May

May Birch (Female player character/rival, Pokémon Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald and the remakes). I decided against putting a Pokémon partner in this image, mainly because it wasn’t adding anything to the composition.

“Getting to know someone on a deeper level takes emotional investment–and the more time you give it the more beauty you see. It’s not without its sad times when things seem to break down but there’s always another moment to bring you back up to an even more euphoric state.”

I know some people don’t like the generation 3 Pokémon games and I’ll freely admit to not enjoying playing Ruby originally when a friend let me play a little on his GameBoy Advance (I never actually owned one of these for another 10 years). I was happy with Pokémon Blue and Pokémon Gold on my little Teal GameBoy Color. Many years passed and I stopped playing the games; however, with the release of AlphaSapphire back in 2015, I decided to pick it up again and took the plunge into Hoenn – and only then did I realise how much I’d missed out. AlphaSapphire (and its counterpart, OmegaRuby) may not be perfect, but they were enough to make me remember my time in Kanto and Johto and I actually did quite enjoy storming around Hoenn with some ridiculously OP Pokémon (most of my main party were level 80 before I got to the final gym).

Of course, coming from the original games, I didn’t have any concept of “friendly rival”: the only experience I’d had was with Gary and Silver, so I rather stupidly looked forward to randomly bumping into May throughout the journey – if only because I felt like someone else was also coming along on the journey and didn’t hate my guts. So here’s a little image of May just for that reason.