Approved by UU moderation & inspired by Feliburn's project
Welcome guys in the "UU Player Interview", a project where you'll be able to discover or re-discover some well known players of the UU community. Those people may be known thanks to their high-skilled level or their achievements on the strategic scene but also thanks to their dedication into the tier or within the community. Time to gossip !
Alola Juno I'm glad to have you here today for player interview. How are you doing ?
bonjour from toronto, and i'm doing well. thanks for asking, how are you holding up yourself?
Yeah I'm doing fine, a bit tired but otherwise feeling great ! Can you talk a bit about yourself ?
sure. i'm 19 years old, from quebec, canada. growing up i didn't really understand english a lot up until a few years ago where i moved to toronto. obviously the schools there have english classes so i grew to learn it more, though i'm still not entirely comfortable with it so please forgive me if my english isn't the best. though covid has pretty much ruined most of my schedule i'm trying my best to deal with it. i'm currently a sophomore in college and studying biology, more specifically zoology. we now have online classes and its still a lot to adjust to but i'm trying my best to get through all of this.
Oh I didn't know you were from Quebec.. bienvenue chère amie francophone ! By the way how did you discovered Smogon ?
bonjour à toi aussi. the story of how i discovered smogon + ps is a pretty boring one. i think i discovered it in like 2013-2014 when i was a lot younger and was completely innocent to the entire competitive scene. i pretty much just fooled around in some untiers until late 2017 or so when i decided to hang out in the uu room. i found it pretty fun and i liked the people there. i wasn't originally going to make a smogon account but i discovered the vr and i thought "hey, why not make a post?" so i registered an account, with a name that people still meme about with me to this day "D2P2 HD." for explanation, this was back when people thought second versions were a real thing that would happen again after bw2, and after seeing someone named B2W2 i decided to take a little inspiration. i registered D2P2 on ps in 2014 but i've long since ditched the name by then. in case you're wondering about the hd on my smogon name, the original D2P2 was taken. anyway i familiarized myself with the community, memed on the ladder a bit, etc etc. eventually i got a name change to Juuno to a. join the "ps name is your real name" club and b. so that my name wasn't cringy anymore. and that's the story of how i got my name.
And now you're trying to get rid of that extra "u" for Juno hehe. What do you think of Smogon overall ? What did the community means to you ?
well, i actually already got rid of it, haha. overall i think its pretty undeniable that the smogon community feels on edge atm with some of the recent events. obviously not gonna name them here but some of the people involved in particular were personal friends or acquaintances of mine and that impacted me and what i think of myself in general. as for the uu community, i've always appreciated it. when i first joined the room the staff were very welcoming and they helped me with a lot of things straight from the start. nowadays i think that the uu staff may not be the same as they were when i first joined, but they're still kind and very helpful to new players that i see. partially i do feel guilty for not being as active in the room as a mod should be, however i'll hopefully be working on my shaky activity. the uu community in general is great though, and this uuwc even got people from other tiers to join as well, which i think is a good sign.
Yeah despite all the dramas, UUWC is overall a great thing for the community. From 1 to 10 what level would you give yourself in Underused ?
I actually don't really like ranking myself since no matter what you look at it, it'll seem biased in a way. rank too high and you seem arrogant or overconfident, rank low and you look highly unconfident. mini-rant aside, i'd give myself a 5, right in the middle. i actually haven't been playing the tier too much because personally i think it has plenty of issues besides the obvious jirachi dog kyurem hatt etc. (though the latter two are leaving) however i think my playing skill is fine enough to still succeed if i did try to build a team or if i was passed one to do something like suspect reqs or facing someone else. i've actually been playing ru for a bit and its been pretty fun, the tier is much more diverse and there isn't much of an omnipresent mon like the other tiers with clefable / jirachi / miltank (i may be wrong on this if any nu players see this i'm sorry if i'm wrong) / stunfisk. but yeah, i think my building skills for the tier atm may be warped or just plain bad but i think my playing is fine enough.
From what I've seen you're not wrong for NU, Miltank is a staple yeah but maybe not as much as Clefable or Jirachi for sure. But yeah it's nice to play other tiers sometimes, I'm enjoying a lot NU right now. Could you tell me what's your favorite Pokemon ?
generally i don't usually pick favorites since i'm a pretty indecisive person in general, however i do have a few candidates. milotic is probably the one i'm most known for, with my post ranking it to s rank a while ago. besides a competitive standpoint its just a very pretty pokemon and those tend to be my favorites. i remember always being sad when i was younger from my dozens of attempts to catch a milotic in the bw postgame failing lol. umbreon is another favorite of mine, and what's not to love - it's a cat (i think.) its cute and its a dark type, one of my favorite types. some of my other close contenders like houndoom and absol are also dark types so i guess its my favorite type. ninetales and suicune are also pretty great. if i had a gun to my head and was forced to pick a favorite of all time i think it would be espeon. i've always loved its design, it was one of the first shinies i had back in bw2 that i ran into completely unintentionally as an eevee, and i used it in most of my hgss runs as well. it's even in my signature lol. some other honorable mentions are raikou, dragapult, primarina, and frosmoth.
What about the ones you "hate" the most ?
well i don't have much mons i hate from an objective standpoint, though there are some mons who's design i dislike. i've always found stuff like barbaracle's design pretty unappealing and it also doesn't help with how annoying it is to face. a lot of the mons that i "hate" in a way are from a competitive standpoint in fact. pretty much every spinner has made it onto my most hated list from how much ladder spams them. coalossal gets a dishonorable mention for also having access to spikes, and while forretress does as well, at least it can be chipped by hazards and repeated switch-ins. coalossal is much harder to chip due to boots. besides that, i think calm mind mons are my worst nightmare. stuff like reuniclus and necrozma obviously need no introduction to people who played the rillaboom meta of ss uu, but others like sigilyph in ru and seed musharna in pu before thwackey rose were pretty unbearable to deal with. they force you to actually use your brain if your usual answers (darkest lariat, haze mons, etc) also have to check something else in the match.
Yeah I see what you mean. I used to hate things like Suicune back in ORAS because of Calm Mind being so dumb on it.. I saw that you often change your profil picture on Smogon. Most of the time it's related to animes..Do you watch animes a lot ?
i will proudly admit that i do watch animes. thanks to covid pretty much ruining ever going outside as a pastime i've needed to find other ways to not drive myself insane. the only cost is being called a weeb by pretty much everyone every day, but it's still better than being called a furry. jokes aside, the most recent anime i watched is koisuru asteroid, or asteroid in love. i won't spoil too much about it in case anyone wants to watch it or is currently watching it but i definitely recommend giving it a watch if you're bored! it's sweet and has good animation to boot.
I'll not cast a stone to you, I have more than 30 different animes to watch lmao. I'll go check your anime tho. Last but not least, do you have a team that you could share with us ?
sadly, i don't have uu teams readily available, as i haven't played the tier in a while. however, here is a team that i built with the ultra nerd Renny
LMAO nice one ! Well that's all for today, thanks a lot for your time Juno.
np, thanks for having me!
Feel free to ask to Juno any questions you want !
If you have some recommendations for an interview, feel free to DM me !
