Cori Falls

Fan
Name:	Cori Falls
Alias(es):	Queen of Rocketshipping
Type:	fan writer
Fandoms:	Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh
Communities:
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Cori Falls was a Pokémon fanfic author from the early 2000s.

She was infamous among many circles due to her strong views on the anime; her favorite characters were the villainous trio of Jessie, James, and Meowth, and she was a die-hard Rocketshipper. Cori Falls had a long, intricately-planned Verse, an Alternate Universe, which swapped the roles of hero and villain between the protagonists and the antagonists.

Fans tend to have strong feelings about Cori Falls' fanworks; while her stories did not age well with some fans, others admire her dedication to her craft. Some Rocketshippers, regardless of how they feel about her work now, have admitted to having a nostalgic place in their hearts for her earlier work due to it being among the first Rocketshippy fanfic they read as young fans.

Apparently, Cori laughs at her old fanfics now. I guess she's seen the light.

Many fics are here.

Fandom Presence

Cori Falls got her fandom start around 2000 when she saw an episode of Pokemon and instantly fell in love with the Team Rocket Trio. When her search for Team Rocket fanworks did not satisfy her need, she began to write her own stories and soon became prolific among the Rocketshipping fandom. She had many admirers and loyal fans who loved her work,and her fics won many awards during her heyday in the Team Rocket fandom. She had a group of friends who helped her manage her site, co-write her stories and add their own to her 'verse, and made banners for her website as well as many fanart contributions. Cori was highly loyal and appreciative of her friends and fans in return.

Cori was very attached to her views and ideas of what the show and characters should be, taking others' interpretations as a personal attack. She only ever accepted suggestions or advice from her close friends.

She stated her unhappiness with Darkfic in which her favorite characters suffered and died, accusing authors who wrote such things of not being true fans. She stated in her autobiography that a good chunk of her stories were Therapyfic written in response to things that upset her, mainly other fics. She was also very protective of her OTP to the point where she ranted at length about how she resented other fans for breaking them up, especially for same-sex couples. It was this attitude that won her her infamy among other fans.

Pokemon

Her Pokemon stories spanned a fully-developed timeline detailing Jessie and James's childhoods, background information on their ancestors, their later years, marriage, parenthood and grandparenthood.

Cori made no secret of her dislike for the main characters, especially Ash Ketchum. In the beginning, her stories were more or less in-character with the trio understandably irritated by "the Twerps" foiling their plans, but this over time developed into Ash and Misty being portrayed as outright horrible people who delighted in the misery of Jessie and James. She did like Brock, whom she mostly kept in the background or portrayed as the sole voice of reason among Ash and his friends. However, she hated his replacement Tracey for the episode in which his Scyther gave Jessie and James unwanted haircuts, as well as finding him irritating and considering him a pervert.

As for Jessie and James themselves, her characterizations of them were closer to canon at first with the exception of Jessie being a touch more vulnerable and James a touch more brave and perceptive. Over time, her fics changed their personalities to the point where many fans no longer recognized them as the characters they knew and loved.

Cori's main focus was the relationship between Jessie and James, who she wanted to believe were canonically in love with each other and would eventually be a canon couple. This belief was furthered by the end of the Electric Tale of Pikachu manga, where the two were shown married and Jessie pregnant. Her early stories tried to rationalize their canon behavior through their backstories and her imagined reasons why Jessie was so mean and James so childish, or why they would fight, though this proved to be so difficult that Cori eventually got fed up and went completely AU. It was the stories written at this point that earned her her infamy among readers, even the ones who had originally liked her work.

Yu-Gi-Oh

She left Pokemon fandom and moved to Yu-Gi-Oh in the mid-2000s. This time, she went AU from the beginning, merely using canon as a loose backbone for the stories she wanted to tell.

Her favorite character was Rex Raptor/Dinosaur Ryuzaki, a minor character whom she fleshed out with a huge backstory and eventually created an OC love interest for, while her partner Shigeru1313 (who had also helped with a chunk of her Pokemon 'verse) specialized in Joey/Mai stories. Her hated characters seemed to shift unlike in Pokemon; she bashed Weevil/Insector Haga before writing a redemption story for him, and then did the same for Duke Devlin. She eventually created her own character to serve as the main antagonist.

Harry Potter

After announcing she had planned to write a Harry Potter fic after the end of the series, she disappeared, leaving the story unwritten and unpublished.

Tropes Present in Cori's Fanfics

• Food. Cori added a lot of meal scenes to her stories, going into paragraphs' worth of detail about how a meal was prepared, the different meals enjoyed by the characters over a period of days or even a single day, and even consulting with Shigeru1313 for what the characters would order in a restaurant.
• The concept of "meant to be". Nothing was ever a coincidence, things always worked out "exactly the way they were supposed to".
• The power of love and friendship being the key to true happiness and success.
• Family. Cori crafted entire family trees for Jessie and James, giving Jessie two sets of grandparents and an uncle and James a set of living grandparents to make up for his maternal ones being dead. She also wrote a lengthy backstory for Jessie's parents, and would redeem James's controlling ones so his and Jessie's children could have grandparents. The Oak family was also portrayed as incredibly close and loving, contrasting the more popular fanon of Gary's parents being divorced and him basically being raised by his grandfather. In her and Shigeru's Yu-Gi-Oh fics, Joey Wheeler's alcoholic father stopped drinking and apologized to his son for mistreating him, while Rex Ryuzaki's parents were forced apart by circumstances but were still very much in love. She was also gave her OTPs at least two kids who strongly resembled their parents in looks, personality, and interests.
• Overcoming adversity. Cori gave her characters painful backstories to overcome as a means of highlighting how strong they were. Bullying was a very common theme; not only were Jessie, James, and Gary bullied by their peers for their interests and personalities, but some of their Pokémon were bullied by others of their kind, or abused by their former trainers.
• Good things come only to those who deserve them. Because Jessie and James suffered so much, they were rewarded with everything their hearts desired and more. She also took everything good from Ash, whom she felt did not deserve anything after the problems he caused for her favorites.
• Paganism, Wicca, and connections to nature. James learned Wicca from his grandparents, and he later gained the power to save Jessie from capture by an evil queen on the Astral Plane. Jessie and James were also married in what was basically a Pagan handfasting ceremony, and the start of the split from canon had them using a Wicca spell to purge all the demons plaguing them.

Fan Comments

Fan Comments: Yu-Gi-Oh

2) Again, she Stu-fies her favorite character, in this case Dinosaur Ryuuzaki. She gives him a typical sob story about being low on cash and having separated parents (they're still married and in love and stuff, apparently, but he's American and she's Japanese and-- I dunno, couldn't understand exactly why they couldn't stay together) and being bullied and what have ya, makes him a lot more mature and modest than he is in canon (but canon doesn't matter, of course), has him befriending Yugi and co. and telling them his entire wangsty lifestory in three hours, and taking all her favorite things and dumping them on him to like.

6) Of course, the characters she doesn't like get their asses handed to them. Insector Haga, for example. Throughout Finding Heart, she gives him the Ash treatment and has Yugi and co. and Ryuuzaki making fun of him and pulling pranks on him (like making him piss in bed at one point. Don't ask). He even goes 'AUGH!!' at one point, just like her Pod Person Ash does all the time. Yeah. Real mature, Cori!

Too bad it makes Ryuuzaki and Yugi's gang come off as immature assholes. Man, and then she complains about Haga and Ryuuzaki being treated terribly in the anime fillers. Hypocrite much?

She later redeems Haga for one reason or the other. Weird to see her having a change of heart. Still, this goes to show just how bad she treats characters she hates.

She also despises Otogi Ryuuji, so she calls him 'Puke' (Duke Devlin, Puke Devlin... oh, cute), excludes him from Yugi's group and gives Ryuuzaki the job of saving Shizuka and Honda from Malik's people. That's immature of her too, but at least she doesn't rape him in the eye socket like she did Haga.

But Cori wouldn't be Cori if she didn't have someone to loathe so the characters could point out how much they sucked, so she imported her favorite hate-object from Pokemon, namely Tracey Sketchit... that is, Cori's version of Tracey Sketchit, which is nothing like the one on the show. She gave him the name "Kenji Suketchii" (giving rex Raptor and the gang the opportunity to dub him "Suck-ecchi" and tried to pass him off as an original character, but anyone who had ever glanced at a Cori-fic before could see that he was meant to be Tracey, who in Cori's mind is a morbidly fat, disgustingly perverted, complete and utter loser who deserves nothing but hatred and ridicule.

Sadly, the majority of her Yu-Gi-Oh website, fanworks included, has been lost to the ether.

Fan Comments: The Degeneration and Problems Inherent in Cori's Fics

In Cori's case, however, the technique is mainly used to show how Jessie and James are secretly pining for each other whenever they're not on-screen in the actual episode, so it's a bit of a waste... but the ever-present canon helps the quality of the stories immensely. It's not a coincidence that the further Cori moves away from canon, the worse her stories get... and here, we even get some small sense that the twerps aren't the Spawn From Hell that they appear as in later stories. If anything, they're portrayed more as "those stupid little kids who don't get anything," which is kind of forgiveable, since the story's told from TR's POV anyway.

If Cori Falls had stayed at this stage for her entire fanfiction career, or stopped writing Pokemon fanfic before the Orange Islands arc began, she would have been thought of quite differently today, maybe even remembered with some small degree of fondness.

For even though both Jessie and James have some massive OOC moments here (James especially; there's not much left of the loveable, childish, whiny goofball when Cori is writing him), they are at least presented as somewhat human. Overly sappy and angsty, but human.

Jessie and James, in between their ranting sessions, are just the most cutest and loving couple ever, and they have a lot of sex now; which is always perfect and always lasts for hours and is always so dull that I skip all the sex scenes because I fall asleep if I try to read them. It doesn't help that Meowth makes a lot of sex jokes, none of which are funny... or that Giovanni (who until recently have been just skulking in the background) emerges as a true-blue Rocketshipper and the nicest guy ever. The only character in this who doesn't annoy the hell out of me is Wobbuffet, who is getting bigger and bigger parts... but even he very quickly succumbs to Cori's determination to warp every single canon character to her own means.

Free of all canon, Cori is free to really concentrate on what's important: The awesomeness of TR, the perfect lives they can now lead, the story of Jessie's perfect parents and James's perfect grandparents, James getting a baby Articuno as his Pokemon and gaining magical powers at some point because of, uh, Wicca or something... hell if I know, it didn't make sense the first time I read it and I'm not in the mood to go read it again. And of course, Tolkien and D&D and all that other stuff that are admittedly fun on their own, but really don't belong in a Pokemon fanfic...

But that's just it, really. This is no longer Pokemon fanfic. It's Cori's own little world, in which her darlings are always correct, because they always think the same as she does, and nothing else is important or worthwhile.

The real tragedy is that this era [Stage 3) is also when Cori is at her most creative, as we see her engage in some actual, real character development. There's the fic where Jessie gets possessed by a "Queen Ayesha", as well as the one where James gets a baby Articuno (in Generation II, well after it had been defined that Articuno can't breed!). There's also the one where Jessie does some soul-searching through a diary her mom left behind that I mostly liked...except Cori manages to fuck THIS up by introducing Miyamoto to an "Ash Noober Ketchum", apparent father of Ash who was mentally ill, joined Team Rocket, and apparently died by pissing on an electric fence! So, not even Generation X is safe from twerp-bashing.

Anyways, her fics basically consisted of why Team Rocket were poor innocent woobies who’d Never Done A Single Thing Wrong In Their Lives, and how Ash and co (mainly Ash) were evil incarnate for daring to defend themselves.

There was also plenty of fatphobia/fat shaming, ableism, sexism, and glorified abuse (how she wrote Jessie and James’s relationship) in her fics. She was homophobic as well.

And there we have it... The Degeneration of Cori Falls's Pokemon stories. It started out as almost promising... and ended up as total dreck. Cori Falls is one of the few fanfiction authors whose revisions of earlier stuff always ends up in a much worse story.

And her hypocricy 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.

This is the main reasoning behind her stories... and it's also the exact same reasoning she accuses canon of having, citing it as the main reason why she's now a pure AU writer... except she doesn't call it AU, she calls it WRH and claims that her version is what's true and canon is the much poorer AU, done by people who don't know or respect their characters and settings properly.

I used to like her fics. For like a month when I was 12 and new to the fandom. I blame her for breaking my mind. You don't mark a sex fic "R", man. You just don't. Especially not a sex fic that doesn't even make sense. I don't think even Musashi and Kojirou would have the energy to go one for hours...

Plain and simple, if something wasn't exactly how Cori thought it should be, then it was stupid, worthless, or just plain wrong, something which eventually extended to her fics... note how in a Cori Falls fic that nobody ever disagrees on anything unless they're mean and stupid and probably have poor personal hygiene as well, and anyone who thinks differently about a subject than Cori (and by extesion, all her favorite characters) are open to verbal abuse to the Nth degree.

A problem brought to the forefront in the early 2010s was Cori's attempts to play the Jessie/James pairing seriously. Canon employed the 90s anime trope of female characters hitting their male friends or love interests with blunt objects when said males acted too silly or thoughtless, and in the Pokémon anime this was played entirely for slapstick. In Stages One and Two of Cori's fics, she adhered more to canon, which meant sticking to these moments, and in Stage Two when Jessie and James became a couple her still hitting him and James not fighting back led to many an unfortunate implication:

(See, this is another problem with playing everything for drama. Certain slapstick behaviors turn into outright abuse when translated into the real world.)

As I looked over at Jessie, I could tell that something was on her mind. I remembered our bike gang days, when the boys she'd dated had used her and dumped her for not sleeping with them. And I remembered what she'd told me a few weeks ago about her ex-boyfriend, Antonio, and how he'd abused her. They'd all acted like they loved Jessie at first, but they'd all ended up hurting her and leaving her.

Jerry: And so James can't do anything to defend himself against Jessie, because otherwise he'll just be like those bastards who betrayed her and left her.

Genderflip it, and it's the same as Jamie not doing anything to defend herself against her boyfriend Jeremy, because otherwise she'll just be like those bitches who stabbed him in the back and left him behind. So everything he does to her is justified, because he's been so hurt by those evil, nasty, bitchy, slutty women in his life, including the mother who abandoned him.

This is so wrong. The way Cori Falls writes it, James has just gone from one abuser to another. And she thinks this is romantic.

Fan Comments: Fond(ish) Memories

That and because many of the people who bash her nowadays were once huge fans of hers who read everything she wrote and acted just like her. So now that they no longer act that way, they feel humiliated whenever she is mentioned because it reminds them of when they were just like her. So instead of admitting they shouldn't have done such and such or admit they acted childishly, they just attack her because she's easy.

I feel sorry for her at times.

When I first read her stuff, I thought Cori Falls wasd pretty good. I mean, I like that sort of what you didn't see' thing going on. Only problem was Jessie cried at everything and James was exuding too much manileness.

I think I'm just regular Rocketshipper, though I go little wrongrocketshippy sometimes XD; As for R*cketshipping read Cori Falls fanficks many years ago and I loved it, I think she's gifted writer even now. There was something about her writing - she was able to match her stories with anime perfectly and everything had got sense. But this what her early works were like. The latest had become being out-of-character, with repeatable harlequinish plot and many things that were unnecesary to write about... Nevertheless I still have huge fondness towards some of her stories ad I'm really grateful that she wrote them :) Ah those were days...

I have a confession: for a long time, I was a fan of Cori Falls' work.

ducks flying projectiles Yeah, I know, I know! But I always have been and always will be of the opinion that Ash is a self-absorbed little bugger, and Rocketshipping fics were kind of thin on the ground at the time. It was kind of fun, for a while, but I grew out of it--kind of like my adolescent Sephiroth obsession. Plus, I didn't have access to Harlequin novels, and I was thirteen.

I also tried to write a Rocketshipping fic of my own, whose characterization was quite like Cori's (but I didn't get very far...I chickened out at the first kissing scene). I also wrote some pro-Gary and anti-Ash stuff. Therefore, I wouldn't have been able to believe my good fortune if I stumbled across Cori back then. Because, OMG, she thought the exact same things I did! She would have been my heroine.

Controversies

Two Fix-It Fics and the Fall-Out

Back when Cori Falls accepted fanfic submissions, she had conflict with another Rocketshipper, MysticVaporeon.

Mystic had misunderstood Cori's guideline about how Cori did not accept deathfic. In Mystic's fic "Memories of Tears," Jessie was reunited with the long-dead James in heaven at the end; Mystic assumed this was a happy enough ending. Unfortunately, "Memories" upset Cori so badly she ended up writing two fics based on it.

The first one was called "A Warm Place" and it was a continuation set in her 'verse where Mystic's story was just a nightmare Jessie had.

This piece is my response to all of those "Rocketshippy" death fics out there. It was originally a continuation of Memories of Tears by Mystic Vaporeon (because that's the one that upset me the most), but it didn't really make me feel better. So instead, I've changed it into a generic anti-death piece. Now, why was it necessary for me to write this story? Well, I originally wrote it because Mystic's fic was depressing me to no end. James dying and Jessie getting over his death, living her life without him, and never seeing him again

until she died of old age 60 years later had to be, without a doubt, one of the saddest things I've ever read! 8_8

Cori Falls considered "A Warm Place" a "flop" that didn't fulfill the role of a "therapy-piece" for herself. One reason Cori Falls cited as a reason for failure was that "with A Warm Place, I made the mistake of incorporating the story into my own arc. This greatly restricted my creative liberties since I was saddled with the burden of where and when the story was set, how the events would affect my other fics, etc."

Cori Fall's second fix-it story, "Forever," was an AU that brought the dead James back to life with the power of love. In the author's notes for both fics, Cori Falls complained heavily about feeling "betrayed" by Mystic's story and that she couldn't move past the emotions the story stirred in her.

There's a huge betrayal factor. When Mystic Vaporeon first wrote to me, she told me that she was a true Team Rocket fan and that she believes wholeheartedly that Jessie and James are in love and belong together. She then told me that her fics are about the truth and sent me Memories of Tears to read and enjoy. She also promised me that it wasn't a death fic or a tragedy, that it had a happy ending, and that she'd read all of my fanfic submission guidelines thoroughly and agreed with my philosophy. (I'd already said about a million times that I have no tolerance for death and tragedy in fanfic...and that was BEFORE I started sounding like a broken record on that issue!) So naturally, when I went to read the fic, I was expecting it to be good. No such luck. -___- Instead, I was "treated" to a drawn-out (and extremely graphic) tale of James suffering and dying and the "happy ending" of Jessie getting over his death and finally seeing him again when she died of old age many years later! WTF is up with that?! I said that I didn't like fics involving death, and James died in that fic...permanently! How could Mystic think that her story wasn't a death fic?! X___x It just felt like a total stab in the back that she said she'd read my rules and then proceeded to subject me to a fic that broke my most important rule. If I'd just happened upon this fic on some random site, it still would have upset me, but I probably would've shaken it off eventually. However, the fact I was "forced" to read it and wasn't expecting it to be a tragedy made it all the worse to me.

When Mystic found out about the fics and the author's notes, she was deeply upset by Cori's anger and felt plagiarized by her actions,^{[citation needed]} especially by the second fic.^{[citation needed]} Cori's reputation took a beating due to this scuffle. ^{[citation needed]}

Fanfiction.net Departure

Cori Falls left fanfiction.net, citing several reasons. One was that she'd revised her fiction and this was no longer represented on the site. Other reasons were her disagreement with fanfiction.net's policies regarding feedback, her unhappiness with people saying mean things about friend's fanfiction. She also disagreed with the site's amount of bad fanfiction, some of which she found upsetting.

Links

• A White Today, and a White Tomorrow (unknown date)
• Site Intro (unknown date)
• Site Intro, older version
• To Denounce the Evils of Bad Fanfics (unknown date)

The Rants by Cori

Cori included many rants on her website. Some were written by her and some were written by other fans. For the rants by other fans, see Cori's Team Rocket Page.

• Listen up! The Soup Nazi of Rant Submissions has Something to Say! by Cori
• The Obligatory Disclaimer by Cori
• The Soup Nazi of Fanfic Submissions Speaks Her Mind by Cori

• We Have a "Winner!" by Cori
• A Rocketshippy Year in Review by Cori Falls (2001)
• The Pokemon Villains -- Bad Guys, or Just Misunderstood? by Cori Falls
• Respect All Shippers, My Ass! by Cori Falls

Archives

• The Team Rocket Timeline, detailing Cori's entire fic 'verse. (unknown date)
• Shining Friendships (unknown date)
• archived version of a series of rants by Cori and her friends (unknown date)
• archive of Cori's fics, plus Shigeru1313's portion of the Split From Canon trilogy by sara jaye (unknown date)

Rants About Cori

• THE DEGENERATION OF THE POKEMON FANFIC OF CORI FALLS, one disappointed fan's take on the tone shift of Cori's stories over time. (unknown date)
• The Internet Was a Mistake Episode 1: Cori Falls by Alex St. Clair/Alex 8899 (Aug. 5th, 2019)
• She did Pokemon. Now, she does Yu-Gi-Oh!, ^{Archived version} by demonoflight and commenters at Fanficrants (23rd-Apr-2006)
• Please, please, someone, help, do SOMETHING. Someone get Cori Falls AWAY from Harry Potter., ^{Archived version} by demonoflight and commenters at Fanficrants (13th-Nov-2007)