 Hello, everybody. Ben St. here. Your best friend and Pokemon king. Pokemon lord. Shit, no. Starting over, I hate it. Hello, everyone. Ben St. here. Your best friend and Pokemon hero. Doing one of these, doing one of these PCP solo vlogs that were briefly in fashion several months ago and then died out without me getting in on it. But here I am, late to the party, as usual, and I'm announcing, I'm, well, hang on, hang on, let me back up. So as I speak, the Nuzlocke Conquest finale is uploading to YouTube. By the time this comes out, it'll be out. I'll probably leave that up for a little while before I put this recording out there. And I am announcing the beginning of Min-Maphnia. And what is Min-Maphnia, you ask? Well, Min-Maphnia stands for, maybe I'll never make a fucking Nuzlocke ever again. That's right. The thing about, so that I have so many fucking feelings, I poured so much of myself and my life into these Nuzlocke, both Nuzlocke series. It's kind of ridiculous. And well, all right, backing up even further, backing up even further. So some people criticize me, some people criticize me for how infrequent the uploads were, and how I would sometimes be late uploading, and just how long the episodes were, and all that. Not everyone liked the format, and that's fine. But I had a vision, I had a vision for these Nuzlocke series that kind of... The thing about the way that I make my Nuzlocke is that I take that old adage of make the art that you would want to see. Because if I wasn't making these, if I was just a regular guy, when I found Mumki's Nuzlocke, I was like, yeah, I love these a lot, and that's what inspired me to do mine. But the way that I make mine, it's perfect. If I was just some regular jack-off, and I found my channel and my Nuzlocke, I would blow me the fuck away. Because to me, the way that my Nuzlocke's are is just perfect. It's exactly the kind of thing that I would want to watch, and I would be so fucking hyped. I guess what I'm saying is that I would be my biggest fan. But I mean, that's how it should be, right? Because I'm making the things, I'm making them according to my own sensibilities. So to me, and for what I wanted them to be, they're perfect. And it's a bit of a shame to me that they're such a niche thing. I had kind of hoped that maybe if I really amped up the production values and made it just put all that fucking art in there, and did kind of the story elements and stuff, and sort of did it all in character. Part of me had hoped that maybe it could break out of that Nuzlocke-specific niche and find an audience, kind of by being a new thing, by approaching it in a way that no one had quite approached it before, and by fully committing to that. And I guess to an extent it did, my channel did grow doing the Nuzlocke's, but not as much as I hoped it would. I hoped that it would be discovered and people would be like, shit, this is a real cool thing. But I guess I'm just weird in wanting that I would want this kind of content. I guess I'm in the minority, fair enough. But since, yeah, no more Nuzlocke's, at least I'm not saying never. That's why it's maybe I'll never make a fucking Nuzlocke ever again, because I'm not going to guarantee, like no, I'll never ever do it again. Never say never. But at the moment I have no plans to do another one anytime in the foreseeable future. I'm going back to focusing on comics. I'll probably devote, and for my free time side projects, the way that Nuzlocke was supposed to be, I'll probably do my little YouTube ramble vlogs, talk about movies and shit that I like or whatever. And doing some videos with Jackie on Ben and Jackie's College Fund, which you should totally subscribe to if you don't know about that already. Maybe do some speed draw videos, more of those. My YouTube channel has been a little bit, my YouTube channel has been a little bit barren lately, because I have been working on the fucking finale, and that has sucked up all of my energy. So, yeah. Fucking starting today and into possibly forever min-mafnia. Sorry if this comes as a disappointment to those of you who like the Nuzlocke's. I know that the Nuzlocke's get a pretty small viewership overall, but I know that some people really like them. So I'm sorry, those of you that really enjoy the Nuzlocke's, I hope you're not too disappointed. So back when I started Nuzlocke Genocide, it wasn't going to be Nuzlocke Genocide. It was just going to be a Nuzlocke, only I was going to do art for it, because I was like, hey, I like Pokemon and I can draw, so I'll combine my interests or whatever, and I'll put art into it. Give it a little personal touch, just up the quality, just make it a little more high production value with my drawings. It wasn't going to have a story or anything, but then at some point, like three or four episodes into it, it just naturally started emerging. I just started joking about how I was going around killing all the Pokemon, and I like that angle. I like the idea of theming it around that and kind of building a little secondary narrative there, aside from the actual Pokemon game story. I thought that was really cool. I guess I was maybe inspired by something like The Yog's cast, What's the Shadow of Israel, which is one of my favorite Let's Play series that I've ever seen, because they're just playing Minecraft, but then all these things start to happen, and the story emerges that is totally separate from the story of Minecraft, and I really like that. At some point, I decided I wanted to do something like that with the Nuzlocs, give them a little something extra like that. But when I started out genocide almost a year ago, it was going to be like a side project thing that I did when I didn't feel like drawing my comics. When I didn't feel like drawing the champion, I was still working on the champion back then. In some of my free spare time, I was going to play Pokemon and make these videos out of it, and I didn't realize... Momkey puts out Nuzloc videos a couple times a week, and he doesn't do anything fancy to them. He just plays the game, puts in the visuals, he does some editing, but it's just what he needs to do to get the fucking point across, and he puts it out. My idea to draw original art of all the Pokemon proved to be totally incongruous with that idea. So my natural instinct, just the way that I naturally approached it, turned it into this thing that was way too high effort to actually be the little free time side project that I meant it to be. And then the time for the end of genocide came around, and I had put so much work into it that I was like, well, I've got to fucking have an epic payoff. I got to make a big emotional finale, so I made a big finale, and it was really cool. And I was like, well, that was more work than I meant to put into it, but still... I mean, it was still good, and I like the product, like I was happy with it. So writing that high, I decided that I wanted to do another one. And when Nuzloc genocide finished, it just happened to line up with Pokemon Sun was coming out and Momkey was going to be doing a Nuzloc of Moon, and everyone was really hyped for Sun and Moon, and I was riding high on that, like, ah, the finale came out and it got a real good response. So I kind of dived... I wanted to take a break. I wanted to take at least a month of like, let me go back to drawing comics for a while, so I don't have to think about this anymore, because this is not my main thing that I want to be devoting all my time to. But it, you know, because I had to keep it up with Momkey, well, because, A, I wanted to time the release to, like, as soon as Sun and Moon came out, like I wanted it to ride that hype wave. I also, because of the way we set it up, me and Momkey had to, like, keep pace with each other, and, you know, all that. So I didn't get to take the break that I wanted. I went basically right from doing that big high production finale of Genocide to Sun, to starting up Conquest, and I fucking was dedicated to making this one bigger and better and longer and more art and all that crap that ended up being so fucking... I don't know, it just stressed me out, and it pulled me away from doing comics more than I had wanted to allow it to do. And I guess that's my bad. I kind of didn't maybe manage it that well in hindsight. Of course, I was like, this one's going to be even bigger, even better. There's going to be even more art for it, and I'm going to go and introduce, you know, there's going to be more of a story. I'm going to introduce more of these, like, little side elements above and beyond what is strictly necessary. And I did, and it proved to be even more of a fucking drain on my time. And, like, it's not that I don't like it. Like, looking back, it's not that I think, like, oh, it sucks and I shouldn't have done it. I like what they became, and I like the series, but I got, like, looking at it is like a cost-benefit analysis thing. The Nuzlocke videos are so, so niche that I don't really think, I think probably in terms of, like, my career or whatever, probably the energy would have been spent elsewhere. Like, I think if I had spent that time drawing comics, I think I would probably be happier today having that done. So, like, again, I'm not saying that I don't like the Nuzlocke's. I do, I think they're great. I hope that they continue to be enjoyed for a long time. But that's kind of, that's kind of was my downfall, because, like, I didn't want to just make any old fucking Nuzlocke video. I wanted to make these big, like, story-heavy, like, high production value things that would be, would stand the test of time and be art and be enjoyed for fucking generations or whatever, or at least, you know, for years to come that people could still find them and be like, oh, this is neat, I like it. But I don't know, man, looking back, that's kind of, that's kind of not how Nuzlocke's, how most people view them. Like, I think, like, when I was watching the monkey videos, I mean, yeah, I watch some of them backlog, but I think what most people are doing is they're watching them as they come out to like, oh, who's gonna die this week? Is anyone gonna die? Let's fucking see. So it's kind of like, it's kind of, like, that medium, if you want to call it a medium, is kind of, maybe it's, I think most people view it in more of a, I think to most people it has more inherent interest just when it's, like, when it's happening contemporaneously instead of like, when it's something that's already happened. So maybe, maybe I'm fucked. Maybe in the future nobody will care about Nuzlocke Conquest and Nuzlocke Genocide and that's, that would be too bad. That would be too bad, but I guess if, I can't fucking do anything about that, it's gonna be how it's gonna be. Anyway, sorry to ramble. The point I'm making is the Nuzlocke's are great and I think they're cool and I like them and I'm proud of them, but I don't think I'm gonna do another one because they're just, like, I know they don't have to be a super high energy, a super high time consuming kind of thing, but like the way that I would do them if I was doing them, like they have to be, like that's just how I would do it. So the way that I want to do them is too much energy, the way, I could do them low energy, I could do them like in a more efficient way, but that's not what I wanna do and if it's not what I wanna do, then why even bother, why even bother making them if I'm not making the thing that I wanna make. That's what it's all about, making the thing that I wanna make, making the product that I see in my head. So yeah, I know that for the GoFundMe, I implied that I would be doing a Nuzlocke for Pokemon Sun and Omega Ruby probably once I got the capture card, but I hope that those of you who watch the Nuzlocke's will be happy with 19 episodes of Nuzlocke Conquest. Anyway, closing statement. So gonna take a break from Nuzlocke's possibly forever. In the meantime, I'm going back to focusing on comics. I'm gonna finish Champion, like I should have done months ago. Once Champion's done, I'm gonna start on Vapors 3. That I've been fucking planning for over a year, like I've known that story for like over a year and I still haven't done it, fucking eats me up inside every day of my life. So yeah, look forward to all that, if you would, and have a grand experience of this day, the rest of this day of your life, my friends, fuck you.