#The amount of people sounding interested made me wanna ctapault them all into the Ourdoors so they can Touch that Grass I can tell you!

[shinygoku]

You know what’s lame and boring? Pitching an Ending of a series to be what I call an Ash Coma Theory. By which, I mean any variation of “Sike! The magical and whimsical adventures of a plucky lil guy is actually because he has BRAIN DAMAGE and nothing is real! Aren’t I clever for figuring that one out?”

This phenomenon, given the TV Tropes listing of Delusion Conclusion, has a tendency to affect Children’s Media more than those with Adults in mind, which I would guess is because 1) Children’s Media tends to be more Fantastic and Strange & 2) More insidiously, people like to punch down on ‘easy targets’, like older kids in their first Edgy Phase marching up to their juniors to tell them how stupid their interests are. People may not be making Ash Coma Theories specifically to burst bubbles, but the more smug and “only way this makes sense” they are about it, the clearer it becomes that they want to lord it over The Masses.

So, an Ash Coma Theory (which from here on I will refer to as ACT), is obviously derived from a rather famous example centred on the protagonist of the Pokémon anime. It’s set right after the part of episode where Pikachu sets off the electrical blast that obliterates everything in the radius — so you can at least see what causes the ‘coma’ pretty easily! The meat of the theory is talking about how Ash’s brain damage and treatments create the bizarre anime world where he never grows up, never wins the tournaments and is always pursued by a weird pair of criminals and their talking cat. Honestly though, as far as ACTs go, there’s a lot more thought put into this one, offering narrative foils and Ash projecting his absent father feelings onto Giovanni, and that he can never become Champion because that would cause the dream to end, etc. I guess my main issue with this famous Creepypasta is that the premise doesn’t fit with the lighthearted, goofy and already wish fulfilment setting that is Pokémon (and the anime in particular is on the lighter, fluffier end of the franchise!) — and this isn’t even a story that explains the Pokémon themselves away, as Pikachu is the instigator!

Instead, I think the ACT would work much better as an Isekai story, where The Protagonist is mowed down by Truck-kun and that causes the lengthy period of Weird Narrative Dreams. For best results, I’d say the 'revelation' should be saved for a few episodes in before flashing back to Protagonist getting run over, then dipping in and out of Reality and Fantasy, showing how one affects the other, but also it obviously having been the plan from the start, not just thrown in to suddenly Plot Twist and gloat about the audience never seeing it coming! Those swerves always feel like a crummy last minute switch, you gotta let the narrative run it’s natural course, even if it means people accurately guess where it’s headed. Besides, there’s still multiple ways to end this Isekai, you have a sliding scale of optimistic or tragic resolutions, but again you have to make sure that the route chosen is one you have built towards in the earlier parts of that tale. (I could put a couple of examples in, but this is getting long lol)

Keep it consistent, even in the weirder sections, and the audience should be left satisfied. Don’t tack on a sudden depressing ending without foreshadowing or that completely jars with the tone and storytelling that’s already been in place!!

So again, most ACTs suck and feel mean spirited as they try to negate something with a lighter tone into something depressing and/or extremely boring. And if you’re going to say “yeah this makes the most sense” when you’ve just proposed that [Character] is about to die and the wacky shenanigans were their extended fantasy sequence to deny reality, I will lose every shred of respect I may have had of you as a writer. Why on Earth should I hear out your ideas when this is how you’d end them?!

#There are also the Sister Theories of Post Nuclear Event and the Drugs Narrtive #they have similars ups and downs to this but the ACT still keeps trying to creep in to Kid Shows in my experience #so I saw a terrible take about the THomas & Friends TV Show today...! #The amount of people sounding interested made me wanna ctapault them all into the Ourdoors so they can Touch that Grass I can tell you!