Pokémon has long offered two very different kinds of appeal. There is the welcoming journey familiar to millions of players: build a team, catch creatures, challenge opponents and work toward the Elite Four. Then there is competitive play, where every choice can carry several consequences and a battle can become a tight exercise in prediction, probability and adaptation.
For author Ava Reid, that second side of Pokémon became a creative spark for Winterveil, her new young-adult dystopian novel. The book is the opening volume of a planned duology and takes place at Valeran Academy, an institution training exceptionally bright and notably criminal students to become assets in a Cold War that has persisted for almost a century. Simulations of war, severe competition, unsettling technology and a mysterious mission involving four students give the setting a distinctly high-pressure shape.
That pressure is where Reid’s competitive Pokémon background is especially relevant. The academy’s contests were informed by the strategic intensity of official Pokémon competition—not simply by the franchise’s creatures or nostalgia for the games.
From FireRed and LeafGreen to the competitive ladder
Reid grew up with Pokémon games including FireRed and LeafGreen, and said Pokémon plushies still have a place behind her couch. But it was during the pandemic that she became deeply invested in competitive Pokémon. She followed creators who cover the scene and played on the in-game ladder herself.
The format she identified is VGC, short for the official competitive format run by The Pokémon Company. That distinction matters. Pokémon competition has spaces created and maintained by fans as well as the company’s official structure; Reid’s stated point of reference was specifically the latter.
For readers who know Pokémon mostly through a mainline adventure, VGC describes a different relationship with the same basic battle system. A turn-based strategy game means the action advances through discrete choices rather than continuous, real-time input. Players select moves and make tactical decisions, then the game resolves those choices. In Reid’s framing, that creates an environment that can be approachable at one level while becoming remarkably demanding when opponents are also optimizing their decisions.
She has characterized the contrast in terms of a low barrier to entry versus much greater strategic depth. The accessible path is recognizable: finish the core game, defeat the Elite Four and catch Pokémon. Competitive battles, on the other hand, bring customization, mathematical considerations, percentages and probability into sharper focus.
That is a useful lens for understanding why Pokémon can inspire fiction set inside an elite academy. The drama is not just about who has power. It is about what people know, how they anticipate each other, what risks they accept, and how much control they truly have when a system includes uncertainty.
Why a battle game fits Valeran Academy
Winterveil is not presented as a Pokémon story. Its setting is a political dystopia built around a school that prepares students for a prolonged geopolitical conflict. Still, a competitive game can offer a strong structural model for an environment like Valeran Academy.
At a basic level, both competitive play and a cutthroat academy premise reward preparation. Students in a ruthless institution may have to assess rivals, understand rules, conceal information and make a decision before all the facts are available. Pokémon’s strategic model provides a way to think about those tensions without requiring a fictional school to resemble a tournament bracket.
The probability element is particularly evocative. Probability is the measure of how likely an outcome is, not a guarantee that it will happen. In a strategy game, players can make a smart choice that still produces an unfavorable result. In a dystopian academy, that same divide between careful planning and unpredictable consequences can heighten stakes: competence does not necessarily deliver safety, and a small miscalculation can carry disproportionate costs.
Reid has also emphasized customization as a central part of competitive Pokémon’s complexity. Customization, in this context, means that players can shape the capabilities of their Pokémon rather than merely use a fixed set of pieces. Narratively, that idea maps naturally onto a school devoted to producing “elite assets.” An institution may try to train, categorize and deploy gifted young people as if they can be precisely configured for a national purpose. That does not mean Winterveil mechanically reproduces Pokémon systems; it helps explain the kind of competitive logic that informed its academy.
“Chess, but sometimes the pieces explode”
Reid compared competitive Pokémon to chess while stressing that the Pokémon version is far more complicated in its variables. She also highlighted a memorable description from prominent competitive player Wolfe Glick: it is like chess, but sometimes the pieces explode.
The comparison is useful because chess is a familiar shorthand for deliberate, alternating strategy. But the “explode” qualifier suggests sudden disruption. A plan can be sound and still be overturned by an unexpected interaction or outcome. It is an image that fits Winterveil’s combination of calculated competition and ominous war technology: an apparently orderly system can contain volatile consequences.
It also explains why “competitive Pokémon” is more precise than saying Pokémon generally inspired the book. The franchise’s broad accessibility is part of its appeal, but Reid’s stated influence is the deeper layer where expert players weigh customization, numerical information and possible outcomes against one another. That layer is less about sentimental creature collecting than about decision-making under pressure.
For players who came to Pokémon through the Game Boy Advance remakes Reid named, the distance between a first trip through Kanto and modern competitive study can seem enormous. Yet the series’ long technical and community history is one reason those entry points continue to matter. For more on the original hardware ecosystem and its continuing afterlife, see our look at Game Boy boot ROMs, flash carts and the Color revival.
A political story shaped by game literacy
The detail is also a reminder that game influences on books need not take the obvious form of adaptations, direct references or virtual worlds. Sometimes games lend a story a way of organizing conflict. An author might take the tension between public rules and private preparation, the necessity of reading an opponent, or the unease of relying on percentages, and move it into an entirely different genre.
In Winterveil, that genre is dark-academia-adjacent YA dystopia. The academy setting places education and competition together; the Cold War backdrop expands individual contests into something national and political. The premise of four students converging on an undisclosed mission further suggests that the school’s formal games may not be the whole story.
Reid’s description of Pokémon’s multiple levels is important here. A system can appear simple to outsiders while concealing a demanding expert culture beneath it. Elite institutions often work similarly in fiction: their official purpose is legible, but their incentives, hierarchies and hidden operations are harder to see. Valeran Academy’s students may be trained as assets, but the book’s premise leaves room to ask who defines their value and what that training demands.
Other Ava Reid projects in motion
Alongside Winterveil, Reid is working on Necromantica, the forthcoming sequel to her gothic fantasy epic Innamorata. The first novel arrived in March, and the sequel is slated for next April. Reid has confirmed that Waltrude will return as a point-of-view character, while Marozia also becomes a point-of-view character. She has additionally pointed to Gamelyn, the Master of Blood, as a major figure in the sequel despite the character having had little presence in the first book.
Reid is also collaborating with Emma Donoghue on a film adaptation of her 2024 novel Lady Macbeth. The script remains in development, and no distribution plan has been settled. Reid has said she would prefer a theatrical release, while remaining open to streaming.
For now, though, Winterveil offers the clearest intersection between Reid’s fiction and her gaming hobby: a political academy story whose competitive edge was sharpened by the elaborate, volatile logic of Pokémon battles at their highest level.
