Hey, it's been a while since I made one of these. Hopefully everything is alright.

I wanted to talk about the problem with purism in communities. In this case, I wanted to talk about the ironMON community, which is a challenge created by iateyourpie. This challenge was so good and so popular that it reached way beyond anyone could've imagined. Similar to nuzlockes, the challenge dares the player to beat the game deathless, but in the case of Kaizo ironMON (the most popular variation), you must do it with one Pokémon.

I have been doing this challenge for almost a year now. It's very fun, it really is. It's also brought my stream to newer heights, and that motivates me to do it even more. One needs to be crafty and knowledgeable about the game to be able to beat it, something that was really attractive to me after seeing the likes of Exarion give it a go.

After playing it for this amount of time I noticed that there were two major things that made the challenge either less fun, less skillful or more toxic: status stat-boosting moves, such as Dragon Dance or Tail Glow, and Perish Song. The former was toxic because it made many, many fights trivial (especially Dragon Dance, which would allow pokémon that were incredibly bad to be able to beat the game with one move alone). I thought this needed to be nerfed, along with Perish Song, which I'll get to soon. I reached out to very knowledgeable people about it and we had a sketch of what an updated ruleset to Kaizo could look like. They all seemed to be on the same page: setup is too strong, and the fact that Perish Song is one of the few (if not the only) move that had no counterplay seemed to make everything both too trivial and too random at the same time. Trivial because of what I already mentioned: Dragon Dance, for example, is too strong. And too random because Perish Song simply has nothing you can do against if your opponent has more than 3 Pokémon: you literally just lose. Period.

So I had an idea: why not do we create a possible counterplay against Perish Song while we also hinder what anyone would agree is the strongest mechanic in the game: setup. Seems good--I got to work with my speedrunning colleagues, and once I shared this with my stream to debate about it, I got hit with something that shocked me: this is not the original thing, call this something different.

Excuse me?

What do you mean this is not the same thing? How is the very essence of the challenge not being preserved here? I, along with the Pokémon Speedrunning community was trying to make the challenge not easier, but better. Better quality, healthier, more entertaining. Something that would benefit from skill a great deal more. But that's not the same thing, apparently.

I have played this challenge as much as the people who I reached out to. We understand it basically completely. And we see problems with it, because everything that has issues and are not fixed becomes stagnant. Stagnation kills challenges, communities, and everything you can imagine. That's why we tried to make a change here, so that it would feel fresh. But no, it's not the original thing, so it must be called something else.

If I call it something else then I am not updating a ruleset. I am creating something new. How well do you think that's going to fair? Not well, I will tell you that. It will not be interesting because it's not the hot thing: Kaizo. And that is fair, that is understandable. That term has gained so much popularity over the last few years that it's basically a staple in the Internet culture. They told me to call it Kaizo+, Custom Kaizo, Kaizo Lite. But it's not any of that, it was an attempt at making one of the best things Pokémon has ever seen better. 

And here is the problem within the ironMON community: Purism. There are thousands of people who watch this, hundreds of people who play the mode, but we cannot change it because the creator said that if you want to change it you must call it something else. What am I changing, then? Nothing. I am creating something different. And that was not my goal: I want to be part of a community that is eager towards creating better things, just like the Pokémon Speedrunning community was. We would work together to make things better, through our understanding and enthusiasm. If we hit a wall that is "the creator said X" while the creator doesn't want to change anything anymore (something very much fair, since we all have our own lives and we don't need to live by anything), then it's our turn as a community to make a change, discuss, bring our points to the table and ponder them.

It seriously felt like the single most demotivating thing I have ever experienced since I started streaming to have this reaction from the community. This backlash, which I think is not deserved. You could just say "oh it's whatever, let them say whatever they want, you can still do it". Yes, I could do that, but where's the sense of community in that? It's not like the creator of this created "Kaizo" as a thing anyway, it's always been there since the Mario community actually came up with it. This is just our adaptation, and no one thought it would be bad to adapt Pokémon into it. So why is this bad? Is it actually bad?

Well, I don't think it is. But seeing how projects like these are just diminished to a simple "you can't because you can't change what the creator said" is devastating.

Please never change,
Shiru