What's a mini?(NM) (nm)

Subject: What's a mini?(NM) (nm)
Author: Seychelles
Posted on: 2014-03-06 19:05:00 UTC

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A mini question and an interesting find. by doctorlit on 2014-03-05 07:22:00 UTC Reply

Hey, folks. I don't start new topics very often, so . . . um.

I am here to discuss Pokémon minis! I've been chugging away at making pages for minis, but I wanted to get the community's thoughts before I made the one for the Pokéminis. We've wound up with three different types. The older Pokémon OFU (the OFU of Kanto) had mini-Deoxys. A newer OFU, the Pokémon Fanfiction University, has mini-Missingno. I can't find it now, but I seem to recall the Warrior of Many Faces asked permission on the Board to start the new one and change the mini, so that's pretty much a retcon. The troublesome bit is that between the active periods of the two OFUs, Sylibane published a Pokémon mission. Probably unaware of the by-then-super-old, and also deleted-from-the-Pit-and-rehosted-elsewhere, OFU of Kanto, s/he made a new mini type, the mini-Rayquaza.

So what I'm asking is, do we want to call mini-Rayquazas a mistake, and stick with Many Faces' mini-Missingnos as the legit mini for Pokémon? Or stick with the Wiki's explanation that minis have one form on missions and others in the OFUs? (A bizarre third option would be to assign each mini type to one aspect of the canon--games, anime, and manga. The drawback here is that both Sylibane's mission "Luke" and Many Faces' OFU are pretty clearly both in the game universe, while the manga remains unrepresented throughout the PPC/OFU multiverse.)

(Sylibane, if you're still around, I'm not trying to call you out or anything. Just trying to keep the bookkeeping under control. (: )

The other thing I wanted to mention was an interesting and practical find I discovered while looking for older spin-offs. On this outdated copy of the Complete List of PPC Fiction:
http://archive.is/DLiat

I found the old site of Chana's "Hal and Chana" spin-off, wherein lay a super-old email directory of PPC oldbies:
http://web.archive.org/web/20090724140452/http://geocities.com/PPCdirectory/

There is a wealth of info on here. It's got links to old writing, both PPC and not; I haven't had a chance to get through them all yet, but hopefully there are at least some archived links in there. It might also help connect some agents to their proper owners, as it contains alternate names for a lot of Boarders. The most immediately helpful section for me is the mini adoptions, as they allowed me to fill out the Mini-Balrog page most dramatically. It also has a few mini-types that had been lost for a while--Sailor Moon makes mini-youmas! Who knew?

That's a major reason I'm sharing the link--I wanted a bit of self-accountability, so people didn't think I had just made up arbitrary misspellings and mini types. But I also just wanted to show off what I found, as it's a pretty dang cool artifact of our history.

(Side note, though: that list has people's emails in it, but let's NOT go bothering people out of the blue about a community they left a decade ago, okay? It would be Impolite. And most of them are probably defunct, anyway.)

Two more mini questions by Antigone68104 on 2014-03-06 23:11:00 UTC Reply

1) I had just assumed (I know, I know ...) that a strangely-named place in the Indiana Jones mission I'm working on was an invented location that I could turn over to DOGA. But I happened to Google the citation, and I'm now thinking it's a really bad misspelling of an actual location.

I know that misspelled fictional locations can spawn location minis, but would a misspelled real place do the same?

2) Don't we have a Mini Adoption Center in HQ? I could have sworn we did, but I'm apparently using the wrong search terms on the wiki.

Re: Two more mini questions by Miah on 2014-03-07 06:09:00 UTC Reply

The Mini Adoption Center has been mentioned in missions before, but it is kind of a place that you dump off minis that no one on the Board wants and that don't have their own OFU's of Adoption Centers to go to.

It may be a sort of generic type place that only exists in a few missions.

If I can find the name, I'll post it.

Re: Two more mini questions by Miah on 2014-03-07 06:54:00 UTC Reply

By find the name, I meant that I have the distinct memory of a scene with a named agent that worked in the generic Mini Adoption Center, but now I can't find it. I'm still looking.

Answers! by doctorlit on 2014-03-07 03:01:00 UTC Reply
1. A real world location that also exists in the fictional universe you're dealing with would indeed make a mini. So "Gurmany" in an IJ badfic would make--whatever you're going to make the mini be, since they don't exist yet. I reckon the same would be true for real world figures who appear as characters in the fiction, like Hitlur. (Did I just Godwin's Law a mini question?)
  
  I guess the same would be true for real world locations that didn't originally appear in the canon? Like, Jones never went to Hawaii (that I know of, haven't seen all the Young Indiana Jones movies), but there's no reason to assume Hawaii magically doesn't exist in the IJ-verse. (If it doesn't, I blame either aliens or some ancient magic. Or magical ancient aliens.)
  
  But again, I'm not sure on that point. Anyone else want to chime in?
  
  2. HQ has several mini adoption agencies. Most of them are for individual varieties of mini, like Miah and Cali's mini-LEO AA, Skeet and Amelia's mini-Mogget AA, and the mini-razor adoptions run through the Creepy Bloodstained Victorians Protection Society. These are basically instances where someone wrote a mission to a smallish fandom, found minis there, and realized there was no OFU author to manage mini distribution. They then took it upon themselves to handle mini adoptions.
  
  I'm sure there is also a capitalized Mini Adoption Agency, although it's typically described somewhat vaguely (that I've read). This was for instances where the mission author, upon finding said minis, did not want to manage adoptions, and wrote a generic place to drop them off at, which other people started to use when they wanted to adopt minis with no caretaker. Since it's been kind of haphazardly used, it probably never got a wiki page created. That's something you could work on, if you feel like it!
  
  (There's also Mini Care, a daycare-style service to keep minis safe and out of trouble while their adopted agents are on missions. As far as I know, it only appeared in Tawaki's spin-off. That could warrant a wiki page, as well.)

Replies! by Antigone68104 on 2014-03-07 12:20:00 UTC Reply

1) While the specific location in Venice that got mangled isn't mentioned in canon that I'm aware of (I should probably check with the IJ wiki), Venice itself exists in canon. I would think that should be close enough for mini-creation.

And for the record, "Snakes. Why did it have to be snakes?" :D

2) If the overtime drops off, I'll see if I can pull together a page for the various adoption agencies. Tawaki, if you're reading this, mind if Mini Care becomes a branch of the main Mini Adoption Agency? Something like the "doggy day care" that my local humane society runs?

The first draft has an unnamed assistant helping collect the minis because the MAA supervisors are out of the office. (I was writing it offline and couldn't check the wiki.) I may leave that alone for now, and expand it when the wiki page is written.

{X D Perfect. by Neshomeh on 2014-03-07 18:43:00 UTC Reply

Are they mini-giant snakes, like the one from the circus train in The Last Crusade? In other words, basically regular-sized snakes? *g*

~Neshomeh

Yep :) (nm) by Antigone68104 on 2014-03-07 21:44:00 UTC Reply

Yeah, Italian places sound like fair game to me. (nm) by doctorlit on 2014-03-07 13:40:00 UTC Reply

Re: Answers! by Outhra on 2014-03-07 05:03:00 UTC Reply

I am relatively certain that any misspellings of real-world countries or cities will create mini-Mochi. Maybe if the location is specific enough and important enough to the plot, like Indepnednce Hall in a National Treasure badfic, for example, it would create that continuum's mini, but in most real-world location situations, they're Mochi. It's more streamlined that way, too.

Eh, I don't know . . . by doctorlit on 2014-03-07 05:38:00 UTC Reply

It would be kind of weird if misspellings of settings like Heroes or Jane Eyre or whatever made an anime-style mini. (Also, they're Hetalia characters, so it doesn't make sense for them to represent "real" Earth.)

I'm a strong advocate of one mini per continuum, personally. If we start making all these individual guidelines for specific situations, any given mission could potentially turn into too much bookkeeping, which would make the writing experience less fun. (While I like it when PPCers use minis as characters in a mission, too many minis drawing description time away from the action would probably be bad for narrative flow.)

Agreed. by Neshomeh on 2014-03-07 18:33:00 UTC Reply

The way I hear it, Hetalia kinda gets away from reality, like, a lot, so their minis wouldn't be remotely appropriate for Real World places. I can't back that up, though, because I couldn't sit through more than a handful of episodes. >.
~Neshomeh

Answers by Neshomeh on 2014-03-07 02:54:00 UTC Reply

1) The Indiana Jones continuum has a lot of overlap with the Real World, so in this case I'd say yes, you'd get an Indiana Jones mini out of it.

2) Maybe? There are definitely several specific mini adoption centers run from response centers in HQ, and there have been occasional references to a generic one, but it's ambiguous. No one has yet buckled down and officially established a generic mini adoption center as far as I know; probably because it would be a lot of work to actually run such a thing.

~Neshomeh

What's a mini?(NM) (nm) by Seychelles on 2014-03-06 19:05:00 UTC Reply

They're tiny creatures whose form corresponds to a monster by Lily Winterwood on 2014-03-06 20:12:00 UTC Reply

in the continuum they come from. They spawn with the misspelling of a character's name in that continuum.

Also, NMs & NMs! -noms-

No clue on pokemon, but the old links are great! by A Random Boo on 2014-03-06 18:22:00 UTC Reply

Those links to the old stuff makes me immensely happy! No reference to me because I was, quite possibly, way too timid to share my personal information. Also, looking at the wiki, I just discovered my long lost adopted mini Mr. Beggins!

What? Me? No, I’m not an oldbie who has been lurking around the board the past few days. Pffft! No way! I’m... aww, shucks! I think I just blew my cover. *runs and hides*

Welcome back! (nm) by Ailavyn Siniyash on 2014-03-06 19:00:00 UTC Reply

Mini-Rayquazas are definitely not a mistake. by Outhra on 2014-03-05 22:05:00 UTC Reply

I had most of this post written before, and then the Internet locked up and I couldn't make another one for hours because of classes. Bah. Now it's shorter. Then again, knowing me, it may have been better for whoever is reading this, since they do not need to confront one of my legendary walls of text.

Okay, to the point. Mini-Rayquazas are the most well-known incarnation of the Pokémon mini that we have. According to the Board search bar, the only mentions of mini-Missingnos or mini-Deoxys within recorded Board history were as alternatives to the mini-Rayquaza, which has been treated as the default Pokémon mini by several badfic analyses and miscellaneous statements. Plus, the mini-Rayquaza has been mentioned in other published missions before(I know there are more times people have talked about them, but Google is acting up today and would only give me this one, while the mini-Deoxys and mini-Missingno have not been seen outside of their native OFU. Neither of the others has that kind of ground. Removing the mini-Rayquazas entirely at this point or retconning them as being the guise of some other shapeshifting mini species would produce more problems than it solves. I say we keep mini-Rayquaza as the form of the Pokémon mini when it appears in a badfic, and have the OFU minis categorized as altered versions.

Tied into that, the wiki's explanation is based in part on something that was decided on a while ago to provide an in-universe explanation for OFAS's mini change, and was later applied to several other continua with multiple mini species. Certain minis might be unsuitable for OFU protection, and if a force exists in the continuum capable of altering the forms of living beings, such as Q in Star Trek or Arceus in Pokémon, they could be adapted to a form better suited for their new job. True, mini-Rayquazas would still do a better job guarding the canon characters than mini-Tribbles would, so a change isn't as necessary from an in-universe standpoint, but the ability to fly at incredible speed and shoot tiny little energy bolts from one's mini-mouth pales in comparison to the glitch powers that the mini-Missigno could have, especially when working in tandem. They might be able to transport people across vast distances and appear in any location with a hiss of static, to guard the staff section from the attacks of fangirls, their wide move pool would make them more unpredictable, etcetera etcetera. The Pokémon OFUs were shown to have the blessings of the Sinnoh legendaries, since the Warrior OFU mentioned that Dialga would be responsible for keeping up temporal consistency, so it's not out of the question that Arceus would be up to transforming the minis into a form that the Coordinator thinks would be best for the job at hand. Arceus is capable of creating and reshaping all Pokémon life, after all.

Yes yes yes by eatpraylove on 2014-03-08 15:29:00 UTC Reply

What a great idea! I really hope the rebooted OPFU goes smoothly!
It seems mini-Rayquazas have no true source, after all. by doctorlit on 2014-03-07 04:16:00 UTC Reply

They got added to the wiki's mini list waaaaaay back on August 8, 2008, by an anonymous IP address. For context, the mission "Luke" wasn't published until July 30, 2011. The mission you linked, where mini-Rayquazas are mentioned in passing was published a few months later, on September 23.

SOURCES
http://ppc.wikia.com/wiki/Mini?oldid=7856
http://disc.yourwebapps.com/discussion.cgi?disc=199610;article=214547;title=PPC%20Posting%20Board

I don't think this was a regular, unsigned-in PPCer (their only other contributions were to expand the "Robecca" page) and adding it after a Board discussion, as the first mention of this mini on the Board is by me (hurr duur durp) on February 19, 2010. (Although it is possible that much of the Board's past discussions have vanished off the internet, but I don't want to think about that.)

SOURCES
http://disc.yourwebapps.com/discussion.cgi?id=199610;article=193238;search_term=rayquaza

So basically, it got thrown up on the wiki by an unknown someone (who was obviously unaware of the mini-Deoxys at the OFU of Kanto), and no one questioned it until now (well, until the Warrior of Many Faces changed it for his OFU).

This makes me even more inclined to support Many Faces' mini-Missingo as the Pokémini. Especially since minis originally came from the OFU multiverse, anyway, and OFUs have traditionally trumped the PPC on the topic of minis.

In addition to what Huinesoron said, by Outhra on 2014-03-08 23:27:00 UTC Reply

Even if it didn't have a primary source before, it definitely has some now, and those stories featuring mini-Rayquaza are currently the only sources describing what Pokémon minis appear as during a mission. Even if the original mention was inspired by the Minis page on the wiki, and there's no real way to confirm or deny that at this point, that doesn't make the choice invalid. It's not terribly different from choosing a mini type based on another Boarder's suggestion.

I think that the unregistered user only making one edit aside from the one on the Minis page may support the idea that the original editor was a non-signed-in Boarder as much as it debunks it. It's entirely possible that the unlogged edits there predate the person in question's creation of a Board presence, or that the person just hadn't logged in when those edits were made. Speaking as someone who originally made unlogged edits before I started using my main account and tracked several unregistered users back when I more frequently edited the wiki, an unregistered user would normally only make one or two small edits, suggesting a similar issue of not logging in or a random Internet user correcting a typo that was bugging them, or they would make several in a string and then vanish, which occurred for any number of reasons.

Re: minis by doctorlit on 2014-03-09 04:54:00 UTC Reply

Still, though, an OFU has created a more recent mini type. The OFUs have traditionally trumped the PPC when it comes to minis, since the mini concept originally came from the OFU universe.

(I hope I'm not coming off as argumentative, replying to every post of yours like this. It's just, you and hS are the only people replying, and hS hasn't really given a definite answer. I was hoping for more community involvement; this should be a group decision, not "doctorlit and Outhra spend a week being pedantic at each other.") '~'

Some unrelated questions, then... by Outhra on 2014-03-09 22:27:00 UTC Reply

What are we going to do about the No Links pages on the wiki? Some of them are Agents by Boarders who are still around and might conceivably put their inactive Agents in stories, some just have never been sourced properly(I'm working on a couple of those now, actually), and some are free-to-use characters such as Flowers, but some are pages for Agents or other miscellaneous characters that never appeared in a published work and are unlikely to in the future, since the person writing them vanished from the PPC years ago, abandoning the characters in the process. This one, this one, and this one, for example. Do we just delete the pages? Is there a protocol for this sort of thing? It's wiki policy that you don't put anything up unless there are sources for it, but not only have those pages not shown any links for several years, the characters in the latter category are unlikely to ever appear anywhere, or to have made any past appearances prior to their abandonment.
And what about these two? The pages were made for Agents that the author didn't yet have Permission to create, and then the original page creator vanished before Permission was attained. Can we delete those by now?

Also: should the Peyote get its own page? It's mentioned on the wiki, in connection to its role as one of the Flower staff members in the Janitorial Department(it appears to have been created by Trojanhorse, judging by one of the links below that page), but it's also shown up in at least two more stories, those two being Phobos's bad future AU and the original ESAS spin-off. Three appearances give it officially more screen time than some formally recognized Department Heads, notably the Head of its own Department, and most of the Division Heads.

Let's see . . . by doctorlit on 2014-03-10 03:38:00 UTC Reply

The Peyote, definitely. Especially since it's a community character; people wanting to write about it should have access to its appearances to be able to write it in character.

The agent pages . . . oy. Strictly speaking, they aren't canon, and therefore don't belong on the wiki. On the other hand, though . . . if we deleted them today, and anamia or Guardian's Song came back tomorrow and saw, I would feel pretty crumby. I don't know what to do about those.

The Kippers Axolotl page I would keep, personally, since Chatvert bobs back and forth between active and inactive. I doubt we've seen the last of her/hope we haven't seen the last of her!

I'll respond to this first. by Outhra on 2014-03-11 13:35:00 UTC Reply

All right, then. I'll get on that as soon as I have some free time and can find a good picture. Google Image search keeps giving me things with watermarks or visible containers.

There are ways to recover deleted pages, you know. If one of the people who wrote those Agents did the unlikely and returned, you could always undelete the page or recopy it from Wikia's archive. In fact, I may have found a special page specifically dedicated to doing just that. I say "may have" because it won't let me on the page unless I'm an administrator, but it's called "Special:Undelete" so I'm quite confident that it will at least be of some help in page recovery.

To add a voice, then... by Neshomeh on 2014-03-09 18:39:00 UTC Reply

I'm not terribly invested in Pokémon, but I concur that OFUs trump PPC missions.

Plus, I know what a Missingno. is and why it's significant: being an actual glitch in the game. To me, Rayquaza just looks like another big dragon-thing in a series with several big dragon-things. As for it being a Legendary, there are lots of those, too, and all of them can be captured in tiny little capsules and commanded to do the bidding of a ten-year-old. *shrug*

~Neshomeh

Kind of forgot Rayquaza was a Dragon-type. by doctorlit on 2014-03-10 05:28:00 UTC Reply

And we have way too many dragon-shaped minis already, don't we?

And yes, Missingno. is a fandom thing, which makes it a bit more significant a choice, to me.

Part of why I don't like it is because it's a fandom thing. by Outhra on 2014-03-10 19:39:00 UTC Reply

At least if it was a mainstream Pokémon, it would have an established series of behaviors, abilities and reactions set up over the numerous generations. Missingno was never intended to exist, and did not exist at all after the first three games, so there's really nothing to work with on it. At least if they were restricted to being guardians of the OFU, they would behave as fitting their role, to protect the canon characters, keep the students within designated boundaries, and so on, regardless of what they actually are.
It seems more fitting that a mini for the Pokémon continuum would be a version of something that existed in-canon in a significant fashion, like most of the other mini-propagating creatures are, instead of something that showed up in a small capacity for a limited amount of time but captured popular interest because of the odd circumstances that created it.

I mean, it's true that we have four dragon-like minis already(mini-Dragons, mini-Time Dragons, mini-neo-Bahamuts, and mini-Wehrs) and if I'd made the choice I would have preferred something more specific and iconic like Meowth, one of the Pikachu clones, or an evolution of one of the starters(even Deoxys is actually a more unique choice, considering that its origins and activities are distinct from almost any other creature in the multiverse, but apparently it's out of consideration), but confirming the minis as versions of Rayquaza isn't bad. Rayquaza's been the focus of one of the games, was the central antagonist in one of the movies and was the antagonist representing Pokémon in the Subspace Emissary, and it's the second-most important legendary Pokémon in Hoenn, next to Jirachi. It's got the sort of recognition to carry a mini species, is willful and problematic to cause trouble for the Agents, and is distinct enough from the other draconic minis(representing a combination of Quetzalcoatl and an Asian dragon rather than the Western dragons shown by those four) to be more singular than it might be if it was one of the other Dragon-types like Salamence or Dragonite.

Also, changing it now raises a major question: what would have caused the mini-Rayquaza to appear in Sylibane's mission? If mini-Missingno usually appear in missions as well as within the Pokémon OFU, why were they mini-Rayquaza that time? It can't just be a Missingno in Rayquaza's form, because one of the few things that is known about Missingno is that it cannot copy the form of another Pokémon, and even if it could, it wouldn't have access to anything beyond the original 151, and the Agent within Sylibane's missions didn't seem surprised that the mini type was unusual, which makes it rather unlikely that there was some sort of metaphysical error.

Missingno.tes by doctorlit on 2014-03-11 07:02:00 UTC Reply

Well, the mini-Missingno.s (that looks really weird, but I can't imagine how else I would spell the plural) are given plenty of behaviors in the PFU; in fact, I would say they display a lot more personality than some other OFU minis I've read. Let's look at some excerpts:

"Several beings were spilling out of this pentagon, with forms that he vaguely recognized: although his Red and Blue days were behind him, he seemed to recall that they were the various forms of Missingno (weren't they too small, though?)."

"Especially since a lot of the Missingnos were saying 'Mommy! Mommy!'

To Liz.

He really hoped that was a mistake of some sort.

'Quiet! Greet Mommy later!' one (an Aerodactyl skeleton) yelled, making the others quiet down to an excited murmur.

The Aerodactyl skeleton then pushed a large pile of stapled-together papers towards Liz. 'Read.'"

I do somewhat agree with your reasoning about Missingno. no longer being part of canon--which is actually why I dislike both Deoxys and Rayquaza, as well. Generation III was a while ago, now, and we don't really see either affecting plots anymore. Missingno. has the same problem, although at least it was around at the beginning of Pokémon. (There really is no good choice for a long-running monster Pokémon that's served as a villain throughout the franchise; if it were up to me, I probably would have picked Mewtwo, myself. Same problem as all the rest, but far more iconic.)

While Rayquaza may be unique from other draconic minis, Missingno. (and many actual Pokémon, besides) would still provide far more diversity when taking all minis as a whole.

As to what would cause mini-Rayquazas to appear in Sylibane's mission: a writing mistake. Even the PPC is not immune to them. Many older missions contain typos and other SPaG errors, continuity problems, etc. We've also had at least one instance before where a mini type became popularized without appearing in writing, then being replaced by something else in an official capacity (mini-Jem Hadar getting replaced with mini-Tribbles for Star Trek). And while a clever explanation was later developed for that continuum to have both a mission mini and an OFU mini, we don't strictly need to do that every time. Sometimes, we just go on writing and ignore old info without feeling a need to explain it away. (Exorcisms didn't originally require charge lists; the DF's head used to be called the Water Hyacinth, etc.)

What I was really hoping to accomplish with this thread was to narrow Pokémon down to a single mini type. As I mentioned before, I dislike continua with multiple minis; I think it's overly complex and inelegant to have more than one. Pokémon, despite its ostensible popularity, has seen all of four PPC missions in over a decade of this community's existence. Of the six authors involved in writing those missions, only two are still active, and neither Lily-Gnome nor Makari have written any new missions in a year. Only one of those missions, by one of the retired authors, actually produced minis. I don't feel that the community is even invested in mini-Rayquazas to the point that we can't just retcon it. (We have always been at war with Eurasia, after all.)

There's really no need for the period. by Outhra on 2014-03-11 15:22:00 UTC Reply

The original OFU spelled Missingno without the period at the end. It's not strictly how the name appears in-game, but it's just as valid a spelling as MissingNO or MissingNo. or any of those other spellings that people use because the Kanto games predated Pokémon's use of consistent punctuation and lowercase letters.

I'm not seeing much other than choppy sentence structure and being very attached to their author for unique mini-Missingno activity. Were the other OFU minis just incredibly bland? I suppose it doesn't help that the Pokémon OFU only has two published chapters before vanishing completely, so we don't get to see what might have been.
Besides, I was thinking more along the lines of what they would be capable of. Teleportation, duplicating items and movesets, Water Gun, and Sky Attack are pretty much the only things set by the games they appear in, which is both disparate and lacking by Pokémon standards, and their reputation as a glitch might mean someone might give them any number of new abilities and attribute them to "glitch powers", when a canonical entity should be diminished in power to make a mini, not increased. They aren't very well established, essentially. Rayquaza and Deoxys might have been left by the wayside in favor of new properties, but Missingno was never canon at all, and could only even be considered so within a very small time frame, since even the remakes of the Kanto games retconned Missingno and its cousins out of existence. That poses a bit of a problem.

Yes, that's the problem with Pokémon, isn't it? New games and movies and shows come out every year, and every three years or so they drag another few dozen Pokémon out into the light, leaving plenty of the existing ones unconsidered and forgotten about. The thing is, though, even if we picked something inconsequential like a mini-Luxio or a mini-Carbink, it would still be an improvement over Missingno, IMO, because it had an actual in-canon presence. Not that those two would be good choices, because they're not, but that's not the point. They do something, they have a well-defined power set, they might affect the average player's experience of the game rather than the experience of someone who went out of their way to create the conditions in which one could be encountered, and Missingno is so ill-defined that I'm not even sure how we'd decide which of its five primary forms an individual mini would take.
Mewtwo is another nice choice, by the way, since it's a presence in multiple generations of games as well as Super Smash Brothers Melee, has two movies and a television special dedicated to it, has well-established powers that could easily be toned down for the mini, and is a perpetual fan favorite. I'd cast my vote for that if we were still in the process of selection.

But regarding your last point, about nobody in the community actually being invested in this... (sigh) you're probably right. I'm probably one of only a few people who would give more thought than "Huh. Didn't that used to be something else?" if the mini was changed. I feel strongly about it to make another huge wall of text, but I'm well noted to offer hundreds of words of support to a number of doomed topics. I admitted then and now that Rayquaza isn't the best choice. Out of the three minis we have, I'd have supported Deoxys if it hadn't been apparently shoved off the table. But it's the choice that's there, due to multiple mentions in-story(not just Sylibane, either, even though I could only find one other example when pressed) and on the Board. Consistency is important, and consistency is the reason why we don't let anyone making a story in a continuum rewrite the mini as whatever they want when they want, even if the choice the second person makes is an improvement over the original. Rayquaza's not the worst choice, and though it is less diverse considering what we already have, it works well enough that I don't see any need to change it. Besides, the continuum will have multiple minis even if we decide to excise mini-Rayquaza from continuity, it's just that one will only exist in an OFU while the other exists both in an OFU and the Word Worlds for some reason.

Meant to add last night, by doctorlit on 2014-03-11 16:48:00 UTC Reply

Am I the only one bothered about Rayquaza popping out of the lake in Brawl? It's supposed to be the sky-themed Pokémon, and they have it pop out of water!

I mean, my head canon for the Smash Bros. series is that it's just being acted out by a little kid with his toys. That's why there's so little talking, and why the boss of the earlier games is a giant hand: it's literally the kid's hand that he's conscripted as a "giant" enemy.) So maybe the kid was just playing around water in his backyard, and didn't really know much or care about Rayquaza's origin?

But my nonsensical in-universe head canon aside, you would think Nintendo could represent their own property a little better.

Your headcanon seems to be supported by the original game. by Outhra on 2014-03-11 18:32:00 UTC Reply

After all, the N64 Super Smash Bros game has Master Hand creating the characters and stages of the game by bringing dolls to life, and Super Smash Brothers Melee says that the place where the characters fight is an "imaginary world", and that Master Hand is capable of crossing between that world and another. It makes sense that the person who is controlling and influencing the toys-turned-fighters would be the one who originally owned them.

I think the Rayquaza popping out of the water may have been because it's easier to make a lakeside stage than a stratosphere stage, especially for the purposes of a boss fight. No matter how cool that would've been, the closest we got to one was Skyworld, and that was basically just another land-based stage but with clouds instead of dirt and enemies that could fly. Granted, the Rayquaza could have just as easily swooped down from the sky and attacked the team that was standing by the lake, but given the altitude at which Rayquaza usually dwells, there would be no reason for it to do that, since it is chiefly protective of its natural territory, which is said to be up near the ozone layer, and wouldn't pay much attention to anything happening on the ground. It would have made more sense for the Rayquaza to start harassing the Halberd, but the team already fights an OC boss up there, so it would've been redundant.
SmashWiki seems to believe that Rayquaza was sleeping underwater, which sort of makes sense, because it might have been woken up by the Arwing crash and flew out of the water to retaliate, but if that was the case, there'd be no reason for it to wait for Diddy Kong to show up. It would've just collapsed the crashed Arwing with Dragon Pulse or Hyper Voice and flown off to find another lake. Even if this particular Rayquaza didn't know either of those moves, it at least could've spat out a few Energy Balls or something instead of waiting for Fox to come out and reflect them back at it.

Argh, don;t even remind me of Skyworld. by doctorlit on 2014-03-11 19:47:00 UTC Reply

The ironic overpower lurked there for me. Those stupid platforms always shattered just as I was about to recover-grab them. Like, 90% of the time, and I am NOT joking. Whenever we got that stage, I focused more on staying on the ground than actually fighting, just because I knew what would happen if I got knocked away from the center.

See, I wish they had used Rayquaza on the Halberd instead of the random monster. They should have made all the bosses be cameos from the different games, instead of making up generic monsters. (Other than Tabuu; I can understand wanting a new character for the final, since most players would already now how to fight Master Hand.) I just hope the new pair of Smashes is going to have an expanded Adventure Mode like Subspace Emissary, because I really liked that.

(And yeah, my head-canon says the kid gets older with the games. Smash 64 had plushes and very simple mechanics. Melee, the kid had started getting plastic action figures, and actually started playing the games, so the move sets got more complex. Brawl is when they started branching out into non-Nintendo consoles, and got even more complex and violent.

The Primids and other SE enemies are probably random non-franchise toy monsters the kid had lying around and decided to throw in one day.)
Since this two-party back and forth is going on to no end by son_of_heaven176 on 2014-03-11 19:22:00 UTC Reply

it looks like the only thing to do is revive this discussion at the top of the Board, since almost no one scrolls past the halfway point, and this discussion is both there AND past the Shipfest.

I'll see you both (and hopefully some other Boarders) up top.

Thanks for doing that! by doctorlit on 2014-03-12 06:17:00 UTC Reply

I was beginning to despair of this discussion going anywhere.
I've been reading it (I check the entire front page). by Ailavyn Siniyash on 2014-03-11 19:34:00 UTC Reply

I just, very strongly, have absolutely no opinion.

Discussions on the Board. by Huinesoron on 2014-03-07 10:41:00 UTC Reply

That's... probably a bit of a grey area. The earliest post on the Board is around 5180 threads back. It's Tawaki posting a K9 badfic in mid-June 2008. Which does seem a long gap for someone to think of adding it, admittedly. Furthermore, the extant (through Archive.org and me copying them) versions of the front page prior to that show no hits for 'Pokemon', 'Rayquaza', or indeed 'mini' in the first half of 2008. That's only post-titles, though, not full-text - and it's not a complete list.

But yes, I'd guess you're probably write with 'someone just up and added it'. It may well have been a Boarder who was planning a mission, but never got round to it.

hS

Hahahahaha. by Outhra on 2014-03-06 15:15:00 UTC Reply

Another companion for me, hyuuman? Truly, your typography is the work of a maaaaster. Though I do not blame you. It is natural to wish the world consumed by the work of the Great Error.

Dang it, Missingo! I thought I was done with you!

I am not here to give you misery, hyuuman. I have merely come to reclaim one of my own. Come, Missigno. Together, we shall make this world ours.

Stupid spelling errors. I should never trust spell-check when dealing with the names of glitches. That's twice now this has happened. It almost seems like they've been org□□□□□□□ □ □□□□ □□ □□□□□□□□□.

Hahahahahahaha.

Just need to say: {X D Yay At4W! (nm) by Neshomeh on 2014-03-06 17:12:00 UTC Reply

? by son_of_heaven176 on 2014-03-06 22:16:00 UTC Reply

Could you please translate that combination of symbols into something more resemblant to English?

(And since we PPCers tend to take things too literally Because It's Funny, let me clarify that I don't need the "Yay" or the "(nm)" translated. I know, I sometimes get some sick pleasure in being the wet blanket!)

Well, the {, X, and D were part of an emoticon... by Outhra on 2014-03-07 01:09:00 UTC Reply

And the AT4W is an abbreviation of Atop The Fourth Wall, a web show that contains an arc-villain known in-universe as The Entity that the mini-Rayquaza Missingo's dialogue, particularly its verbal tic of "hyuuman" and the color of said dialogue, referenced.

Thanks for the reply. by son_of_heaven176 on 2014-03-07 01:38:00 UTC Reply

Since you seem to be online now, did you get the email that I sent you earlier today? I have not received a reply to it as of yet...

Another question I forgot to add: by doctorlit on 2014-03-05 16:41:00 UTC Reply

Does anyone have any idea what the mini-Balrog "Elftone" could possibly be a misspelling of? It's the one name I couldn't figure out from browsing the Tolkien wikis. (It's on both Miss Cam's original list and the email directory, adopted by author!Rosie C. B. so it's definitely a legitimate mini.)

Elfstone. == Elessar. (nm) by Huinesoron on 2014-03-05 16:50:00 UTC Reply

Ack. I should have known. by doctorlit on 2014-03-05 20:43:00 UTC Reply

Aragorn and his many names have been problematic for me. Thank you, hS!

Let me theorize for a moment by Phobos on 2014-03-05 14:46:00 UTC Reply

Missingno, being a glitch, has been known to look like other Pokemon. Specifically, I recall my Missingno looking like a Kangaskhan. If that is possible, would it not also be possible to appear as Deoxys and Rayquaza?

So, that is my theory. The mini has always been mini-Missingno, but has appeared to be other Pokemon at various points.

Thoughts?

-Phobos

I like this muchly! by doctorlit on 2014-03-05 16:30:00 UTC Reply

Partly because it gives a nice, clean explanation.

It also matches up with their characterization at the Pokémon Fanfiction Academy, where they sometimes took the appearance of their less famous images, which Outhra mentioned.
Maybe if they were mini-Ditto, or mini-Mew. by Outhra on 2014-03-05 15:55:00 UTC Reply

When a Missingno takes on a non-pixellated form, it nabs one of the sprites not assigned to anything else. In-game, it can appear as the unidentified ghost from Lavender Tower, a few types of skeleton, or a number of ambiguous partially-loaded entities, but it can't take the form of another Pokémon, and it can't change its shape once it selects one.
Minis, minis, minis. by Huinesoron on 2014-03-05 15:01:00 UTC Reply

What are minis, anyway? This isn't the only case of them changing over time - Star Trek has had both mini-Tribbles and mini-Gorn, for instance, and reading the current OFU doesn't suggest an official explanation for that. I'm pretty sure we've had people show 'formless' minis on occasion, too.

So why do minis form? We know they're misspellings, which suggests a connection to the literalness of the Word Worlds: since, for instance, there is no Pokemon called Kangascan, the World decides there must be something else there. And since it's a spelling error, the thing that appears must be a monster - since spelling errors are bad, after all. But, being a manifestation of the Word World's sense of humour, it will also, generally, be friendly to the Canon Protection Initiative.

Perhaps the form of the mini depends on the expectation of any canon-friendly operatives in the area. So when Triumvir Cam- wait, sorry, wrong mythology, Miss Cam of OFUM first met the first mini, she saw what she expected - a miniature (since it's not real) manifestation of one of the worst monsters of Middle-earth - the Balrog.

As to how the other minis took their form, once people knew they existed, I propose three methods at various times:

-Their form grew out of their behaviour. Mini-Aragogs act like acrowhatsits, so even before seeing them, Meir Brin may have developed an idea of what they looked like - which projected onto them.

-Discussion among those who knew about them. If a debate (on the Board, say - or, in fiction, in HQ) leads to a general conclusion that, uh, Pokemon minis must be mini-Missingnos - and in this case, evidence to the contrary can be countered by Phobos' argument - then people will be primed to see them in that way.

-Declarations from an OFU. If the Administrator of OFUDisc announces that Discworld minis are mini-Luggages, that's evidence enough for everyone, I think.

We have to assume here that PPC Agents do their homework - that they know what to expect in a new canon. I'm not sure that's a reasonable assumption, though... maybe we should postulate some sort of cumulative effect? Like, if enough people believe something about a canon, then (when and only when the canon is already weakened by a badfic) it will tend to come true regardless of the current agents' lack of belief? There might be a 'when not directly contradicted by the canon' clause in there, too.

Oh, and to add - I think mini-Missingnos are the best (and funniest) solution, and that Phobos' argument is a good way to get round any discrepancies.

hS

A good idea, by Outhra on 2014-03-05 22:33:00 UTC Reply

But unfortunately, it's not entirely well-founded. There have been several instances of Agents encountering a mini in a story without knowing what it is, even if that encounter was the first mission in its continuum, which suggests that while minis are based on iconic beings, machines, and monsters, they are not derived from the list of iconic entities that those who encounter them are familiar with. Also, if the mini was decided based on the impressions that the first Agents encountering one had of the continuum, there would be a lot more redundancy than we have. For a prominent example, there are so many places that have, as their best-known creature, some form of dragon, and thus the Agents would be very familiar with those dragons and could, if the Word World was looking for a blank slate, project those dragons as the continuum's mini. But they don't. We have mini-Urgals and mini-Wehrs and such. And the idea that the Agents would be primed to see minis as a certain species through either discussion of what the mini has to be or examination of their behavior suggests as a logical extension that an uninformed Agent could see a mini that they encounter as one of any number of species from the continuum it hails from, which is just not a thing that happens.

As for the OFU declaration deciding what the mini species is, I think that explanation is looking at the problem from the wrong end. Of course the Coordinators know what the mini is for the world they supervise; they didn't make them or stabilize their form on this mortal plane, but they've got a few hundred of them running around the halls. I'm pretty sure the staff would know what they look like.

The Star Trek discrepancy actually has been explained. I mentioned it in one of my other posts, but the short form is: Tribbles are really bad at being guards, and so the OFAS Coordinators got Q, Star Trek's resident omnipotent being, to make them into mini-Gorn once they arrive, so that they can be better at what they do.

The first part is pretty indisputable, though, the section on how the Word World creates the minis because there has to be something there that goes by the uncanon name that's presented in the Words. See? Not everything I say in one of these threads is disagreeing with someone!

Fair enough. by Huinesoron on 2014-03-06 09:22:00 UTC Reply

That does mean, though, that we're left with the conclusion that the Word World 'chooses' the mini type - or that the species of a mini is just an inevitable outgrowth of the world itself. Or, of course, that there's a group of authors who discuss these things and somehow 'choose' what the minis should be... but you don't want to go too far down that road.

hS

I consider it to be the second of those three, personally. (nm) by Outhra on 2014-03-06 14:59:00 UTC Reply

I would say Missingno by Anonymous on 2014-03-05 11:15:00 UTC Reply

Just because Missingno is awesome and technically doesn't exist- just like the misspellings. They don't exist, either.

Well, they do and don't. You know what I mean (I hope).

Also, excellent find with the websites! I haven't seen a lot of these... Pardon me. I have some reading to do...

Whoops, that was me (nm) by Iximaz on 2014-03-05 11:16:00 UTC Reply