"Make a Pokémon that defeats all Pokémon other than Pokémon that defeat themselves!"
— (With apologies to Bertrand Russell
)
)"All his life, Ash has had a dream: to Catch 'Em All. And now, he's finally done it -– or has he? What mystery awaits him on Cinnabar's shore? And is he ready for where it will take him?"
— the summary
Ash's Return is a short Pokémon fanfic by "Questionnaire," following our hero Ash's quest to find the mysterious "missing" Pokémon. Flavors of Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid and Inception, with bits of "bored in Computation Structures class."
It can be read here. There is also a rewritten version, currently incomplete.
Ash's Return provides examples of the following tropes:
- Alien Geometries: The strangely-connecting doors in the "city."
- Ascended Glitch / Eldritch Abomination: Missingno itself.
- Bavarian Fire Drill: part of the "plan" in Chapter 3.
- Cheshire Cat Grin: "Meowth making a large, toothy, lopsided grin◊."
- Dead Fic: The revised version has not been updated for more than a year, thus leaving readers who didn't read the original utterly confused.
- Exposition: Chapter 2 is pretty much just this.
- Foreshadowing: "Wouldn't want anyone to get hurt, y'know?" and various less blatant examples.
- Go Mad from the Revelation: What happened to Professor Vattha.
- Gratuitous Japanese: Getto da ze! Dokokashira?
- Laser-Guided Amnesia: "I don't remember anything."
- Load-Bearing Boss: invoked explicitly by name.
- Logic Bomb: the page quote at the top.
- O.C. Stand-in: The old man in Viridian City who triggers the Missingno. glitch is given some backstory here.
- Ontological Mystery, The All-Concealing "I": The italicized portions at the beginning of the chapters.
- Painting the Medium: Chapter 3 ("Parallel Process") uses three columns of text to represent three simultaneous lines of action. Until...
- Patchwork Fic: Even though the fic appears to take place in the Pokemon anime, the glitch Pokemon are exclusively in the games.
- Shout-Out: The chapter titles are all references to some computer-science concept. The keys are named after the axioms of ZFC set theory.
- So What Do We Do Now?: the beginning, actually.
- Team Rocket Wins
