an old joke about the appeal of canon

Years ago, to shorthand my fannish interpretations and preferences, I used to say: "I'm a canon-based lifeform." ;-)

Many people love total AUs and flat-out "canon? what canon?" denial, and that's great! I'm different. When I care enough about a story world to engage fannishly, I can't usually, happily, simultaneously disengage from it that way. Conscious divergences from canon ("What if?"s) are all joy and delight; and hidebound fidelity that cannot forge anew is pointless, of course; yet there must be awareness of the raw material, tribute to the superstructure.

I'm a foil fencer (not epee, not saber). If you know modern sport fencing, that sums up my fannish tendencies even more pithily: I freely choose and celebrate the weapon — ~cough~ I mean, "sporting equipment" ~cough~ — with all the intricate, infuriating, beautiful rules meant to make you behave in the ways that would be wise if it were sharp, which it's absolutely not and shouldn't be. :-)

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A happy US Thanksgiving to those celebrating today! Good luck to those working on fannish events like HLH_Shortcuts, NaNoWriMo, and Yuletide! Best wishes to those hunting Ditto in Pokémon Go! Comfort and strength to all people of good will. ♥

caught 3 dittos!

This afternoon, before the rain returns tomorrow, I went to a park confirmed on Silph Road as an oddish nest. In addition to enough oddishes for the candies to fully power up my double-S.T.A.B. vileplume with solar beam (my current favorite pokémon), an exeggcute, a totally random jynx (you never see jynxes here; my previous jynx was hatched), and assorted ordinary catches, I happened upon 3 dittos! The release is real!

2 were disguised as ratattas; the other as a pidgey. (I strongly suspect that some zubats that got away from me were also dittos in disguise, and probably some other ratattas and pidgies that got away.) Stats do differ; they're not clones. All 3 of mine came in between 51% and 64% IVs (usually, I send anything under 82% to the professor, but not a new entry in the pokédex, obviously).

Given that ditto has catch and flee rates on par with the starters, my guess is that any relentlessly ordinary pokémon (e.g. ratatta, pidgey, zubat, ekans, krabby, paras, caterpie) that show surprising catch resistance now have a fair chance of being ditto in disguise. Or they may just be strong ordinary pokemon, and a waste of your razz berries and great balls: impossible to know! :-)

Anybody else snag a ditto yet?