Web Video / Twitch Plays Pokémon Red

Make the voices stop...

Image courtesy of Lolita-Yaoi-Girl. Used with permission.

Red: The voices tell me the future. I will lay to rest the restless spirits. I will destroy you and your organization. I will climb to the peak of this land, with all the Badges and accolades it has to offer. And then...
Giovanni: (thinking) He's insane...
Red: THERE WILL BE SILENCE!

~Twitch Plays Pokemon: Dreams (Part 2)

Twitch Plays Pokémon (TPP) is a social experiment in which commands representing buttons on an original Game Boy (up, down, left, right, A, B, start, and select) are entered into a chat on Twitch, and then translated into a game of Pokémon Red via an IRC bot. In short, over 100,000 people are fighting over a controller. Throughout its life, Twitch Plays Pokémon has spawned hilarious characters, memorable moments, and even a few religions.

Originally the game operated on a simple basis: any player could enter any command in chat and the command would go through for Red to follow. As the stream worked on a 20-second delay, this caused any task requiring the most minimum of finesse to become a herculean feat. No section demonstrated this more than Route 9, a simple ledge maze that bamboozled the players for fifteen hours.

As time went by, the frazzled and confused Red discovered religion in the form of the Helix Fossil: a Plot Coupon that could be "used" (to no effect) but crucially could not be discarded or consumed. Thus, it was accidentally "used" to a ridiculous degree and "CONSULT THE HELIX FOSSIL" became a meme; and eventually, a god. Subsequently, the over-leveled Pidgeot on Red's team became "Bird Jesus" and "The Only Hope" when every other viable Pokémon (including the starter!) was accidentally released.

TPP's popularity eventually grew to the point (topping out at 123,000 over one million simultaneous players) where even the most simple hurdles became impossible to pass with so many conflicting commands being entered. After Red became trapped for more than twenty-four hours within the Team Rocket Hideout (and its nefarious floor-tile puzzle), a new system was created: players would vote for commands every five seconds and the most popular command would be chosen as the input.

This made the precision moves necessary to progress possible, but many players felt this was a betrayal of what made TPP unique and fun, as basically now what players were left with was just normal gameplay, but much slower. This led to players protesting the move by spamming votes for the "start" button, keeping the game permanently paused and making all progress impossible. This prompted another rethink and a new system was made: the Anarchy-Democracy System. In addition to command inputs, players could vote for when they wanted the game to be played by voting and when they wanted it to be a free-for-all as it was originally.

At 16 days, 7 hours and 45 minutes, Red and his team of Zapdos, Nidoking, Venomoth, Lapras, Omastar and Pidgeot completed their mission, and became champions of the Pokémon League. They returned home to Pallet Town, and although the mob kept inputting its commands, Red was freed from the burden of having to obey them. He spent a long, quiet moment standing in front of his home, unmoving, stunned from sheer relief. The Mob thus exited his mind and left him for good... until the second run where they sparred off against Red and his team atop Mt. Silver, now controlling the mind of another trainer from Pokémon Crystal.

Come April 2016, in the lead up PBR 2.0's debut, several older run saves were played. Red was the fourth and final of these, following FireRed, Emerald and Crystal, over 2 years after its end.

The official stream could be found here. Also, there are YouTube channels for time-lapses and highlights. The stream has a fan-made Game Intro. A two-minute long dramatic summary can be found here.

See also here for the archived progress of the game, here for the archived status of the run, or here for live updates, which have been archived here. There is also a recap page, found here.

A note when adding examples: Every Memetic Mutation adopted by enough people ascends to canon. In fact, the whole TPP universe is composed of Ascended Memes.

Since no one is going to watch the 255+ hours necessary to get caught up, all spoilers will be unmarked.

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Twitch Plays Pokémon contains examples of:

• The Ace: Pidgeot (aaabaaajss a.k.a. Bird Jesus and Abba Jesus). Being ridiculously overlevelled helps a lot, though.

• Achilles' Heel: Button spam in Anarchy mode works surprisingly well most of the time, but it has two major weaknesses:
  • Using a PC: it's so good at accidentally releasing Pokémon that The PC was declared Red's true enemy.
  • Narrow walkways along a ledge: walking in a straight line is nigh-impossible, so Red keeps jumping off and having to start over.
  • Democracy often takes over to accomplish these things.
  • Timed missions also tend to be a nightmare in Anarchy mode. The Safari Zone proved to be borderline impossible with the button spam. The Pokémon Mansion also proved difficult due to Red's Pokémon all being poisoned by local Koffing, creating a time limit to grab the key to the Cinnabar Gym before he whites out.
• Added Alliterative Appeal: Most of the Pokémon names start with A (which isn't surprising given that the cursor starts on that letter in the naming screen.)
• Alternate Self: The Red of Twitch Plays Pokémon Blue. Had significantly less Mob members controlling him (200 compared to 130,000), and thus could reign them in better. Basically, this Red is a more well adjusted version of the incompetent mess we know and love now.
  • "xxx", the version of Red we saw for a few minutes after the accidental soft reset, is also seen as this. One mythological timeline◊ claims he's the Red from a "false world" created by not discarding a particular Nugget.
• Ambiguous Gender: Due to the lack of gender in Pokémon Red, a lot of Pokémon genders are up in the air for the mob to decide. Most of the team is thought to be male, but ABBBBBBK(, aka Abby, is considered female.
  • Also applies to Cabbage and (possibly) Abby Jr.
  • Transferring the save file from Gen I to Gen II reveals the genders of the surviving Pokémon. Abby Jr. is indeed female, as are the Fresh "Prince" and the Burger "King". The rest of the Pokémon are male.
  • Earlier save files eventually released by the streamer reveal the genders of released Pokémon. Abby and Dig Rat are male, while Jay Leno, Dux, Flareon and Cabbage are female.
• America Saves the Day: Both subverted and played straight. There are users from all around the world playing simultaneously at any given moment. At the start of Bloody Sunday, while America was sleeping, users from different time zones stepped up to wrestle control from trolls and keep damage to a minimum. Later that day the PC was successfully navigated and an adequate team put together during America's turn at the wheel.
  • It is also commonly believed that America has to "fix Australia and Europe's mistakes" every morning. Conversely, Australia and Europe tend to make the most actual progress, with the exception of the walk through Victory Road.
  • Ultimately averted, though, as the final victory came at about 4:00 AM US Eastern time.
• Angels, Devils and Squid: With Lord Helix, Bird Jesus and Double-A Jay filling in the "angels" role; Dome Fossil and possibly Flareon filling in the "devils" role; and the PC and the Voices probably filling in the "squid" role. Note that, while initial lore had this trope played pretty-much straight, later games implied that none of these sides can accurately claim to be "the good guys" in this universe.
• Animated Adaptation: At one point during the wait between the end of Twitch Plays Pokémon Crystal and the start of Twitch Plays Pokémon Emerald, the Admin decided to let the Mob control a DVD player showing Pokémon: The Series. Many declared the result to be this to the LP, nicknaming it Twitch Plays with the Remote.
  • In a more traditional example, the minds behind Pokémon The 'Bridged Series have come out with "Twitchy Pokemon."
• Anticlimax Boss: Invoked and ultimately subverted. In normal play Giovanni's Gym battle is considered an anticlimax because he has no Normal-type Pokémon, letting a Water-type sweep his team. The mob hoped that Omanyte and Lapras, despite their lower levels, could do the same. Giovanni then proceeded to defeat Red with a combination of Guard Specials, poison, and Red's own tactics.
  • Played completely straight with the ledge just outside of Kanto's Victory Road. Said ledge is even longer than the one on Route 9 that took many hours to pass, and most of the Mob expected to spend more time on getting past that ledge than actually going through Victory Road. The first time they approached it they ended up getting past it on less than a dozen tries. Who would have thought that the Ledge's final form was actually a Clipped-Wing Angel?
  • Also played straight with the Final Boss battle against Blue. While the Elite Four themselves scored plenty of black outs on Red, Blue only managed to do it once in the last battle, and that only happened because Red's party had been reduced to the low-leveled ATV. When Red reached Blue a second time relatively unscathed, Blue got slaughtered in a matter of minutes.
    • Blue in general fits this, despite being Red's rival and having a strong and diverse team overall, every single battle against him with a decently healed team throughout the game was a walk in the park. To give you some perspective here, after defeating Giovanni, the Mob decided to intentionally lose to Blue so they could heal, rather than go to the Pokemon Center and risk invoking the wrath of the PC. That's right, Blue was the Mob's mini Pokemon Center.
• Anyone Can Die: Using the PC is dangerous, and releasing is permanent.
  • The attempt to get rid of some filler (Eevee) that was taking up slots in the party ended with JLVWNNOOOO and ABBBBBBK( being released instead. Bird Jesus was also deposited but was miraculously retrieved.
  • A plan to counter this involved fainting every Pokémon in the party except Bird Jesus. The belief was that the last Pokémon in the party can be neither stored nor released. It turns out that not only can you store your only usable Pokémon, but you also pass out immediately afterwards.
  • During the Great Zapdos Purge, aka Bloody Sunday and the Red Wedding, 12 more Pokémon were released, among them were Cabbage, Dux, and Dig Rat. This is after the party got Zapdos and Lapras, so you win some, you lose some.
  • Many participants variously thought that your starter Pokémon (Abby), Pokémon who know HM's, traded Pokémon (Dux) and/or the only Pokémon that's not fainted could not be released. (There was some logic to this, given that Pokémon who know HM's cannot be put in the daycare center, and traded Pokémon cannot be renamed because they are special.) To their dismay and horror they found out otherwise.
• Apple of Discord: Flareon (formerly Eevee), who caused endless debate on what to evolve it into (Vaporeon or Jolteon were the main arguments, but it ended up a Flareon anyway) then a trip to the PC that ended up releasing two Pokémon and almost losing a third. Some claim that Flareon ruined Twitch Plays Pokémon.
  • To a lesser extent, the Master Ball. Some want to use it on Snorlax, since he can be reached without encountering any further wild Pokémon. Others want to use it on Zapdos, citing how helpful having a legendary on the team would be.
  • The ball was eventually used to successfully capture Zapdos, who started a whole new level of discord when twelve Pokémon were released in efforts to retrieve him from the PC. Fortunately MOST of them were never-used safari-caught Pokémon, but not all of them...
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Now that Zapdos and Omastar are part of the team, the Mob has settled on a final team to beat the Elite Four with: Omastar, aaabaaajss, AA-j, AAAAAAAAAA, AIIIIIIRRR, and AATTVVV. The fandom describes them◊ as:
  A God, a Messiah, an Angel, a King, a Prince, and an All Terrain Vehicle.
  • Subverted near the end, when ATV Took a Level in Badass and ascended to the status of Dragon Slayer.
• Artifact of Doom: The PC. Occasionally players will need to use it to swap out Pokémon, though they always fear what might happen and will stay far away from it whenever they can.
  • Again, the Master Ball, which has brought with it the curse of inaction and discord. After all, it is composed of two domes...
    • It would later merge with Zapdos, the events thereafter would be known as Bloody Sunday, the day that 12 Pokémon were released.
• Artificial Stupidity: Worked in the favor of Red, fortunately. In Red/Blue, the stronger trainers' AI (such as Lance's) would select moves that had a type advantage over the player's Pokémon...even if the move did no damage whatsoever. Because of this, Lance's level 62 Dragonite would keep using the Psychic-type status moves Agility and Barrier against the Poison-type level 36 Venomoth, letting it survive way longer than it should have. Because of this, ATV was able to defeat Dragonite and by extension Lance...even though it would get destroyed by Blue's Pidgeot a moment later.
• Back for the Finale: Meta example. The stream had dipped to nearly 30,000 people during the Grinding day after beating Giovanni. As soon as they reached the Elite 4, it shot back up to 100,000 commenters within a few hours.
  • Spoofed here, along with Dance Party Ending.
• Badass Adorable: Omanyte is called "Lord Helix" and worshipped as a god, in spite of being a littler, more wide-eyed aspiring-Eldrich-abomination than would have been expected from the buildup, and was underleved compared to the rest of the team upon resurrection. Hasn't stopped the mob since then from leveling him into a Pint-Sized Powerhouse.
• Big Bad:
  • The Dome Fossil has been declared this, with Flareon/Eevee originally seen as his agent. Other interpretations portraying Flareon as an agent of Helix began to appear, which after Bloody Sunday became a more popular opinion, though they don't necessarily agree on who is the Big Bad. This opens a whole can of worm as to which version is right, or if there is a "canon" one. Most people involved with TPP don't bother digging too deep and the Helix Cult is by far the most popular one, though.
  • A sizable portion of the fandom have referred to the PC as the Blood God.
  • Another Twitch streamer sent viewers to attempt releasing Bird Jesus. He was declared a villain almost immediately.
• Big Bad Ensemble / The Big Bad Shuffle: Blue sees himself as Red's rival and will also be the game's Final Boss (barring Mewtwo), but he doesn't actually pose any significant hindrance to Red's quest. Giovanni as the leader of Team Rocket and a proven threat to Red in battle is a more traditional Big Bad, but the Mob believes him to be insignificant compared the Dome Fossil which is seen as a God of Evil and ultimately responsible for any and all setbacks to the quest. However the PC presents a much more clear and present threat to Red and his Pokémon, but whether it is an independent actor is a point of contention; more people believe that it is an agent of Bill, its creator, but he also seems to have some kind of undetermined relation to the Dome.
• Big "NO!": When Lord Helix and Zapdos fell during a battle with Agatha, the chat erupted into a hurricane of people shouting "NNNNNNOOOOOOOOOO!!".
• Boisterous Weakling: Despite Blue constantly claiming how much better he is than Red, he's lost literally every fight with Red so far—sometimes in a matter of minutes. Considering the fact that Red can't get out of a supermarket without making it into a major ordeal, that's saying something.
  • Current "Mopping-The-Floor-With-Blue-On-His-First-Try" count is 8/10, and even then it should be noted that the battles Blue won don't really count because Red just let him win.
    • The first time was in order to black out and heal, and thus save himself from having to navigate past the ledge just outside the nearest Pokemon Center. When Red came back for a rematch, Blue's party was promptly slaughtered. See also Worf Had the Flu below.
    • Second time was after most of the team was taken out beforehand, save for a low-leveled Venomoth that laid an AI-assisted beat down to Lance's Dragonite. It promptly got destroyed in two hits, sending Red back to the start of the Elite 4.
• Boring, but Practical: Most battles are won by Normal-type Pokémon with Normal-type moves such as Gust, Quick Attack, Body Slam and Cut.
  • As Red discovered that Dig Rat could quash Ghost-types with ease, and after he managed to teach Drowzee "Psychic," suddenly these two have been winning most every battle Red fights... until Drowzee replaced Psychic with Headbutt.
• Button Mashing:
  • The chat had a massive stream of spamming "a" during Erika's battle to ensure Bird Jesus used Gust.
  • The Button Mashing is Lampshaded in this picture.
  • When the chat entered a room full of PCs inside the Cinnabar Mansion, the reaction was a massive flood of "b".
• Cannon Fodder/Red Shirt: Dux, Jlvwnnoooo, Cabbage and Keeper constantly die in battle.
  • The stream's Safari Zone catches became this on Bloody Sunday.
    • Exception being "The Fonz," a Nidorino that was eventually evolved into a Nidoking and is now part of the party.
• Can't Catch Up: At least half of the Pokémon in the team roster started to become useless around the time of the fourth gym due to the user mob's inability to switch Pokémon around to get enough battle experience. Doesn't help either that the Mind Hive has a tendency to run away from wild Pokémon battles.
  • Recognizing this, the Mob has begun a multi-day grinding and TM-acquiring mission to give these Pokémon a boost.
• Cargo Cult: The Twitch users start worshiping the Helix Fossil after constantly (accidentally) selecting it in battle.
• Central Theme: Anarchy vs. Democracy, never giving up, and the ability for strangers with different viewpoints to work together.
• Cerebus Syndrome: What started off as a fun social experiment exploded into an epic adventure with intense emotional investment in the party's Pokémon, and heated religious and political debates about the nature of the stream and what the best system to manage it is. In-game, things get very dark upon the realization that Anyone Can Be Released.
  • Knight of Cerebus: Eevee. The player base's division on whether to get it, let alone which Eeveelution to evolve it into, caused some huge fractures, and in their attempts to get rid of it, they ended up evolving it into the least useful of the three possible options, and then ended up accidentally releasing two of the main party Pokémon, including the starter.
• Cherry Tapping: A Level 20 Dux (Farfetch'd) using Cut on Giovanni's level 25 Onix◊ is about as effective as you'd think it would be. However, Onix's accuracy was so terrible due to being locked into Rage that it actually worked until Bird Jesus was sent in to finish the job.
• The Chosen One: Bird Jesus is considered this. After reaching Pokémon Tower, Drowzee is burdened with everyone's expectations, being the only one in the team who is anywhere close to being qualified to take on Ghost types.
  • Helix. Chosen from the beginning, worshipped, brought to Cinnabar Island for its revival, soon becomes a central part of the team.
• Clingy Jealous Girl: The Clingy Girl in one of the supermarkets, who nearly trapped Red trying to talk to him.
• Continuity Reboot: Accidentally, when A, B, Start, and Select were all pressed at the same time, the game restarted and "New Game" was selected. After renaming Red "xxx" and Blue "Aadeeef", the (metaphorical) Reset Button was pushed by loading a save state, and the "Select" command disabled entirely.
• Cosmic Horror Story: For those that consider Red to be sentient, the entire thought of having thousands of commands issued by omnipotent beings (many of which are malicious or just kind of jerks) to your fragile body at any given moment, and being forced to do all of them in rapid succession, regardless if they directly conflict with one another, leaves for a miserable existence. The creepiest part? This is all Played for Laughs!
  • To hammer the point home ever harder, the direction the story has taken would fit right in with the Cthulhu Mythos. An insane and insomniac protagonist, bizarre religions formed around equally bizarre things with bizarre names (it's all too easy to compare the Helix Fossil/Omanyte to Cthulhu himself at this point), and strange and dangerous creatures everywhere are all hallmarks of something H. P. Lovecraft would write.
• Crazy Enough to Work: The "house strategy"◊ to cut the tree in front of the Celadon Gym.
  • The Eevee Sabotage Plan. To end the war between Jolteon/Vaporeon supporters and the other factions, the IRC users agreed on a plan to sabotage Eevee by evolving it into Flareon, killing the possibility of people getting a Vaporeon/Jolteon. The plan? Spamming START and A in the Game Corner, where everyone would be pressing A to press the switch, hoping that, eventually, the Fire Stone would be used on Eevee. It worked.
  • The "Faint All Except X" plan, a way to counter Anyone Can Be Released, making X immune. It failed.
  • Operation Shoot For The Moon◊: When all Pokémon that knew (or even could learn) Cut were released on Bloody Sunday, the Mob came up with a complex route to reach Cinnabar without Cut by traveling around the ledges on Route 4 and through Mt. Moon, just so that they wouldn't have to access the PC again. It worked.
• Crutch Character: Bird Jesus turned into this, becoming hideously overleveled while the rest of the team was underleveled. Worse, he had no way of damaging Ghost types since all his damaging attacks are Normal, so relying on him too heavily could make the game unwinnable. Eventually he learned Mirror Move, allowing him to reflect Ghost types' moves back at them, and since Ghost is super-effective against itself...
  • Drowzee, after much effort by the masses, learned Psychic... and then forgot it for Headbutt.
  • For a short while before Bloody Sunday happened, it was believed that Bird Jesus was lost to the PC and Zapdos would have to become this over a party that was generally under level 20.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: AA-j against Blue's Blastoise on Route 22. It went about as one would expect.
  • During the winning run against the Elite four Aa-j dished out so many curbstomps.
• Dance Party Ending: Spoofed here, along with Back for the Finale
• Dangerous Forbidden Technique: Democracy mode is this. It is only used when deemed absolutely necessary by the majority of the mob, and when used, Red becomes susceptible to start9 spam and everything in general just slows down. Luckily, combat is turn based.
  • The PC. Every time it's used, there's a substantial chance of Pokémon being released, so it gets avoided until absolutely necessary.
• Darkest Hour: Day 10, known by the fandom as Bloody Sunday, whereupon they successfully caught Zapdos, but at the cost of Dux, Digrat, Cabbage, and most of the Safari Zone Pokémon. Many wondered whether it was worth the effort.
  • Before that, Day 3 was considered as such, when the party first encountered the False Prophet/Martyr Flareon, which led to Abby and Jay Leno's subsequent releases.
  • Day 12 could be considered one as well, where Red was stuck inside a two-square corridor inside Cinnabar Mansion between a table, some rubble, and an NPC Roadblock for about 1.5 hours, with Red having to resort to intentionally whiting out again to escape the prison.
• Deadpan Snarker: The clerk at the Pokemart. "Take your time", indeed.
  • Giovanni also qualifies. Even he's surprised that Red made it to his office.
• Death Equals Redemption: Some mob members believe Flareon was absolved for his crimes after the absolute massacre that resulted from trying to withdraw Zapdos.
• invokedDefictionalization: Ask the Helix Fossil anything! Note: It may necessarily be truthful...
• Deliberately Monochrome: The game itself, and sometimes occurs in fanworks in order to distinguish this version of Pokémon Red and Blue's world from the one already established in the games.
• Democracy Is Bad: The creator changed the anarchic system for a voting, democratic system. It made everything worse◊, because Red was no more coordinated, it just made him even slower.
  • The stream has also gone down several times since it was incorporated.
  • The group seems to have agreed on a compromise that they'll use "Democracy" to get through tricky areas, and "Anarchy" everywhere else. It HAS proven to work in this regard, as they finally navigated through the Team Rocket HQ maze after learning to adjust for the stream delay that all of the viewers have due to Twitch's inbuild delay of 20 to 40 seconds.
  • Played straight again when someone started using bots, their own internet followers, or some combination thereof to vote-bomb once democracy came on at a PC for the sake of releasing as many important Pokémon as possible.
• Democracy Is Flawed: Invoked in that, although Democracy allows the mob to perform surgical actions, decisions are still susceptible to mistakes thanks to the lag, process is much slower paced, the voting system is easy to abuse, and of course, there will always be people with different ideas who will be silenced by the majority.
• Despair Event Horizon: Morale dropped severely after Drowzee forgot Psychic for Headbutt.
  • Pretty much every other day has players go through severely upsetting moments, especially whenever Pokémon are released to the wild. The game is essentially becoming a Secret Test of Character for the mob.
• Determinator: Red, in-game with a bit of Too Dumb to Live. The thousands of users as a whole may or may not be a reconstruction, having still continued when struggling with ledges, cutting down trees or navigating mazes. Or pretty much when trying to attempt anything together.
  • Anarchists have started to complain that Democracy supporters give up too easily and that Democracy is no longer used as the last resort it was supposed to be. Many Anarchists have expressed that they are in no rush of finishing the game and that thousands of people struggling together is what makes Twitch Plays Pokémon worth playing. Several have also stated that they wish to stay and see the run through, regardless of how long it takes.
  • Even after "Bloody Sunday", many users reacted by gritting their teeth and refusing to give up.
  • Red never gave up against the Elite Four no matter how much he lost to them.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: AATTVVV single-handedly defeated Lance's Dragonite, without taking so much as a scratch.
• Distressed Dude: Red spent two days trapped in the Rocket Game Corner and another two days in Pokémon Tower.
  • He was also held captive by a Burglar in the Mansion, forced to fight Pokémon until he blacked out.
  • In a very weird example, Red spent some time trapped outside Giovanni's gym due to a maliciously placed ledge.
• The Dragon: Flareon to the Dome, the argument is over who else serves the Dome Fossil. Giovanni and Dig Rat have had their names considered.
  • Depending on who you ask, Drowzee, Bill and Zapdos also qualify.
• The Dreaded: Zig-zagged with the PC at Red's home: It can only be used to deposit and withdraw items, not Pokémon, and thus it should be safe to use (and was used to try to deposit the Pokeflute)... but then they lose several useful TMs in the process of using it before heading back to Viridian.
• Dream Sequence: After beating the League, the stream switched to an edited Rom of The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, where the protagonist is Red wielding the Helix Fossil. It was later changed to other games, such as Denju Telefang. It's implied and accepted that they are Red having nightmares while sleeping for the first time in over two weeks.
• Driven to Suicide: Multiple times, as purposely whiting out is much easier than convincing 70,000 people to go back to the often far away Pokémon Center.
  • Red dropped down a floor in a mansion, encountered a Burglar Trainer, and discovered after beating him that the Trainer, by walking towards Red, had trapped the latter in a two-square prison.◊ Lacking a Pokémon with Dig, and the hand-eye coordination to use an Escape Rope, the team had no real option other than taking enough damage from random encounters to black out and get teleported back outside.
  • Following his Gym Battle with Giovanni, Red needed to heal, but the nearest Pokémon Center was located over a ledge. Luckily, Blue was nearby, so the mob had Blue knock Red out to get him to the center faster.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: When ABBBBBBK( and JLVWNNOOOO were released to the wild during the failed attempt to free up a slot in the team roster. Flareon, CCC, and X suffered the same fate later on.
• Dungeon Bypass: There was much fear about what would happen when Red reached Seafoam Island, expecting a lot of problems with Surfing, rock-pushing puzzles and (heaven forbid) Articuno. What ended up happening instead was the group backtracking all the way to Pallet Town and Surf to Cinnabar Island backwards, avoiding Seafoam Island entirely.
  • Worth noting is that the bypass may not have been intentional. Going through the original path required Cut, which the group had lost access to with Dux and Cabbage's release, so they were forced to get to Cinnabar the long way. Avoiding Seafoam Island was just a bonus.
• Dwindling Party: Many Pokémon are gained over the course of the playthrough, but many end up released. Of the original party of six, only Bird Jesus and Drowzee remain. Thankfully, they have been replaced by other caught Pokémon, including Zapdos and Helix itself.
• Dying to Be Replaced: ABBBBBBK(, the starter Pokémon, was sent to the PC, making Bird Jesus the definitive main Pokémon of the party.
  • Also necessary when the party is lacking a HM-able Pokémon. With the randomness generated by 100,000+ players, anyone can be boxed to be replaced. Suffice it to say they learned their lesson after what happened with ABBBBBBK( and avoid the box like the plague until they absolutely need it.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: In-universe, many in the Mob are caught off guard by certain mechanics of Generation I, having gotten used to modifications in more recent games:
  • If some of your party has fainted, the game will not prevent you from depositing or releasing the ones that are still conscious, thus causing your to white-out INSIDE a Pokémon Center.
  • Pokémon can be released even if they know HM moves.
  • Poison-type Pokémon take more damage from Bug-type moves instead of less, which made AATTVVV's Leech Life unexpectedly useful against Gastly and Haunter.
  • Many players are repeatedly confused when Whirlwind does nothing, because it had no effect in Trainer battles until Gold & Silver.
  • Throwing a Poké Ball at a Pokémon with a sufficiently low capture rate results in a complete miss, much to the dismay of those trying to take potshots at Snorlax.
  • AI Pokémon having no Power Point (PP) limit, Struggle being a Normal-type move that cannot hit Ghost-type Pokémon, and Gust being a Normal-type move. All three of these factors came together to turn Pokémon Tower into "Ghost Hell".
  • Interacting with water or strength rocks did not prompt the user to use the related HM. This was especially difficult for Victory Road.
  • If a Pokémon uses the move Disable on an opposing Pokémon, the move selected to be disabled is randomized in Generation 1 games, rather than the selection being dependent on the last move used by the foe. This trait was especially evident during the first battles against Lance and the first Champion battle against Blue, where Dragonite's Hyper Beam and foe Pidgeot's Whirlwind (both of which were present in the movepools of the aforementioned Pokémon but went unused during each battle, respectively) were randomly selected by Venomoth's Disable move.
  • Due to an error in coding, Focus Energy decreases the Critical Hit-ratio as opposed to increasing it, resulting in wasted turns and an adverse effect to the user rather than a beneficial one.
  • Instead of Full Restores (items that fully restore health and negate non-volatile status ailments like paralysis and poison), like in later games, opposing Trainers in Generation 1 (such as the Elite Four members) typically utilize Super Potions (items which only restore a meager 50 Hit Points of a Pokémon's health) during battle. This mechanic allows Red to have an easier time in defeating foes that are on the brink of fainting.
  • Stronger Gen 1 trainers (such as the Elite Four) were programmed to always use the super effective type against their opponent. In the case of Venomoth, this means Psychic Types. As it turns out, Lance's Dragonite knows two Psychic type moves; Agility (Speed Boost) and Barrier (Defense Boost). Venomoth wiped Dragonite in the upset of the century.
  • In a musical example, in Pokémon Red, the standard Trainer battle theme plays for Lorelei, Bruno, and Agatha, as opposed to the Gym Leader battle theme (the latter of which all 3 Elite Four members received for their battles in Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen and Yellow). Also, the first room of the Indigo Plateau building plays the "Indigo Plateau" theme rather than the "Pokémon Gym" heard in the same area in Pokémon FireRed/LeafGreen.
  • Out of universe, however, the early stages of the game had no Anarchy/Democracy scale.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: After 16 days, 7 hours and 44 minutes of sleeplessness, insanity, kicking ass, and getting his ass kicked, along with more than 50,000 people screaming at his head and telling him what to do, Red was finally rewarded with the sweet victory known as silence after defeating the Elite Four. You earned it, buddy, you earned it.
• The End of the World as We Know It: Many viewers' reaction to the irreversible release of Abby and Jay Leno was of utter shock and incredulity. It crippled the team's strength and marked a clear before and after for the game run.
  • Apocalypse How: Of the Focused Destruction variety. May count as Societal Disruption at a meta-level inside the Twitch Plays Pokémon community.
• Enemy Mine: Whether Mob members are on the side of Anarchy or Democracy, both sides would like to give a swift kick in the proverbial faces to Destiny and the PC.
• Every Man Has His Price: This comic interprets the second Giovanni battle as Red simply bribing him off with Nuggets and cruise ship tickets.
• "Everyone Comes Back" Fantasy Party Ending: This fan interpretation of the ending using footage from This Is the End.
• Evil Counterpart: Blue's Pidgeot, to Red's Pidgeot. Bird Judas to Bird Jesus.
• The Fellowship Has Ended: The Post-Zapdos Exodus included the releases of Cabbage, Digrat, and Dux, three core team members.
• A Fool and His New Money Are Soon Parted:
  • Red has made significantly bad or unnecessary purchases in Poké Marts and the Celadon Department Store.
  • Red tends to employ Pokédolls and Poké Balls when they are not useful.
  • Red has thrown away valuable items such as Nuggets, which have an in-universe value of 5,000 Pokémon Dollars.
  • In Safari Zone, Red has proven adept at wasting the entrance cost by digging himself out (via Raticate), exiting just after paying for entrance and carelessly wasting his 500 steps and 30 Poké Balls without achieving anything significant.
  • Red frequently plunges into unwinnable battles and blacks out, disregarding that every defeat makes him lose half his money.
  • During his run at the Elite Four, Red bought several Ultra Balls (when the Mob were trying for Revives). He later throws these Ultra Balls at the Elite Four Member's Pokémon, who of course bat the ball away, wasting it.
• For the Evulz: Some users are simply playing to sabotage serious attempts to play the game. On Day 11, a group of users collaborated to slide into Democracy Mode as much as possible and spam commands during Anarchy Mode with the intention of releasing Pokémon after Zapdos was captured. It mostly worked, with 12 Pokémon being released and the event being nicknamed "Bloody Sunday".
• Freak Out: Red at the Lavender Pokémon Center, if you interpret the brief game crash there as this.
• Glass Cannon: Averted with Gastly who has managed to completely halt the party's progress into the Pokémon Tower, despite being so underlevelled that Bird Jesus should be able to plow through him. Problem is, the mob didn't bother getting any Pokémon who had attacks that can harm Ghost-type Pokémon. The Cannon is still made of glass, it's just that the party has ruined their ability to break said glass.
• A God Am I: The fandom's reaction to the Helix Fossil being picked up and constantly "used" in battle.
• Goldfish Poop Gang: Blue's team. Always show up expecting to be trouble, always curbstomped.
• Good Luck Charm: The Helix Fossil, though it seems to have a long recharge time.
• Gut Punch: Bloody Sunday.
• Hate Sink: Bill quickly became this after the multiple PC fiascoes. It didn't help that people started posting scenes from the anime that depict Bill emerging from a Kabuto suit, causing many to speculate that he's an agent of the Dome Fossil.
• Heart Is an Awesome Power: In normal gameplay "sand attack" is often considered by most players as an almost useless move (all it does is to lower the opponent's accuracy), usually quickly replaced with something more useful. Here, however, it has helped win lots of battles that would have otherwise been very difficult or even hopeless.
  • In particular, since the effectively random attack choices by the Mob tend to extend battles to tedious levels, Sand Attack, especially en masse, keeps the foe from delivering potential knock out blows while the Mob attempts to find the actual attack they need to use.
• Heel–Face Turn: The mob managed to capture one of the Gastly in the Pokémon Tower thus making it into an ally for Red.
• Hell Is That Noise: The sound of the PC being activated.
• Heroic Resolve: When trolls attempted to throw the run overboard and release Bird Jesus and Zapdos, many users responded by spamming B and fighting as much as possible to regain control.
• Heroic RRoD: Red, for several minutes at the Lavender Town Pokémon Center. He's fine after a while.
  • On a meta example, TPP was effectively breaking Twitch elsewhere on the site by causing extreme amounts of lag to other chats that had nothing to do with the game. The Twitch programmers wanted to see TPP played all the way through, and they worked towards keeping the servers up in the process.
• Hope Spot:
  • Red has spent two days straight inside the Rocket Hideout. Twice he's actually gotten past the spin tile maze and near Giovanni, only for Rattata's Dig to get used accidentally.
  • Multiple when Red finally arrived at Fuchsia City. His Pokémon were on their last slivers of health, but there was fortunately a Pokémon Center in town... that was set on the side of a ledge. The mob decided to pull together and use democracy mode to successfully navigate Red to the center...Only for Bird Jesus to faint from Poisoning, sending them all the way back to Lavender Town.
  • Despite threats of sabotage from another channel, somehow the viewers managed to meticulously manage the menus when battling Zapdos in Anarchy Mode, managing to throw the Master Ball and catch it in perhaps one of the highest points of the stream...then came the slight problem of actually retrieving Zapdos from the PC. There was a massive push against Democracy Mode thanks to fears that people would deliberately release Pokémon, and under Anarchy the entire team ended up boxed at one point or another, replaced with Safari Zone Pokémon. What followed can only be described as a massacre that took out both Com Mons and beloved team members alike.
  • Hope Is Scary: Considering how much more likely things are of taking a downturn, getting your hopes up is highly discouraged.
• A House Divided: The 100,000+ players were (mostly) cooperative until Eevee came. They then got divided between people who wanted Vaporeon for Surf, people who wanted Jolteon for Electric coverage, people who wanted anything but Flareon, people who didn't want Eevee at all and people who were afraid that the spastic commands at the Evolution Stone shop would empty Red's wallet before they purchased a drink for the Saffron guards (which did almost happen). Things got worse when they accidentally bought, of all things, the Fire Stone.
  • Ironically, the people who wanted to ignore getting Eevee as party member #6 ended up being absolutely right. Everyone's efforts to either make Eevee useful or free up the party spot for a Surfer caused one disaster after another.
  • Earlier on, any time that Red is near the PC, people will divide between who wants to free a slot for Lapras (or get rid of Flareon) and who is too afraid to use it. The result is a confused Red running in circles inside the Pokémon Center.
• Humans Are Bastards: "Bloody Sunday" happened mostly because of trolls spamming commands while the mob attempted to withdraw Zapdos from the PC.
• Hurricane of Puns: Mostly evident in the chat and in Reddit's live-update thread, particularly when LEDGEndary issues are involved.
• Hypercompetent Sidekick: Bird Jesus surpassed ABBBBBBK(, the starter Pokémon, in both level and movepool. Since ABBBBBBK( was unceremoniously released, this is probably a good thing.
• Insurmountable Waist-High Fence: Both the infamous ledge and tree have become even worse in this playthrough since not only do you need to get through the obstacles, you have to do it by coordinating with 100,000+ people. This can, and often does, lead to a lot of accidental hopping and passing trees. For example, it may take hours to cut a tree down.
  • The Team Rocket Maze made things even worse. Due to the nature of the hideout maze of propelling tiles, you really can only move one space at a time, or else get stuck in the hideout. While it may not be a waist-high fence, it's proving more difficult to deal with than the ledges.
• Intermission: At roughly 100 hours in, the video feed was paused and the chat was put into "sub-only" mode so the chat could be moved to a better server.
  • And then again at 5days 8hours in order to change the input system to involve a vote after a rather involved sequence in which half the chat tried to open up the PC to deposit Rattata to avoid it accidentally digging them out of the Rocket basement again and the other half desperately tried to avoid risking another release. The chat became extremely wild in the meantime... and then dissolved back into the ruthless tug-of-war, vote be damned, as soon as it came back.
  • A 26 hour intermission was held following the completion of Gen 1 before the start of "A new adventure."
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Some suspect that Giovanni is this, believing that he's let Red go whenever Red lost to him because he felt bad for the poor kid.
• The Juggernaut: Gastly, though only because the mob was stupid enough to not grab a Pokémon with his weakness.
• Karma Houdini:
  • Red can't defeat Bill and the PC. Bill has no battle data, so even if they hacked the game he's unable to be fought.
  • Anarchy mode is regularly touted as the safe method because of hypothetical troll attacks in Democracy, yet all of the 21-and-counting releases were Anarchy's fault. Democracy is always helpful when it is activated, accomplishing safely in minutes what Anarchy failed to do with several hours and multiple sacrifices, but they usually only resort to Democracy when Anarchy has killed someone within the last hour.
  • Zapdos's capture led to the release of twelve Pokémon, including three popular ones. In his case, it's zig-zagged. He's blamed for the deaths even though it's really the fault of the PC and random keypresses (some have taken to calling him "Bird Judas"), but he's so powerful that hardly anyone wanted to actually punish him for it, and he became a regular team member.
  • Omanyte's completely unnecessary revival caused three more releases and got Keeper stuck in a box again, but he came from Helix Fossil, so everyone worships him anyway.
• Karmic Jackpot: After DigRat screwed the party over in the Team Rocket Hideout, it was very tempting to dump him in the PC and be done with it. However keeping him around resulted in the party being able to get through the Pokémon Tower, as he was the only party member who could fight the Ghost-type Pokémon there.
• Killed Off for Real: Jay Leno and Abby accidentally got released during an attempt to get rid of Eevee/Flareon, much to the mob's horror. A second attempt to ditch Flareon was more successful. CCC the Hitmonlee and X the Zubat were also accidentally released on day seven.
  • On Day 10, twelve Pokémon were released during a PC fiasco, namely DigRat the Raticate, DUX the Farfetch'd, Seed of Hope the Gloom, three Venonat, three Nidoran, an Exeggcute, a Paras, and a Geodude.
• Know When to Fold Them: After releasing twelve Pokémon (including 3 former team members) in an attempt to withdraw AA-j from the PC, Mob mob decides to cut losses and try it without AA-j.
• Level Grinding: Averted. In an exception to how RPG's are usually played, the mob has put very little investment in training. Bird Jesus being a competent fighter is only thanks to being the oldest surviving Pokémon in the team. Despite outcries to grind Drowzee to make him stronger against Ghost types, the mob has been uninterested in changing strategies so far.
  • Played straight after obtaining the 8th and final badge. The mob agreed that they weren't ready for Victory Road, and they weren't going to afford dealing with the ledge of Route 22. So instead of traversing the ledge, whiting out at Victory Road, and redoing the ledge again, the mob decided to send the team to train at Pokémon Mansion, the place with the second-highest leveled Pokémon. It also helps that the mansion is significantly easier to access.
• Lightning Bruiser: Bird Jesus is the best party member for a reason. He has all the best attacks, is fast, is leveled up higher than any of the other party members, and has proven strong against most of the foes encountered so far. However he became Awesome, but Impractical in the Pokémon Tower, where his Normal type moveset prevented him from hurting the Ghost type Pokémon that infested the tower.
  • With the addition of Zapdos and Nidoking, it's become somewhat debatable if Bird Jesus still has the best moves. He is the most overpowered by a mile, though.
• Little "No": Some of the mob started to do this when Red blacked out near the Fuchsia City Pokémon Center, landing themselves back at Lavender Town.
• The Load: Dig Rat was this at first, but he Took a Level in Badass once the party reached Lavender Town.
  • Cabbage became the team Load later, providing the least in terms of combat and utility.
  • Towards the end of the game, All-Terrain Venomoth was considered this, although the mob kept him because he was better than going back to the PC. He was still largely the Sixth Ranger until he single-handedly destroyed a Dragonite twice his level.
• Luck-Based Mission: Everything. One example: it took the hivemind a few hours to teach something Cut after acquiring the HM, but only a few minutes to actually cut down the tree blocking Vermilion Gym. It took a little less than half an hour to solve the Gym's puzzle, to the surprise of thousands. On the flipside, Lt. Surge's Raichu promptly wasted the party and kicked Red back to the Pokémon Center, at which point it then took them another few hours just to cut the tree again.
• Mass "Oh, Crap!": When the group found a roomful of PCs at Cinnabar, this happened.
• The Millstone: Eevee/Flareon ended up causing nothing but headache and problems for Red and the user mob, and attempts to ditch the thing resulted in the loss of Abby and Jay Leno and nearly got Bird Jesus killed off too. Thankfully, the users were finally able to get rid of him by dropping him in a PC, where he was promptly released.
• The Mole: Flareon is considered a False Prophet sent by Dome Fossil, mainly because of his status as Apple of Discord.
• Mood Whiplash: Yay, we caught Zapdos! Fuck, now we have to use the PC again.
  • And said use of the PC was an absolute disaster, with twelve Pokémon, including Digrat, Dux, and Cabbage being released. And they didn't even retrieve Zapdos!
• Morton's Fork: The Helix Fossil is praised for anything that goes right in Anarchy Mode. If anything goes right in Democracy Mode, Mob members will claim the Helix Fossil is responsible for that success as well.
• Mundane Made Awesome: An especially dramatic example is their attempt to catch Zapdos. They only needed to open the item list, scroll almost to the bottom, and press A to use the Master Ball. But they failed to activate Democracy mode, so they had to do this by button-spamming, while hoping they wouldn't accidentally run away or, equivalently, use Whirlwind. Somehow, they pulled it off.
• Mundane Utility: Blue and his Goldfish Poop Gang were used as an alternative to navigating a ledge in front of a nearby Pokémon Center.
• Nasty Party: The PC.
• Necessarily Evil: Zapdos is an extreme example of this. Despite being blamed for the Bloody Sunday massacre, he went on to become the most powerful member of the team, even going so far as dealing the final blow to Blue's Blastoise.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: How those who wanted Lapras felt about the mob's choice to get Eevee. Which only became even more frustrating after the decision to risk using the PC to make room in the roster resulted in the release of two of the most beloved members in the team.
• "No. Just… No" Reaction: How Mob reacted to finding room full of PCs.
• No Name Given: The Zubat's original name was "—-"
• NPC Roadblock: Even if Red weren't crippled by his own schizophrenia, he still managed to get trapped behind a counter by a random NPC girl in a store.
  • Happened again in Cinnabar Mansion, in which was dubbed "The Great Burglar And Table In Our Way Crisis◊". At least there were wild Pokémon that could be battled to force a blackout...
  • At one point in Red's visit to Pallet Town after the events of Cinnabar, an NPC managed to wander on top of the door to Red's house.
• Obvious Rule Patch: First, the creator removed the use of Select to prevent any more accidental resets. Then, they blocked "Start" spamming. Some time later the block was lifted. Later, they added the new voting system and the Anarchy/Democracy slider in an attempt to rescue the run from the quagmire it fell into during the Rocket Game Corner maze. This was... controversial.
• Odd Name Out: As this image◊ shows, the names of Red's party Pokémon are all deific or noble, except for Venomoth's. Subverted after Venomoth earned the nickname "Dragonslayer" during the legendary fight with Lance.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: Players are guaranteed to experience this, since no one will probably be able to watch the whole stream in one go.
• Off the Rails: The players have managed to turn a fairly simple game into a ridiculous, complicated, confusing, and headache inducing experience of madness.
• Oh, Crap!: Many viewers' reaction to the irreversible release of Abby and Jay Leno was of utter shock and incredulity.
• Old Hero, New Pals: After the events of Bloody Sunday, the only three members of the main party to survive the PC purge were Bird Jesus, Air Jordan, and the Keeper, and the Keeper was eventually boxed for good. This leaves Bird Jesus as the only member of the pre-Abby party left, with the rest of the slots filled up by Air Jordan, Anarchy Jesus, the Fonz, All-Terrain Venomoth, and Helix itself.
  • Before the ill-fated decision to go back for Bird Jesus, it was worse. The only veteran member left was Dux. This◊ was the team at that time.
• Omnicidal Maniac: The PC. It has no qualms releasing Red's Pokémon, from the little-used ones collecting dust in the box to the high profile ones.
• Only Sane Man: Professor Oak and Giovanni seem to be becoming this.
• Paranoia Gambit: Some fanart has Giovanni wondering what Red's 'game' is as he wanders in the elevator for hours.
• Powered by a Forsaken Child: Red's entire adventure is kickstarted by his possession, if the Mob actually exists in-canon.
• The Precarious Ledge: Red's inability to walk in a straight line makes the ledges in this game very precarious.
• Put on a Bus: Attempted. The failed mission on Day 5 to leave a Pokémon behind in Pokémon Daycare to free up a slot in the roster for Lapras. Resulted in the first PC fiasco.
  • Succeeded with Flareon, though also depositing Drowzee in the process.
  • The Bus is essentially a revolving door unless a Pokémon is accidentally released. Party members such as Dux, Bird Jesus , Rick Gastly, Zapdos, Venomoth and Drowzee have been deposited in the PC and then brought back.
    • Bus Crash: Many have been accidentally released through the PC, sometimes in an attempt to bring them or others back into the team. In order: Jay Leno, Abby, Flareon, CCC, X, three Venonats, Exceggcute, Paras, three Nidorans, Cabbage, DUX, Geodude and BigDig.
• Recurring Boss: Several:
  • Blue: Tends to get his butt kicked by Red every time, despite Red's issues.
  • Giovanni: More competent than Red, and has defeated him several times, although generally reaching Giovanni is more difficult than actually defeating him.
  • The Ledge: A terrain feature that first appeared on Route 9, causing Red to waste several hours attempting to navigate past it without jumping over. Appears again whenever Red attempts to enter the daycare. It showed up again outside of the Viridian Gym and Pokecenter. Its final form lies in wait for Red just outside of Victory Road.
  • The Elite Four during the final phase of the playthrough, especially Lorelei, who had to be faced over twenty times.
• Religion of Evil: It is currently thought that the Bird Keepers near Fuchsia City are part of one, given that they attack using Pokémon similar to Dux and Bird Jesus (thereby worshipping false gods).
  • The Dome Fossil is portrayed as a Lucifer-like being, directly opposing Lord Helix, and almost all of the team's failures are blamed on it (the most notable occurrence being when Abby and Jay Leno were released, which lead to Flareon being branded as a false prophet and an agent of the Dome for a time before his redemption in the eyes of the Mob). All of the Dome's followers are portrayed as sadists who are hellbent on running the game off-course.
• Room 101: The mob encounters a room full of PCs. Here is their reaction.
• Samus Is a Girl: For the entirety of the stream, the mob thought Air Jordan the Lapras was a dude. Transferring the Pokémon from the save file into Gen II reveals that the Fresh Prince is actually a Fresh Princess.
• The Scapegoat: Obviously Eevee/Flareon isn't responsible for the choices forced upon Red by the chaotic hivemind of 50,000 people, but because of his Base-Breaking Character status combined with the fact that he occupied the last party slot, the PC trip that ended with Abby and Jay Leno's release have become associated with it, and solidified its place in the fandom as the Antichrist to Bird Jesus' Messianic Archetype.
  • Zapdos, who was initially given nicknames like Alternate Jesus or Anarchy Jesus, swiftly became a new Antichrist figure following a nine-hour ordeal in which the party line-up was scrambled and a dozen Pokémon, including 3 fan favorites, were released, all in the attempt to deposit one Pokémon and withdraw Zapdos; its new nicknames aren't exactly flattering. Like Flareon, Zapdos itself did not cause the problems, but all the wrong things happened.
• Schizophrenic Difficulty: Kick the butts of trainers and gym leaders? No problem. Even with practically random button-mashing, the overleveled Bird Jesus makes that pretty easy. Walk in a straight line for ten paces to get to the next area? Yeah, good luck with that. The first attempt took at least 6 hours.
• Screw Destiny: Another streamer known as Destiny and a mob of his own have tried to infiltrate the Mob multiple times with the goal of bringing about Bird Jesus's end. So far the Mob has thwarted every attempt made.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: After the Hive Mind had to go back to the PC to get the Heli-Silph Scope because of an accident when also releasing two Pokémon (CCC and x), EVERYONE mashed the B button.
  • Once the Mob switched to Democracy Mode at the second encounter with Route 9's Ledge of Doom, they went back to Cerulean City. Anarchy brought Red back to the starting point from which the Mob left.
    • Some believe the reason they wound up back in Cerulean City was due to an attempt to release Bird Jesus. It was also due to people being fed up with the ledge.
  • Sealed Evil in a Can: Flareon, considered to be an Apple of Discord and the Antichrist sent by Dome, was stored in the PC. Drowzee got stored together with him, becoming the Keeper. Later on, Flareon got released, and Drowzee retrieved, leading to Gandalf references where Drowzee killed Flareon and emerged from the PC victorious.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: The quest to capture Zapdos succeeds, but upon trying to retrieve him from the PC, Democracy is avoided due to the threat of an effort to purposefully release Pokémon, and by the day's end, 12 Pokémon are released in the chaos. Though Zapdos was eventually retrieved, they took a several-hour break for fear of screwing up more.
• Shout-Out: A, a.k.a. "A for Anarchy", has been named after V for Vendetta.
• Soft Reset: After this happened once, it was disabled.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: The cheery Pokémon Center melody plays as a dozen Pokémon are systematically massacred.
• Spanner in the Works: Due to lag between chat commands and the game and how easy it is to get confused, there is a good chance that someone's input is out of touch of what is necessary and can easily bring down minutes or hours of work.
  • Unwitting Instigator of Doom: It's possible that those who contributed to the release of Abby, Jay Leno, Flareon, CCC or X were not intending to do so and might have not even realized their part in it.
  • Digrat (the second Rattata which is now a Raticate) in particular seems to have a affinity for this. Red accidentally selected Dig at least four times in the Game Corner Rocket HQ, including once just after defeating Giovanni but right before picking up the Silph Scope.
• Spoony Bard: Jay Leno didn't contribute too much to the party, but many had taken a shine to him. Which made losing him and Abby all the more devastating.
  • xCabbage was the same, having only Cut as a damage dealing attack. But she was lost in the great Zapdos PC Massacre of Day 10, to the tears of many.
• Suicidal Overconfidence: Blue keeps trying to fight Red despite getting his butt kicked each and every time he does so.
  • This also applies Red when he enters the Pokémon Tower. Out of all of the Pokémon on the team, only two of them have moves that can hurt the Ghost-type Pokémon inside, but he continues to go in only to eventually lose all of his Pokémon and black out.
• Take Your Time: Giovanni is a very patient man.
  • Some fanart paints a different picture◊.
• Tempting Fate: The Hive Mind has collectively agreed that going for Fly◊ (which can be used anywhere like Dig except crazier, and defaults to Pallet town) is a bad idea.
• That One Level: invoked
  • The Safari Zone before democracy was declared; in the future, the path to Victory Road.
  • Anything involving carefully navigating around ledges, but the one in Route 9 takes the cake.
  • All things that are even remotely related to Giovanni; be it the infamous Rocket HQ, Pokémon Tower to rescue Mr. Fuji, the Silph Co. building, and even something as simple as getting inside the man's Gym proves to be not only difficult but also extremely frustrating.
  • Victory freaking Road. Although Seafoam Island and its boulder puzzles can be skipped (and was skipped), the same can't be said for Victory Road. It took an entire day to finally start pushing boulders.
• This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman: Digrat's presence in the party was universally frowned upon because of Dig having repeatedly canceled hours of progress in a dungeon. But once it came to fighting ghosts in Lavender Town, it was one of the only two Pokémon on the team that was immune to Ghost-type moves and had a move that dealt any damage to a Ghost-type Pokémon. Being super-effective against their secondary type was a plus.
  • The usefulness of Dig was also remembered when Red got stuck in a two-square wide corridor◊ in Cinnabar Mansion for 1.5 hours, having to intentionally faint his whole Pokémon party just to escape the area.
  • All-Terrain Venomoth was seriously underleveled compared to the rest of the team, and was only on the team because they didn't want to go back to the PC yet again. But then he single-handedly DESTROYS Lance's Dragonite, because of the game AI forcing Dragonite to use Psychic-type moves against the Poison-type Venomoth, but Dragonite's "Psychic" moves were both stat-buffing moves that did no damage.
• Took a Level in Badass: Besides Bird Jesus and Abby, the vast majority of the party have been considered largely filler and quite useless. Come Day 5, however, and other party members started pulling their weight, notably Drowzee and Digrat, who were now able to destroy the Ghost-types of the Pokémon Tower with near-impunity.
  • And then Dig Rat evolved into Raticate, giving him a massive boost in stats.
  • Considered by many to be what the Party went through during the Post-Badges grind.
• Too Many Cooks Spoil the Soup: A similar game of Pokémon Blue started at around the same time and finished in about a week, because they only had about 1,000 viewers. The original Twitch Plays Pokémon had over 50,000 viewers at all times. After almost 11 days, they had only 6/8 Badges, had clumsily released many useful Pokémon (including their starter Pokémon), and were attempting to meander to the next Gym without the use of Cut.
• The Unfought: Bill and the PC are simply unable to be fought, because they aren't in-game enemies. The admin ended the game after the Elite Four and Blue were defeated, so the mob never got a chance to take on Mewtwo; and they'd used up the only Master Ball anyway, so they had very little hope of catching it. They also never encountered Moltres or Articuno, and never dealt with the Snorlax blocking the bike path.
• Unintentionally Unwinnable:
  • Twitch realized midway through the game that it was possible to run out of money for the Safari Zone with no way to get more, preventing them from getting the items necessary to beat the rest of the game. It was this event that pushed them to try Democracy Mode.
  • Using the PC. Given the relative ease of releasing Pokémon, especially ones that know certain HM (Hidden Machine) moves, this has been recognized as a major threat by the mob.
  • Red dropped down a floor in a mansion, encountered a trainer, and discovered after beating him that the trainer, by walking towards Red, had trapped the latter in a two-square prison.◊ Lacking a Pokémon with Dig and the hand-eye coordination to use an Escape Rope, the team had no real option other than taking enough damage from random encounters to black out and get teleported back outside.
• Unreliable Narrator: see CosmicHorrorStory above. If the source material, memes, etc. are being produced by the players, voices inside Red's head reportedly relying the will of the Helix, then they could as well be spreading propaganda for some Eldritch Abomination trying to get revived.
  • The same could also be said about people defending the Dome Fossil or claiming Eevee was a victim, obviously.
  • Basically, if you take this angle the whole story is a mess of conflicting versions and opinions making it hard to see any light. You can't trust anybody and who knows what lurks in the corner!
• Unstable Equilibrium: Bird Jesus shows exactly why Pokémon players prior to Generation VI will usually end up with a One-Man Party unless they make an effort otherwise: what started as a small level advantage ended up making it the only one that could survive most battles, overleveling it even further. Then they ran into Ghost-type Pokémon, which Bird Jesus' movepool was unable to damage at all.
• Unwitting Pawn: Some believe that Red's release of Abby and Jay Leno occurred under the influence of Eevee/Flareon a.k.a. "The False Prophet".
• Useless Useful Spell: Disable and Whirlwind. Thanks to the requirements for the attacks to work, and the risk of using it at useless times.
• We ARE Struggling Together: The creator changed the chaotic pressing system for a voting system, and people suddenly united against it◊ by repeatedly pressing "start9". Soon after they overthrew the voting system, they continued to fight because of the PC.
• We Hardly Knew Ye: The mob somehow managed to get CCC and X released barely an hour or two after getting them, in an attempt to use the PC. Hilarious, since getting CCC and X into the party was the only reason they went to the PC in the first place. C3KO's lifespan has been clocked in at a resounding 37 minutes by the Progress Document.
• Wham Episode: When using the PC, Abby and Jay Leno are released into the wild, when the goal was to just deposit Eevee.
  • Team Rocket HQ, which showed just how insane and difficult the stream was going to be.
  • Pokémon Tower, which showed how much of a Crutch Character Bird Jesus had become and took days to get past.
  • The capture of Zapdos, followed by a massive slaughter of the party's Pokémon in an attempt to get Zapdos out of the PC.
  • The mob is able to revive LORD HELIX...only for it to be put in the PC.
    • Miraculously, the mob was able to withdraw Lord Helix without releasing any major party members ^Note Some Safari Zone Pokémon that were not used anyway were released, however., so it was a short lived (but still very stressful) hardship. Keeper did end up getting stuck in the box, but at least it wasn't released.
• What Is Evil?: Destiny and his asshole brigade of trolls have cited this as their reason for screwing around with the game.
• When All You Have Is a Hammer…: As Bird Jesus continually increased his huge level advantage over the rest of the team, battles soon degenerated into "get half the team knocked unconscious, then send out Bird Jesus and spam Quick Attack."
• Worf Had the Flu: Blue finally manages to beat Red on his seventh try, but Red was severely handicapped in that battle since he hadn't healed after beating Giovanni, meaning he only had his weakest Pokémon, AIIIIIIRRR, and a Bird Jesus at 15% HP. After blacking out and healing, Red took revenge without much trouble.
• Yo Yo Plot Point: The mob tends to have a LOT of difficulty getting past areas involving ledges. If you see them encounter an area involving a thin strip of land they must travel across that's right above a ledge, the chances are good that they'll be spending the next several hours there.
  • Most infamously, there was a ledge on Route 9 along the way to Rock Tunnel that took them HOURS to progress past, because Red kept jumping down it and setting himself back to square one. A few days later, the Master Ball was obtained and the mob decided to try and capture Zapdos with it. They traveled to the Power Plant via the same exact route, and it took about as long as you'd expect.
  • The same thing happened whenever the mob attempted to visit the Daycare. Visits to the Daycare thankfully didn't tend to take QUITE as long, but they still were very difficult and every time the mob failed, they had to travel through several patches of grass if they wanted to try again.
  • Giovanni's gym took an extremely long time to enter due to Red constantly jumping down a ledge, then having to take a long detour around many buildings in order to get back near the gym.

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Oak: "RED! This isn't the time to use that!"

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