PLAYER AYANO wants to battle!

My name is Ayano! I'm an autistic young adult of 23 years residing somewhere in the USA. I am a lesbian and you can refer to me with she/her pronouns. If you see me elsewhere on the internet, you'll notice that I'm very open about having Dissociative Identity Disorder, and being disabled with POTS (Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome), although that's not too relevant to this website. Still, it's interesting information about me, I suppose!

I'm a pretty shy and introverted person, and you're more likely to find me curled up in bed playing Pokémon for hours instead of socializing. I find talking in-person, out loud, especially exhausting. I really do love people despite my introverted nature, though! While I don't open up easily, I hold my close friends in high regard. I consider myself to be a fairly sentimental person. I care about my loved ones and my interests in a deep and thoughtful manner.

Some other fun facts about me include:

• I have a love for sweet foods, and am very sensitive to bitter and sour flavors, which makes me have the tastebuds of a child a little bit. My favorite food is chocolate chip pancakes with fruit and syrup on top!
• I am an artist, although very casually, and just draw whatever makes me happy, or art that expresses my feelings that I mostly keep to myself.
• I'm an aspiring software developer or web developer, haven't decided which specifically yet! I have experience with JavaScript because of working on this website, but I also have fiddled with the likes of Python, Ruby, C#, C++, and more niche things such as GML for GameMaker Studio since I was a preteen.
• Other than Pokémon, I have a huge interest in the Vocaloid music scene, and have been listening to Vocaloid consistently for over a decade by now. My favorite producer is still wowaka to this day, and my favorite voicebanks include Meika Hime/Mikoto, Yuzuki Yukari, and of course, Hatsune Miku.
• My favorite singer is Kaf (花譜), a virtual singer managed by Kamitsubaki Studio. This heavily ties in with my love for Vocaloid as the two fandoms are very interwoven. My favorite song by her is "quiz".
• I was born seven weeks earlier than expected, and somehow perfectly healthy. Since I was born in December after being expected in January, my family often jokes that I wanted to be there in time for my first Christmas. (My family isn't religious, but we still celebrate.)
• I'm nowhere even remotely close to proficient, but I'm self-studying Japanese! あたしは勉強の日本語する。ｗｗ

My Pokémon favorites

• Favorite Pokémon: Quagsire. My friends often send me pictures of Quagsire they find on the internet because they associate Quagsire with me. I also love Wooper of course!
• Favorite Legendary: Suicune is definitely my favorite by far, but I also love Raikou and Entei. My favorite between Ho-oh and Lugia is just narrowly Lugia due to the second Pokémon movie. I also have a really strong affection for Yveltal from Pokémon Y despite playing X and catching Xerneas in 2013 for... some reason?
• Favorite Starter: My favorite starter is Chikorita! Are you seeing a Johto pattern? Even though Chikorita is my favorite, I did happen to pick Cyndaquil for my first Crystal playthrough because I knew Cyndaquil's shiny was different in GSC than in all future Pokémon games, and that felt special to me. I strongly believe they should have kept the purple flames, but oh well. His name is Cinders!
• Favorite Pokémon movie: The third movie, Spell of the Unown. I personally resonate a lot with Molly's character and the movie makes me cry every time. Honorable mention to Secrets of the Jungle though, it was unexpectedly good and I've rewatched it multiple times.
• Favorite Pokémon game: This is obvious, but my favorite is Crystal. Outside of generations 1 and 2, I have a soft spot for LeafGreen because it was my first, and I really enjoyed X, though in an entirely different way from the likes of Crystal. I feel like this is a good place to mention that I am also a big fan of the spin-off Mystery Dungeon and Ranger series! I've been working on 100% completing Blue Rescue Team, and Shadows of Almia is my favorite of the Ranger trilogy.

How I got into generations 1 and 2

I was born 12/12/1999, which means I actually missed the height of Pokémania in the 90s, and by the time I could consistently read and handle a video game controller, I started with generation 3, completely skipping the generations that are the focus of this website! My first Pokémon game was Pokémon LeafGreen for the Game Boy Advance, which I got as a gift for my 5th birthday after begging my parents for it months prior. My babysitter at the time had been bringing LeafGreen to my house to play it while bored, and I had become enthralled in watching her play it on the couch, incessantly asking her questions about everything happening on that tiny screen. Aside from the mysterious Pokémon Red and Blue cartridges lying on a shelf in my house next to a stack of N64 games like the first Stadium and Snap, previously having belonged to my older brother who was there for Pokémania and subsequently grew out of Pokémon as soon as it was over, I really had no contact with, or interest in generation 1. I felt like my LeafGreen copy was the definitive best version of Kanto, so aside from fiddling with rental battles in the first Stadium without access to Transfer Paks, I didn't touch generation 1 for a very long time. In fact, I didn't even know generation 2 existed until I started browsing the internet closer to my preteen years!

Despite this, I have had a consistent and unending interest in Pokémon since four years old when begging my parents for LeafGreen, in no small part due to being autistic and fixating on singular interests. Aside from Black 2/White 2 specifically (It's a long story, I'll get to them eventually), I've played at least one of every "main series" set since then, including a barrage of spin-offs - pretty much anything I could get my hands on! However, as Pokémon grows further and further away from my original vision of the series from when I was a child, the more I find it difficult to connect with the way Pokémon games feel and play nowadays. That isn't to say they're bad, but just that they're so different, I sometimes feel like I'm playing a completely different game with familiar characters and creatures. My full realization of this feeling came in sometime around Sword and Shield's release, and sent me into a retro Pokémon frenzy in early 2020, buying all of the old Pokémon games that I had lost as a kid and playing them extensively, much more than my spiffy new Switch game. This ended up being a domino effect into finally playing Crystal, starting in January 2021, which is when I realized what I had been missing out on.

While collecting old games in their physical cartridge form in my aforementioned retro frenzy, I realized that I had never played generation 2, and decided to scoop up a refurbished Game Boy Color and Crystal cartridge with a replaced battery on eBay. I didn't realize how much fun I was having until I had suddenly sunk dozens of hours into the game in just a month or two, and I hadn't even reached the Elite 4! I couldn't remember the last time I had enjoyed a Pokémon game that much, and I was actually really surprised by just how much I was enjoying Crystal. It's even what got me interested in shiny hunting for the first time! I spent upwards of 80 full hours resetting my game over and over for the 1/8192 chance of getting a shiny Eevee from Bill in Goldenrod, and when I finally got it on reset #8850, I was hooked on the full-odds experience and couldn't go back. A lot of Googling and researching later, and I realized how much depth there was to the seemingly simple mechanics of Crystal, as well as how much more fun I could have if I played through Stadium 2... And the rest is history!

All of my main series generation 1/2 games next to a vintage carrying bag that I take with me in public sometimes!

Since then, I've picked up all the other games from generations 1 and 2. I am still working on truly 100% completing my original Crystal save file, as well as Round 2 of Pokémon Stadium 2, and I haven't even touched the original Stadium yet! This website will be growing and expanding based on my own accumulation of knowledge over time. On top of all of this, I am also working on completing a shiny living dex in generation 2 without using the breeding method, which means I am hunting every shiny available in the entire Pokédex with the base 1/8192 chances. I expect it to take me multiple years, and I'm not in a rush to finish.