Commentary: The last ordinary day in the Pokémon world · 6:14pm Jun 20th, 2019
This is the commentary for Prologue: Anticipation of Moonkind: The Wayward Butterfly.
Fun fact: this chapter was originally going to be called “Forewarn”.
Welcome to Moonkind: The Wayward Butterfly!
I decide to write a prologue for this story in order to establish what normal life is like for April, in order to contrast it against the even-more-fantastical world she’ll be flung into. It’s so short that I don’t have anything to say about it, though... except that Digit’s voice is what I imagine Porygon2’s voice would be like if it were in the anime (I normally don’t like having Pokémon say their names in fanfiction; this is one of my exceptions), a fact I’ve been upset about since 2009. Also, I originally wanted to include a couple of sentences at the end about how this was the last ordinary day for anyone, but I thought it was too on-the-nose, and a jarring shift to omniscient narration.
Instead, let’s talk about the inspiration for this fanfiction!
This was inspired by A New World, a New Way, a fanfic about humans-turned-Pokémon and normal Pokémon being sent to Equestria and beyond. I’ve written for that ‘verse before (but I’ve unpublished most of my stories set in it), but I’ve also wanted to put my own spin on the concept for a while. A few years ago, I asked in its fan group what other universe the Pokémon could have been sent to, and someone suggested Digimon. Fastforward to a couple of months ago, I made a thread about that concept in the same group.
As soon as I posted the thread, I got a very vivid mental image: a human-turned-Beautifly falling onto a beach, like the beginning of the opening of Digimon Adventure. Soon, I began to plan out an entire story for her, entitled I Became an Unhappy Beautifly: she was found by a Biyomon whose dream was to fly, and they went on an adventure that followed a very similar route to the DigiDestined. I came up with character arcs for both of them, and imagined what Pokémon they’d meet upon the way... then I realised that I still barely know anything about Digimon. To be specific, I was reading the TV Tropes page for Digimon Adventure 02, and it mentioned a “Digimon Emperor”. I realised that I didn’t know who that was, but I couldn’t just gloss over something that sounded important, so I scrapped the idea.
...That is, until I threw out the idea of what it would be like if Pokémon appeared in season 1, and then realised that I could reuse the concepts from I Became an Unhappy Beautifly here. I originally considered coming up with a new protagonist for this My Little Pony version (who may or may not appear later), but in the end, I decided to return to April.
