dosmeow
@dosmeow

Yesterday marked the 5th anniversary of my incredibly simple romhack of Pokemon Crystal called Poképan Crystal. The mod makes just a single change to the game: It makes the move "Attract" work on all pokemon regardless of gender.

The Attract TM item description which now reads 'Makes the foe infatuated'.

The actual date it was completed is sometime earlier, but the 28th was the day that the hack was rejected from ROMhacking.net for being "too political". Folks with a better knowledge of that site's history are saying "lmao" right now.

So I tweeted about it. (As was the style at the time.) And got enough people on board and a at least one gaming news site interviewing me about it.

A female Pidgey falls in love with a female Nidoran

Needless to say, most folks correctly identified the rejection as stupid and bad. Of course, plenty of folks came out on Twitter to let me know why this hack was in fact a bad thing. I know 2019 was some time back now, but even then seeing the term SJW felt comically dated.

Eventually a staff member that was much higher up reached out to me inviting me to re-upload and informing me that the person who originally rejected it had been permanently banned.

I still think about the ratio of effort in creating the hack to outrage generated by shitheads. The hack was built from a decompilation of the Crystal rom and so all I had to do was change the move's flavor text string and delete a call to a gender checking function and potential jump based on the value returned. The amount of typing I did to make the changes was shorter than any individual comment about how I was ruining the game by adding homosexual propaganda.

I didn't actually expect anyone to play the game. I mostly wanted to make pokemon more queer and to get an idea of how Game Boy code is written. There were plenty of folks also upset at the hack because it would unbalance the game. (Cool. Don't use my hack on a then 19 year old singleplayer video game then!) When you get the Attract TM you only get one use, and so it is up to you then to use the move as much as you want to on that one pokemon. As for trainers, you get an even tougher Whitney's Miltank and then a single trainer in Kanto that can be avoided entirely who also has something or other with the move. Gamers gotta be gamers. I have never done a run of the game with the hack myself, and tested it using somebody's complete pokedex save I found online plus some game genie codes.

Rattata unable to resist Mew's beauty

While it's all well and good to get that dude removed from the hack verification process (who knows what else they rejected prior whose author just called it quits instead of trying to draw attention to what was happening), the real legacy is the friendships made along the way.

No really. Plenty of kind people also sent their support via DMs and a few asked to reach out on Discord. Most of those conversations were brief, but one led to a lasting friendship that continues to this day. It had a permanent positive impact on my life. All the pokemon I know are queer, so I figured it would be nice for that to be the case in the games for a change.

I don't purchase anything Nintendo anymore so I can't speak for Scarlet/Violent's representation, but as far as I know, while the games do quietly include non-binary characters with they/them pronouns, any romantic relationships depicted remain exclusively heterosexual. I understand the reality that making attract "just work" would throw a wrench into the game's multiplayer balance, but maybe the real solution would have been to come up with something better than thrusting heterosexuality (and asexuality) on every pokemon
to add another "sometime you just don't attack" into the game's list of statuses.


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