Subject: Missingno.tes
Author:
Posted on: 2014-03-11 07:02:00 UTC
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.)