Way back when I was a wee one of six or so, my father managed to find time to leave his Air Force base and visit me on my birthday, bringing along a GameBoy Advanced and a copy of Pokemon Blue (yes, it did manage to work, somehow). It took me a good while to actually beat it (significantly in part due to the fact that my youngest brother overwrote my savefile right after I had finally evolved my poliwhirl, which I had been trying to figure out how to do for a week beforehand ), but beat it did with... a pretty dang noobish team. Venasaur, zapdos, and a Lv. 27 kadabra. Whoops! Shortly thereafter, I had a huge falling out with my grandmother, and didn't see the GameBoy again until well over a decade later, and the Pokemon game... never. I dunno what happened to it.
Eventually, Dad left the Air Force entirely and my youngest brother and I went to live with him and the lady he was seeing at the time. She found out about the GameBoy at some point and decided that it was time to replace it, and so got my one of those fancy-schmancy Nintendo DS Lites for my eleventh birthday, along with a copy of Pokemon Diamond, and eventually grabbed Emerald and Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time for me over the course of the following year. This naturally turned an attachment to somewhat vague memories to a full-on hook, and boy did I make some solid memories with them (it raining hard when I first made me way to Snowpoint, I beat Cynthia for the first time the same day I first made went to the Hidden Highlands...). Eventually, though, the two of them broke up and she left to live on her own, leaving my father as the only adult in the house. And then I made a single mistake.
I brought the DS to school without permission and got caught.
Didn't see any of the games or system again until just last year, among a massive slough of highly unreasonable punishments that were decidedly unnecessary and only served to make me bitter towards him. But that's a story for another time.
Anyway, losing the ability to play the games for a small bit of time (or so I had thought) wasn't going be enough to douse the fire that was burning inside me at that point. I had recently discovered the internet (still don't understand Dad's logic with that one), and a friend of mine had pointed out the existence of Pokebeach during the one week I didn't have to deal with the paternal problem (thank you, summer camp!), so I was able to keep up with news on Pokemon Black and White in my free time. Then Pokemon Conquest (I remember 'going to bed early' one summer so that i could watch a playthrough of that one unobstructed), and BW2... I had given up hope of ever seeing the DS again by the time X and Y were announced, but I didn't let that stop me. Nor did the many times my internet was shut down completely- rarely was I more than three miles away from the nearest public library, and that stops being a hard walk when you do it enough!
So, uh, I guess pokemon's an integral part of my 'rebellious phase'. Whoops.
Thankfully, almost everything was returned to me when I turned 19, and my biological mother caught wind and got me copies of Black and Black 2 as graduation presents, so I'm not quite as far behind the curve now. And even that hadn't been the case, I did recently find out that Pokemon Reborn and Rejuvenation aren't blocked by Dad's anti-download programs for some bizarre reason, so I've been able to play those with impunity as well. And I must say, watching someone play a game and playing the thing yourself are two very different experiences~!
...And goodness gracious, I am quite the blabbermouth, huh?