The toughest choice of your childhood: which starter Pokemon do you choose?

As a kid, i watched the Pokemon anime and played with the cards for years before I ever had a copy of the game. Parents wanted me to wait until I was at least old enough to be able to read. Santa apparently agreed, not letting me join in on the "cool gamer club" until I could read Magic Treehouse.

Unfortunately, that means I actually started with Pokemon FireRed on the Gameboy Advance SP instead of Pokemon Red on the Gameboy, but the principle remains the same. I wasn't the brightest kid -- I remember thinking I had to pick the starter that was on the box, forcing me to skip out on even considering Bulbasaur or Squirtle in favor of Charmander instead (which would promptly become my over-leveled HM Mule for the rest of the game with cut, fly, strength, and blast burn as its final moveset :P)

I remember the first time I entered Viridian forest, my poor Charmander got poisoned by a random poison-sting. I didn't know the glitch effect was supposed to indicate that your Pokemon was losing HP in your party while you walked around. My tiny child mind panicked and went crying to my parents. They, not knowing either, telling me "Maybe you played it too long and broke it". Thankfully my puny 90mins of playtime wasn't enough to break the game, but I was so panicked that I ended up quitting the game without saving and starting over in hopes that it would "fix the glitch". It worked... until I got poisoned again in the same forest.

Finally, my stubbornness overcame my panic. I was desperate to play a real Pokemon game, and not even a wonky glitch was gonna stop me. I was fully prepared to play the entire game with the glitch effect. Imagine my surprise/relief when it stopped after visiting a Pokemon Center!

Funnily enough, I ended up abandoning FireRed as a kid. Turns out, a level 71 Charizard with Cut/Fly/Strength/Blast Burn & a bunch of level 10-20 random pokemon from the early game wasn't gonna be good enough to beat the Elite 4 (especially Lance). I'd always run out of PP during the Lance fight, and had no way of being able to heal. I knew I could send in fodder to revive if Charizard fainted, but I could never figure out how to heal PP as a child. I ended up beating Sapphire as my first Pokemon game finished (with an overleveled Swampert because it was the blue starter that matched the box), then LeafGreen with Venusaur (which again, matched the box), before finally returning to the game, catching the legendary birds, and finally beating my first ever Pokemon game :P

• Fun Fact: childhood Derpy_Cat actually ended up wasting the Master Ball on a Ditto. The anime said it was a clone of Mew, so I thought it was super rare and I was out of other Pokeballs. The cope is real **

Pokemon has quite literally been my autistic-fixation my entire life, and even as an adult, it still continues to hold a prominent place in my life <3