Abyss in Cahoots (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
abyssal_sylph) wrote2024-10-07 01:18 pm
abyssal_sylph) wrote2024-10-07 01:18 pm
Choosing Pokémon Protag Gender
Something we've been thinking about is; how do people choose the gender of the Pokémon Protagonist for their AUs & fanfiction?
I've seen 2 AUs that make all the protags male to match the fact that Red's the only canon protagonist we see after their journey (within B2W2, the gender of the protag being determined by if you played the previous game & connected it's save to the sequel). Both these AUs gave the female versions roles if they canonically didn't have them, but it's something that made us think when we saw somebody go for an all-girls AU.
But in regards to what I've seen on AO3; Red is always the protagonist for Kanto (logical seeing as it IS Canon). Johto is a mixed bag on what protag you get & the most recent games all being the female versions more often than not. My assumption is that the girl-tags just, have nicer designs generally compared to the guy-tags, who usually have plainer ones. The only exception is ScarVio, which is a pretty mixed bag (& even then it's pretty often that the writers just make both protagonists canon). The only other guy-tag besides Red I've seen consistently getting favored over the girl-tag is Hilbert, which I'm pretty sure is cause he's a male protagonist with an above-decent design & it makes the thing with N gay.
I'm curious what other people think of when choosing the gender of the Poké-Protag(s) in their fics / AUs. We've not decided yet how we'll determine it, so we'd like other people's thoughts to see if it'll sway ours.
I've seen 2 AUs that make all the protags male to match the fact that Red's the only canon protagonist we see after their journey (within B2W2, the gender of the protag being determined by if you played the previous game & connected it's save to the sequel). Both these AUs gave the female versions roles if they canonically didn't have them, but it's something that made us think when we saw somebody go for an all-girls AU.
But in regards to what I've seen on AO3; Red is always the protagonist for Kanto (logical seeing as it IS Canon). Johto is a mixed bag on what protag you get & the most recent games all being the female versions more often than not. My assumption is that the girl-tags just, have nicer designs generally compared to the guy-tags, who usually have plainer ones. The only exception is ScarVio, which is a pretty mixed bag (& even then it's pretty often that the writers just make both protagonists canon). The only other guy-tag besides Red I've seen consistently getting favored over the girl-tag is Hilbert, which I'm pretty sure is cause he's a male protagonist with an above-decent design & it makes the thing with N gay.
I'm curious what other people think of when choosing the gender of the Poké-Protag(s) in their fics / AUs. We've not decided yet how we'll determine it, so we'd like other people's thoughts to see if it'll sway ours.
no subject
kanto: red; i make blue and green siblings as a play on their names getting swapped between the english and japanese releases, and because they have the same hair color.
johto: kris is "my" canon protagonist, but i actually wrote so much drawerfic of her as a kid that i basically created a whole new storyline where she becomes a legendary hunter and works with lance, lol. so i give the canon-ish storyline to gold, which makes shipping him with silver easier for me, yay. lyra/kotone is gold's cousin.
hoenn: may/haruka is my protagonist, with brendan/yuuki as birch's son/assistant. i ship may/haruka with lisia/lutia.
sinnoh: dawn/hikari, with lucas/kouki as rowan's assistant.
unova: i like to make hilbert/touya and hilda/touko twins who go on the whole journey together! which i think is a somewhat common strategy? so they're both "protagonists," although, yeah, i give the more shippable N interactions to hilbert and then ship hilda with cheren.
i don't have strong feelings past this because B2W2 is when i stopped being very active in the fandom; i played XY and sunmoon but never developed any mental storylines about them. probably by default i would make everyone else girls because i like girls.
i think my preferences are fairly in line with the fandom at large now that i've typed it all out. and i would wager one of the biggest factors is just which gender the writer happened to play when they played the game themself - red and gold/ethan/hibiki being more common than blue/leaf or kris/lyra/kotone makes a lot of sense because for the older generation of fans, red was the only option and kris only existed in a special edition of the game, so most everyone played as red and gold. plus there's some influence from the PokeSpe manga.
no subject
Yeah, the games do give a different vibe starting from XY, so I get you.
That's something I haven't thought of before (Red & Ethan being the only options till crystal) but makes complete sense! Same with PokéSpe since while I'm only in the crystal arc now, it does seem from what little I know that they sway a little closer towards guy-tags.