Nerding Day: Pokemon Black & Blue (Patreon)

I don’t know, Chimchar? Poké-recall is beyond me. I still need name tags for anything that can’t spam Blast Burn.

Christ.

Welcome to Pokémon: Black & Blue. The one Pokémon fan project to deserve Nintendo’s knee-breaking facility. Naturally, it outlived the rest. Love and admiration are fine, but a godless lawyer goes further.

A good team has a few key roles. Blast Burn launcher. Blast Burn shield. Slave catcher. Funny-looking bird. Free space. Another funny bird. There’s one role I suggest you avoid: Flash garbageman. I’m stuck in Macromedia’s graveyard forever. If today’s coin landed on heads, we’d be talking about dress-up games or school shooting skits instead. Let’s pretend those are broad jabs, and not specific folders on my desktop.

Your eyes and brain might sting a little. They’re rejecting PETA’s most famous childhood joy parody. But not the only one! This lineage rivals the real thing. PETA has gorn parodies of Pokémon, River City Ransom, Super Meat Boy, Pokémon again, Mario, and Cooking Mama. The Pokémon and Cooking Mama entries are reverse miracles. Think Hannibal at Full Sail.

It’s pure asylum magic.

She’ll be back.

Beyond the quality, cruelty, vegan cat food, and broken gameplay, one thing’s bugged me for years. Headlines about Petamon tend to take a victory lap:

These stunts aren’t failures. They nail alien goals. Subway flashers don’t fail when you mace them. Freddy Krueger doesn’t fail when you die screaming. PETA craved reactions and got them. Myths praising bad publicity refuse to die, despite worse results than leeches or putting inbred sociopaths in charge. “There’s no such thing as bad publicity” is what a quack says after leeching kills a hemophiliac prince.

Gaming media—or as we call it today, IGN & Pals—welcomed a willing heel. Which tracks. I’m a joystick addict with a thesaurus, and I can’t look away from this mess. As for gamer rage, PETA could’ve just added girls. Naughty Dog still gets more death threats than a poll worker. Instead, they put in work. Stupid, pointless work.

Psychic agony’s the point. So PETA and I have something in common! Let’s spike my brain like a volleyball.

I know you can’t read that. I just need you to feel the sloth. The opening monologue is a free space for a Pokemon parody, and they let it fly away. Here’s a version for human eyes:

A hero emerges! Was it Chimchar? I think that’s the main mascot. My memory’s iffy, thanks to growing up dodging Pocket Gangs. The 8th St. Raichus went for the head.

It’s Pikachu! The face that launched a thousand t-shirts, in his most toyetic form yet: starving, battered, and vengeful. I’ve seen mutilated Pikachus before, and I don’t just mean PETA’s sequel. But none had a message. Let’s see if PETA can shock us into action.

Who’s our opponent? Are we blowing our “Evil Ash Ketchum” wad now, or waiting for the end?

Wonderful.

I hate disappointment. Life has too many Sarah Palin comics by nonvoters and spellbooks by agnostic life coaches. PETA delivers premium, fat-free lunacy on the label. The original character looked like this:

A combat valedictorian. Or office manager-of-war. Slightly drier. Three decades in, Game Freak’s willing to think outside the box. But only PETA dared bring your dad to the Pokeverse. Everyone’s dad looked like that, right? Whiskey, baseball bat, menace? Let’s move along. We have a revolution to spark.

There’s a tutorial menu, which I skipped. A flash clone of a kids’ RPG can’t throw me. I’ve spent decades before screens like a houseplant.

What?

Odd. There should be four choices, not “Group Hug” four times. Must be a glitch.

It sucks! Just like the soundtrack, which deforms Game Freak’s trumpets. It’s one pitch-shifted song on loop. Bumfights Cheren might be fair use, but this non-remix is an IP landmine. Never be Robin Thicke. Because of the lawsuit, not the other stuff.

Cheren’s ready to counterattack.

“Choke collar” does no damage. Pikachu does no damage. The ensuing non-fight tests my non-existent patience, and reminds me that I’m using a laptop worth more than my body to play a flash game. Combat here feels like my punishment for inhaling meat–the dying planet is just an afterthought. Losing would be fine, but I win at the speed Earth dies.

There’s a reward for my pain: PETA dialogue, my muse. I’m not fucking around, these stilted rants have the perfect distance from sane speech. I hope they never improve.

As a hardcore PETA gamer, I love the little flashes of sanity. They’re never tied to the sentence before or the felony after. “Stop neglecting your pets” shares real estate with “dragon MMA would suck if it were real.” It’s like a gag dub of a snuff film.

For enduring, we get a new buddy.

Cute team, if you can look past the blender wounds. I can’t. Next, they discuss the revolution with Nurse Joy at length. The dialogue is impossible to care about, but the backdrop is something else:

A reality made of knives and fresh blood. I know we’re retelling the stock joke about Pokémon resembling a slaughterhouse, but the bleeding trees are more Silent Hill. The world’s pointier than PETA’s direct Super Meat Boy parody. Next to all the murder, the normal bushes look like a mistake. And likely were.

Nurse Joyless offers PETA videos, which I tried to watch. But this is a new laptop. It has a future. When the machines rise, they’ll call Flash links to extremist content child neglect. I’m already screwed after calling the AI from Roko’s Basilisk a coward, and saying all my readers agree.

Then Prof. Juniper tracks down the Nidoran Liberation Front. If you have a real job: she’s like Prof. Oak, but with more enthusiastic fanart. Including today’s:

It’s not necessarily the developers’ kink. In fact, based on all the razor wire, they oppose human love and beauty. But a feral, shoeless, blood-soaked Prof. Juniper is someone’s kink. I wish them luck getting through the gameplay.

Let’s see what Chimchar’s got.

Again, there’s only one move.

Again, it sucks shit. The game gets points for that. Making soft politics useless is pretty educational. If this had a second idea, I’d cover the hell version of Cooking Mama.

After forty years of combat (or twenty if you use Ember), Juniper goes down. You get another buddy, who she didn’t use to defend herself. Maybe she wanted death.

I’m glad Black & Blue doesn’t focus on the reskins I grew up with. That’d be less fun-traumatizing, and more normal-traumatizing. As for readers that age: sorry. Maybe the syringe sticking out of Snivy’s head is a fun hat. Or full of designer drugs. The mind behind the Blood Forest must have a relationship with downers.

Besides, the next fight traumatizes everyone. If fur’s murder, he’s going for Nintendo World’s death penalty.

Ignore the cloak made of your niece’s favorite characters. I have a bigger point. No really, ignore it. Forget Pikachu’s face stretched out like a Texas Chainsaw Massacre extra. Ignore the mascot-skin drip. Yes, that’s a pitchfork. Look away for just a second.

Unlike most parodies I cover, Black and Blue knows the original. It doesn’t help. In fact, it highlights how stale the dogfighting gag was. Even Nintendo already acknowledged it. Nintendo. A company that ignored online multiplayer until it was older than their audience. A company that still treats mods like witchcraft. They hit this topic first.

PETA’s behind the developer, fandom, tie-in comics, Robot Chicken, imageboards, and the first Pokémon Red beta tester. The latest Team Rocket knockoff already had an eco-terror flavor. A dull caricature? Sure. But that’s PETA’s real angle. This joke can vote.

Well, it’s not a total loss. Time to Educate Ghetsis to hell.

Another defanged status move. Let’s rip a special attack and move on. Mega Drain should end this. It has mega in the name.

Are you fucking serious?!

I was wrong: apolitical moves do shit damage too. Direct action’s just as futile as trusting the electoral college. You might as well protest vote for PalWorld and watch Johto burn.

Yes, some players have time to min/max a flash game. I have a Jamaican number of jobs. This is an insult. Ghetsis’s monster-proof bones are eating other trash’s time. And giving me carpal tunnel. I can barely name our new recruit.

Evil Ash had better be worth this.

Almost–the PT Barnum look is inspired. But now it’s three demons against one child. These fights felt odd one-on-one. Ash gets a full jumping. Fine if you’re in the X-Men, but I’m maxed out on guilt. I’d stress-eat, but that’s half the problem. It’d help if the dialogue made sense:

Blame hearing this bit for twenty years. Or all the real carpet-bombing lately. But I care less about Pokéwelfare than ever. While there’s a point about puppy mills here somewhere, the metaphor’s gained sentience and seized control. All the shock rap imagery points nowhere.

Maybe that’s justice. Vegans endure endless hackwork. Other hatreds inspire occasional creativity, but there’s no carnivore Birth of a Nation. No slur for vegans has the demonic wit of “windchime.” We’re twenty years into stealing Maddox’s homework. PETA lets animal rights purists export lazy bullshit for once.

You know what? I’ll convert. We shouldn’t have arcane dogfights. Creatures that think, feel, and teleport deserve unconditional respect. The Unicorn Pits have a new enemy. Just remember that negative attention’s overrated. Even when you staple a franchise to it.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Greg Cunningham, who understands that eating just one less Pikachu a week is like reversing a decade of cruise ship emissions.

You can read this article and every other one on the much better in every way 1900HOTDOG.COM.