Cori Falls

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.
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. Shining Friendships - The Library, disclaimers. "And just for the record, a flame disguised as constructive criticism with a patronizing little "I'm just trying to help by telling you this" is still a flame as far as I'm concerned." 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.To Denounce the Evils of Bad Fanfics 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.Respect All Shippers, My Ass! 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. "Also about the characterization of Tracey in this fic -- I really do think he's a pervert. I've hardly ever seen him making sketches of pokemon, like he says he does -- it's almost always Officer Jenny, Nurse Joy, or some other female trainer. And then, he's usually concentrating on their boobs, and he's always got this perverted leer on his face while he sketches. At least Brock just flirts with girls and backs off when they shoot him down -- he's funny and harmless. Not Tracey, though. That guy just disturbs me. *shudder* - the end notes to What the BLANK?!
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. In Which Romance Kills Characters Personalities
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 "This story was a long time in the making. My good friend, Shigeru1313, and I actually started thinking of writing this trilogy about a year ago. We'd been reading episode guides for Master Quest and learning about what was going to be happening in Advanced Generation and were extremely unhappy with what we saw. Between all of the screwed up stuff the show's writers were doing with Gary and the way Jessie, James & Meowth were continuing to get screwed-over in increasingly cruel and demeaning ways, we just didn't want to write stories within the canon of the anime anymore. We'd put too much work into our timelines and stories about Team Rocket & Gary to see it get ruined by sub-par writing on the show. So, we decided to break away from series canon and do our own thing in order to remain true to the backgrounds and characterizations we'd established for our favorite characters." - from her endnotes to A White Today, part 3 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. An older version of her website's intro page
* 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===
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===
 
 
 
 
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:
=== Fan Comments: Fond(ish) Memories ===
For all the criticism and mockery of Cori and her fics, there were just as many people who'd read her fics in her heyday and genuinely loved them. Some even still have a soft spot for her as one of the first Rocketshippy authors they'd ever read.
==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. 
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." from the author's notes for Forever
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.
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, especially by the second fic. Cori's reputation took a beating due to this scuffle. 
===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. 1. I've revised many of my fics since posting them on , which means that the versions on this site were no longer the best or most up to date.<Br>
2. I don't agree with 's ban on reviewing fics more than once. It gets on my last nerves when people say mean things about my friends' fics, and there's nothing I can do to defend them if I've already reviewed the story...or when I can't add author's notes to or defend my own work.
3. I also don't agree with 's lax attitude towards the material that gets posted here. I'm all for freedom of expression, but many fics on this site cross the line. Without any kind of content guidelines, has gotten completely out of hand. I'm an extremely sensitive reader, and I no longer wish to be part of a site that's become overrun by material that I find offensive or upsetting. -- Cori Falls's fanfiction.net profile and why she left the site
==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)
* by demonoflight and commenters at Fanficrants (23rd-Apr-2006)
* by demonoflight and commenters at Fanficrants (13th-Nov-2007)
==Notes==
==References==
Category:Fanwriters