AMA with The Cave of Dragonflies

Darren

For our second AMA, we will be requesting questions for Dragonfree, webmistress of The Cave of Dragonflies! I know this website has a long and positive history with many Pokémon fans, so I am hopeful that we will see lots of great questions. I am thankful to @Dragonfree for agreeing to take part!

Name: Dragonfree
Role: Webmistress of The Cave of Dragonflies
Ask me: Anything
When: Answering questions from February 10th, 2026, and ongoing

truthordeal

What is your favorite type of challenge run?

Dragonfree

truthordeal What is your favorite type of challenge run?

To play, or to watch others play? What I do personally when I want a more challenging experience with a Pokémon game is to be deliberately underleveled, usually by spreading the experience thin among boxes of Pokémon. But I enjoy watching others do various sorts of wackier challenges that I wouldn't have the patience to do myself, especially when the rules make some random innocuous trainer fight into a near-impossible obstacle that requires some fiendish out-of-the-box thinking. Shoutout to blueapple128's "Worst Luck Possible" Nuzlocke runs, for example.

Darren What do you consider to be your biggest success story with The Cave of Dragonflies?

Probably the Gen I Capture Mechanics getting big on Hacker News and then making its way into a physically printed magazine! Hacker Monthly no longer exists, but I still have the copy they sent me. The issue had Pokémon on the cover because of my article, which I loved.

The other, in a different way, though, is the Favorite Pokémon Picker, which I believe is still the most popular page on the site by some margin. I made it on a whim and never saw it becoming as popular as it did, but it's always fun to see people using and linking it in the wild.

Darren Pokémon celebrates its 30th anniversary this month. What are some of your memorable highlights of the franchise over the years?

Hmm, hard to define what counts for it! This franchise is such a huge part of my life there are a lot of things that mean a lot to me that involve it - making my website and some of the content I've done for it, completing the fanfic that grew up with me after sixteen years, meeting so many of my closest friends on forums dedicated to Pokémon. But are they highlights of the franchise, or just of my personal history with the fandom?

More directly related to the franchise itself: the glitched Jolteon that I had on Yellow, whose secrets I managed to uncover in 2024. The discovery of the Mew trick in 2003, revealing that all along you could catch Mew in R/B/Y, in a way so gloriously like the playground rumours of old. The summer of 2016 when we walked out to a cluster of Pokéstops and sat there with a bunch of Pokémon fans playing Go while someone drove in circles playing the Pokémon anime opening. Attending Worlds 2022 in person, getting to watch Pokémon matches with people just as hype about that. Visiting every Pokémon Center in Tokyo and Osaka in the summer of 2025 and just getting giddy at the big Pokémon statues and the sheer number of Pokémon plushies.

Darren

I wish to ask a few questions myself! It's quite possible more may come to mind over the course of this AMA, because I have so much love and respect for your website, and your enthusiasm to keep going all these years!

What do you consider to be your biggest success story with The Cave of Dragonflies?
What kinds of additions have you wanted to add to The Cave of Dragonflies, that you are hoping to include, or may never have the opportunity to include?
Pokémon celebrates its 30th anniversary this month. What are some of your memorable highlights of the franchise over the years?

YukiHoshikawa

As someone who's dabbled with the thought of making their own website about Pokemon, do you have any advice for first time website builders? How hard is it to learn things like HTML and CSS?

Dragonfree

YukiHoshikawa HTML and CSS aren't too hard! There is a lot to learn there, of course, especially today - but don't let the full scope of it intimidate you. I've got a basic guide on the site (which doesn't even cover any of the neat features added to the standards since the early 2000s) that by itself would be enough to carry you through making a simple website, and then you can study from there, adding to your knowledge as you look up how to do particular things. I myself started out at twelve years old, working with what little my dad had taught me in a couple of sessions of sitting with me, and slowly expanded my knowledge as I went and thought of more things I wanted to do with the site.

Fansites today are a somewhat different landscape than they used to be, so some of what I wrote in my webmaster sections is less applicable today - in particular, the internet sadly isn't nearly as full of fansites anymore! But other things are evergreen. You can check out my Website Tips page for my basic advice for webmasters.

Above all, just get creative and make the sort of content that you personally wish existed out there but that you haven't been able to find! Nothing is obligatory, and the weirder and wilder, the more fun it probably is to visit. Don't be afraid to experiment and get out of your comfort zone - making stuff you don't quite know how to make yet is one of the best ways to learn to do new things. And if you make it a reality, please apply to affiliate with me! I love to be able to promote other fansites.

FernyNinetales

Hi, Dragonfree! Long-time fan of your website here--I think my first visit to The Cave of Dragonflies must have been about 18 years ago. 🙂

Years ago, I was thrilled to see that you have a Shiny Ninetales style on your website. What inspired you to design that style?

Dragonfree

FernyNinetales Aw, that's lovely to hear!

Shiny Ninetales style happened simply because I liked the look of shiny Ninetales a lot. I had a bit of a Ninetales phase after FireRed and LeafGreen came out - I liked Ninetales' FR/LG sprite a whole lot, and the shiny in particular was just beautiful, this ghostly grayish lavender color. I dug that, and I didn't have any other styles with that sort of color scheme, so I took the opportunity to make a shiny Ninetales style.

There wasn't too much of a story behind it otherwise; I've never actually had a shiny Ninetales on any game, unfortunately! (FireRed was actually the first game I ever found a shiny in (shiny Chansey in the Safari Zone that ran away) as well as the first game I actually caught a shiny (shiny Gastly in Pokémon Tower), but I've never had great shiny luck or done deliberate shiny hunting; at the time I made Shiny Ninetales style, I think I still had never seen a non-scripted shiny in any Pokémon game.)