April Fools' Day 2016

April 1, 2016 was an April Fools' Day that fell on a Friday. In the Pokémon fandom, some websites pulled hoaxes on gullible fans.

Hoaxes

Fansites

• Bulbagarden's Fun and Games forum was renamed the Woobat Cave, the Mafia subforum renamed Zubat Caverns, and an extra Random Messages thread was created. Most of the moderators changed their usernames to bat-related ones.
• On Reddit, subreddits /r/pokemon and /r/CFB switched themes for the day turning /r/pokemon into a sub on College Football and /r/CFB into a Pokémon themed sub.
• On Pokémon Showdown created by Smogon, a Digimon theme was adopted for the battle simulator. Similar to previous years, all sprites and models were replaced with various fan-drawn sprites, with the exception of some sprites that were introduced in Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire.
  • Several of these sprites seemed to be mutilated versions of the actual sprites, but other were arbitrary drawings created largely as a joke (such as Xerneas's sprite looking like a tic-tac-toe board).
  • Changes were also made in the text displayed to the user. A few of many examples follow.
    • When the move Stealth Rock was used, the flavor text "Mischievous Pebbles" or "Discrete Bricks" was shown.
    • When the move Taunt was used, the text displayed was "*Pokemon name* said "Yo momma so stupid, she makes her special attack go down when she uses Nasty Plot!"
    • When the move Earthquake was used, the browser window would shake and the text displayed was "*Pokemon name* used Fissure! Just kidding, it was Earthquake!"
    • When the move Substitute was used, a wooden billboard with "Pay no attention to what is behind this board" written on it would appear instead of the substitute doll.
  • Smogon also released false information for Pokémon Sun and Moon.
• On The Cave of Dragonflies, webmaster Dragonfree claimed to be replacing every image on the website with their own art. To back up the claim, the top banner and sprites of Bulbasaur and Ditto used on the front page were replaced by their drawings.

References

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