdering sapient beings. Then Goobert arrives, rambling excitedly about how he's now a Pokémon.
  • While in Orichalcum the group are given some free food, and enjoy a lighthearted meal for the first time since their arrival in the world. Then Eliot starts puking up (what appears to be) blood.
  • After meeting Frau Morbitesse, Sedmi immediately begins flirting with her to no avail. Moments later, Mila has a complete mental breakdown after remembering her previous gender.
  • Almost immediately after the conclusion of the fairly silly and everybody-wins ending of the Ruffian arc, the party gets lost in the woods and runs afoul of a hostile Trevenant, who, after being brought to her senses, warns of some sort of menace capable of inducing a Hate Plague among Pokémon.
  • Voxno — Aside from being Mood Whiplash incarnate, it is often in the wrong form to properly deal with situations. Awkwardness ensues.
  • While Cortez's transformation into a young Tyrunt during the Hoard arc is initially played for laughs, with him running away crying for his mother, the next time we see him, the realistic outcome follows big time; he loses his inn, his position on the council in Hoard, and the few friends he had, and is ultimately mistaken for an orphan and taken to the local orphanage, where he laments the loss of everything he once had.
  • The first day of the Gleamscape arc started off mostly lighthearted ^note (with a few serious moments here and there, such as Finley's struggles to break her secret to the party and Jani's plans for her Transfer Orb), involving another round of Heart-Swapping shenanigans and a singing contest at the local music festival, with plenty of silly and occasionally touching moments to go around. Then the party begins heading to Richard and Lucille's for the night, and the day takes a 180 as the party rescues Aspen/Lucas from an abusive Sawk, Finley confesses her secret to the party, Jani follows through with her plans to escape the Terranports, more insight to Noriaki's Dark and Troubled Past is revealed, and Eliot and Finley have a huge fight when it turns out that she (along with PJ) knew about Jani's plans but didn't tell anyone.
  • The second day of Gleamscape for Finley ends up like this. She starts out revealing her secret to Niles, betraying his trust severely, and getting punched out. Later in the day, she gets involved in wacky shenanigans in a pizza place, such as considering "Sarah" to be a stalker and offering a child to vomit in her hands.
  • During the Blissparce side-arc, one scene constantly shifts back and forth between the Dos Santos family mourning the loss of one of their family members and Goobert, Dieter, June, Maran, Cortez, and others cutting up and discussing plans in a restaurant.
• Mr. Exposition: Yalta, the first Pokémon that the group run into. He explains to them where they are, the current state of the world, and where their next destination should be, and then bows out of the scene.
• Multiple Narrative Modes: A consequence of the game's player-base: some narrate their actions in first-person while some narrate them in third-person.
• Mushroom Samba:
  • While in Hoard, Goobert bungles his first use of Sludge Wave and winds up poisoning himself. During his illness, he begins experiencing hallucinations, including thinking that the Dragonair maid cleaning up his messy hotel room is melting after he vomits up more Sludge Wave material that gets on her. He later begins perceiving his surroundings as looking like a very messy painting and the nurses that tend to him at the Hoard hospital as constantly shape-shifting.
  • During the Gleamscape arc, James inadvertently puts some toxic mushrooms into a mushroom soup he is making that Jani/Sarah and the party's Oricorio host Richard wind up ingesting. Jani/Sarah holds herself together pretty well, but Richard isn't as lucky and winds up hallucinating the entire party morphing into his many sisters and mobbing him.
  • The party meets Maran and Cortez at a hospital during the Foxfell arc after Cortez ate a bad mushroom and fell victim to one of these, mumbling about Flabébés flying around his head.

Tropes N-Z

• Nerf: "X shattered the Protect" has become more and more common with boss monsters since its debut in the Hoard vector battle, being subsequently used by Dore, Priscilla, and others to establish them as miniboss and boss-level monsters. Even though Dore turned out to be a Player Character all along. May also be a form of The Worf Effect, as Protect started becoming a frequently seen powerful deterrent after the Yamaropu battle, but ended up shattered by one of the Hoard vectors.
• The Nicknamer: A number of players have come up with nicknames for concepts that have stuck.
  • sarysa: humanmons - the humans-turned-Pokémon.
  • shrubBird: Fila - Finley and Mila.
  • Caliburn Absolute EX: Goo Crew (Goobert, the Silversand Trio, and sometimes Marlon depending on who's talking).
  • In-universe, Marsha the Swampert tends to give nicknames to everyone she meets (Calling Finley/Autumn "Foxy", Andy "Buggy", Goobert "the big guy", Marlon "Marly", etc.).
• Nightmare Sequence: Nearly as frequent as Mood Whiplash in this game.
  • Mila has one (brought on by her Heroic BSoD after shocking everyone on accident) the night after the fight with Dras-Il.
  • Oz has one (that seems to be Dreaming of Things to Come) the night before the party leaves Orichalum, which, among other things, includes a series of Legendary/Mythical Pokémon and a corpse leaping at him.
  • Shortly after arriving in Silversand, Goobert has a surreal stress-induced nightmare (brought upon by his crush on a Garchomp named Delilah, realizing that Cyk has a crush on him, and Jani being brutally attacked) where everyone around him transforms into Cyk and/or Delilah, including Goobert himself.
  • Goobert later has another nightmare in Hoard where he winds up involuntarily using Sludge Wave on Cyk and Delilah, melting them, followed by everyone else around Goobert, then the landscape, and finally Goobert himself. Goobert eventually wakes up to find himself violently ill from a poor use of Sludge Wave.
  • Jani has recurring dreams about a battle on a mountain, which themselves aren't at all nightmarish. After she gets hospitalized by Perigo, however, this recurring dream is twisted with surrealist warping, looping images of her (completely made up) Diglett father getting killed by a flood, Moltres fighting a Groudon with a Delcatty's head, and a looping image of Perigo murdering Dana over and over (which never happened, but Jani thinks it could have). The dream is heavily deconstructed when Jani has her first shared dream with Tilly and Lilly. Tilly makes the astute observation that the events shown aren't set in real time, and Lilly just completely makes a mockery of it by using her lucid dream powers to do whatever she wants.
  • During the aftermath of Perigo's attack on Finley and several other party members, Marlon (who holds himself responsible for it) has a nightmare where his human self is found by a human version of Perigo, who promptly enacts his revenge upon Marlon before Marlon wakes up.
  • PJ experiences a large number of horrifying and macabre nightmares in the days following his experiences with Belladonna.
  • Grigori suffers from recurring nightmares of the Frenzy mocking his professionalism and tells him that he just enjoys the killing and nothing more. One had during the Foxfell arc, in particular, apparently involves repressed memories of him murdering the girlfriend he had as a human.
• Noodle Incident:
  • Sushi has been to jail before. No-one knows the details, but it causes them to freak out whenever prison is brought up.
  • When the party is getting Heart Swapped by Manaphy in Gleamscape, Lars (watching this on the sidelines before bolting) lets slip that he apparently has experienced at least one body swap before and the experience wasn't any fun for him.
• No Seatbelts: Be it the various carnival rides, Jani's cart, or any other means of mechanical locomotion, there are no seatbelts in the world. Justified as body shapes are all over the place, rendering seatbelts extremely impractical...at best they'd have to be species-specific for expensive, custom designed goods.
• The Nose Knows: Weird Guy uses his sense of smell to get around, as being a Snorlax renders him partially blind.
• Nothing Is Scarier: It hasn’t been stated how humans came to be driven to possible extinction.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome:
  • Voxno had this during the battle against the slums gang, which was more of a recap of what Voxno would have done during that RL night's roleplay if Voxno's player didn't have to sleep.
  • Circumstances forced the remainder of the Eluant Canyon sidequest to be relegated to one of these due to its GM taking a sudden indefinite hiatus from the thread and going months without posts afterward.
• One-Letter Name: F and J are only referred to by a single initial.
• One-Man Army: Pretty much all Vectors of Viral Aggression can qualify.
  • Yamaropu singlehandedly takes on an entire police force and comes out unscathed, while still possessing the body of a Chansey hospital receptionist.
  • Despite her size, Belladonna was more than capable of taking some of the party's toughest hits, and at her most powerful could vaporize a solid stone wall with a Dazzling Gleam.
  • Chairgon Merqury was an absolute juggernaut who withstood nearly every attack that came his way, no matter how much damage he took, and still refused to back down.
  • Anastasia was granted borderline Reality Warper powers upon becoming a vector and becomes extremely difficult for the party to get a hit in on, while she freely attacks them.
  • Although not a vector herself, L'Arachel qualifies when it takes a party of around 20 Pokémon to fight her to a standstill, due to her magic and fighting prowess.
• One-Steve Limit:
  • Averted with species — in fact, there have been both PC and NPC Sableye, Ribombee, Diglett, Goodra, and others so far.
  • Also averted with names — a PC and NPC share the name Dieter, and there are a whopping three Lucies as of page 1009: Lucy the Hardware Store owner, Lucy the Riolu orphan, and Lucille from Gleamscape. There are several Richards, as well; Richard the recurring Pom-Pom Oricorio on the Guild, a minor Exploud character during the Agartha arc, and cursed Tyranitar Rich.
• One-Winged Angel: Montresor turns himself into a Shadow Pokémon during the course of the L'Arachel arc.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: A good portion of the player characters choose not to share their real names, if they can even remember their names in the first place.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business:
  • Goobert is seldom seen without a smile on his face, discounting his moments of worry and insecurity off and on throughout the RP, and is such a jovial individual that he has to be provoked into getting angry enough to use Outrage. Then comes the battle with Chairgon Merqury and Belladonna where Delilah (who had just become Goobert's girlfriend at the time) winds up getting badly injured and knocked unconscious by Merqury. Upon seeing this, Goobert gets truly angry for the first time and uses Outrage all on his own, shocking the other members of the party.
  • Happens again with Goobert at the beginning of Day 17 when he has a brief panic attack over how much his instincts are affecting him and actually swears.
  • The normally cool-headed and stoic Noriaki goes into full Oh, Crap!-mode when he makes the discovery that his old enemies (especially L'Arachel) have also been transported into this world along with him.
• Out of Focus: Deconstructed. Oz's freakout after Eliot disappears and the crew begin to head off to Orichalcum revolves around the fact that he didn't take charge like the others did and kept to himself in the background when he could've done more to help when they needed it.
• Painting the Medium:
  • All NPC text is shown in some sort of colored text.
  • White text is used for things introduced by one player that other players could pick up on but not necessarily always notice, especially if the player's character doesn't know about it. Useful for those who have first-person narration that mixes action and thoughts.
• Parts Unknown: Invoked so much during Round 1 of the tournament that the referees mocked it twice...taking it literally the first time, and then pointing out that the S-tier professional champion originates from somewhere.
• Passing Judgment: Seems to be Togekiss Nurse's trademark, but she's especially hard on Jani — who she deems to be someone who's undertrained and well out of her league.
• People's Republic of Tyranny: Much like the city of Rapture which inspired it, Hoard itself is an exercise of the darker side of capitalism — a sort of corporatocracy. Dragons' political superiority could be an allusion to landed white males having all the power in the early U.S. There are virtually no municipal services, though this is a mixed bag...the public library is gorgeous, but obtrusively commercialized, while other typical municipal services remain to be put to form. There is also an oppressive layer of bureaucracy and a militarised private police force, enough so that Hoard's reputation has been tarnished by those denied entry to the city.
• Pint-Sized Powerhouse:
  • Sushi was the first player character to kill anything, and she did so at her weakest evolutionary stage.
  • Belladonna proved herself to be quite capable to both take and dish out damage despite being under a foot tall.
• Plot Detour: Ran rampant through the Slak Rock arc due to the messy history behind it that caused its main plot to become dormant and the player characters having to find other things to do in the meantime. In the end, the arc ended up being aborted and the party moved on.
• Police Are Useless: Subverted with the Silversand Police Department. They actually respond fairly sensibly to the attack of an empowered, rampaging Chansey, cordoning off the boardwalk and evacuating civilians, setting up a water-bound electric barrier to stop her escaping, and sending in Magnezone air support and Emolga SWAT Teams to tactically dog pile her into submission. It's just that none of this is any use against an extremely powerful spirit and Viral Aggression vector fueled by pure hatred, especially when it starts to spread the VA across the city.
• The Pollyanna: Goobert is one of the few who takes their transformation into a Pokémon in complete stride. Even when it really dawns on him what has happened to him, he only briefly panics for a bit before just carrying on. In the events since then, very few things have truly brought him down. This may have to do with the fact that he has become a naturally happy-go-lucky and friendly Goodra.
• Posthumous Character:
  • By the time she makes her debut, Belladonna's sisters Sage and Azalea are already dead.
  • The first mention of Autumn's brother, Spring, he's called "the late Spring," as he died before the events of the RP.
  • Lucy the Riolu's parents have already died by the time the party meets her.
  • Sunny the Heliolisk's acting troupe had a sixth member, a Leafeon named Bearuegard, who was accidentally murdered by Phoebe the Gorebyss who is occasionally mentioned by said members after his passing.
• Power Floats: Oz and Weird Guy are temporarily given these powers by the Espeon healer, so that they can go upstairs quicker to get healing.
• Power Incontinence:
  • Part of Eliot’s Sketch ability involves this, much to his dismay (and initial shock). While he can use it to copy the moves of any other Pokémon, it typically results in an uncontrollable burst shortly after Sketching them. For example, when he accidentally copies Oz's Octazooka, he begins to violently throw up paint instead of spitting out an ink attack.
  • Light and Mila have both experienced this with their electrical powers. Light keeps creating sparks by accident, while Mila manages to short-circuit her electricity.
  • Although not often mentioned, the reason F is wary of testing out their powers is because they want to avoid this.
  • A minor one happens to Oz in Orichalcum City. In an attempt to use Hydro Pump to clean a building wall from the paint Eliot threw up earlier, he accidentally uses Octazooka instead, launching an ink ball at the wall and making it even messier.
  • A much more major instance occurs at Silversand; Jani, defending herself from Perigo, triggers a minor earthquake that alerts the entire town and creates cracks in the surrounding buildings. She faints from the stress soon afterwards.
• Punny Name:
  • Osie's name comes from a butchering of 'OC', an acronym for Original Character.
  • Finley's name is also a pun on "fennec." Like fennec fox.
  • In Orichalcum, the group meets a Mr. Mime, a Pokémon that's known for using the move Barrier. His name is Barry.
  • Deli and Quinn, the Mankey brothers from Hoard, are combined to sound out "Delinquent."
• Put on a Bus:
  • Goobert would often leave the group to go on his own adventures away from the party early on in the RP. This would be somewhat deconstructed during the Danjor Island arc and the following transitional arc when his latest adventure away from the party ends up with him getting in enormous and potentially fatal trouble and Goobert becomes more reluctant to go off by himself.
  • Noriaki and Hikari bid farewell to the party following the Danjor Island arc in order to finish cleaning up the mess L'Arachel made and ultimately establish a new settlement in Harnicara around her manor. Noriaki's position in the humanmons' party was subsequently filled by Raboot humanmon Royal. Nyquil similarly stays in Foxfell when the party leaves at the beginning of the L'Arachel arc, and his spot in the party is taken by an Alolan Marowak Swords of Justice guild member named Roland.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: Among the main group are a Smeargle that shifts between multiple forms, a Dartrix (later evolved into a Decidueye) that hails from a world of sword and sorcery, a runaway princess Braxien that has the memories of a ex-human Growlithe, and many more. And these are just the player characters!
• Rank Inflation: The professional battling circuit has been stated to have ranks C, B, A...then S. It also has F, E, and D...it was the intent to have Digda be a middle-of-the-road professional battler.
• Real Dreams are Weirder: A Running Gag with Goobert:
  • When the party rests after meeting the ruffians and Dras-Il, Oz has Mind Screw-y dreams related to the battle against Dras-Il, Mila has Anxiety Dreams about accidentally injuring or killing other members of the party with her powers, and Goobert...dreams that he is in front of a mirror, discovers he has retractable limbs, and turns into a Goomy after retracting all of them including his head and tail.
  • Goobert dreams again on Day 4, and manages to one-up his previous dream by imagining everyone in the party transforming into either Delilah the Garchomp or Cyk, his two crushes, before imagining himself transforming into a hybrid of the two.
  • Happens once more during the night of Day 7, where Goobert dreams that he is Lugia in a grocery store being hounded by child versions of Articuno, Moltres, and Zapdos who want him to get them something.
  • An Acid Reflux Nightmare that Goobert has on Day 21 involves him transforming into Belle and trying to sing for an audience of Muppet-like characters in a school auditorium, only for them to get mad when Goobert yells at them, cause Goobert to break into several pieces with thrown severed arms, and then turn into a massive ocean wave that washes Goobert away.
• Real Life Writes the Plot:
  • sarysa had originally planned to introduce the boss of the Silversand arc, Yamaropu, within the depths of the slums. After sleeping through what was meant to be the bait-and-switch encounter and with most party members having left the slums, the final encounter had to be rewritten. It ended up being far more high-stakes and impactful than what was originally planned, going from a difficult battle within the slums to riots in the touristy parts of town and a three stage boss fight.
  • A number of conspicuous illnesses or handwaved episodes of some troubling condition are the result of player absence, such as Mila's airsickness stemming from her player being behind on the rapidly moving thread.
• Relationship Upgrade: So far has happened on three separate occasions, with two under remarkably similar circumstances to boot. Finley and Goobert both experience life-threatening injuries (Finley from the Perigo attack, Goobert becoming severely poisoned after a bungled use of Sludge Wave), resulting in Mila and Delilah having a Love Epiphany as they wait worried for them and confessing their love for Finley and Goobert respectively as they recover, with both Finley and Goobert reciprocating their feelings. In the third case, (under much less dire straits though), Marlon admits that he had feelings for Marsha ever since the Dojo, but didn't act on those feelings until the party wound up in Agartha. The author wanted to do this much earlier but with the end of Hoard incoming it got shuffled to Agartha.
• Riddle for the Ages: Some questions about the setting have been intentionally left unanswered for various reasons, but it's usually because a satisfactory answer will likely never be found for them. These include who or what brought the humanmons into the Pokémon world in the first place, what caused the humans to disappear, the setting's exact relationship to the canon of either the main Pokémon series or Pokémon Mystery Dungeon^*the only thing set in stone is that it's not canon to the anime and the sole reference to the anime at all during the course of the story is a one-off appearance of Ash-Greninja as a heavily damaged training dummy, and whether or not there's a way for the humanmons to return to their respective homes/worlds (in the case of the last one, the reason that particular question won't be answered is because if it were ever answered, it would surely spell the end of the RP).
• Running Gag:
  • A player posted a one-off where a Zangoose stares down upon the onlookers from atop a building in Hoard. It has since evolved into a joke means of explaining characters who fell out of focus but didn't really accomplish anything, with the Zangoose's stare entrancing both Niles and Voxno at separate times.
  • In-universe, there is Goobert's strange dreams and tendency to end up in situations that either threaten to or succeed in turning him into another Pokémon, and, during the Foxfell arc, Vassago taking to exclusively calling Snaptooth "Parachute Pants" after Eliot insulted Snaptooth by calling him said name.
• Sapient Eat Sapient:
  • Sushi, a carnivorous Litten, kills three other Pokémon with the purpose of eating them. Only then are the group told that all Pokémon in this world are sapient, and that Sushi essentially just committed murder. This leads to most of the group freaking out while Sushi has a My God, What Have I Done? moment.
  • An NPC example is Jillian the Jolteon. The difference here is that Jillian is completely unrepentant about this and even thinks the party is crazy for not following her example.
  • Another NPC example relates to a syndicate that functions on smuggling meat led by a former pro fighter Crabominable Umberto.
• Scare Campaign: Serris' corporation has been running one off-screen to dissuade mons from eating wild berries, similar to the bottled water campaigns in real life.
• Shoo Out the Clowns: Marsha, Delilah, and Benji are initially with Marlon, Goobert, and Jani as they go to meet up with Vox, Serris, Sudeaux, Ripley, and Khmalidze at the Mick Drosen Cafe, but the trio is ultimately disallowed from going in with them as they aren't humanmons like Marlon, Goobert, and Jani. As the humanmons are going into the cafe to discuss the two Viral Aggression vectors within Hoard with La Résistance, the Silversand trio would be very out of place in the discussion anyway.
• Shout-Out:
  • PJ’s proposed nickname for Beldum is Ringabel.
  • The confident and personable Alolan Raichu is named Koss.
  • Wrench has the same name as a character from Watch_Dogs 2, which he points out when he decides on it.
  • While on way to Orichalcum the group get into a discussion about anime, referencing such titles as Dragon Ball Z, Puella Magi Madoka Magica, AKIRA, Osomatsu-san, The Law of Ueki, and many more.
  • Upon being invited for drinks by Koss, Eliot attempts an impression of Tim Curry, which apparently ends up sounding more like Jordan Underneath than anything else.
  • When PJ asks Sushi she "won't go all homicidal again", she replies with "I'm a cat. I hunt, PJ, it's what I do."
  • Serris shares his name with a dangerous snakelike creature found aboard the BSL station.
  • Spooks shares his name with a Louis Armstrong song. Although it was coincidental at first, he is heard singing the song when he reappears after a long absence.
  • Jani is a factory that spits out names of real world works on a regular basis, with Final Fantasy, Cool World, and Mad Max being a few of many works referenced for comparison to the party's current situation.
  • There is a bar in Silversand called the Salty Spittoon.
  • Upon emerging into Hoard proper, the first thing the party sees is a copper-plated statue of its founder, Merqury, under which is a plaque that reads 'No Gods or Kings. Only Mons.'
  • The name of Serris' company is SuperiorFarms, and he rents out a brewery in Hoard called BrainStorm Brewery, in a nod to RuptureFarms and SoulStorm Brewery, respectively.
  • At a bookstore in Hoard, author Gourgeist L. L. Magmar of the popular A Song of Spirits and Mystics series gets referenced.
  • When Eliot finds PJ after the first day of the tournament, the latter is singing "On the Right Track" from Pippin. Eliot has to resist the urge to sing the song himself when reflecting on Transforming into a copy of Marsha and his overall progress in utilizing the move.
  • When PJ orders a berry cake from Judy and Amelie at the carnival, he obviously gets the "Razzle Dazzle".
  • The Pawniarmy's plan to provoke Merqury and Belladonna into fighting at each other at the end of the Hoard Arc is called Operation Dragon Install.
  • Marsha reads a book from a mystery novel series called "The Meowth Who..." at the Argatha library during the Orbs arc. The title of said book itself is The Meowth Who Aimed for the Horn.
  • Jani routinely refers to her sharing thoughts with the Terranport sisters as a mind meld.
  • The main shopping area in Gleamscape is referred to as Rainbow Road.
  • Two members of the acting troupe the party meets in both Slak Rock and Foxfell are named Javert and Eponine.
  • Recurring Flygon character Maran is a walking Ranma ½ reference, having a Ninetales curse functionally identical to Ranma's.
  • Castaway amuses himself with the thought of an enemy Pokémon sent flying away landing in Albany or Utica (or if you prefer, upstate New York), then later that night dreams about watching the Aurora Borealis with June while feeding her hamburgers and playing piano. Then dreams about playing football with June, Jack, and Nori while wearing his tuxedo. A later dream had by Castaway essentially ends up being an extended Chrono Trigger reference.
• Sixth Ranger: Serris, who's only introduced after Mila's breakdown 100+ pages in and tags along with the party as they head back to Orichalcum. Ironically, he arrived in the Pokémon World weeks before all the other characters, but was off doing his own thing until he finally met up with them.
• Sleepwalking:
  • Sushi is able to sneak away from the party, pick up a scent, and wander down an alleyway all while sleeping.
  • A rather humorous version of this happens to Beldum the morning after they stay at Frau Morbitesse's manor. Since they can't turn off the force that allows them to float, they end up drifting in their sleep and repeatedly bump into a wall.
• Sneeze of Doom: Nyquil/Niles unleashes one of these when he gets the brunt of PJ's failed Pollen Puff, unleashing a SmokeScreen that causes Goobert to stumble into a rolling Oz (who had lost control of his rolling earlier) then land on Finley.
• Something We Forgot: The group accidentally leaves Mila behind once they head off for Orichalcum, and only realise it when she calls down a Thunderbolt in her panic.
• Speech Impediment: Light has a pronounced stutter, which highlights their timidness.
• Split Personality:
  • Something like this seems to be happening to J; especially pronounced after the fight with Dras-Il.
  • Eliot seems to be experiencing this as well, particularly after the L'Arachel arc, seeming to completely change personality at the drop of a hat.
  • Grigori deals with one he dubs "The Frenzy," which often tempts him to give in to his desires, namely brutal violence.
• Suddenly Bilingual:
  • Once at Frau Morbitesse's house, it is revealed that F and Finley can speak German.
  • Mila herself spoke some Romanian shortly after, in the same setting. Justified, as she would have the same knowledge of the language as her player, a native speaker.
  • Then to show them both up, Andy spoke both fluent German and Romanian.
  • While trying to figure out ways to foil mind reads, Jani got out her Japanese that she learned in college. Justified somewhat as Jani's player also learned some Japanese in college, though Jani herself is better at it.
  • The first morning Wohm wakes up as a Pokemon, his first words when getting up are in German. Justified as his player is also German.
  • Voxno is revealed to be an Omniglot, or a speaker of all (major) languages. It makes sense, because Voxno is an embodiment of language after all.
• Star-Crossed Lovers: Several of the romantic couples in the main party end up having relations at several points, though this usually fails to lead to anything as the couples either don't share an egg group (such as Marlon (a Gallade) and Marsha (a Swampert)) or are a gay couple (such as Autumn and Mila). The one time a straight couple that does share an egg group, Goobert (a Goodra) and Delilah (a Dragonite), end up having a night (during the Foxfell arc), a brief scare the next morning results in concerns being raised over babies entering a group that experiences danger at almost every turn, and Goobert and Delilah agree to wait until they're done adventuring for good and have returned home to Silversand before doing anything like this again.
• Taking the Bullet: Guy cracks a few ribs taking a Wood Hammer from Dras-Il, protecting the rest of the party from the hammer's shockwaves and helping Dras-Il recover from the Hate Plague that was affecting her.
• Telepathy: Psychic-type Pokémon are capable of reading minds. This is first mentioned when F subconsciously reads Eliot's mind, and is then brought to the forefront when they meet Neiti, a Natu who discovers they're humans by reading their thoughts.
• That Man Is Dead: By the time the party meets J again after he disappears following the fight with Dras-II, he has all but abandoned his humanity and name and has taken the name "The Juggernaut".
• Theme Naming:
  • The instructors of Hoard's dojo are named Tai Kuwa Ando or "Taekwondo," Jude Doe or "Judo," and Sue Mow or "Sumo."
  • Belladonna and her sisters Azalea and Sage are all named after plants.
  • Several members of Belle the Primarina's family are named after real-life pop singers.
• Those Two Guys: Among the humanmons, Goobert and Marlon occasionally fill this role. Some NPCs fall under this as well, such as Marsha and Delilah in Silversand (and while travelling with Goobert), Penny and Jenny in Hoard, and Max and Bash and Maran and Cortez in various locales.
• Through the Eyes of Madness: Late in the Hoard Arc, we get to experience Chairgon Merqury's degrading sanity firsthand as he hallucinates a shadowy figure that bears an uncanny resemblance to Belladonna, which goes on a tirade about how it's responsible for all his troubles as an act of revenge against his urban development.
• Time Travel for Fun and Profit: While time travel is not involved, the humans come from a world with hundreds of years of technological advancement over the WHABP world. While the WHABP world may have minor amenities unavailable in the human world due to abundant electricity and certain odd powers, the humanmons have messed with the world in a number of ways:
  • Serris takes the cake on this one, having arrived months before the others, he brought a bit of engineering knowledge with him — and via sponsorship from the powerful Chairgon of Hoard, was able to recreate the agricultural Haber process, producing vastly superior berry yields over his competitors. Knowledge of game mechanics also allowed him to create proprietary beverage mixes and just overall outclass the competition.
  • Jani leaks an incomplete recipe for Vulcanized rubber, with enough information that a local chemist and her were able to experiment with a number of mixes and processes and got a prototype running overnight. It only took one more day to satisfactorily optimize the process. The invention itself is pivotal for modern transportation, as rubber tires greatly reduce friction and shock, allowing for much faster land speeds than metal or wooden wheels of the past.
  • An easily ignored aspect is that both Jani and Serris bring a near century of rapid changes in advertising techniques along with them, and presumably other humanmons who disrupt the status quo will as well. This can be a mixed bag, though for the most part, Pokémon not wise to a number of both legitimate techniques and scams.
  • Modern means of misdirection are also imported by the humanmons. It implied that some of Serris' advertising involves scare campaigns against eating wild berries, akin to the real world bottled water companies scaring people (irrationally) away from tap water.
• Token Evil Teammate:
  • Sushi fits the bill, killing three people on their first day in the Pokemon world and, upon their reappearance during day three, having evolved after killing an untold number of other Pokemon.
  • Andy also often falls under this (especially when Sushi is away), having become very morally ambiguous since he first arrived in the Pokémon world and managing to amass a body count almost as large as Sushi's in one fell swoop.
• Took a Level in Badass:
  • Seems to happen to nearly the entire party once they reach Hoard, some organically, some not so — most of the party is made up of competent fighters, and Guy himself manages to take out an earlier miniboss who he's type disadvantaged against. Though in the latter case, Max was a little tired from over-training.
  • Earlier, Lars had taken a few levels in badass himself during his rematch with the party; while in his first encounter, he got trapped down a hole before he could do anything, the second time he stuck around for longer and was able to take out Guy before being defeated.
• Tournament Arc: The party partakes in one upon arriving in Hoard, as there happens to be an amateur fighting tournament going on, intended to give up-and-coming talent more recognition.
• To Win Without Fighting:
  • Andy believes that this needs to be the go-to solution to the party's problems, almost to a fault. Even when the party is at the mercy of two VA vectors in Hoard, he calls out the party for believing that provoking said vectors into attacking each other was the best solution to subduing them (Even after being told blank that this was the only option by that point that wouldn't result in a drastic loss of innocent lives). He later throws this mindset away with extreme prejudice when he becomes a Honedge.
  • Autumn, a self-proclaimed pacifist, greatly prefers the party to find the least violent solution to their problems and tends to disapprove of any fights resulting from confrontations. This has occasionally resulted in disputes between her and one or more of the others, but it's implied that there's a reason for her pacifism and why she insists on it.
• Trapped in Another World: It’s part of the premise of the story; all the player characters have been flung into the world of Pokémon against their wills.
• Trrrilling Rrrs: After returning to Morbitesse's mansion, the gang is greeted by an Espeon healer who speaks like this, in a way reminiscent of purring.
• Two Lines, No Waiting:
  • The A and B plots of the Hoard, Carnival, and Orbs arcs weave flawlessly, but time is rather skewed in each of them. Special mention goes to the orbs arc, in which one group runs around town while the other group is trying to get their bearings — essentially a 1-2 hour ordeal happening in the time span of a 10-15 minute one.
  • The Foxfell arc includes a Treasure Hunter B-plot that's completely unrelated to it, though it tries to follow a similar timeline and it's located on the same continent. It's just far away from the A-plot's action. It eventually morphed into the C-plot of the L'Arachel arc's A-plot and its own B-plot in the form of the Blissparce sidequest when it lasted longer than initially planned before ultimately getting quietly cut short after it ended up going months without advancing.
• Uncertain Doom: While a number of NPCs from Slak Rock have been spotted (or shown or at least confirmed to have been spotted) elsewhere following the kingdom's descent into anarchy (having fled the kingdom before the situation there took a turn for the worse), the fates of a number of other plot-important NPCs like King Raleigh's heirs^note The sole exception in this case being Olias, who was Killed Offscreen in the ensuing mayhem in Slak Rock per word of his player] (plus a number of incidental characters and at least one PC) have yet to be disclosed in canon.
• Uniqueness Decay:
  • Over a rather small amount of time, the mysterious aspect of the Viral Aggression fades...first, the defining of it between the Dras-Il and Yamaropu arcs, and then with the notion that the guild has been quarantining suspected carriers for awhile.
  • Same thing happened to Orichalcum, once it became apparent that first — there is limited trade with the outside world, and then second that they are one of a number of cities and towns with a Musketeers Guild (aka Swords of Justice) branch.
  • Orichalcum's mysterious nature fades even further into the roleplay, as it seems the Council of Exploud are aware of them and there's an entire town, Agartha, situated near them — albeit underground. A sizeable chunk of its legacy residents are aware of Orichalcum's existence.
• Unreliable Narrator: Eventually lampshaded to players when Voxno's notebook was OOC mentioned to contain inaccurate information about Hoard's trading practices. This was used to tidy up the numerous errors put forth in the prior 280 or so pages about Hoard.
• Urban Segregation: Central to the plots surrounding Silversand Town, so much so that the Big Bad of Silversand lived through the urban sprawl and was more or less victimized by it.
• Vast Bureaucracy: Hoard is implied to have one of these to deal with keeping track of all its visitors, assigning permits for travel and advertising privileges and rental payments for the temporary businesses visitors set up. It seems relatively efficient, even if its staff is highly overworked.
• Vice City: Hoard may very slightly qualify, as while a Haxorus woman made her son think she could complain about Jani marketing her carts to children, the council really wouldn't give her the time of day. It has been suggested that the city's moral standards are quite lax overall, with more emphasis being placed raw statistics of the town's public image rather than the rantings of a few moral guardians.
• Villain with Good Publicity: Serris is eventually revealed to have become this following Hoard's collapse, painting himself as the hero (and Ripley as the villain) in the events that lead up to and after the loss of Hoard. When Marlon and Marsha return to Silversand at the beginning of the Lucifuge arc, they find that Serris has weaseled his way into getting in good graces with not only the town's local government, but the town itself, due to him aiding repair efforts in the town in the Guild's stead.
• Wham Episode: The RP is no stranger to plot twists, unexpected battles, and other such shocking surprises, but there have been several standout examples so far:
  • The "Lost In The Woods" arc, which sees the party getting into real danger for the very first time and establishes the Viral Aggression as a danger to the party and everyone else. With this now hanging over everyone's heads, the tone of the RP takes a noticeably darker turn.
  • The sixth chapter of the Silversand Arc, in which the party meets Pergio for the first time and sees Finley getting critically injured by him. At the same time, some members of the party are discovered to be carrying the VA.
  • The tail-end of the Hoard arc, where the party discovers the extent of Serris's plans for the other humanmons and very nearly wind up trapped in Hoard forever by him, only being spared from this by Ripley. The party immediately flees Hoard, and from this point on, Serris is a clear enemy to the party.
  • The Gleamscape arc started off as more of a Breather Episode until things came down hard at the end of the day: Finley confesses to the party that she has always been a Pokémon from day one and simply wanted some to hang out with and thus posed as a former human. The party is shocked. At the same time, Jani attempts to escape the Terranports by using a Transfer Orb on herself (turning into a Purrloin named Sarah) which has clear adverse effects on Lilly and Tilly.
  • The Foxfell arc, big time. The local Treacherous Advisor turns out to not only be another vector, but also responsible for creating all of the other vectors the party has faced (or failed to face in the case of the unknown Slak Rock vector)...and she's not even the one responsible for the Viral Aggression in the first place, meaning that there is a Greater-Scope Villain that the party still has yet to face. Additionally, Autumn announces plans to leave the party to stay in Foxfell...possibly for good (but she is talked out of it).
  • The L'Arachel arc may be just as big of a case, as it reveals that Noriaki wasn't the only one from his world to end up in the Pokémon world...and this is not a good thing. Even worse, Nyquil is turned evil by them. L'Arachel's arrival also has a drastic effect on the setting itself as she and her associates have brought magic into the world, and some completely separate Pokémon (such as recurring antagonist Phoebe, a Yamask named Silas, and inept Sceptile and Haxorous magicians Irving and Wilbur) have been shown using it.
  • Even in an arc already dishing out shocking surprises like candy, the end of the second chapter pulls no punches: Mila and several other members of the party are tricked into walking into an ambush on them by L'Arachel, and in the ensuing mayhem a friend of the party's is killed...by Nyquil (albeit by mistake). Even the characters can do nothing but return to their inn base in Stunned Silence. Furthermore, at this point Nyquil is mortified by his actions and wants out of L'Arachel's plans, but it's too late for him to escape.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Due to the nature of the RP, few plot points and characters are ever truly in danger of being forgotten or ignored. Plot points can be put on hold for later and player characters who end up vanishing when their players leave the RP can come back. There are some exceptions though:^*For something to qualify for this trope, the element, plot, or character must be either impossible to continue or follow up on due to outside circumstances or having gone several arcs or IRL months without being seen or heard from.
  • Jani's dreams about a faraway battle between Groudon and Moltres were officially scrapped by her player due to waning investment in the plot it was foreshadowing.
  • Hoard has some minor examples:
    • The island of Wild Ridge played a minor but somewhat important role during Hoard and many characters from it made Early Bird Cameos during the Hoard tournament. However, since the Hoard arc's conclusion, there has been no significant mention of Wild Ridge nor of its inhabitants or the things going on there whatsoever, and further maps of the Dejara Archipelago no longer include it.
    • A villainous Aegislash character known only as the Black Knight and his minions were heavily set up as a future threat for the party to face. Like Wild Ridge, however, they seem to have gone completely forgotten since the arc's conclusion.
  • Many plot points about the Slak Rock arc never wound up being answered due to its abrupt ending. Due to a lack of interest in returning to the town or its plot and characters (the arc ultimately left a bad taste in everyone's mouths for a variety of reasons), these questions may end up never answered:
    • The party never found out who ultimately murdered King Raleigh after his death nor did they ever find out the identity of the oft-mentioned VA vector of the kingdom.
    • Another thing that happened during the Slak Rock arc was Andy being kidnapped by a trio of dog Pokémon from Foxfell who were implied to be searching for Finley/Autumn. However, after the Slak Rock arc was cancelled, Andy's kidnapping failed to be followed up on save for a brief mention of how Andy still hadn't been found yet, and Andy has not been seen or heard from since. His kidnappers disappeared from the arc entirely, and when they reappeared later, they made no mention of Andy.^*This is mostly due to two out-of-universe factors: Slak Rock's cancellation changed the circumstances behind the party actually going to Foxfell, rendering the kidnappers moot since they were originally meant to kidnap Autumn and force her to return to Foxfell, resulting in everyone going after them. The other factor is due to Andy's player being removed from the RP, leaving Andy's story to end on the unfortunate note of him never being seen or heard from again following his kidnapping.
    • There has been no word about whom among the many heirs succeeded their deceased father at this time, assuming one was able to at all given that most mentions of Slak Rock since the arc ended suggest that it has descended into anarchy since the King's death.^* Though out of universe, Frederika the Mawile has been kicked around as the potential winner, though this hasn't become canon yet (assuming it ever eventually does). As for the rest of the heirs, their fates are currently still ambiguous with the exception of Olias, who has been confirmed by his player to have been Killed Offscreen in the midst of the ensuing mayhem in Slak Rock following King Raleigh's death.
  • At the beginning of the Orbs arc, among the various mons affected by the Wonder Orbs was Guy, who was turned into a Midday Lycanroc. While everyone else either returned to normal or decided to stick with their new forms, Guy not only wasn't present when the Reset Orbs were being handed out but ended up disappearing entirely midway through the arc and so far has not shown up again since. Whether he ever returned to being a Snorlax or not is up in the air until Guy reappears again.
  • During the Hoard arc, Marlon and Goobert both ended up with their respective Mega Stones. While there was some closure to Marlon's use of his stone (which ended up destroyed by Zelgius during the L'Arachel arc), Goobert's stone ended up disappearing entirely without any real explanation due to his player having little to no real ideas of any stories that could involve it, not to mention constantly forgetting that Goobert had it. (His player's original explanation that Goobert simply left it at home by mistake no longer holds any water as Goobert has been back at his home multiple times since the original explanation and yet still never comes back with it.)
  • Subverted with most of the treasure hunters involved with the aborted Eluant Canyon side-quest. Although most of them didn't immediately appear other places following the sidequest's cancellation, their players have confirmed where they went after the treasure hunt and will show up again in the future. The only one left unaccounted for is Jani/Sarah, whose current whereabouts are unknown.
  • Hudson was a Togetic who joined the party per Voxno's orders at the beginning of the L'Arachel arc to study the humanmons and interacted with them a bit before quietly vanishing a little ways in and has made no further appearances at this time. In a similar vein, Tilly and Lilly's intended benching ended up being with far less fanfare than initially intended and they likewise simply disappeared instead.
• The Worf Effect:
  • The party's training is interrupted by a Ludicolo leading a bunch of Cherrim, which causes the party a bit of grief. Then Bash, a Blaziken, comes in and knocks out the Ludicolo in one blow, establishing Bash as a badass.
  • One of the top cops gets bowled over by the possessed Chansey while trying to stop her, just to show how ridiculously strong Yamaropu's possession made her.
  • Both Max and Bash later find themselves on the receiving end of this trope during the tournament in Hoard; Bash is brutally beaten by Kapitani Khmalidze - in the guise of 'La Cuchilla' - establishing her as a serious threat. Max is later defeated by the type-disadvantaged Guy, who had himself Took a Level in Badass. Subverted somewhat, as Bash had tired himself out from training too hard, and Max was still reeling from Bash's defeat and couldn't focus.
  • Goobert is almost immediately put out of commission by Merqury and Anastasia when he tries to fight them.
• Wounded Gazelle Gambit:
  • While at the hospital in Silversand following being attacked by Perigo, Finley and the others briefly have to deal with a creepy Mr. Mime who got in the hospital in this manner just to hit on the female Pokémon there.
  • Also (unsuccessfully) attempted by Jillian in Hoard when she doesn't get her way while trying to convince some of the party members to let her join the party.

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