>>22727201It's one of those things that starts off as a joke narrative, then people just can't let it go and mutated it into something serious, even though it's still just kind of an "eh" joke at best.
It was an interesting "emergent" narrative, sort of cobbled together by the way TPP worked and the fan intensity it generated. There's no one author, but the whims of what seized most of the fandom's mind. I think its nature as something both largely out of any one person's control (at least nominally) but technically under everyone's collective control made it appealing to that kind of "let's turn this into a story" mentality.
Like Nuzlockes. The point is to basically remove much of the individual player's ability to game the system in exchange for making things more reliant on things outside the player's control, like crits and which mons you run into first. It makes chance have a much higher significance in the game, because you can't just undo what happened. So it makes it feel "realer" to people, because you didn't have total control of the outcome. It makes things feel more significant. Like something that happened to you, rather than something you did.
So with TPP, people easily read stories into the largely random nonsense that happened because no one person was controlling it all (you know, nominally). I wouldn't call it a parody of Pokemon fanfiction, because the basis for the "Story" was specifically the events that happened in TPP, not any outside context. People were just having fun with it, because it's fun to pretend things are real/serious, and it was easy to do so because, again, no one mind was making it up. It was a shared experience.
That people made amusing stories about it could maybe be tied to general fanfiction culture and tone, but I'd say the cancerous nature of TPP is wholly its own. It could've just had its 15 minutes of fame, but people have never met an idea that they're capable of leaving before they kill it.
