Latias' Journey

Latias' Journey by Ri2 is a 67 chapter, 1,000,000+ words Pokémon fan fiction.

Obviously, the star is Latias. When the Ghost King destroys her home city of Alto Mare and kills all of her friends after she spurns his advances, she is forced to embark on a long journey that takes her across the Pokémon world. There, she meets up with Ash and the other Chosen. Together, the Chosen are forced to embark on many adventures across the land.

It's absurdly long, surprisingly deep from plot and character standpoints, Mind Screwy with little way to tell just how much was planned ahead of time and how much was Ass Pulled by the author, surreal and bizarre to hilarious extremes, interspersed with plenty of lightheartedness, epic fight sequences and acts of unbelievable badassitude...oh, and sometimes it's really, really dark, Squicky, messy, and all kinds of disturbing.

Oh sorry, we should've mentioned this is rated M. Pack your security blanket and Brain Bleach. Don't expect to stop laughing even as you're traumatized.

There is a prequel and a sequel. Sequel page here: Brave New World

Tropes used in Latias' Journey include:
  • A.I. Is a Crapshoot - Mewgle.
  • Aint No Rule - Ash invokes this six times in a row against Berry Stoo and his poké-Sues. Ash curbstomps him 6-1, with his only loss being a One-Hit Kill Pursuit.
  • A Million Is a Statistic: Judging by the city it is based on, Altomare has over 800,000 people living in it. The Ghost King destroys the whole city. Not even Latias, the sole survivor, holds this against him for more than a few months.
  • Anyone Can Die: Many major characters fail to survive the final arc.
  • Ascended Glitch - During the final arc while everyone gets their Eleventh-Hour Superpower, Phanpy is evolved into a "corrected" version of one of Berry Stoo's Poké-Sues.
    • And Missingno, the glitch Darklord Pokemon
  • Badass - Quite a few, but Mewtwo and Wes are the most prominent.
  • Badass Spaniard - Zorro and his entire team, and Brock's Lombre.
  • The Bet - Wobbuffet's Goth phase turns out to be just a bet with Meowth.
  • Beware the Nice Ones - Do not make Latias mad. Destruction will ensue.
  • Brainwashed - Tate and Liza do this to Latias. It is actually a test to see how strong the bonds between Ash and his Pokémon are.
  • Beware the Superman - Red Ranger is completely amoral and borderline sociopathic. And the Alpha Ranger and Shining Ranger are even worse.
  • Biological Mashup - Cerebrus is Raikou, Entei and Suicune combined, Coldstone is Regice and Regirock, and Omega is Shalor and Shining Ranger. Most of them end up being Body Horror
  • Bloody Hilarious - Eventually you start to get jaded to the Gorn, and then the less-dramatic cases to characters you don't care about so much start drifting into this. The deluge of Black Comedy throughout exacerbates helps.
  • Body Horror: Let's not get into details about the Dark ones armies..for the love of GOD.
  • Break the Cutie - May. Dear Mew, May. Her adorable little Munchlax is shot in front of her, Drew's head gets exploded while she's standing right next to him, she sees her father killed horribly on national television, she fails to commit suicide, she is rejected by her own brother, she horribly kills her real parents after being tricked into thinking that they were Deoxys's monsters, and is finally given one of the worst deaths in an already horribly High Octane Nightmare Fuel story. Damn.
  • Bring My Brown Pants - Happens to the Murkrow at Wing Fortress when Latias incinerates them and a good portion of the forest.
    • Also happens to Maxie when the three Regis effortlessly kill all his trainers and their mons.
    • Ah, hell, Phanpy has this occur to to him several times.
  • Contractual Immortality - Jessie and James have a contract with the show's producers guaranteeing their survival, as they are such popular characters. Deoxys doesn't really care.
  • Cyberpunk - Arguably the region of Silica. Rukario describes it as thus:

Rukario: A desolate wasteland devoid of Pokemon or plant life, a hollow kingdom of neon and twisted metal populated by people who hungered more for short-lived pleasures and comforts than the simple pleasures of living.

Latias: So you even denigrate your comrades who fight alongside you. You attack a pair of Pokémon who had done nothing to hurt you without provocation or warning, intend to beat me to a pulp to capture me, and are also assisting a madman with his evil plans. You are no hero.
Red Ranger: Hey, as long as the people of Ever Grande City think I am, and I get paid for my work with money and power by Ford, I don't care what you call me!

    • And the kicker? He's Richie of all people.
  • Determinator - Giovanni is killed no less than three times. He's still alive at the end too.
  • The Ditz - Jigglypuff, who spends the first half of the book getting murderously pissy at people for falling asleep during her performance (the infamous Face Doodling is apparently her attempt to stab them to death with the marker in a blind rage). Turns out she had no idea the only song she knew was a Brown Note lullaby. Chimecho is an extreme version of this trope.
    • To a lesser degree, Latias is somewhat ditzy for the majority of the book.
  • Doomed Hometown - Chapter One.
  • Doorstopper - 1,186,409 words of text.
    • The sequel is 1,624,420 words and will probably get longer.
    • For comparison, the Lord of the Rings trilogy is around 525,000.
  • Dude, He's Like, In A Coma! - Molly! What the hell?!
  • Driven to Suicide - May. Doesn't quite work. She might've been better off if it had.
  • Earn Your Happy Ending - Full force. Keep in mind what the Unown are offering the good guys if they win is basically a Reset Button. The hope of this may at times be the only reason you can keep bearing to read.
  • Eldritch Abomination - Missingno, Mewgle, Mariah Susanson, and all of hers and Berry Stoo's "Pokemon".
  • Expy - A lot of people, if they don't outright Cameo. At one point, Ash battles Zorro and Mr. T. Zorro joins the recurring cast.
  • Eleventh-Hour Superpower - The entire cast at the end of the last battle.
  • Face Fault
  • Fan Nickname - a few notable ones, though they're all spoilers:
    • You really want to know? Fine...:[2]
  • Family-Unfriendly Death: There are countless in this series. Some are subtle and some are just diabolical Gorn. Most notably are:
    • About 99% of Earth's population are turned into undead monsters.
    • Most members of Team Rocket get grizzly ends.
    • The world leaders in all categories are crammed into a giant crusher.
    • Lord and Lady Ho-Oh's deaths are indescribable.
    • Meowth gets eaten and digested by Chimecho.
    • May and her Pokemon.
  • Fate Worse Than Death: Several are shown in the series, including the Master Ball. And Dark Karma. Just, Dark Karma.
    • Poor, poor Latias gets this during the final battle when she is thrown into a neverending cycle of pain and lust by Dark Latios to perform his xxx-rated fantasies on her, turning her into a zombie.
  • Fetish Fuel - Latias the Songstress. Here's a description of what she's wearing:

She was wearing a blue bodice with white lace around the collar that ran down her chest to a set of light blue silk skirts. Black straps were crisscrossed across her thin upper arms, and blue velvet cloths were wrapped around her lower arms.

Bayleef: "What is it with people and stupid acronyms these days!"

  • Gainax Ending - Twice.
    • The first one results in a relatively small fraction of the cast still alive, the good goddess heavily wounded, all of them setting up a last stand, and the bad guy has just destroyed the entire universe around them. And some three chapters of extremely esoteric Navel Gazing.
    • The second one was added two years after the book's completion. The whole "universe ending" thing was Mewgle screwing with everyone and trying to brainwash both dueling gods under his control. He's stopped by Squirtle (who is thoroughly pissed off that he hasn't been in the story yet) coming out of nowhere.
  • Gambit Pileup - On a cosmic level by the end. The sheer amount of contingencies and unspoken plans both sides have in play is staggering.
  • Going Cosmic - And how.
  • Gorn - The torture and "fatal battle" scenes are quite gory.
  • Groin Attack - Oniichan Eusine transformed into a Raikou uses his spiked tail to rip out the undead Raikou's genitals in a fight.
    • Alpha Ranger kills Brock, cuts off his genitals and shoves them into the corpse's mouth. He gets better.
    • Sphinx!May rips off Vigoroth's genitals, thinking that it was one of Deoxys's monsters assuming her father's pokemon's form. It wasn't.
  • Hand Wave - See Fridge Logic.
  • Half-Human Hybrid - Many exaples:
    • Mariah Susanson, a blantant Parody Sue who hits every "Pokemorph" cliche in the book and then some. She's actually an insane psychic construct created from an experiment Gone Horribly Wrong.
    • Various inhabitants on Mewgle's fake version of Birth Island, including Raiki, Ash and Pikachu's father [3].
    • Ash, Misty and May during the final story arcs, via Eleventh-Hour Superpower.
  • Harmful to Minors: When Phanpy walks in on Crawdaunt's massive orgy, it immediately renders him comatose and erases his memory of the incident.
  • Healing Factor - Most of Deoxys's armies of shambling horrors regenerate endlessly. Dark Latios gets totally vaporized and comes back.
    • Latias gets in on this as well during the final arc -- it gets to the point where when she's blinded, she just rips out her motherfucking eyes because it's faster to just grow a new pair than to bother clearing her vision.
  • Heroes Prefer Swords - Zorro, El Gato, Lombre, and Pikachu.
  • Hold Your Hippogriffs: And how.
  • Humanoid Abomination - Berry Stoo and Mariah Susanson appear as a rather muscular and handsome man and a gorgeous woman respectively. But everyone seems to pick up that something is horribly wrong with them. Obviously overlaps with Parody Sue.
  • Interspecies Romance - What kicks off the plot. It's exactly as awkward a topic for all parties involved as it sounds.
    • And Delia Ketchum's fiancée at one point is Mr. Mime. Just... don't ask.
      • She may or may not be paired up with Mimey at the end. It's actually left to your choice.
  • Lampshade Hanging - Constantly. ""It's like the laws of reality are being repealed or something, allowing impossible things to happen," the intelligent talking yellow rodent who had the ability to generate thunderbolts speculated."
  • Lemony Narrator - Progressively more so over the course of the book.
  • Loads and Loads of Characters - Trust us on this one.
  • Loveable Sex Maniac - Brock and Corphish/Crawdaunt.
  • Ludicrous Gibs - Wing Fortress massacre for one. The entirety of the final act for another.
  • Mind Rape - A few times, most notably Lugia, who is tricked into unnecessarily killing his Brainwashed and Crazy son and wife, then forced to dream an infinite loop of suicides.
    • This is topped spectacularly by Latias, in probably the Squickiest part of the book.
  • Mind Screw - There is quite a bit of allegory and symbolism in the story and some of the elements in the story are quite bizarre. Indeed, many reviewers have commented on this.
  • Mood Whiplash - From a greater-story standpoint, entire lighthearted and easygoing story arcs can go very quickly to hell. Sometimes they go literally to Hell.
    • On a smaller scale, comedic and disturbing moments can and will occur in the same paragraph.
  • Murder the Hypotenuse - Bulbasaur eventually kills Sceptile via Unfriendly Fire.
  • Navel Gazing - The entire first epilogue. The second epilogue, written a good deal after the fact when the author had a good deal more experience, blames it all on Mewgle trying to be pretentious.
  • Noodle Incident - Brock's trauma regarding Professor Ivy is finally explained.

Brock: (noticing a picture of a bearded man) Oh, is that your ex-boyfriend?
Ivy: No, that was me before the operation.

  • Overly Long Gag - One could consider the whole book one such, but the author is rather fond of these on the whole.
  • Pair the Spares - Ri2 gleefully sticks characters together throughout the book. During the epilogue, an Overly Long Gag recaps all the pairings he's made. It lasts over two pages, has a Running Gag within itself, and leaves the choice of Delia's significant other to the reader's discretion.
  • Parental Abandonment - Played straight and subverted. Ash despises his father for ditching his mother before he was born. At the very end of the book, he finds out his father is freaking Zorro. Turns out someone spiked the punch at a fundraiser, they did a few things they might not have otherwise (Delia specifically did several), and neither one remembered anything the next morning.

Ash: Zorro...is my dad. All this time I thought he was some deadbeat who abandoned us...or a crime boss...or an alien...or a League Champion...or a legendary Pokemon...or my time-traveling future self...

Tate: The League fears us. They fear the power we possess. They will not lift a finger to prevent us from doing as we please.

  • Screw the Rules, I Make Them - Mewgle does this a lot in his RPG Mechanics Verse, just for shits and giggles.
  • Serial Escalation- Gets pretty epic fairly early on, proceeds to top itself repeatedly. The sequel starts off somewhere around the level of epic of the first book's penultimate arc, and just keeps running from there.
  • Shout-Out - Many, but the one that comes to my mind is a Sailor Moon Abridged reference in the REAL final.
  • Sliding Scale of Comedy and Horror - Breaks both ends of the scale. Sometimes simultaneously.
  • Spell My Name with an "S" - Weavile, Lucario, and Phanpy are referred to as Manyula, Rukario, and Phanphy. No idea what's up with the last one, but the former two were cameo appearances before Gen 4's English names/romanizations were finalized.
    • About Phanphy, in one of the early chapters he said he likes it better this way.
  • The Stinger - The book originally ended on a huge cliffhanger with the majority of the cast dead and the entire universe annihilated, and the remaining people set up for a last stand on a flying island. Two years later, Ri2 wrote a sequel that Ret Conned the entire last chunk of the story. A good quarter of the way into the sequel, he threw a (second) epilogue onto Latias' Journey that revealed the entire ending sequence was just Mewgle screwing with everyone, including the two gods duking it out, in a Starscream gambit. He gets his ass handed to him by Squirtle, who comes out of absolutely nowhere and earns everyone's happy ending.
  • Subverted Rhyme Every Occasion - Crawdaunt's 'Assumption,' which is successfully used as a Brown Note to defeat an Eldritch Abomination.
  • Sweat Drop
  • Take That - Ash's encounter with Mariah Susanson is one big ol' "Take That" against Mary Sues in general.
    • As is Latias' encounter with the first Mary Sue early on, who captures most of the legendaries in the world.
    • And in a flashback in Chapter 6, when Latias is told to "Go to Hell" by a member of a cult that thinks Pokemon are Satanic, a stab at the people in the real world that think Pokemon is Satanic.
  • The Power of Rock - The Pokerockers, an all Pokémon rock band. They have assisted in killing an Eldritch Abomination, a walking Diabolus Ex Machina, and their rock-mecha was co-opted by the local goddess in the climactic fight.
  • There Is No Kill Like Overkill - Repeatedly, and almost always from the bad guys. Deoxys uses this to psych out his opponents through sheer Gorn.
  • Took a Level in Badass - Anyone in the cast who doesn't die soon after introduction is likely to take several.
  • Touched by Vorlons - Molly Hale gains incredible powers after her interactions with the Unown.
  • Training from Hell - Lance and Drake force Ash and Latias to journey through an ice cavern with no winter clothing to toughen them up for the Hoenn League Championships. A bunch of Glalie nearly kill them..
  • Translation Convention - Ri2 says "For convenience's sake all Pokéspeak will be written in English. Just pretend the humans can't hear them, though".

Chimecho: CHIIIIIIIIIIII!

  • Translator Microbes - Latias's telepathy allows Ash to understand and converse with his Pokémon. After Ash is is selected as an honorary Chosen, he is fully capable of understanding Pokéspeak thanks to the Unown.
    • Latias's translation extends to anyone who considers her a friend, thereby subconsciously giving her freer psychic access to their perception. She still has to write things out for everyone else prior to her Eleventh-Hour Superpower, and had to convince Misty that she wasn't a rival for Ash's affections anymore before she could be let in on it.
  • Troperiffic - By the time the sequel rolls around, Ri2 is a confirmed troper.
    • And up until the sequel, just look at the percentage of this page coated in blue.
  • Unfriendly Fire - When Team Rocket realizes Wobbuffet knows Destiny Bond, they have him use it on Pikachu, then attack Wobbuffet to bring them both down.
    • Also Bulbasaur to Sceptile during the final battle.
  • Virgin Sacrifice - Team Aqua brings in a naked woman to sacrifice to Kyogre. For Groudon, Team Magma brings in a fat, nerdy, unattractive man who is far more embarrassed about his status than worried about being chucked into a lava pit.
  • The Voiceless - Played with. Latias can Pokémon-Speak just fine, and later learns how to put up a psychic translation net for her friends, but her human disguise is mute. She has to carry around a notepad to scribble messages in when she has to communicate with humans who aren't in on her translation net.
  • What Do You Mean It Wasn't Made on Drugs? - There are some pretty fucked up moments in the story.

Latias' Journey is Pokémon tripping balls on every hallucinogen known. On meth. And PCP. And Rare Candies. While huffing nitrous oxide. And off its mood stabilizers.

  • What Happened to James? - Abducted for some Plan of Deoxys or other. When Mewgle winds up taking the whole thing Off the Rails in the epilogue, James is left alone on a space station wondering what the hell is going on, and the reader never finds out what Deoxys was planning on using him for.
    • In the newest chapter of the sequel, it is revealed that he was the container for Dark Latios's seed.
  • Wretched Hive - Lilycove City is portrayed as an utterly lawless hellhole as a result of Team Magma and Team Aqua fighting each other.
  • X Meets Y - Arguably, the last arc is Pokémon meets Gurren Lagann meets Event Horizon.
    • In-universe example. The Battle Palace's rules are amended for the Hoenn League Championships so the roles are reversed. The end result is something like mixed martial arts meets Pokémon battling. No, really.

Ford: Instead of Pokemon competing against Pokemon, it will be human against human, with their Pokemon giving them commands from the sidelines!

  1. ↑ 1) Phanpy challenges the much larger Oliphan to balance on his rubber ball. Oliphan smashes the ball, Phanpy cries, and Oliphan gets pelted by the audience with garbage until it forfeits.
    2) Bayleef burns a Stun Spore cloud with Solarbeam to fill the air with sparkles and give her opponent a seizure.
    3) Charizard has been hypnotically regressed to childhood. His opponent is goaded into doing so as well for some reason, and ends up reformatting its own brain because as an eldritch it had no childhood.
    4) Corphish sings an obscene song to distract his opponent and punches him a lot in the jumblies.
    5) Latias sings death metal as a combat distraction, backed up by the Pokerockers and their giant sonic-weapon mecha.
    6) Pikachu pulls out his sword and forgoes distractions altogether, and just pounds the crap out of a poké-Sue in a straight fight.
  2. ↑ -- Seraphim Forme Latias (Seraphim Latias) - Latias resurrected after she is killed by the psychotic Red Ranger.
    -- Taloscario (Colossuscario) - Rukario (name used in the story) with his Eleventh-Hour Superpower: (his entire body becomes metal)
    -- Misty The Seadragon (Waterbender Misty) - Misty with her Eleventh-Hour Superpower: Aqua-kinesis.
    -- Reverse pokémon battle - The modified rules of the Battle Palace's that require the trainers to fight each other with their Pokémon" giving commands to them.
    -- Archangel Charizard (Mithos Charizard) - Ash's Charizard resurrected after a crazed Blaziken kills him in an extremely brutal fashion. Distinction of this form: wings made of light
    -- Rocktimus Prime - the giant mech used by the Pokerockers.
    -- Guardian Forme Groudon - Groudon's Eleventh-Hour Superpower: a suit of custom made metal armor.
    -- Guardian Forme Kyogre - Kyogre's Eleventh-Hour Superpower: a suit of custom made bone armor.
    -- Pants Forme Groudon - What? Groudon really likes his new pants.
    -- Sandstorm May - May with her Eleventh-Hour Superpower (control over sand)
    -- Electro-Ash - Ash after he becomes Crimson Lightning Ranger
  3. ↑ But not really since Ash's father is really Zorro. Raiki is something of an Ascended rumor in the sequel though
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