jelloapocalypse
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REMINDER: Manga Book Club - Pokemon Adventures (RGBY ARC)
🕑 Added 2024-03-29 20:27:18 +0000 UTCTHE CLUB MEETS ON SATURDAY APRIL 13th @ 1pm PST.
READING ASSIGNMENT: Chapters 1-90
Hey all! We're back with a brand new book club. You voted for Pokemon Adventures aka Pokemon Special, the only Pokemon thing with good writing.* This is the Pokemon series where Pokemon die and the characters are metal as hell. When it's good, it's VERY good.
Like with One Piece, this first book club meeting will be open to all patrons so you can decide if you're interested in reading along with us. For those who don't know how book club works, you're given an assigned reading (in this case Chapters 1-90 of Pokemon Special, which is up through the end of the Yellow arc). Your job is to read all the chapters by the date of the book club meeting, and then we all get together and talk about it.
This book club only features me and Aloha, so we need a lot of people to hop on so we don't get lonely!
Q: Jello, where do I read the Manga?
A: PokeManga is a tricky guy to find in its entirety. This first meeting requires the first seven volumes. Volumes 1-4 are fairly common to see in most book stores or libraries, but beyond that the series gets very spotty. Normally I don't outright recommend piracy and instead just heavily imply that's the thing you should do, but this time I think I have to offer at least this reddit link.
If you are a Gen Z child who has never pirated manga before, ideally you're going to want to be on a desktop for this. Something that can install UBlock Origin, which is like Adblock but way better. It's easy to install on your browser. I think even Android phones can use it, but not Apple products.
If none of the reddit links above work for you, just google "Read Pokemon Special online" and browse various manga sites. They go up and down all the time. I've read this series a few times before and, to my recollection, it's pretty easy to find everything in this first sitting. It's only around post-Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald that things get so hard to find I'll actually have to supply links personally.
Volumes 1-7 are available as a box set from Amazon for a pretty low price.
Also, I'm warning everyone in advance: All the leads in this series are named after the title of the game they're from. There are two characters named Green and Blue, after Pokemon Green and Pokemon Blue. Because Green only came out in Japan, the localizers in the English version renamed the rival/Gary Oak character to Blue, and then swapped the original female lead (Blue) to Green.
I am going to be calling the male rival Green and the female lead Blue.
So, to be clear, this is Green:
...and this is Blue
If we don't standardize this up front things are going to get very confusing. I don't care what translation you read or how many times the scanlations change it back and forth, I will never deviate from this. These are their actual names and their volumes and color schemes are based on their JP names. The boy is Green, the girl is Blue. Got it? Great.
Happy reading, excited to see you all at book club!
*except Mystery Dungeon sometimes
Comments
AssuredlyReal
Is this exclusively Pokemon Adventures, or are any other Pokemon Manga going to be included, like the mystery dungeon ones?
BreadBunny
Alright I am extremely late but here we go, don't really have much to say other than that yeah Yellow's secret was probably just due to the fact that girl protagonist is scary back then and still is now in too many cases. I am also glad to hear that Blue is like re-occuring for future seasons of pokespe, because like she just does not get anywhere near the same screentime as Red and Green do despite nominally also being a protagonist. This probably due to the same reason as Yellow (girl scary). Aside from that Yellow is a fun character but her arc sucks sorry to say I just could not care for the Elite Four because ultimate genocide is rarely interesting as a villain motivation and the manga does not do any of the legwork to make it anything. And yellow's secret ended up being very funny for me because obviously I was like "that's the same character as the girl Red gave that Rattatta in Viridian Forest" but then because the manga tells me Yellow's a boy I go "oh sure I guess" at which point her being a girl actually ended up being surprising because I just did not take into account that this manga is from the 2000's and assumed at that point that Yellow's secret was that she's the same person that Red gave that Rattatta to. Because that's conceivably actually a secret that only Red could know lmao.
Moff Muppet
The way the characters act about Yellow's "secret", you'd expect her to have pokémon ears under that hat or something...
Candaru Driemor
Goddamn nobody else wanted to read Pokéspe?? cowards... fools.... they know not the power of sheer childlike joy and stupidity...
Adrian Radley
aww man just one day late! i love the pokespe manga, oh well :p i did already read it haha
Foxowl
I procrastinated again to an insane degree and read it all last night and this morning. Initial thoughts: it's fine. I've been so inundated with Pokemon over the years that it's hard for me to feel truly surprised or excited about this but yeah, it's pretty good. It's an easy read and it feels very fresh and adventurous while also being like 20% more 'complex' than the games were at the time. LOL at the Elite 4 having Team Plasma's motivations. Blaine is the best character and also pretty hot. My only Pokemon Adventures experience is having read a few of the BW volumes back in the day at my local Barnes and Noble. I don't remember anything from it though.
Alec
Yeah, Explorers is bar-none the best writing across all the games. Rescue Team is a bit simpler by comparison, but still holds up pretty well, and I'd absolutely recommend snagging the remake if you can, as it adds a ton of the QoL changes from the series' history. The other two are pretty sub-par imo. GtI is cute, but seriously lacks the depth with its antagonist (and most other characters, tbh) that the prior games had in spades, and Super... I know there are people who like it, but everything about the characters and storyline just felt like straight up pandering to me, especially the recruitment mechanic in that game, and the actual gameplay balancing as a whole is an absolute mess. If you do want to play Super, just... DON'T use the level 50+ Salamance you can recruit in like... act 2. It's the most obvious sign of a lack of playtesting in the entire game. :)
JelloApocalypse
Yup! All the book club meetings are saved in the Book Club collection and with the Book Club tag.
Asher Levy
Was really looking forward to this one but I’m busy on Saturday. Will there be a VOD available?
Justice Hainsworth
Ah yes, the Rigby Arc
JelloApocalypse
The 13th, this was a miscommunication between me and Aloha
JelloApocalypse
Whichever one had a Grovyle in it
Effervescent Everpresent
April 12th is a Friday, so are we doing it then or the next day?
Veeson
Maybe a bit side tracked question, but which mystery dungeons do you consider good writing? I’ve been considering revisiting that series.
Alec
Love his goofy green shorts in Sun & Moon as well. :P
Jurei
Reading this manga I have come to the realization that Green never had green as a main color in any of his designs until Pokémon Origins, which honestly baffles me.
Alec
Gotta say, I remember falling off in Yellow originally, and I'm so glad I got this excuse to go through it again! Yellow still feels a bit corny to me, leaning super heavy into environmental messaging by the end, but eh? It's still plenty fun, and it's intended for younger audiences, so I can overlook to heavy-handed nature of the messaging. (especially since it's still a pretty decent message) Also, knowing how GSC plays out in the games, it's fun to see the forshadowing to certain elements start to take place throughout Yellow, and I'm particularly fascinated to see what direction they wind up going with one of the characters there, as they seem to have a very different tempterment shown in the end of the Yellow arc compared to how they act in the games. Could lead to some fun dynamics, which I'm very much looking forward to~
Alec
Some of my favorite moments like this were Red taking out a Nidoqueen with Pika's Thunderbolt, and Yellow later saying that Pika is, "Weak to water." It does look like they get better about this stuff near the tail end of Yellow though. I was gonna get irked that a dizzy punch worked against a gengar, only to have things explained later and actually make sense. Really hope this continues into GSC, because I love seeing them get creative with actual game mechanics, rather than just ignoring them and saying whatever suits the narrative.
Zayn Ryzen
I read all of Pokemon Special R/B/Y online when I was much younger and the translators gave the characters the proper names. I started reading the official Pokemon Adventuers books and WOW the American localization shows. It switches from charming to overly pandering so far. I do appreciate they haven't tried to censor anything yet though, bisected pokemon are "intact".
PrettiestBeardedLady
Sat down to read the first few chapters and read the whole of the RBG arc OOPS I was surprised how much fun it is and how weirdly grounded a lot of it feels while still being funny.
Benedict Ide
Oh my god, I'm like twelve chapters into this thing, and... taking a step back, this shouldn't really bother me so much, but whoever's writing this has clearly never looked at the pokémon type matchup chart in their life. It wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't always going out of its way to pause the story to explain game mechanics to you- if you're going to do that, at least get it right! "Good thing I've got an electric-type, which is super-effective against all these bug-type pokemo--" NO THE FUCK IT'S NOT! IT'S A NEUTRAL MATCHUP!! VENOMOTH ISN'T EVEN NATIVE TO VIRIDIAN FOREST I'LL CHOP OFF YOUR LEGS!!! Realistically, this is- this is a good thing. At the end of the day it's good that they're not getting bogged down in trivia and just telling the story they're trying to tell, with the visual devices and world logic that works for them. It's fine. I'm gonna keep reading. I shouldn't be mad. But I'm SO MAD.
Chandler B
Hyped~
Christopher Wiley
Man I love the Manga series! It was one of the few times a Sandshrew was relevant.
Atelous
Regarding the use of a browser with uBlock Origin on mobile, Firefox's mobile app supports the plugin the same way the desktop version does. That's what I used when I got my copies of Dungeon Meshi & Golden Kamuy.
LostRevolution
Hooray! These've been one of my favorite manga series since, like, childhood. Really hope y'all enjoy it and ESPECIALLY hope y'all stick around for more of the series! GSC is PHENOMENAL, FRLG is AMAZING, and RSE is WONDERFUL. So excited to hear y'all's thoughts!
Defahn
I've been looking for an excuse to read these! Can't wait!
Myths01
Jello, I think you'd also be interested in this fan manga! It is about a tournament of some of pokemon's most notable trainers but what's really interesting is the wel-written story between the three main characters! https://mangadex.org/title/2c4b353f-d968-461b-be49-4f2599189a79/pokemon-festival-of-champions
JelloApocalypse
Aloha and I decided to do this one with just the two of us, mostly for scheduling reasons
Psycho
Would vixen be interested in consuming the monster collection manga and talking at length about it?
