Love Is A Place Where Your Innocence Goes When It Dies

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.

Has social media caused you to stop liking any fandoms, if so, which and why?

Not really social media in specific, but many a ship / pairing to me have been ruined by the general fanon around it. As for fandoms I don't really trust to get the canon it's Pokémon, PLA specifically. Cause let's be honest here: Kamado isn't the worst, he's fine actually. Also the whole 'Uncle Ingo' thing, not against it, just overfocused on.