Story Information

This page will guide all viewers to the way Tears of the Fallen is presented, with guides to the video version, an explanation of how Nocturnal Jay thought of the story, and other general information.

Please see the Backstory for full information about the plot and how everything in the story began.

Plot Summary
The story takes a darker turn on the Pokémon anime. It's a world where humans have the power to control types, similar to Pokémon. This is known as Type Manipulation. Manipulation is a power made possible by Arceus, the Mythical Pokémon who created and shaped the entire Pokémon World. Arceus has 17 Plates, and each Plate (except the Normal one) is needed for a Manipulation for that type to be possible.

An evil organization has currently taken over the regions of the world. It's called the Tekiyoku and it's made up of mostly every evil team and evil person in the world. Standing at over 60 members, this organization is a major threat to mankind. They have captured Arceus after it lost its Plates, which give it power, and are holding it captive. The Tekiyoku is led by the former leader of Team Flare, Lysandre. His goal is to become the world's first Supreme Manipulator, which would give him power enough to almost rival Arceus's strength, and with Arceus not having its Plates, Lysandre would control everyone as he sees fit.

However, a young man has escaped the Tekiyoku, tired of the evil they were doing. His name is Alain. Before escaping, he learned a move from Arceus that allowed him to spread all of Arceus's Plates around the world and make them go dormant. This stopped Lysandre from becoming a Supreme Manipulator, which requires all Plates. 3 years have passed and the Plates are scattered around the world, about to stop being dormant. Alain is ready to travel with another young man named Ash Ketchum and collect all of the Plates to gather an army of regular citizens to become Manipulators, fight the Tekiyoku, and free Arceus, thus returning the world to normal. Heartbreak, chaos, and despair await many people in this journey.

Format
The video version of the story is uploaded to YouTube. For the videos, a variety of screenshots of characters from the Pokémon anime is shown. Captions accompany each picture. The character on the screen is the one who is saying the line of text in the caption or performing whichever action the caption is indicating. Narration helps to explain the story more, while aiding in keeping track of the dates and times.

Episodes usually start with the introduction, followed by a recap of what happened on the previous episode. This is followed by the title of the current episode. Episodes generally don't go past 30 minutes each. Music and occasional sound effects accompany each episode.

The introduction to each episode is a short compilation of video clips from the anime. A shorter version of the Tears of the Fallen Theme Song goes along with it. The clips highlight different enemies, along with the three primary main characters, Ash, Alain, and Dawn, and the three top secondary main characters, Barry, Zoey, and Paul.

Guide
For the videos, narration in the story is indicated by a black background at first. Starting in Episode 14, this changed to a backdrop being used to show narration. The backdrop consists of a lone triangle in the middle of the screen with a certain color for the background. The color of this backdrop indicates the mood or happenings in the episode. This is explained as follows: Whenever there is more than one person on the screen in a picture, whoever is speaking the line of text or performing the action in the caption will be indicated in brackets before the line. If the person who is speaking, thinking, or performing the action is unknown, question marks will replace the spot where the person's name would be, along with a black background.
 * A purple backdrop is the default one used for general narrations.
 * A red backdrop indicates periods of intense action, fights, or anger.
 * A blue backdrop indicates sadness or depressing moments.
 * A dark grey backdrop operates the same as the purple one, but it's primarily for title screens, "to be continued" screens, or other narration that's more specific than ones that call for the purple one.
 * A lighter grey / black and white backdrop is for flashbacks.
 * A sepia (dark brown) backdrop indicates that somebody is having a dream or some sort of fantasy moment, including trances. This won't be shown if it's meant to be hidden that a person is having a dream or fantasy at the moment.

For the captions on each picture, asterisks (*) will surround lines of text that are not spoken, but are actions being performed by the character being shown or another character.

Parentheses (along with *thinking*) will surround text that is being thought in the mind of the character shown in the picture.

Ellipses (...) are shown to indicate pauses when a character is speaking. If a line of caption for a picture only has ellipses, it means the character isn't saying anything at all at the moment, but the focus is on them because they're usually silently reacting to what just happened, or thinking heavily, with their thoughts not being shown in the caption.

Dashes (--) are used when a character is either stammering in their speech or when they're about to be interrupted by someone or something.

Captions for some characters are color-coded, pertaining to the color of the text and the outline. The color for certain characters usually matches what they're wearing or their hair color. Otherwise, they're colors that Jay believes represent them the most. Characters who don't have captions color-coded will have their caption with white text and a black outline. Note that Team Skull members have black and white as their caption colors, but it's inverted to stand out more, as in the text is black and there's a white outline.

For images of characters, Jay tries his best to have what's on the screen match what's really happening. For instance, when Ash and Pikachu are both on the screen, Pikachu is actually there with Ash. If Pikachu gets separated from Ash, the pictures will just have Ash on his own.

Following this pattern, if you haven't noticed, pictures of Dawn do not have Piplup in them (some might have a little bit of Piplup still in, but the vast majority of it would be cropped out). Jay works to crop all of his images to take out anyone who wouldn't be needed in that part of the story.

Written Version
Due to the nature of the video version, this makes the entire story written in script format. A written version of Tears of the Fallen is currently planned to be released in the distant future whenever the story is finished in video version.

This written version will be released on AO3 and Wattpad.

Origin
This story started out as an idea Jay had for a story where humans control types, just like Pokémon. Originally, regular citizens would possess this power during their years in an academy, living their normal school life. At first, one general ability and move would be possible for each type.

It later evolved to an idea for people to be able to do 5 moves for each type, along with at least one ability, but possibly more. Then, it changed to having evil people start off with this power, with the possibility for citizens having this power, but earning it first. Jay came up with an energy system to be used for these moves next, preventing overuse of the moves.

For the evil people, which Jay has never used in any story before this one, he decided to make them all join together into one organization. He researched and came up with a name for this organization and designed their logo. An extensive process followed to get full basic information for every character.

Lastly, he needed a way for Manipulation to be possible, meaning he needed three types of items in the Pokémon World that have multiple versions of them that relate to types. With Generation 7 out at the time, he decided on the three items being Arceus's Plates, Gems, and Z-Crystals, since these all have several versions of them pertaining to every type. Since the Plates are the strongest of the three, Jay thought to make the story revolve around Arceus, coming up with a way to have Arceus's Plates be scattered around the world for the main protagonists to have to search for.

A Backstory was then prepared for the entire story, with a length of over 5,000 words.

Shipping
The story focuses on PearlShipping, meaning it focuses on the love interest of Ash and Dawn. PearlShipping is Nocturnal Jay's favorite ship. Other ships will surely be present also.

Manipulation Moves & Abilities
Each Manipulation move and ability was made from scratch by Nocturnal Jay. There are over 100 moves and abilities that he thought of. It took a few weeks to come up with them. Tweaks are still being made even now, as some moves had to be made possible to repeat in one use, with the former versions being too wasteful to only occur once for the amount of energy being used.

Character Detail
Every single character in this story received full detail from Jay:
 * Each character has a first, middle, and last name. Some have nicknames or codenames as well.
 * Each of them also has an exact hometown and region. Most characters with a hometown in the Pokémon anime/games still have those hometowns (with some locations being renamed for the story), while those with no hometowns were assigned one by Jay.
 * Every character also has a birthday. Most birthdays have significance for why they were chosen, listed in the character's trivia section in their articles, while a lot were picked randomly.

Calendar Information
The "year" isn't ever mentioned in the story, as in the numbered year. This is due to Jay not wanting to be limited to what content can be placed in the story based on the year. Instead, articles written about the story will just number the years in chronological order as needed: as in, the first year of the story is "Year 1" and so on. Things that happened in the past go backwards from year 1, such as "7 years before the start of the story".

Regardless of the year not being mentioned, each day in the story has an actual day of the week and date on the calendar. The "reference year" used when making this story was 2018, the year Jay started the story. This means that whatever date and day of the week that's being shown, is the actual date and day for that month on the 2018 calendar.

Symbolism
The general color for the series is grey. Grey is present in the official series logo and likely all over this wiki (if viewing it on a computer), along with the fact that a lot of the caption is coded to be grey, usually on the title screens or in certain mysterious spots in the series. Grey is the color, due to grey skies, which Jay associates with deep sadness.

The symbol for the series is a triangle, present mainly in the eventual backdrops during narration, each Manipulation image, and the shape the objects have to be on the ground in order for Manipulation meditation to take place. It also might be present in the background of this wiki and it might even be replacing your mouse cursor right now (if viewing this wiki on a computer). All A's in the series title or Episode titles are replaced with "triangles", which are the Greek letter, Delta.

Series Logo
The official logo for the series has greek letters on the bottom of the triangle. These letters are Pi, Sigma, Delta, Kappa, Upsilon, and Alpha. These represent a saying for the story, which is "Pain, Suffering, and Despair Keep Us Alive".

Rating
Strong language, violence, and extreme saddening themes are occasionally used in the story, which recommends that the audiences use viewer discretion.

Etc.
Episodes/Chapters are generally uploaded as soon as Jay gets done with them. He updates on his Community tab on his channel whenever an episode is taking longer than usual or with certain information about the upcoming episode.

Trivia

 * Instead of calling them Z-Crystals in this story, they're called "Zenryoku Crystals". The Z in Z-Moves in the Pokémon franchise already represents the word "zenith", which means full power/force. The Japanese translation of zenith comes to the word "zenryoku".