Welcome to my twisted WIP

Ketsuban: This guy has such a ludicrious out of universe story where I need to specify that the original guy came to me in a dream, which was sometime in March. I'll requote it here: "The other Pokémon related dream I’ve had in a while was also kind of weird. I was playing through a copy of Red and whenever I’d beat the game I’d end up back at the start like in a loop. I kept getting weird hints too like there was someone else playing alongside me. It wasn’t anything scary, just more surreal. Maybe I’ll write something for it." The first dream was kinda funny as hell because it was about a shitty costume getting added to pokemon masters which was Red's rival wearing a blanket over his head like a ghost.
(Actually, I just looked through a bit of my sketchbooks because I forgot my most recent ones for the gallery and the sprite sheet thing... so the sketchbook page with Ketsuban's labeled as 2/29 (because it's a leap year in 2024), which means it wasn't March. The sprite sheet I posted on cohost was made on 5/26 and sat in my drafts because I was too lazy to post it. So he's got a confusing origin story even out of universe.)

What exactly is the relation between Ketsuban and Red and Fire from the protagonist headcanon zone (I think I forgot to mention that most of the protagonist headcanons are shared in their own universe so Red and Fire exist simultaneously)? Truth be told I uh... haven't written it out very much aside from Ketsuban not liking Fire and generally not being nice to him in a way that gets very invasive and bad for everyone involved. Ketsuban was Red at one point and now he's no longer Red and instead of going about in his own way he decided that he would make it everyone's problem. In terms of hierarchy, Fire and Ketsuban have a Yuji Sukuna like relationship. Ketsuban tends to bully Fire, but Red bullies Ketsuban because Red is a hard counter to Missingno's bullshit. No Leaf puts up with Ketsuban's nonsense. He's the guy that shows up and no one likes him.

But how exactly are ketsuban and missingno related? Well, easy. He's a missingno. Missingno doesn't exactly have a will of it's own as much as it's raw power (while simultaneously it does have one. It's a contradiction, that's what glitches are. Actually, I change my mind, it's like the master crown from kirby. it's a pokemon, so treat it like one, or just do whatever you want.) There are more out there, like 'M ( Iyazo) and... I don't actually know the other missingnos. I forgot about SMT, these guys really are just digital devils lol at some point though ketsuban stops being a little hater and turns his attention to god. ketsuban keeps trying to fight arceus for some reason like "fight me!" and arceus keeps going "what is that thing down there... i don't like it... that's scary..." and no one on the legendary pantheon wants to even LOOK at ketsuban and he keeps screaming at them "look at what you have wrought, look at what you've abandoned!" He'd without a doubt be the Chaos Route.

Him and his friends just kind of pal around in the glitch dimension and hang out like in those ENA videos and occasionally just clip through reality, like to human eyes what they do makes no sense but to them its normal to be like… glitching. The wings are more inconvenient than they look. It’s really hard to get through doors sometimes if they get caught on something, occasionally they just pop off. He doesn’t even fly with the Aerodactyl wings, he just floats.

In universe ketsuban's a bizarre encounter because he fights you with pokemon that don't exist, aren't registered on the pokedex, make weird garbled noises (note: if you've never heard the pokemon yellow cut anime cries, think of that), attack with moves that don't hit or affect the pokemon in a "wrong way" (like when missingno's water gun attack bugs out sprites), and he only appears in weird spots so no one can verify if he was real or not.

I’m trying to limit the glitch powers to be that they can only really effect pokemon rather than people because even in gen 1 interviews there was the line of question of “if people have powers, what do they need pokemon for?” So having an in universe limit helps. Ketsuban is still horribly broken beyond belief because he can drag out things that Don't exist and therefore do not follow the type chart or just have an infinite number of items or visual and auditory things.

He could break reality if he really tried, but he doesn't.
Idk the level of severity that Ketsuban can properly display. As the author, I'm going to flip flop on this forever based on how seriously I want him to be taken. In my mind he's kinda like the spot from spiderverse. Like he can flip flop between a joke or a huge problem. (Same goes for his personality. He’s both the protagonist and antagonist of the glitch users.) No one can really tell if he's serious or not about the fighting and ursurping god thing because he's mostly unable to sit still and properly execute anything he says.
he's got a level of self awareness of the fact that he's a "red" and that there's a multiverse of everything (save files.) Possible input reading awareness as well based on twitch plays pokemon. Maybe that's what Missingno sounds like to him (since he uses that power the most, they're the most connected.)
Normal designed Ketsuban (I played with his design in mind during a sword playthrough..)

Abandonware:
Abandonware is an improvement hack of pokemon red that ended up with the nickname abandoned red because the game was abandoned. To simplify it, he's called abandonware because the game was abandoned, and abandoned, and abandoned, and--

In spite of the redundancy, he had some kind of self awareness even beforehand due to the enthusiasm of the original creators passing their code onto a new set of owners, and those owners to those owners, and eventually everyone who tried to finish the hack grew to the same level of apathy including himself over being "just another Red improvement hack".

(cursed items take on the emotional feelings of humanity like in JJK, so he gained the apathy of his original creators the longer they held that particular feeling about him. But I think objects gaining power from emotions is a general kind of trope and not just JJK exclusive? It's the most recent thing I can think of an example of though, so go with it... that is to say, glitches are just a new kind of curse based more on the digital world than physical reality. Maybe the glitches are connected to the collective unconscious as well?)

it was kind of an embarrassing existence of being ditched and people would take the ditched version and attempt to work with it and drop it and work with it and drop it and they'd keep getting close to the finish line only to just decide to not finish it at all. The improvement hack was to have a more mature take on kanto but the most that ever happened with the game was making red look older through his sprites and slightly raising the levels of pokemon in battles. anything else like adding in betamon, new plot features, and new maps for kanto only existed in the new defunct forum post on an abandoned site. Ketsuban dragged him out of his IPS patch.

In spite of this, him and ketsuban do not get along and have an apathetic sort of relationship because abandon is aware of the fact that his original game and legacy are considered a bug ridden mess and how people have replaced him with the remakes or attempt to work on improvement hacks and here comes ketsuban who appears to have willingly accepted that factor and uses the glitches and can laugh and smile and play around all he wants but the light never actually reaches his eyes. What a morbid existence. He doesn't even use his own name anymore.
Not like he'd ever point that out, because if the boy dragged him out of his world and gave him existence to call him his big brother, what's to say he can't just as easily snuff it out?

Wisteria:
An experiment by Ketsuban in an attempt to replicate the powers of cloning. "If missingno can clone items, can it also clone people? Could I clone myself?" It was to quote ketsuban "an absolute dogwater kind of event, big bro do NOT come over, I messed up big time." He was supposed to be centered on events in regards to lavender town but instead of being a 1 to 1 replica of Ketsuban's personality he's to quote Ketsuban again "a big weepy crybaby grandpa." In abandoned's opinion this is slightly better because it means he doesn't have to deal with two creepy children that act the exact same. Abandon does not want to know why he's called a grandpa.
He's got the behavior of a genwunner except instead of being annoying it's like "I don't get it... why does it look like that?" Instead of his hair being black, it's white. And he uses a giant nail. No one knows where it comes from and everyone tends to avoid him because he's carrying it around. I also have a design for Wisteria based on my Sword playthrough... he was a monotype Ghost Run.

been making older designs in gaia online for ketsuban and wisteria where they aren't apocalypse bringing world destroying gremlins. its a work in progress. ketsuban is a horrible snk boss and has rugal banishment because he's also an evil zoner. If this team feels weird and somewhat off to you, congrats! You have experienced the cognitive dissonance Ketsuban immediately feels looking at this guy! Rumors proper Red is basically just Adventures/Special Red appearance wise but Games Red personality wise. Blends different team picks from various canons too. Since abilities didn't exist in gen 1, ketsuban's Regigigas doesn't have slow start. Have fun! three idiots and fire. and their new fourth more evil brother who was the best at identity theft since he actually wears red. gaiaonline wisteria is too cute and seemingly wants to give an incredibly deadly huggo also he's a grappler, his ghost thing just throws you he has a far more traditional haunted aesthetic to differentiate himself from ketsuban in terms of the fact he's a clone. he's a bit insecure about that. Since they're OP and pokemon naturally avoid them, having smaller teams makes sense. Kanto only for now since they're pretty much the defacto main characters. This means Ketsuban just carries around an infinitely exploding Bulbasaur at all times Kinda funny no one has a porygon even though it is the textbook digital pokemon Others (Other Users and Support Cast) Old RG intro 1995 Further accentuating that Wisteria is just a mean guy pretending to be meek when his gengar looks like that It's just my mono sword clear team or Gengar I guess Insert Image of abandonware Pixiv Red here for *Squeeze!* References ZAZZ glitch Pikachu :) New Reference to Scrapped Lore (Originally I would've just given him prototype arceus) Raichu because it's severely neglected in favor of Pikachu Did you know there is a canon where Red's Pikachu does become a Raichu? It's pokemon Zensho/The True Story Manga. Wisteria is an exception to every rule established. Should you feel yourself attacked by a sudden chill, it is evidence of an approaching Gengar. There is no escaping it. Give up. Abandon is the only sane man in terms of glitch users from Kanto because he's too apathetic to actively care about doing bad and his only thing in mind is "keep Ketsuban and Wisteria from doing acts of dubious mischief/misaligned malintent" Wait they can recreate the OG Nidorino VS Gengar fight siiiick Sidenote: The scrapped lore bits from the teraleak kind of are handwavey on which one of these two is actually the shadow of arceus/the giant that was like the shards of the cosmic egg it broke from but in terms of not making that little dude more OP I opted out of Giratina and Giratina is more like a random summon. Also there's still the hoard of random glitch pokemon that aren't here as pokemon the gang can still use.