Scrapped ideas/plots you've had.

[BossCar]

Idk what else so here's a big plot that was heavily inspired by the manga that I scrapped most of, but other pieces of it might come back as a "test" to see how Valen will react.

Basically, Valen's a sidelined Interpol agent, but when this plot was in the works, that wasn't the case. What did remain is Rosa having a vile ex who led her into Team Rocket. The final version was coercion, but for the scrapped plot, it was "love made her do something stupid." Valen had been looking into an unnamed former Team Rocket fugitive. When he found out who it was, he turned on Rosa, but was also deeply hurt. Valen did piece together what happened(after a request from Leaf+advice), and eventually they would have reconciled. Red would have shown up, and would have helped him on his "new" path. When Valen returned to the pro league, Rosa came all the way to cheer him on in the finals, which moved him to tears. After this, they'd become official, and Valen would let her crash at her place. This part mostly remains intact, but of course the events leading up to it are different.

There was more of it left, but when revising, I decided to remove the investigation part. I wanted to change things, and in hindsight. it didn't feel necessary.

Here's how the "Valen's moved" scene was revised

Spoiler

Valen’s emotional state can’t be bottled up anymore. After all that's happened, from disappearing from her life to revealing his darkest secret, Valen's deeply moved that Rosa still loved him this entire time. Valen clenches his teeth, closing his eyes as tears begin to stream down his face like an overflowing river. “Rosa actually forgave me! Not only that, but she didn't abandon me!” Valen sobs loudly. “I didn’t reach out to her for so long because I thought she’d hate me! She proved me wrong, and she’s proved me wrong again! I need to change the way that I act towards her so she actually gets to be with the Valen that she deserves! I’m sorry that I ever doubted you! I need you in my life too! I love you, Rosa! I've always loved you, even when we were apart. I really mean it!"

That's one of mine. Let's see some of your scrapped plots/ideas.

 

[IFBench]

I was originally going to have a Drampa character take care of Gen in Overcast Village before I decided to have him live with Saltriv's family.

 

[LiquidMadMan]

Hm, what an interesting topic...

Considering I've been developing PMD Wildcard over the course of five years and going through nearly twenty different versions of the story before finalizing the one I'm publishing now, I have a ton of stuff I could talk about...

Though that'd probably be way too much and unless people really want me to talk about it, I'll just stick with some of the more basic or notable changes.

• Eli the Riolu wasn't always my main character. The original main character I had chosen for the first few versions of my PMD story was a female Braixen named Faye. She was initially a carryover main character from a regular Pokémon story I had tried to previously write in 2014- which was a slice-of-life romance about her and a Zoroark falling in love and going on lots of weird and crazy adventures in a Mexico-inspired region. Faye has since gone through a major design and concept overhaul, but is actually still going to feature in Wildcard as a major supporting character. That's all I'll say on her for now though...
• The very first version of a PMD story I had tried to develop back in 2015 was called PMD: Team Wannabe, and it was a fairly basic plot about a team of misfits and miscreants having to serve out a sentence working as Explorers. They would uncover a plot by a villain to use a Pandora's Box-esque artifact that would cause chaos, but that's as far as I went with that one.
• During one point a few years ago, I had tried to experiment with making a much darker and mature take on a PMD story. This one had a lot of death, gore, heavy themes, and quite a bit of sex. I eventually decided that direction wasn't going to work out for me, so I went back to a general "T-Rated" tone in later iterations.
• There was also a version of the story that involved a main character duo of a Human brother and sister staying at their grandfather's lab (who was a Pokémon professor) next to some woods that harbored a portal that led to the PMD world. In that version, the regular Pokémon world of the games and anime was connected to the PMD world via portals that were found all over the world, allowing the more advanced, talking Pokémon to go back and forth in between the two worlds, and vice-versa. It involved the professor grandfather being kidnapped by some nefarious Pokémon and taken to the PMD dimension, and the kids would then follow and become transformed into Pokémon themselves.

I could go on and on about these old attempts, but I'll stop there for now.

 

[Luxray1000]

Dusk was originally an Arcanine and a very incidental background character whose entire purpose was to be dead in the backstory. Much more recently, I decided to think about his backstory, and he just grew on me. Then I recruited a Houndoom with Steamroll in RTDX and that was the tipping point that had me decide to have a separate timeline from the main one where he survives and forms a rescue team based on the team I have with him in RTDX.

 

[K_S]

I initially was writing two stories at the same time, an anime based 'mon AU where Giovanni disbands team rocket and retires to try life as a civilian aka attempt to be reformed out of a mix match of boredom/nihilism and an au (that stole a lot of it's background from the story I was working on at the time) where he manages to keep his empire, raise his son, and Silver replaces him as Boss when he decides to retire.

I couldn't get more than a few chapters of the Gio stays evil fic and had scraped the whole thing for years only to find my "redemption" story taking a weird turn and the cast being tossed into a lotus eater dream scenario. Under the claws of a revenge obsessed psychic I had the cast live out a big section of my notes from GIo's "unredeamed" story and the trauma of having the cast go through that AU (considering who Silver actually was in that story the moral shift of the kid even having to see much less live out those scenes was catastrophic to the kid, the kids family, and his friends as they were all sucked into the mess). Even Gio, a legitimate evil character, was left reeling form the experience as he'd had enough character growth at that time to be disgusted by what he was being forced to do/see.

I only wound up using a fraction of it and almost all of the cast is still trying to heal from the experience a story/ half a year, later.

 

[DeliriousAbsol]

Ooh scrapped 'fics. I have a couple of poke-centric ones I can talk about here!

Idea 1:

My scrapped 'fic called Children of Light had an umbreon as a protagonist. Ultra beasts had attacked Solgaleo's domain and Lunala, in a bid to defend it, was defeated and reduced to a cosmog. The Umbreon and his friends found the cosmog when it crashed to earth and they went on a journey to help it.

The ultra beasts had been coming through wormholes that were being opened by Palkia and Dialga in a bid to find UB-XX Distortion (Giratina), and they'd recruited pokemon to help them including an Alolan raichu named Rider.

Solgaleo would be encountered by the main cast, and Rider who was a redemptive character, and point them in the right direction to defeat the enemy of the story. I even had an endearing Tapu Koko character planned who would team up with Rider, and he was so boistrous and energetic XD I might have to bring him back at some point.

I'd written a few chapters of this before I hit a snag and dropped it entirely. I just wasn't gelling with the umbreon character at all. He was very bland and boring to me, unfortunately =(

Idea 2:

This setting was a dystopia heavily inspired by The Hunger Games, with a bit of No. 6 thrown in. The mayor of the region had exiled pokemon of certain types if I remember correctly. The city was surrounded by a high wall, hiding the run-down outskirts from view. Those outcast by her wanted her out of power. I can't fully remember the plot, but every year the mayor held a violent battle for entertainment, and would use exiled pokemon for it. The winner would get enough food to last them a long time.

Notable characters were a decidueye named Archer and a stuffle named Bojangles. There was also a fennekin who was lowkey inspired by Harlequin (my zorua assassin), as I wanted a cute grumpy fox character again.

I'd set to work on worldbuilding and backstory for this before finally scrapping it.

Both of these were during a time I was working on FIVE 'fics at once and I got seriously burnt out. All of them got dropped, and I think two of them were for the dystopia setting. The others may have been Wings (The End set from Harbinger's perspective), and Of Chalk and Cheese (a sequel to my Zootopia 'fic All Up in the Fur).

...

Both the above ideas won't be coming back any time soon since I recycled elements of them to write System:Reboot. The mayor from the dystopian 'fic was rehashed as Socket, along with her desire to keep certain pokemon types in the main city. The ultra beasts leaking into the world was done by Socket's hoopa-robot BackDoor, and he did eventually encounter Giratina who he didn't recognise and named him Distortion. I do write Christian fanfiction (the title Children of Light is probably pretty obvious lol), and I wanted to keep the idea of Solgaleo as the Jesus figure. I brought that back for Reboot, and Macro and his crew came across him in Ultra Space and were gifted power to defeat Distortion.

I also recycled Archer (the decidueye) but named him Waveform instead. At some point I want to bring Bojangles back. I did start a third story in the System universe and I'd love for it to reach completion, but it ended up making me very depressed. I think it was the music I'd chosen for it more than anything else... Since I might actually revisit that story at some point I'll avoid labelling it as 'scrapped' for now.