Die for Our Ship/Pokémon



Despite having little to no couples, the Pokemon Fan Dumb manages to get its own page for the shipping wars that go on here.


 * May/Haruka was brutally hated by Pokéshippers and Misty/Kasumi fans in general, to the point where some of them stopped watching after Misty left the series. This emigration meant that things pretty much cooled down within the online fandom after a couple of years, and the return of negativity for Dawn/Hikari's introduction was much more short-lived, only persisting with the rabid May/Haruka fans. To put it in a bigger perspective, every female lead that came after Misty was subject to the Replacement Scrappy treatment.
 * Misty has been bashed for "being in the way" of the (apparent) Ho Yay between Ash and Gary or Brock or of any other pairings involving Ash. Others love to use her to bash Melody from the second movie, too: as seen above, Misty wasn't happy to see her hog Ash's attention at the beginning, but to the Fan Dumb that meant "MELODY IS A WHORE!". That Misty and Melody become good friends by the end of the film seems to be forgotten.
 * The remaining Misty fans have an alarming tendency to kill her sisters off via house fire in fanfiction -- literal Die for Our Ship, as this takes Misty off the bus and puts her back into position to be a (romantic) factor. It's confusing in that, despite their relative incompetence at head-to-head fights (which are Serious Business), we're talking about people who can summon living fire extinguishers basically at will. (Besides, their presence was the whole reason that Misty could even go on the journey instead of stay in the gym!) The better uses of this device turn into Hurt Comfort Fic (to which Sturgeon's Law still applies) while the others make token references at best.
 * Another startling fanfiction trend relates to Contestshipping (May/Drew) fics. As of late, some writers seem to have developed a fixation with plucking Brendan (the male playable character from the R/S/E games) out of nowhere to act as a generic villain who underhandedly plots to steal May away from Drew. This is a particularly strident example, in that Brendan hasn't even shown up in anime continuity aside from some very fleeting cameos that had little, if anything, to do with May and Drew. Worse yet, he has no established personality in any fiction, and people that ship him with May are relatively few (nowadays, anyway).
 * On a similar note, Advanceshippers (Ash/May) tend to portray Drew as a lecherous young man who only wants one thing from May. Aside from the sheer absurdity of portraying a friendly rival that way, does anyone think a television show like Pokémon would explore issues like this?
 * Interesting enough Gary tends to get the same treatment in a lot of Pokeshipping fics. The irony in all of it is Gary and Misty have had about one conversation in the whole series so he's just used as a Designated Villain.
 * Not a case of killing characters off exactly, but nearly all of the above shipping categories are guilty of basically forgetting altogether the existence of characters like Pikachu, Max, and Meowth (Brock as well, though when he shows up he's usually a Butt Monkey) who would by all common sense be ever-present. Skewered here.
 * Not always true, but a decent yardstick of what you can expect from a shipping fic with Ash is to hit Ctrl-F and type "Pikachu". The ones that actually bother to include him at some point are usually the ones proficient enough with characterization to not feel too cookie cutter.
 * Some Gymshippers treat Ash like an annoying little kid and make it seem like Brock and Misty couldn't care less about him.
 * Not even the Pokémon games are excluded from this, though the game shipping fandom was quite passive until Pokémon Black and White. In Silver/Lyra fics, Ethan is often a jealous clingy kid. In Barry/Dawn fics, Lucas plays the role. In Lucas/Dawn fics, Barry gets an immaturity boost. The Unova fanfics are all over the place...
 * Specifically: N/Hilda fics often have Hilbert and/or Cheren as a clingy, jealous Jerkass. Hilbert sometimes gets the same in Cheren/Bianca fics, which, alongside N/Hilbert fics, portray Hilda as a hyper-controlling, vicious Yandere. Cheren/Hilda and Hilbert/Hilda fics outright ignore all of N's redeemable qualities and portray him as a psychotic creeper. Bianca/Hilda fans will sometimes make Cheren into a self-centered Jerkass who wants Bianca all for himself.
 * Anime characters get thrown into the game fanfiction for no reason other then counterpart shipping fuel, and the game characters ignored or derailed. For Galactic related pairings other then Cyrus/Dawn, most Galactic admins are seen as incompetent.
 * Silver/Kris and Ethan/Kris fics often portray Lyra as either ditzy or a Clingy Jealous Girl. Expect a line or two about Lyra "replacing" Kris and being a bragging brat about it. Ethan/Silver fics also do the same to Lyra sometimes (minus the replacing). Occasionally, Kris gets the same treatment in Silver/Lyra and Ethan/Lyra fics, only instead of her "replacing" Lyra, Lyra is constantly overshadowed by her.
 * Some Brendan/May fans do this to Wally. He's often written as a Crazy Jealous Guy despite him being more quite meek in the actual game.
 * A few Silver/Lyra and Gold/Silver fics paint Lance as a callous jerk. Granted, the man can be intimidating and he did get his Dragonite to attack a Rocket grunt, but come on.
 * The worst part is that there are barely any true canon pairings in the games, let alone ones involving the protagonists. N/Hilda is just as canon as N/Hilbert, which is just as canon as Hilbert/Hilda, and so forth. The Die for Our Ship in game fics is solely to either create a cheap conflict or to take a jab at rival ships, especially if said rival ship is popular.
 * Pokémon Special has had a particularly brutal war surrounding the Kanto characters. The main ships were Red/Blue, Red/Yellow, Red/Misty, Blue/Green, Blue/Silver, Green/Yellow and Lance/Yellow. The opposing characters typically get Flanderized; for example Blue's, Green's, and Silver's get made into abusive Jerkass's and Red goes back into an Idiot Hero or his Oblivious to Love trait is amplified. Most communities have however pretty much settled on Red/Yellow and Blue/Green.
 * To say nothing of the ship war between the Sinnoh trio. You have four options surrounding this one: ship Diamond/Platinum and paint Pearl as an annoying brat who does nothing but abuse Dia, ship Pearl/Platinum and have Dia be a wimpy glutton who thinks about nothing except food, ship Diamond/Pearl and characterize Platinum as a spoiled Rich Bitch who just gets in the way of their friendship, or just ship all of them together at the same time.


 * Meanwhile, if we look away from our heroes to our cadre of villains, we get RocketShipping, or Jessie/James pairings. This one, oddly enough, got some support from Toshihiro Ono's manga The Electric Tale of Pikachu. See the link for details.