>>32185082The year is 1998.
Pokemon had just been unleashed on the United States.
WIthin the first few months, rumors to get mew are abound from Friend to Friend. Awful Merchandise starts to accumulate everywhere.
Then the States gets hit by the anime. The overwhelming popularity of Pokemon permits a shit protag, shit animation, and shit dialog to be catapulted to some of the most viewed cartoon lists. Only by 2003 will it begin to descend to it's rightful place in the cartoon hierarchy.
It's partway though 2000, the States are hit hard with a ton of 3rd party Merchandise in which Nintendo is not involved. Everything from quater-machine toy dispensers to Gas Stations had these knock offs of warped, pokemon-look a likes.
Then it happened. Sometime between late 2000 to 2002, normies got tired of the Ultra-Autists screaming about their Pokemon. Pokemon was put on a de facto list of Shit Subjects and slowly, but surely, between 2002 to 2004, the fandom heavily contracts. If you liked pokemon, you were not permitted to talk about it out in the open, lest you put yourself at risk of open ridicule.
Sometime in 2006, Pokemon makes a very minor resurgence with gen 4. If you bothered to check the Anime, you might have noticed a subtle, but well appreciated bump in it's story telling. However, Pokemon is still on the Shit Subjects list. No more pokemon merchandise really to be found, except in small pockets in toy stores, as opposed to fucking everywhere.
Any true pokemon fans who desired to live a normal life would have decided the "no one must ever know my secret" strategy to be the best. The few autists who still cling to pokemania are frequently mocked, only a smidgen higher in the deplorable hierarchy than rabid sonic fans.
10 years later, Pokemon Go gets released. It's not as big, else the fake merchandise would have hit gas stations and quarter-vending toy machines hard. But hey, the normies loved it till the servers went to shit.
