disaster crew: origins

A few footnotes on how the characters, namely Nico and Ivy, have changed over the years. To copy-paste from the index:

In April, the player characters of the [Pokémon] Black 2 & White 2 games leak, and I immediately start going ham on “headcanons.” Thus spawn the earliest iterations of Nico and Ivy. When I actually played through the game, I messed with the plot based on the characters I’d come up with, and later even had some some vague ideas for where the duo would end up as adults[. And then I switched creative focus entirely for several years!]

2017–18. […] Returning to the “disaster duo,” I divorced their story from Pokémon entirely—which warranted some character replacements (Tara, Vexus, and kinda Ava) and, by extension, new people (Levi and Dodder). But despite development tying most of them together in some way, I didn’t stick with any particular “main story” idea long enough for anything to coalesce an Established Project Canon.

Disclaimer: I am writing this in 2023, and have very little memory of the B2W2 storyline. I am referencing neither that nor my ancient noes; it’s memory all the way down, babey.

Oh, and spoiler warning, I guess, far as a timeline that doesn’t have A Canon™ can be spoiled. If you’re interested in whatever these characters may or may not turn into and want to go in “blind,” turn back now, I guess??

PKMN era

• pre-game: “Alex” is an adventurous go-getter. “Ivy” is more timid, but has her own drive. (At this point, the B2W2 protagonists’ names hadn’t been revealed. “Ebony & Ivory” was one of the speculated pairs, from which I sniped “Ivy,” but I didn’t know what to do with the guy so I just used a random name I liked.)
• The game storyline more or less proceeds as canon. But while Hugh slowly comes around to Team Plasma, I had Alex-now-Nate go in the opposite direction. Kid had a hero complex. Also, Ivy-still-Ivy* was there, since as part of my usual headcanon shenanigans I shoehorned both player characters into the main plot; she was a runaway, which made for some side drama.
  • * “Rosa” is a perfectly fine name but I think I just got attached to “Ivy.” “Alex,” meanwhile, was always more placeholder-y.
  • Also of note, Ivy had a seviper(-later-serperior) from the start. The snek’s name is “Excalibur” because she’s a fucking weeb. (I don’t know shit about Soul Eater but I saw this comparison everywhere. I made Ivy a weeb because -gestures vaguely at impossible anime hair, which I basically ignored in my headcanons For Realisms but still-)
  • As for Nate’s hero complex? Not sure where that came from! Just thought it’d be fun, or something.
• Nate increasingly hates Team Plasma, to the growing concern of both his friends. I don’t think they tried to intervene, though; wailing on the bad guys is just something that happens, right?
• Then the Plsama Frigate happens. Nate is taken prisoner and his pokémon are confiscated, which makes him Rage. Somehow he gets in contact with his team again, and orders them to “unleash hell.” The details of this are fuzzy to me, but I distinctly remember it turning into the “Frigate Massacre;” it’s only thanks to Ivy and Hugh’s intervention that it doesn’t get worse.
• Subsequently, an extremely guilty Nate is depressed as fuck, but Ivy has codependence issues and saves his life. The… end…?

I don’t entirely remember what those early, vague ideas of their adulthood were at the time, but a central thread has always been “what if tired sitcom dynamic of lazy guy + nagging girl, But Make It Drama.” Which sounded a lot more novel to me in 2012–18 than it does in retrospect, but it’s nonetheless fundamental.

not-pokémon

• One of the first things I run into is “what the fuck did Nate-now-Nico do,” because I still want him to be a guilty bastard but I don’t want his Adolescent Folly™ to be actual mass murder.
• Meanwhile, I also don’t know what to do about “Team Plasma,” never mind the whole Neo- thing, but I like the bit whre Hugh starts to like them. Oh, “Hugh,” what if Nico kills him? And Ivy helps cover it up! And now no shit they’re stuck; they can’t unpack their issues (er, this particular issue, at least) without coming clean!
  • The thought process probably meandered a hell of a lot more than this but again, reporting from memory here. This is a years-down-the-line TL;DR of something I only faintly remember.
• Okay, Nico kills his childhood friend. Over not-Plasma, yeah? No?? Memory’s fuzzy here; I think it went something like “Hugh-not-Hugh gets involved in a cult?? → but there should be a Specific Person who ‘Hugh’ gets attached to, as a microcosm of the whole ordeal → actually what if it’s only that person” and also Hugh turned into Tara somehow. Not really sure how that happened, but I wasn’t attached to the Pokémon version much.
• I don’t want the One Person to be an adult, or even part of a group now; the less justified Nico’s outburst looks, the better. Thus spawns Ava; same age, just a friend! A new friend made in really weird and suspicious circumstances, but a friend to Tara nonetheless. And so maybe Nico’s rage isn’t about the specific person at all, but the very fact of the drift…

Ivy stays more or less unchanged, just with shifted circumstances; Excalibur turns into a lifelong pet, the dog Buddy, and he’s old now. Hugh’s little sister and her purrloin stay, too; Tara’s still a big sister, and they have a new kitten. ;3c….

but wait, there’s more!

Skimming right over the part where I flesh out the backstory between these four. Not that the process was linear; I’m sure I hopped all over the timeline with reckless abandon. But retroactively, since the game is more or less ignored from that point on, there’s no need to detail the continued diversion here.

What I will cover, instead, is how the rest of the gang came into play:

• One teenager is not going to cover a whole-ass murder, even if she has top notch composure; I don’t know shit about law but someone’s gotta be keeping things hush-hush, and it’s sure as hell not her (or anyone else’s) parents. Enter an ally: “Dodder.”
• Alright, cool; we’ve retconned the entirety of the 2012 timeline to have fuckall to do with pokémon. We have two tired-ass adults, Tara’s dead, and… uh, what are the other people doing now, anyway? Surely this can’t stay covered up, but I have no idea how it… Stops Being That.
• Thus the lil sib gets hit with the character development stick. Five years later, Vexus is the same age as Nico was when Tara died (13), and of course Vexus isn’t convinced by the suicide story.
• Also, I’m a sucker for parallels. Who’s the Ivy to Vexus’ Nico? Thus: Levi. They are, of course, very different duos. But there are lines to be drawn here…

And, uh, that’s it! That’s all I’m saying here.

• Oh, and for whatever it’s worth: Ava may or may not be alive in 2017, and that is entirely because I don’t know what the Vexus-centered storyline would do with her. It’s possible she died in 2012, in the climax of The Circumstances, but I also like the dynamic of older-her with the rest of the cast. Until/Unless I work out more of the story, consensus: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯~!