OH GOD I'M A TERRIBLE PERSON I BLEW UP POKÉMON.
Anyway, a long time ago, maybe about a year or so, I made a thread on worldbuilding in which I mentioned off-hand that Pokemon in a nuclear wasteland might make for some pretty interesting stuff, and at least a couple people thought it was cool. So what did I do?
I totally forgot about it for awhile instead of building on it like somebody with an attention span would do. :P
Eventually I started putting down little ideas here and there, and it became a pretty cool blend of a lot of stuff. It's a little bit Cold War, a concrete wall stands between Johto and Kanto, not to mention paranoid billboard propaganda (Johto! Menace of the West!), a little bit Mad Max and Fallout, the land is perpetually burnt and dry, with little touches of old fashioned advertising for the sake of dark irony. Certain features started to stick around more, like the fact that you can walk to Cinnabar Island because sea levels have dropped, the Cycling Road was never built, and is instead a high density highway with actual cars, and Silph Co. decided to sell comically expensive blast protection kits for people's houses.
Stay SilphSafe!™
So the general gist is that it's an alternate timeline that took a turn for the more industrial and aggressive, and slapped all the cute out of Pokémon! In a funny way, a mean funny way...you know.
Is this the future?!
MAP UPDATE! Looks like a survivor went and scribbled all over my map, are they just sightseeing, or are they looking for something? Some new places here, The Kiln is an ashen stretch of land blackened somewhat from Viridian Forest burning. Saffron Flats is a relatively calm and of course, flat area that centers around the ruins of Saffron City. Saffron City is something of a pilgrimage location, crossing the desiccated land to get there is quite a challenge, but there's a decently sized society of people holed up there. Up north is Rareworth Family Candy Company, the pre-war world's favorite candy company, and a terrible pun. Replacing the Indigo Plateau is the Indigo Hills ICBM Base, which of course launched missiles during the war. The base is home to "The Remnant" now, a group of hostile survivors. Cinnabar Point is of course Cinnabar Island, now a peninsula like I mentioned before. The SCZ, which stands for "Seafoam Contamination Zone" was already a mess before the war, it was used as a convenient out-of-the-way waste dump.
The Dustbowl is...a dustbowl, probably the least inhabited area of Kanto, Cerulean City has actually vanished under the dust storms. Millyan City is the remains of Vermilion, also home to a small society, though the name has degenrated over time. Lastly, out east is Fort Surge, apparently named for a soldier who went missing when undercover in Johto before the war, despite its solid construction, no survivors live in it, they consider it bad luck, or haunted.
Honestly though, this is more of a worldbuilding thing than a set up for a fanfic, I like making settings, but not so much with stories. If people like the idea enough, maybe they could write in it, like a collaborative setting dealie. I'd love comments and ideas though! There's all sorts of little notes I've jotted down that I haven't mentioned yet, a crashed Holon Jetliner blocking off Route 4, a creature creeping about the remains of the Cinnabar Labs, all sorts of nightmare fuelish stuff.