Cori Falls

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These are not the bumbling foolish baddies and cocky trainer you know and love...

Cori Falls was a highly prolific and well-known author in the Pokémon and later the Yu-Gi-Oh! fandoms. She's most known for her participation in the former, her personal canon for which encompassed an epic saga of fanfics and had its own timeline. This might be impressive if not for the, ahem, questionable quality of her fics where things like canon and characterization were concerned and her general attitude towards fandom.

Actually, her fics started off as being fairly decent, but the further she moved away from canon and the more she fleshed out her personal canon, the worse they got. Violent Tsundere Jessie suffered a severe case of Chickification as she was derailed into a weepy damsel who cried at the drop of a hat. Dorky, childlike James was buffed up into a manly knight in shining armor. Meowth fought harder to stay in-character, but even he only retained about 10% of his original self as he was modeled into little more than a matchmaker for Jessie and James who cracked fratboyish sexual jokes on a regular basis.

As for the heroes, Ash was robbed of all his good qualities in order to tailor him into the antagonist Cori insisted he was. Misty became a sneering, snot-nosed bitchy brat. Brock suffered the least; at worst he was simply portrayed as a dumb girl-chaser and was considered "the most reasonable and least detestable of the twerps" by the Trio. And Tracey was twisted into a womanizing moron who Cori decided was "fat" simply because he wasn't as skinny as other characters. Brock and Misty eventually made a Heel Face Turn and became friends of Team Rocket, but Ash and Tracey got worse and worse as time went on.

Here's a comprehensive essay on the decline in quality of Cori's fics as time went on, in fact. Interesting reading!

Cori didn't work alone, though. Her friend Shigeru1313 wrote several installments in the timeline, though her works were more focused on Gary Oak, another favorite character of Cori's and the favorite of Shigeru1313. Gary also suffered terrible Stuification under their "guidance".

Cori eventually left Pokemon fandom and closed her Team Rocket site in order to focus her attention on her Yu-Gi-Oh! fics. Then one day, without warning, she closed that site as well. While her Pokemon fics can still be found scattered across the internet (or here if you don't feel like googling the entire net) and parts of her YGO site are accessible from the Internet Archive, her YGO fanfic series is largely sadly lost to the ages.

She also used to have a whopping seven pages of rants on her Team Rocket site, wherein she and her minions-er, friends went off on a million tangents about the "injustices" done to the beloved woobies, vitriol against the Twerps and the writers, long diatribates on why people who wrote certain types of fanfic or supported certain ships weren't True Fans, etc. One page of the madness was salvaged by the Internet Archive, just beware the eye-hurting purple text on a black background. (It's best if you 'Select All' before attempting to read) As evidenced in her rants, Cori had quite a problem with other fans having ideas and opinions that contradicted her views and as far as she was concerned, only people who thought exactly like her deserved to call themselves True Fans and True Rocketshippers. Then there's her vendetta against the canon and its writers, but more on that below.

She disappeared from the fandom scene in the mid-2000s, and reportedly chilled out lots and laughs at her old stories now. While remembered with derision by many, some Rocketshippers have a soft spot for her due to her earlier works being among the first Jessie/James fics they ever read.

These stories contain examples of:

• Actually Pretty Funny: Meowth's "They're the best glittery plastic money can buy!" line from A Phony Matrimony.
• Adaptation Expansion: Early on, anyway; but that eventually took a backseat as the stories drifted further and further from canon.
• Alpha Bitch: Cassidy, Jennifer and Bonnie in Jessie's flashbacks.
• Always Save the Girl: James takes this to a disgusting extreme in "New Directions" chapter 1; panicking that Ash and his friends care more about saving Celebi than helping him save Jessie, then beating Ash to a bloody pulp for doing just that. Because anyone who doesn't drop everything to rescue your one true love is clearly a bad person.
• Ascended Extra: A lot of one-episode characters and faceless Rockets are expanded on in order to create a slew of allies for Jessie and James.
• Author Appeal: Cori is a big fan of the fantasy genre and certain rock bands, which make their way into Team Rocket's interests and the overall feel of the story.
• Author Avatar: Cairdea Underhill.
• Author Filibuster: Eventually, the characters are no longer characters and become mouthpieces for Cori and Shigeru's views.
• Author Vocabulary Calendar: Crimson mane, mop of blue-violet hair, sapphire-blue eyes, emerald-green eyes, eyes narrowed to slits, "I felt my blood boil", "those goddamned twerps", "Jesus tap-dancing Christ", couples resting their foreheads together, brushing away tears with the thumb, putting himself inside her. Playing a drinking game with these fics is not recommended; you'll be too drunk to blink on this trope alone before you're even halfway through any given fic.
• Babies Ever After: Her timeline of fics ends not just at Jessie, James and their friends getting married and having kids, but with their kids finding true love with their friends' kids, getting married, and having kids of their own. "Never Too Late" even opens with youngest Woodson child Rose just having given birth to her and Sam Oak's son.
• Beauty Equals Goodness: Compare a description of Jessie, Mondo or Gary to one of Ash or Tracey. Guess who sounds like a supermodel and who sounds like a pig crossbred with a troll doll.
• Bias Steamroller: Cori's review of the book Team Rocket Blasts Off!, to the point where she was compelled to write one of her infamous WYDS stories to correct the mistakes she felt were made.
• Big Eater: Jessie, James and Meowth frequently eat or order lots of food at one time - and seem to have a fondness for banana splits with all the trimmings. Ash and Tracey are also this trope but while J, J&M can get away with it, those two are mocked for it. Gee, we wonder why...
• Boyfriend Bluff: In "Seven Shades of Red", Jessie is rendered incapable of fighting off a gaggle of perverts harassing her (what mallet, giant fan and rocket launcher?!). James immediately comes to her rescue by claiming she's his girlfriend, and that immediately gets the men to back off.
• Broken Bird: Jessie
• Broken Aesop: "How James Got his Mojo Back" is an extreme example. James's horoscope turns out to be Magikarp, and Jessie spends a good deal of time trying to convince him that the horoscope doesn't mean anything, and that he shouldn't take it to heart or think he's as worthless as a Magikarp. Then we learn that he read the book wrong, and his true horoscope is the much more badass Articuno, thus implying that the horoscope was right about him after all.
  • The way abuse is portrayed. Both Jessiebelle and Jessie's ex-boyfriend Antonio are rightfully portrayed as monsters of the highest order, her for torturing James in the name of "being proper" during their childhood and him for coercing Jessie into dating him and then beating her. But during stage two, Jessie is absolutely horrible to James several times and it's excused because they're in True Love and she's just stressed or sad about something.
• But I Was Taking The Pill: When Jessie thinks she's pregnant in "Family Matters".
• Chickification: The first stage is about as close to in-character as Jessie's going to get, and even then the reader is still treated to scenes of her crying in jealousy over James's crush on the Maiden's ghost, getting introspective and depressed over some negative reviews of her performance as a Team Rocket member, then bursting into tears when she and James have a fight over the stolen badges from the episode "Bad to the Bone." And once she and James get together, it goes downhill from there.
• The Complainer Is Always Wrong: True friends always have the exact same interests and never disagree on anything, and anyone who thinks outside the box is evil, nasty, stupid and probably doesn't shower.
• Cool People Rebel Against Authority: James
• Creepy Child: In Where Angels Dare to Tread baby!James was supposed to come as Wise Beyond His Six Months, but looks like this instead. Seriously, which baby deliberately cries in his christening and then looks all "I did it to screw my parents' plans for me!"?
• Daddy Had a Good Reason For Abandoning You: Sort-of happens with Jessie's father - or at least, Jessie thinks of it that way after reading his journal.
• Deceased Parents Are the Best: Dorian and Miyamoto, to a nauseating extreme.
• Description Porn
  • Costume Porn: Cori spends way too much time describing what the characters wear.
  • Food Porn: And eat. Or order in restaurants. And every fic of hers has at least one gratuitous meal scene.
  • Scenery Porn: Though to her credit at least she does have at least have talent for describing locations.
• Deus Angst Machina: Jessie's canon Parental Abandonment and poverty made you feel for her, but Cori piles on bullies and kidnapping and an abusive boyfriend to go along with it.
• Fanon Discontinuity: In Cori's fics, all episodes of the anime after a certain point never happened or were Ash's sick daydreams
• Disproportionate Retribution: Jessie, James and Meowth have beaten the stuffing out of the Twerps for even the slightest insults.
• Distress Ball: Jessie in "Seven Shades of Red" (see Boyfriend Bluff), Gary in "Loyalties".
• Domestic Abuse: Stage two's portrayal of Jessie and James's relationship reads a lot like this due to Cori's attempts to portray canon in a more serious light. In the show, Jessie smacking James around is merely 90s anime-style slapstick. In the fics, one expects James to tell their friends his black eye is from walking into a door.
• Don't Like, Don't Read: Shows up in both forms on her Yu-Gi-Oh! site as well as on a few of her Pokémon stories.
• Double Standard Abuse (Female on Male): "Blood on the Moon" is made of this trope. James is cranky for valid reasons of being tired and hot and overworked, and when he displays such crankiness to Jessie she immediately believes her best friend and one true love is going to start physically abusing her. This, according to the narrative, gives her the right to hit James, tell him to go to hell, and never apologize for it.
• Double Standard Rape (Female on Male): In one fic, while James isn't raped, he refuses to have sex with Jessie because he's simply not in the mood. Jessie then starts whining and bitching at him, then tries to browbeat and guilt-trip him into sexing her up, without giving a shit about his feelings and well-being. Meowth then comes to them... and takes Jessie's side, harshly berating James for "not wanting to have sex with the most beautiful woman in the world." Creepy, creepy.
• Dull Eyes of Unhappiness: Jessie has these in "The Power That's Inside", to a ridiculous degree: "Slowly, she turned to face us. But I didn't recognize the woman I saw. Her blue eyes were dead...devoid of light. The look on her face was that of a soul lost in the deepest pit of Hell."
• Easily Forgiven: James's (abusive) parents come begging on their knees, and after James's initial show of defiance he forgives them when they butter him up and explain why what they did was wrong and how right he was about everything. In her YGO fics, Joey's alcoholic dad apologizes for being a jerk and Joey forgives him almost instantly.
  • This extends to Jessie in stage two, where James will always forgive her no matter how awful she's been to him. Especially in "Blood on the Moon".
• Embarrassing Old Photo: James finds a picture of his stiff, stodgy parents as hippies in an old photo collection.
• Entitled to Have You: Weezing uses the "friendship as a coupon for romance" version in "Two of a Kind." Of course, Arbok goes for it because, surprise surprise, she's in love with him too and she's just been afraid to admit it!
• Family-Unfriendly Aesop: After learning Jessie was abused by her ex-boyfriend Antonio, James becomes almost afraid to stand up to her because he's afraid he'll be just like "that son of a bitch." Yet Jessie is allowed to treat him like shit as much as she wants because she's so angsty. Basically, never stand up to your significant other when they act like an asshole, or you're just like their abuser.
• Fat Bastard: Tracey
• Faux Action Girl: Sort of. Jessie does get to kick ass, but she's nowhere near as strong and powerful as the narrative insists she is, and she gets weaker and weaker with each passing fic.
• Fix Fic Gone Horribly Wrong
• For Want of a Nail: "To Wish, Perchance to Dream" shows Ash all the bad things that would happen if Jessie and James never met-for example, Brock dies when he's taken away by the Maiden's ghost in "The Ghost of Maiden's Peak."
• Fragile Flower: Jessie definitely qualifies in Stage Two.
• Freudian Excuse: Giovanni is given one of these. While the CD drama does give him something of a fractured relationship with his mother and Team Rocket seeing him as just "Ariana's brat boy," Cori blows it out of proportion.
  • Jessie, James and Meowth already had some in canon, but Cori just dumps on more to the point of absurdity.
• Funetik Aksent: Meowth talks with one of these - even when he's the narrator.
• Future Loser: Ash gets his trainer's license revoked and his Pokemon taken away, becomes more and more delusional as the years pass and in the end only his mother gives a shit about him anymore. Poor kid.
• Generation Xerox: Not just their children, but going back at least three generations. Lampshaded by Jessie in "Never Too Late."
• Good People Have Good Sex, or so Cori would like us to believe.
• Heel Face Turn: Weevil and Duke, oddly enough. Cori spends half her YGO fic series bashing them only to make Weevil into The Woobie and Duke into a halfway decent person. Misty and Brock have theirs in her Pokemon fics and eventually hook up.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Jessiebelle in "Broken Souls". A lot of the cardboard villains in Cori's fics tend to get this as well.
• Humiliation Conga: Cori seems to get off on doing this to Ash later on in her series.
• Hurt Comfort Fic
• Hypocrisy: The Essay points it out:

"And her hypocrisy is enough to give anyone a foul taste in the mouth - if I like you, you can do absolutely anything, and it's all good or at least defendable. If I don't like you, and you step one toe out of line, you deserve nothing but pain, humiliation and, oh, I'll laugh at you when you nearly die as a result of my antics too, you asshole. Hell, why wait until you step out of line? I'll gladly inflict pain and humiliation on you right away."

• Identical Granddaughter: Jessie notes how her paternal grandmother looks almost exactly like an older version of her.
• IKEA Erotica: The sex scenes are this with an attempt at Mills and Boon Prose thrown in.
• Incorruptible Pure Pureness: Jessie, James and Meowth are apparently so pure and wholesome and shiny that their self-reflections are literal angels. Angels.
• Informed Deformity: Sure, Cori, Tracey's a fat tub of lard. We totally believe you.
• Interrupted Suicide: Wobbuffet intervenes just before Jessie throws herself off a cliff in "To Extend Our Reach to the Stars Above."
• Intimate Healing: Of the "nude body heat" variety in "To Unite All People Within Our Nation".
• Intimate Psychotherapy: How James helps Jessie overcome her depression about not making it to the Pokemon League. Also used in "A Warm Place", "The Power That's Inside" and part one of "New Directions".
• Lampshade Hanging: Jessie in "Seven Shades of Red" is angry with James and herself for not being able to fend off the perverts (see Boyfriend Bluff above) by claiming that it makes her feel like she's James's property and can't take care of herself. Appropriate since Jessie at this point has been acting more like a Distressed Damsel than anything.
• Laxative Prank: In "A Phony Matrimony?!", Blissey brags to everyone about how she laced a serving of brownies for Ash with chocolate-flavored laxatives.
• Love Martyr: A disturbingly accurate interpretation of James in stage two. His life's goal is to keep Jessie happy, even if she's horrible to him.
• Love Transcends Spacetime: The lost to the ages fic "To Wish, Perchance to Dream" has a frustrated Ash wishing Jessie, James, and Meowth never met each other, but Jessie and James still find each other and wind up together. A later fic has Jessie outright stating that this was all a dream had by the three of them, and a reminder that her and James's love was this trope.
• The Matchmaker: Meowth.
• Melodrama: One notable example being the way she turned the comic relief of Jessie and James being shaved bald by Scythers in "Tracey Gets Bugged" into an epic tale of harrowing psychological trauma. Cori's own reaction to the episode was pretty melodramatic as well.
• Moral Dissonance: Jessie and James claim they're "good people" and that they can't stand when people harm others, but then they turn around and beat the stuffing out of anyone who so much as looks at them wrong.
  • Not to mention letting Jessibelle die even when she's crying and begging for help. And we're supposed to feel glad that she dies.
• Moral Myopia: Ash taking extreme measures to protect his Pokemon is sick and twisted, but Team Rocket beating him to a bloody pulp to protect themselves is perfectly heroic.
• MST: Several of her works have been given this treatment. Most of these MSTings can be found here.
• Never My Fault: Starting in Stage Two, nothing the Team Rocket Trio does is their fault, and the narrative tends to back them up:
  • In "Thorns of a Rose," James blames the presence of Ash and friends for making Jessie want to steal the Nidoran pair instead of enjoying a romantic vacation with him until she explains her real reasons for her change of mood. Still doesn't make James's accusations any less ridiculous.
  • When they tried to steal the festival food in "The Difference," the story attempts to put some of the blame on Jessie because it was her idea. It doesn't last, because Lulu and the mayor are instantly won over by the group's sob story and manage to easily shift things to make Ash the villain for trying to stop their theft.
  • Anytime the trio attempts to steal anything, the narrative calls Ash and friends' objections "whining" because gosh darn it, don't those insensitive clods understand that the poor things need to commit crimes to stay alive?
  • All of Jessie's behavior in "Blood on the Moon." She nags James, takes his crankiness as the start of abuse, hits him, tells him to go to hell, and he ends up apologizing to her.
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown. Sort of. The so-called heroes are always the ones giving these to people. A particularly disturbing example is in "Never Too Late", when Jessie's grandparents beat the ever-loving snot out of Ash and Misty and are praised for it.
  • The most unforgettable one to some fans is James's absolute mauling of Ash in "New Directions" because Ash saved Celebi instead of Jessie.
• No True Scotsman: Cori and her friends would invoke this when complaining about interpretations of the characters that differ from their own.
• Old New Borrowed and Blue: In "A Phony Matrimony", Jessie's "something blue" is a pair of panties, which she hikes up the skirt of her wedding dress to show James. This leads to the pair almost engaging in a pre-wedding quickie before Meowth stops them.
• Old Shame: Cori apparently laughs at her old stories now.
• Opinion Myopia: Cori and her friends seem to have a hard time believing anyone could view Ash Ketchum as a decent person after all the mean things he's done to their precious Team Rocket. Cori's friend Hot Lips also cites being friends with Tracey as "evidence" that Ash is dumber than ever during the Orange Islands arc.
• Orwellian Retcon: In her earlier stories Ash is portrayed as being halfway decent despite Cori's dislike of him, but later on she went back and edited them, altering Ash's personality to make it look as though he'd always been a hateful little creep.
• Patchwork Kids: Actually discussed in "Dark Reflection".  
• Pet the Dog: Cori actually portrays Ash as halfway decent in "Broken Souls" and "Forever". Or at least not like the monster she usually makes him out to be.
• Playing the Victim Card: Not only do Jessie and James do this, but Cori does it on their behalf in her rants.
• Porn With Plot: Cori never, ever wrote sex for the sake of sex. Even "The Thrill of Defeat," which was about Jessie and James having sex for the first time, was very story-heavy.
• Post Dramatic Stress Disorder + Bleed'Em and Weep: Jessie, after defeating Queen Ayesha in "Where Angels Dare To Tread".
• Post-Rape Taunt: While Jessis isn't actually raped in "The Power That's Inside," the narrative treats her unwanted haircut like the most horrible violation (Meowth even refers to the haircuts as "the rape of [Jessie and James's] locks"), and when Meowth fights the lead Scyther, the latter gloats about how much fun he had hacking Jessie's red hair to bits, and asks Meowth "so how loudly did she scream when she realized that I'd scalped her?" in order to break his focus. Meowth falls for it and nearly gets himself killed.
• The Power of Friendship and The Power of Love: Everywhere. Pretty much the driving force of her later fics is how strong and powerful and shiny and special the love and friendship between Jessie, James, Meowth and Gary is. At least her YGO fics have the excuse of friendship power being big in YGO's canon.
• Protagonist-Centered Morality: Basically, whether or not you're a good person in Cori's fics all boils down to how mean or how nice you are to her favorite characters.
• Psychic Dreams for Everyone: Happens in "Family Matters", and possibly a few other stories as well.
• Psychopathic Manchild: Ash as an adult.
• Purple Prose: The sex scenes border on this.
• Reality Subtext: It's been suggested that Cori's treatment of the overweight and mentally ill are her real-life attitudes towards these people, and that her depiction of Jessie and James as bullied nerds is based on her own school days.
• Rebellious Princess: Jessie's maternal grandmother ran away from her oh-so-predictably evil douchebag fiance (who certainly isn't named for one of Cori's two most hated characters) to marry her One True Love.
• Revenge Before Reason: Sure, Meowth, go fight a pack of dangerous bug-types twice your size because they gave your friends unwanted haircuts. What's the worst that can happen?
• Secret Test Of True Love: "To Denounce the Evils of Truth and Love".
• Selective Enforcement: Jessie melodramatically cries about how her school did this to her; the bullies were rich kids and spoiled brats who got to do whatever they wanted to her but when she tried to defend herself she got punished. Later, it's flipped around when she's allowed to punch other kids and the teacher turns a blind eye simply because Jessie's late mother was one of his BFFs.
• Serious Business: Never, EVER tell Jessie and James that Lord of the Rings is "just a movie".
• Sickeningly Sweethearts: Every couple, but especially Jessie and James.
• Shipper on Deck: Everyone, good lord. But Meowth is so pathological about this he secretly arranges for Jessie and James's "fake wedding" to be a real one via neglecting to tell them their "fake" Pagan minister friend is ordained and licensed!
• Shoddy Knockoff Product: "The Chili Pepper" as a stand-in for Chili's in "Poetic Justice".
• Slash Is Ew: The very idea that people thought James might be less than "COMPLETELY, 100% HETEROSEXUAL!!!!!" sent Cori into conniption fits.
• Spurned Into Suicide: Jessie comes close to it in "To Denounce the Evils of Truth and Love" when a mind-washed James cruelly rejects her attempts to distract him from the maiden's ghost. She runs crying into the woods in a long flowing nightgown before walking to the edge of a cliff, before the maiden comes to taunt her. That's enough to snap her out of it, and she takes her anger out on the ghost instead.
  • Happens again in "To Extend Our Reach to the Stars Above." Though Jessie ends up staring down the edge of a cliff thanks to feeling she's wasted her life, it's having a fight with James and him walking away from her that leads her down that dark line of thought.
• Supreme Chef: James, apparently.
  • Lethal Chef: Jessie, though later on she gets better thanks to James's "cooking lessons".
• Take That: The disclaimers for "A Warm Place", "Forever" and "Broken Souls" were thinly-veiled attacks on the authors whose fics upset Cori enough to feel she had to "undo the damage" with her own. She and Shigeru have also written scathing comments about the canon writers and the show in their author's notes.
• Talking the Monster to Death
• Team Chef: James
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Jessie, James, Gary and their fanpoodles love giving these to their enemies, but the most epic example would have to be the smackdown James gave Misty in "To Extend Our Reach To The Stars Above", which shame her into beginning a "Heel Face Turn" (so to speak.)
• Their First Time: "The Thrill of Defeat."
• Three-Month-Old Newborn: Used repeatedly.
• Trademark Favorite Food: Jessie's French Toast and strawberry cheesecake, James's Belgian waffles, Gary's custard dishes, Meowth's fish (though this could be considered a product of All Cats Love Fish in general). On the "enemy" side, Ash with his cheeseburgers and Tracey with Oreos, Mountain Dew and pork rinds.
• Traumatic Haircut: Jessie and James both get them in "The Power That's Inside." Jessie goes into a borderline Angst Coma over it before she unleashes her rage upon James, screams her guts out, and talks about wanting to die. It's because the last memory she had of her mother was her mother brushing her hair.
• Tourettes Shitcock Syndrome and Cluster F-Bomb: During stage three, when TR adopts their practice of cursing up a blue streak at anyone who wrongs them. Even worse, this usually convinces people to apologize and grovel before them.
  • Obligatory Swearing: Sometimes she has the characters swear where it's completely unnecessary or out of place in a failed attempt to be "edgy".
• The Unfair Sex: So many examples in stage two. No matter what Jessie does, it's always James's fault. Even when he calls her out he ends up apologizing for it later because she starts crying about how stressed she is and blaming her horrible childhood for her actions.
• Woman in White: Jessie invokes this trope in "To Denounce the Evils of Truth and Love" when she wears a long, flowing white nightgown to try and seduce James so he'll stop daydreaming about the Maiden's ghost, complete with her hair down and out of its typical gravity-defying arc. When James cruelly pushes her away, she runs sobbing through the woods in that same nightgown.
• Would Hit a Girl: James. And it's treated as perfectly acceptable.
• Wounded Gazelle Gambit: The stories try to make it seem like J&J's enemies are the ones doing this, but in reality it's J&J when you take these stories in the context of canon, logic and reality.
• Writer on Board: Hooo boy...
• Yo Yo Plot Point: Stage Two is nothing but Jessie and James having endless angst, fighting, weeping about how their relationship is ruined forever, then falling into each other's arms for hours of make-up sex. Rinse and repeat.
• You Fail Biology Forever: Sex does not typically last for hours. In fact, an erection lasting more than four hours hurts like hell and can be very dangerous to a man's health. Also, newborn babies generally do not giggle and coo and grab little fistfuls of mommy and daddy's hair.