The Gissettison Group was first created in 1999 under the name of 'The Gissetti Group'. The two founders of the club were 11 and 9, respectively (that is, if my maths skills are accurate, those ages are really scary...). The day we met was pretty much the day we made the club. Amazingly enough, it was only a random meeting of two people in the first place which got us talking firstly.
I had been sitting down on the brick ledge surrounding the school yard, waiting for the Sing 2001 bus to arrive and take our group to a choir rehearsal. Seated next to me had been a girl I didn't know, with a pencil and paper in hand. She had started sketching a picture of the model of the white horse across the street advertising the paint shop, and I - being bold as brass in my younger years - had asked if I could draw too. 'Sure', she had said, and I had proceeded to draw a Pikachu on her piece of paper. 'Oh! Do you like Pokémon too?' she had asked.
That small link has spawned a friendship that is still going strong even now...
"When I first met Pixen I was a little bit on the shady side of how much she liked Pokémon and whether or not she liked it as much as me, so I sat next to her on the bus and after a pretty full-fledged conversation I realised that she & I were buddies in the crime of Pokéfreakedness."
Like Aaria said, it was a huge conversation. We started the chatting back then in 1999 and the results are what you are slowly seeing here on the website. Our ideas, using Pokémon as a creative conduit to express ourselves. Our fakers, our stories, our imaginations.
But besides all that... we found another person who hated Ash as much as we did. Which is how Cedar was created. Cedar, as our very first 'Original Pokémon Character' was unfortunately - but quite necessarily when you think about it - a Mary Sue. She was a character created to be everything Ash wasn't - smart, adept, female. Only problem was she was actually Ash's great, great, great, great... (etc) grand-daughter and as such had to cope with the pressures of knowing she has a famous ancestor who she doesn't want mentioned to her at the start of every conversation. More on the Cedar character and stories on another page.
The Gissetti group in its first spawning was an almost-club. At one point we wanted to increase our membership. I asked a few local friends whether they wanted to join and they agreed, but I hadn't factored in the possibility that they might not want to talk about Pokémon, nor would I really be feeling comfortable about expressing my own new ideas every week in their presence. They seemed to just be in it for the sake of being in it. Even at this time Pokémon wasn't 'cool' any more. Aaria and I made an executive decision to postpone the club and instead make the GG the name for our own duo chat sessions during the break times we had at rehearsals.
I remember the books of lined paper we had - we'd bring them to rehearsals and during the trip in on the bus and also on our breaks we'd write stuff down and draw stuff and brainstorm ideas. This was around the time we started sketching all these fake Pokémon and gave them names. We also discussed much more stuff on Cedar and came up with ideas for an episode series centred around her. Eventually, the land of Minami came along as well.
Once the both of us had both quit the choir after the year 2000, we continued seeing each other at each other's houses. There were long breaks when we never saw each other - too busy with life, unfortunately - but absence makes the heart grow fonder, you know. When we got together we would go through things, have fun, be creative, come up with new stuff then do a huge Pokémon movie marathon at the end of it. I do not know how many times I have watched the first movie due to those times. Knowing the way we used to do huge chunks of the dialogue from it randomly anywhere and anywhen, probably too many times.
The movie marathons pretty much petered off once we felt we'd seen the movies enough times. However, we didn't stop with the late nights. We did everything during those late nights; drawing, chatting, brainstorming more, writing ideas down, eating junk food, and one night even creating a website for ourselves. This was the first introduction to the online-factor, spurring me on to create a website dedicated to Minami, the island we had also come up with, during the middle stages of our early friendship, for somewhere all the bad fakers could live.
After the point in time which we had all our ideas pretty much invented, two more members were introduced - one, much closer to my family, and another much closer to Aaria's. This is how the Gissetti Group became the Gissettison Group, when we decided to incorporate the fourth member's importance and change the group name to do so. Even though we really only had a few chat sessions with this fourth member - and practically none at all with the third - the new name stuck and that's what it has been called ever since something like four or five years ago. (Come to think of it, this is also around the time that we decided to make the website for the Gissettison Group, which, now that I check, was created on the 1st of August, 2004. Wow!)
So what else is history? Well, all my original books I brought to our brainstorming sessions have disappeared into the void... :( This could be due to overzealous relations deciding to toss things out or I could have accidentally gotten rid of them myself. Which is a crying shame, because some of the stuff in those was simply classic. The time we decided to make a page-turner comic dedicated to Pikachu? The tagline was 'Feed Pikachu the potion?' Of course, once you turned the page you did, and Pikachu morphed into a rabid tooth-filled beast (which went by the name of... was it Vampirechu?) and proceeded to eat you. Or the song parody of 'Mambo No. 5' which had just hit the top 40 (wow!) and we made a Pokémon version one time when we heard it on the bus radio. ('A little bit of Jessebel, here I am, a little bit of Mew makes me your 'mon!') and we drew things like female version of Mewtwo and wondered about the new Gold and Silver games and the cool new starters which we'd only seen silhouettes of. Back then we only knew two of them; Hinorashi and Waninoko. Needless to say I didn't realise those names would change.
And of course, eventually, Gissettison history changed into Minami history as one site was deemed 'finished' and another was opened by yours truly. But will we see Cedar's original adventures not exactly pertaining to Minami uploaded onto this site? Yeeaaaah... I reckon. They're too classic not to revisit. I don't care if they're set in Kanto and Johto. They are history in the making. They are our history. And that's what it's all about.
