PokéTube Adventures: Cardinal

Foreword

Hello there!

Thank you for checking out what I hope to be the first in a series of fanfics based on PokéTuber original "game" concepts. Or as I like to call it, the PokéTube Adventures series.

For those unfamiliar with this trend, HoopsandHipHop started it all with his storybook series back in 2020, and since then many other PokéTubers have jumped on the bandwagon with their own fakémon game concept video series. While Pokémon fan games are nothing new, developing one is costly, time-consuming, and requires more than just a basic understanding of computer coding and copyright laws.

So if you're just a regular PokéTuber who wants to make your dream Pokémon game, but your Patreon funds are too low to develop a playable rom hack, especially when the whole world is on lockdown from a sudden pandemic, what do you do? Well, the next best thing is to commission an artist or two to make fakémon artwork for you, and then use your basic editing skills to put it all together.

Pokémon Cardinal was a novelty because it was the first series to do this. Nowadays, though, many PokéTubers have strayed away from the storybook format altogether and just have lazy videos titled "Let's make new [insert type] pokémon" or "let's make new gym leaders/elite four" or something boring like that. It's just not the same without that indepth story experience. You can watch the first episode of Pokémon Cardinal at the top.

At some point during the peak of this trend, a PokéTuber called Bird Keeper Toby took the opportunity to do some canon welding by incorporating fakémon from three other series (including Pokémon Cardinal) into his ancient Greek-inspired series, Pokémon Tempest, thus establishing a shared universe setting. HoopsandHipHop would later support this idea by creating a prologue to his Cardinal series that has all four fakémon regions' professors meet up. All four PokéTubers have also done some voice acting in each other's series, as well as other collaborative works before and since then with the broader PokéTube community.

This sort of canon welding, as well as this sense of interconnectivity, reminded me of the Pokémon Adventures manga, in which the protagonists of different games would occasionally come together to save the world. And that was how I came up with the idea to do this fanfic series.

Now, I'm not a talented artist, nor am I even close to being wealthy, so I can't afford to commission an artist to draw manga panels for me. That's why this fanfic story will be in the same vain as the YouTube fakémon series; I'll be following the conventions and tropes of the manga, but in a purely literary format. Though for the sake of an optimal viewing experience, I will be including images (screenshots mostly) from the actual series to avoid wasting time describing the fakémon and characters. Otherwise, I'm free to play around with the material as much as I want.

I cannot guarantee that I will write a story for all the fakémon series, or even if I'll do anymore past this one. It all depends on the reception this story gets, if I start feeling any burnout during the writing process, and other real life reasons. For now, I just want to put everything I've learned as a writer thus far into making this story as entertaining as I possibly can.

So without further ado, let's get to it!