Scottish Pokémon Trainer

About

Scottish Pokémon Trainer refers to parodies of the female player character Gloria introduced in the first Pokémon Sword and Shield trailer which imagine her with a heavy Scottish accent and dialect.

Origin

On February 27th, 2019, Nintendo streamed a Nintendo Direct focused entirely on the announcement of Pokémon Sword and Shield (shown below).

Many Twitter users were quick to remark on the game's new region resembling England and created parodies imagining Pokémon in the UK. One particular strand of these jokes imagined the female Pokémon trainer with a Scottish accent. Two early versions of this were themselves adaptations of popular Merida's Scottish Slang tweets. User @puritikuma^[1] tweeted a parody of user @_IMWE's tweet,^[2] gaining over 14,000 retweets and 39,000 likes (shown below, left), and user @CaptainHanyuu^[3] tweeted a parody of a @Lookin4Serenity tweet,^[4] gaining over 19,000 retweets and 54,000 likes (shown below, right).

Spread

Over the following week, fans created many more tweets and fan art imagining the female Pokémon trainer as a Scottish woman. Some examples include a comic tweeted by @Merryweatherey that gained over 18,000 retweets and 65,000 likes (shown below, left) and a drawing by @yucno that gained over 5,000 retweets and 19,000 likes (shown below, right).

The spread of the Scottish Pokémon trainer character was aided by a tweet by voice actress Elsie Lovelock, who read puritikuma's tweet and several others in the same ilk, gaining tens of thousands of retweets per video (examples shown below).

Other users began to ship the Scottish Pokémon trainer with Serena from Pokémon X&Y, imagining Serena as calm while the Scottish Pokémon trainer was feistier. Some examples include a post by @Sheery_sBox that gained over 1,100 retweets and 3,000 likes (shown below, left) and a post by @_bbdouble that gained 350 retweets and 1,100 likes (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References