This is a work of fanfiction by Butterfree/Dragonfree/antialiasis and is not to be reposted without permission. This story is in no way official or endorsed by Nintendo, GAME FREAK, Creatures Inc., or The Pokémon Company.

Morphic

For more information on this story and a full list of chapters and extras, click here. Please note that Morphic is rated R (M if you prefer Fiction Ratings) for strong language, violence and other sensitive subject matter.

April Fools' Day 2011

This idea came about as a sort of follow-up to my April Fools' joke 2010, a joke chapter of The Quest for the Legends. While that one had been planned for years, this one was mostly thought up because I hadn't thought of any other April Fools' joke to make - opaltiger asked me if I had any plans, and I mentioned it would be fun to write a joke first chapter of the promised sequel to Morphic.

I had two basic ideas for what the joke chapter would contain: one, Will and Mia coming back from the dead; and two, the introduction of new Pokémorphs, particularly legendaries. Both of these were based on reader suggestions that would never actually happen: the former would be wildly out of sync with the general tone and direction taken by the fic by making death cheap, and the latter is patently nonsensical (seeing as it would involve somebody somehow having secretly created extra Pokémorphs ten years ago and kept them secret the whole time, in addition to the fact legendaries don't actually exist in the Morphic universe, being basically cryptids equivalent to unicorns, and even if they did, somebody getting their DNA and making Pokémorphs out of them seems wildly implausible). Originally I intended to start with Lucy imagining Mia back to life, but after several days of not really getting anywhere writing it, this scene with an extremely tired Dave answering the door for a guy who claims to have created Mew and Mewtwo Pokémorphs started taking root in my head, and I ended up starting with that instead.

Now, Dave happens to be very possibly my favorite character I have ever created. (I realize this likely makes no sense to anyone but me, but just go with it.) And the thing is that although I'd sort of planned to do something similar to the QftL joke chapter, where everybody would be twisted out of character and acting like parodies of themselves, it was just so much more fun to write Dave reacting realistically and in-character to this guy appearing at his door making these completely ridiculous claims. So I actually kept him in character and subsequently had a lot of fun with that in the scene where he, Bubbles, Raven and Jean get acquainted. Awesome.

Then I realized that this meant I'd have to have in-character Dave finding out about Mia's resurrection, too, which didn't really rhyme with my ambitions with this as a joke chapter, because that wouldn't just result in some comic conversation about the gayness of unicorns. And though I realized I could try to avoid that... I didn't want to. Because Dave finding out Mia had been brought back to life asdf. I just wanted to write that, damn it; screw the joke.

So I did. And because Dave was in character and realistic, my mind was in realistic-mode and decided that Mia hadn't really been brought back to life; she was just a projection of Lucy's mind. This completely screwed up my joke because then her return wasn't entirely ridiculous after all, but the story was writing itself at this point; it didn't really feel right to override it. Besides, delicious subtle Dave angst upon realizing it's not really Mia! :D I just couldn't pass that up.

So by the time I'd written the paragraph where he realizes Not-Mia is just a mind projection, I sighed and realized that this was starting to take itself way too seriously. It couldn't possibly work as a joke anymore. I used my ongoing conversation with my friend Espeon to whine about this, and he jokingly suggested he should write it instead (the joke being, largely, that he has not read Morphic and had no idea what it was even about). I jokingly suggested I should totally just send him a list of one-liner descriptions of the characters and have him go nuts. There were more joking suggestions back and forth and at some point it stopped being a joke. So I wrote up a list of one-liner descriptions of the principal cast (example: "Dave: Irritable, argumentative atheist who lives the most miserable, lonely life in existence and says 'fuck' a lot"), suggested he somehow bring Mia and possibly Will back in some manner, and sent that to him. We continued to communicate while he wrote it (largely the conversation consisted of "Does that sound anything like [character X]?" "No, but keep doing it this way because it's hilarious"), I eventually suggested he add crack shippings as well (and was endlessly amused when he picked Dave and Mia without knowing anything of their interactions), and basically the outcome was this.

In the meantime, however, I'd let opaltiger read my version of the joke chapter, and he insisted it would work just fine as a joke and I should rather go for it than Espeon's version, because he likes April Fools' jokes to be of the plausibly-fooling-somebody kind rather than the just-plain-silly kind. I was still skeptical, but because I actually really liked my joke chapter and kind of wanted to find some excuse to put it up, I eventually suggested I put up Espeon's chapter first, then later (but still on the first of April) withdraw it saying "Oh, that was a joke, but here's the real one" and then give my joke chapter. opaltiger was very enthusiastic about this idea, and the more I thought about it, the more I liked it myself.

So I kept on writing my own joke chapter, cheerfully letting it take itself as seriously as it wanted to. The big problem was just that I had no idea how to go about ending it. I'd originally planned to have it end with Bubbles and Raven saving the day in some ridiculously contrived manner, but that would have caused a serious mood whiplash against the resurrection part in the middle. Conversely, I was tempted to have Lucy realize the Mia she brought back wasn't real and go on a rampage or otherwise end it in some horrible tragic angsty way, but that would have left Bubbles and Raven as a bizarre, dangling humourous loose end in an otherwise serious-sounding story.

Inspiration struck at a birthday party on April the first itself, where I'd brought my laptop in a desperate attempt to finish it before midnight. The way I was currently handling the resurrection plot was basically that I took a ridiculous premise (Mia being brought back to life) and then twisted it into something plausible enough to be taken seriously by modifying the circumstances by which it had been brought about (rather than actually having been resurrected, that Mia is just a projection of Lucy's mental image of her). So why not do the same with the Mew and Mewtwo morphs? And how could they be made plausible? Well, only really if they weren't Mew and Mewtwo morphs to begin with...

And thus the dangling humourous loose end became a very, very serious plot twist, and I got to write about Dave being killed without actually killing him off for real (:D), and the whole chapter was suddenly earnestly plausible - the main reason I'd been skeptical about its potential as a joke chapter was that while it took itself too seriously to be a just-plain-silly April Fools' joke, the fact it included Mew and Mewtwo morphs also made it far too wildly ridiculous to plausibly fool anyone. So now that they weren't really Mew and Mewtwo morphs anymore, I could properly have one of each type of joke, with the fact it was preceded by Espeon's version further strengthening my version's plausibility as if this had been planned all along. And I could even make Bubbles' random religiousness from the beginning sound like clever foreshadowing now that she turned out to actually be a Mew belonging to Isaac Daniels! Ha!

So ultimately, my joke chapter embodies the only circumstances in which I would ever write in something like Mew and Mewtwo morphs or Mia coming back from the dead: it turns out to not be what it seems, and the whole thing is ultimately played to make everyone more miserable! Aren't I fun?

(Incidentally, if this had been real, Lucy would have been Not Quite Dead - otherwise the setup with her bringing back Will and Mia would have been rendered completely pointless. I also considered making her evil, or rather making it so that Bubbles and Raven had actually bribed her with the ability to "resurrect" Mia somehow, but I couldn't properly get that to make sense, unfortunately. I should not have thought this much about this.)

« Back to Morphic

« Back to Fan Fiction

Page last modified July 14 2017 at 20:44 UTC

Comments

No comments on this page as of yet.

Post comment

Name

E-mail

Website address

Website name

Comments

Please type the name of the above Pokémon into this box: Fun fact: The above sprite has a 1/8192 chance of being shiny. Feel free to brag if you get one.