About

Welcome to Greenfield City, a site for fans of Pokémon and Sonic the Hedgehog. This is my own little space, which I've created in order to share resources, useful facts, experiences, and opinions with you. I hope you'll enjoy your stay.

The site is called Greenfield City because it was being made entirely from scratch. I had made fansites before, when I was a kid, but I gave up on them at a certain point when I felt I had nothing more to say. I decided to not reference my previous fansites and start anew, with entirely new content, layout, and organization.

My goal with this site is to bring a mix of content. I want to make pages that organize information in a useful way for people playing the games. I want to write opinion pieces and interpretations on the material. And I want to bring together historical or 'lore' information in one place that is easy to understand, with citations for everything; I want the claims I make to be verifiable. I also want to be whimsical and fun!

I'm interested in making it easier to play older games on modern software, preserving games, and ROM hacking. I also enjoy commenting on various aspects of game design and aesthetics.

Genesis

I used to be really into fansite culture, running a few sites myself and frequenting plenty of fansites. As that culture died in the 2010s, working on my site felt increasingly irrelevant and pointless. I fell out of fandom for years, and I thought fansite cultue was truly dead. I considered starting one on Neocities every now and then, but I had no idea what to say. I didn't want to make a really intricate graphics-heavy layout like a lot of the main sites on Neocities. I also didn't want to rehash what was done in the 2000s - the culture has changed, fandom has changed, and the games have changed, and it makes no sense to pretend that they haven't. I ran into some Pokemon websites on Neocities that felt like they had adapted to the modern times (you can see them in the links), and I was stunned. It seemed there were still people who had things to say about Pokemon, and who were contributing something new. It got me thinking - did I have something I wanted to say?

The idea that I had something to contribute was critical to motivating me to start a site. I used to keep up with major releases of Pokemon and Sonic and other series, but with time (and disappointing releases), I stopped buying every new release that came out. This led to me feeling out of sync with the fanbase. Back in the day, it felt like you could conceivably know 'everything' about these properties, but today, it seems that there is an astounding volume of information and somehow every ten-year-old with a YouTube connection knows all of it. What did I have to say when I didn't know every single thing that had happened in the ten years I wasn't buying every game? I felt that I was outdated or even obsolete. Realizing that there were still new approaches to take to old material made me understand that new fansites don't have to be an exercise in nostalgia - they can represent a fresh take on an old practice.

There was another motivation - my frustration with social media and how it has affected fandom. Social media sites seem to cause a centralization of beliefs, headcanons, artistic interpretations, etc. that I find alienating. Fansites aren't perfect, but they are definitely a representation of the webmaster's particular aesthetic sensibilities, technical capabilities, opinions, beliefs, priorities, desires, etc. Additionally, the use of highly centralized social media that algorithmically promotes high-engagement (aka high outrage) content means that fandom moves very quickly and can even become hostile. Looking at modern fansite culture showed me there was an alternative that was slower, more considerate, and less outrage-oriented. I would love to model a version of fandom that incorporates those values.

I originally only wanted to make it a Sonic website to document my findings on Chao, but I kept going back to Pokemon. I had gotten into ROM hacking and was frustrated at how opaque a lot of it was. I figured this would be a good place to document my findings for anyone else who is struggling through Discord servers and Pokecommunity threads. And it turns out I also have a lot of thoughts on things like how cities look in Johto or the music thoery behind the OST, things I hadn't seen on a fansite. Why not write them here? This iteration of my Pokemon fansite was definitely very different from previous attempts, but that's how I want it - I'm not the same person I was before, and different things about the game interest me now.

The website has grown slowly and a little chaotically. Instead of adding a lot of new pages, I often add a page and then add a new section to it, or rewrite it, or update the images. This makes it easier for me to update in smaller chunks, rather than having to wait to write one large thing and publish it. It helps me keep moving forward and accomodates my schedule as a working adult.

About me

Call me Goolix. I'm a woman, an American, and a life-long Pokemon and Sonic fan. I'm a general fan of Nintendo properties.

Link to me

If you like this website and would like to link to it using a cute button, we have an 88x31px button you can use! Please use the following code below to upload it. You may upload it to your own image hosting service if you would like, but please keep the styling so it appears as pixel art and not blurry.

Copy Button HTML

    <a href="greenfieldcity.neocities.org">
   <img src="https://i.imgur.com/xtjcflN.png" 
   width="88" height="31" 
   style="image-rendering: pixelated; 
   image-rendering: crisp-edges;">
</a>