My Relationship to Shiny Hunting

Since you're already kind of futzing around my website (like I am as I set up these mishmashes of templates folks have made), I wanted to make this main about page to be related to my experience with shiny hunting and Pokemon in particular - and especially going into why I wanted to make this part of my site and maybe other little details like links? Well you'll probably notice the change if that's the case.

Shiny Pokemon have always been an interesting phenomenon in Pokemon games and it was something I always knew about. Most of it was because of going around Serebii and reading about Ash's Noctowl being a shiny, as well as the Red Gyarados and how it was one of the first shinies introduced and to be one everyone could get. Since Serebii was one of my favorite sites to look around for stuff about Pokemon before my parents would buy me a system or any of the mainline games myself, looking at the Pokemon and theire shiny forms at the time was one of the many fun things I could do. It was around 2007 when I got a Nintendo DS and Pokemon Diamond. While there was no random shiny I found there (yet), it also meant I could get games like the GBA games to play on it. An old friend of mine in middle school traded me Pokemon Sapphire and I went on an adventure where I basically based my team off of Ruby from Pokemon Adventures. In that file, I distinctly remember finding my first ever shiny Pokemon - that being a shiny Electrike on Route 110 when I decided to head down there to train because I was struggling with Wattson (If you know Pokemon Adventures Ruby's team, you will understand why this is one of the most ironic statements to write here). I caught her in a Great Ball, named her Blu and have since transferred her to Pokemon Y where she sits to this day.

Despite how exciting that experience was, my own attempts to use methods that games like Diamond but especially Platinum gave with the PokeRadar was something I was not good at doing at all. And since I had no clue how to properly use wifi on my DS to access something like the GTS with Diamond, the Masuda Method was not something I could try. Despite this, I've found my fair share of random shinies throughout Pokemon completely randomly. And maybe one day I'll share that - but that's not the main focus of this first post. What IS the focus is why I even made this part of my website in the first place.

Among the Pokemon content I loved to watch on YouTube,a long with rom hacks, there were some videos about shiny Pokemon that really interested me. I remember CandyEvie being one person who really piqued my interest with it because of her Pokemon Sun playthrough. She looked so long for a Pichu so she could use it on her team, and when she finally got it, it turned out to be a shiny. While these videos came out later compared to when I saw her Pokemon Sun playthrough (which was definitely around the time the games came out), I did really enjoy her videos where she talked about her picking up old shiny hunts but in particular, her showing off notebooks that she filled up with tallies that she'd count herself as she shiny hunted in older Pokemon games. Later on, possibly around 2020, I discovered AbsolBlogsPokemon. I don't remember what the first video I saw from him was, but his vidoes have left a Hell of an impact on me. Not only with how cozy his videos feel, but the way he talks about full-odds hunting and the journey related to them.

While those two aren't the only shiny hunters who really inspired me, they're the ones who really made me want to get into shiny hunting and do it in a way.