20 KiB
Pokemon: The Origin of Species, Chapter 12
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Author: u/DaystarEld Pokémon Professor*
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URL: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/9794740/12/Pokemon-The-Origin-of-Species
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Score: 38
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Created: 2014-09-28T21:39:25
Post:
Comments:
u/DaystarEld [+5] Pokémon Professor (34 seconds later)
Welcome back for the second interlude! I didn't mean to set a pattern, but so far this is how it's worked out. Hope you enjoy it, and as always, all feedback appreciated!
u/AmeteurOpinions [+3] Finally, everyone was working together. (44 minutes later)
Nice, though I really have no idea when Red and the rest will encounter these various plots. Hopefully soon.
Missing period:
Bode's voice cuts through his panic
u/DaystarEld [+4] Pokémon Professor (an hour later)
Well, at the very most Fuschia is fairly far from Viridian, so don't expect it too soon :)
And fixed the period, thanks!
u/AmeteurOpinions [+2] Finally, everyone was working together. (an hour later)
Sigh. I predict more walking, a gym battle and a subplot before real stakes begin.
u/DaystarEld [+10] Pokémon Professor (6 hours later)
I think it depends how you define "real stakes." Red's story is very much a small scale one at the moment, but that doesn't mean the stakes aren't real, it just limits their boundaries.
Is Red or company going to be psychically maimed or lose an arm sometime in the next few chapters? Probably not, no.
Is Red and company going to miss out on opportunities to catch pokemon, fail to save people, or lose their own pokemon? Maybe.
Worm did an amazing job escalating the plot and characters from Tier 1 to a Tier 3 story. It's a model and progression that I use a lot when constructing tabletop RPG campaigns. If I've done my job right, no stages of the story are uninteresting or boring, even if they're not all as exciting as, say, a Zapdos attack.
u/AmeteurOpinions [+12] Finally, everyone was working together. (15 hours later)
You misunderstand me (warning: far too many words about imaginary things below).
Worm was gripping from the first few chapters because Taylor had multiple threats, and more importantly, multiplekinds of threat. She had to avoid getting roasted by Lung of course, but she also had to protect her status as a double-agent from both the heroes and the villains, keep her doings a secret from her dad, evade Emma and Sophia, deal with Rachel, stay in school, and manage her developing feelings for a certain person. All of these were distinct challenges for Taylor, and their immediate mixture keeps the tension high until the many side characters and other events get their own hooks into the reader.
Taylor had several objectives from the get-go in Worm, and many ways to fail -- and oh did she fail. It wasn't the size of the fights which created a looming sense of this can't possibly last much longer, but the understanding that she was juggling too much and something was going to collapse somewhere and knock everything else out of whack. Taylor's life was falling apart long before Leviathan.
Now, I get that your protagonists are much younger, but you still have problems with pacing. You're trying to emulate a webserial, but you're still writing it like a regular novel. The story's current pace would just fine if it were a complete work... but it isn't. The party is roaming around looking for
dragons to slaypokemon to catch, which is great in a game but kinda arbitrary in a written work.It's a model and progression that I use a lot when constructing tabletop campaigns
This isn't a tabletop campaign, but sometimes it feels like one, and that is not a good thing.
You know what was your most compelling scene by far (for me)? Red almost losing his pokedex to the spider. That was the first time I was engaged with the text, when I suddenly felt a character had something at stake and would do anything to protect it. That was when I was reading because I wanted to find out what would happen next and not just indulging the novelty of Rational!Pokemon.
Then you cut away to an interlude which has nothing at all to do with the protagonists.
The big problem is that you are creating a monthly serial which is not yet quite interesting enough to hold attention through the interim. The solution is not to have interludes which hint at The Plot, but to make that happen to the characters. The biggest misstep in this chapter was you made me care about what would happen to the bureaucrat far more than the ninja, which one would think would be impossible. The problem with trying to use these interludes for foreshadowing is that the actual protagonists have no idea what is happening and no capability to act on it.
Harry-James-Potter-Evans-Verres' ambition was to use magic and science to
conqueroptimize the wizarding and muggle worlds (and the rest of the universe). Taylor wanted to be a hero in a world where the only other person who even approaches actual heroism is freakin' Skynet.What does Red want? To become a Ranger? That's cool, I guess.
HJPEV had an absurd, spectacular goal, and made an enemy or friend of a character within a few lines of meeting them. Taylor had a very realistic goal, except that every single element of the setting was stacked against her. Worm could have breakaway interludes because its characters already had massive problems to tackle, and indeed, sometimes it needed a break. HPMOR didn't need to have large-scale foreshadowing because it was a fanfic lampooning an existing storyline with plenty of its own creativity to add. P:TOoS has the creativity but but not the storyline; the foreshadowing but not the struggle.
I don't know what the solution is, and I can only judge what you have written, not tell you what to write.
I'm not sure when this turned into a review, but I hope you understand what I'm getting at. Don't you dare stop writing, but try to step away from the conspiracy diagrams and plot notes and battle plans and scene drafts from time to time and take more distant view.
u/DaystarEld [+7] Pokémon Professor (17 hours later)
First off, thank you very much for writing all that out. You get an upvote, which I normally don't do in my own threads. This is exactly the kind of criticism I look for, because it's what helps me improve as a writer and make better stories. It was a post similar to this that made me utterly revamp the last interlude.
I definitely see how I can be doing a better job making Red's goal more central to the story. He doesn't want to become a Ranger, he wants to become a Professor, which means learning as much as he can about pokemon.
I think weaving that into the story takes time though, since it's hard to make nothing but exploring how pokemon work every chapter consistently entertaining to anyone not way too interested in pokemon seriously I have problems. But part of that might just be due to the choices I made at the start of it all.
To begin with, I wanted the story to still reflect the recognizable "Pokemon journey," rather than just have Red stuck in a lab with the occasional expeditions out. Besides disliking the "Quest hub" feel that would have, I like the opportunities traveling provides to organically meet new characters and have new experiences.
Second, I wanted there to be other characters with Red, both because it makes sense in a realistic pokemon world and to provide companionship. Blue's goal is to become Champion. That means doing the general route that mirrors the pokemon games. Leaf's goal is more academic, like Red's, but less defined for a particular reason. I may be mistaken in keeping that reason hidden for now, but it's another one that will not become central to the story right away.
What all that amounts to is that, as all long-term goals, they require, for lack of a better word, "walking" (and later biking). Which means not staying too long in one place to deal with local and consistent plots or challenges, but dealing with the ones that traveling trainers would face. I see it as my job to make that walking as close to as interesting and exciting as actually experiencing it would be as I can (taking into account that it's in the pokemon world, where walking from one town to the other can be a life threatening experience).
I'm as excited to get to "the good stuff" as any readers are, but I don't want to rush through the foundation of their character development, group dynamics and experience as trainers to get there. I'm actually going to start picking the pace up temporally in the next chapter, so that each one doesn't span just a few hours at a time, but I don't know if that'll really solve the issues you pointed out.
I can promise to keep working on them though, and finding better ways to make the chapter-to-chapter plots more interesting without sacrificing those things. I'm definitely not saying it can't be done: I'm just not sure yet that I'm a good enough writer to do it :P
On the interludes though, I know they're going to be hit-or-miss for people, and that's one area that I'm okay with there being a genuine difference of preference on. There's just too much of the world and story that I want to tell to stick with Red's perspective, and I think the foundations of things have to be set up now to be meaningful later, rather than just springing them on the readers, or having them weakly referenced by some vague foreshadowing. I know that slows down the pace of the "main story," but I'm okay with that, and the best I can do is try to make both the main story and the interludes as compelling as I can so that neither detracts from the other.
The biggest misstep in this chapter was you made me care about what would happen to the bureaucrat far more than the ninja, which one would think would be impossible.
Ha! I actually was hoping for that :) It would have been far too easy to side with Janine for being the world's equivalent to Batman. I wanted people to care enough about Kamal to think she might actually be in the wrong. Not sure how to take it being seen as a misstep, other than that I just failed to make it clear enough in my writing.
u/AmeteurOpinions [+2] Finally, everyone was working together. (17 hours later)
You're welcome. I called it a misstep because somehow I don't think Kamal will be important to the plot ever again, or at least, never as important as Janine.
Edit -- further thoughts on the plotting:
I guess the problem you really have is that Red is wrong character for the setting. He's properly curious about and awed by many of the pokemon, but the pokemon themselves are not inherently mysterious. They aren't some alien race which mankind barely comprends, but ordinary domesticated functions of society, and every other person has an encyclopedia about them in their back pocket. Since the protagonists have no enemies, they have no time limit, which is something that text can do much better than games.
I said I wouldn't tell you how to write, but if I was undertaking Rational! Pokemon I would set up some kind of pokemon-only epidemic (scientists and disease are natural enemies) or writing about some kind of rescue shelter for abused or injured pokemon.
Maybe your root problem is not deviating from the original setting enough to more elegantly support the story you really want to tell.
u/DaystarEld [+5] Pokémon Professor (17 hours later)
Ahh, that makes sense. You're right, he won't be. I may be somewhat biased in not regarding that as a bad thing though, because I grew up on Stephen King novels and love stories that explore unimportant side characters as a way of developing the world.
u/DaystarEld [+4] Pokémon Professor (8 days later)
So I've been doing some thinking about your points as I began writing the latest chapter, and I realized what Red's story is missing in these early stages: a concrete idea of what "become a pokemon professor" requires.
"Become a Champion" is straightforward. Collect 8 badges, beat the Elite Four, and bam, suddenly you have more political clout and public adoration than anyone but other champions. The goal is easy to imagine wanting, and the steps, if a bit gamey, are easily understood.
"Become a Professor" by contrast is missing all that. So I definitely need to do a better job establishing it, which means a bit of editing and expanding in a couple of previous chapters, not to mention tailoring future chapters to tighten Red's focus.
But first I wanted to get some feedback from you: do you think I've homed in on a major issue, or am I off the mark in my diagnosis and prescription?
u/AmeteurOpinions [+3] Finally, everyone was working together. (8 days later)
Yeah, that would go a long way. I somewhat recall Red desiring a lab of his own like Professor Oak, but I don't believe you took the opportunity to establish the criteria for one.
You may not want take my opinions unsalted, however, since I've never actually played a pokemon game or watched any of the cartoons -- my deepest encounter with the franchise was Twitch Plays Pokemon.
u/DaystarEld [+5] Pokémon Professor (8 days later)
Yep, that's exactly what I have to work out: what exactly qualifies someone as a Pokemon Professor worthy of their own lab, and to mention specific things Red wants to research with his own lab.
And don't worry, the games and anime are pretty useless as source material or reference: they provide the bare minimum world building, and much of it is contradictory between mediums or blatantly illogical. Your criticisms are valuable as a reader reading a story, and being familiar with the particulars of Pokemon wouldn't change any of that.
u/DaystarEld [+4] Pokémon Professor (11 days later)
So I added and rewrote some bits to the end of chapter 1 and the middle of chapter 4 to focus on Red's goals a bit better. I also added a few minor lines throughout the rest of the story to keep it relevant, and edited a scene in chapter 5 and 8 to make Leaf's goals/journey more focused, but these are the main two things I added, and I'm curious to know what you think:
End of chapter 1:
They arrive at the PC, and Professor Oak begins setting up their accounts. "Really?" Leaf looks interested rather than skeptical, which is a nice change of pace. Most people outside the lab don't tend to take him seriously, but then, she is the daughter of a professor herself. "What will your lab be focused on?"
"I want to study the origin of pokemon species."
"Which ones?"
"All of them."
Now she looks skeptical. "All of them? You mean..."
Red tries to ignore Blue's smirk. "Yeah. I want to know where they all came from. What makes them so different from each other, and what makes us so different from them."
The girl gives a low whistle. "You and the rest of the world. You don't dream small, do you?"
Red smiles. "Where's the fun in that?"
"None at all, I say," Professor Oak says as he registers Blue's Trainer ID to the network.
Leaf smiles back. "Well, I'd be happy to hear about your theories on pokemon types."
"And I'll be happy to help prove them wrong—through battles," Blue says with a grin, and spins his pokeball on his finger again.
Mid chapter 4:
The sun continues to inch along the sky, and eventually Blue excuses himself to duck behind some trees. While he's gone, Leaf turns to Red. "So what does it take to become a Professor in Kanto?"
Red raises a hand and ticks a finger up one at a time as he speaks. "First, to become a registered Pokemon Researcher, I need to contribute twenty new articles on pokemon from my observations and experiences with mine. I can submit them through the pokedex, but I have to wait for them to be peer reviewed."
"Can they be on any pokemon?"
Red nods. "One article on twenty or twenty on one or anything in between. I just need to discover or verify something new. Second, to become a Pokemon Instructor, I need to by verifying ten results from other people's research with my own pokemon, after contributing at least an additional thirty articles. Third, I can apply to become an Associate Professor to work in the lab under Professor Oak, and to qualify for that I need to submit a hundred articles and verify thirty of others'. And finally, once I'm an Associate Professor, I can become a full Professor by disproving ten theories that have already been established."
Leaf gives a low whistle. "I can't quite remember what it's like in Unova, but that sounds like a lot of work."
"Yeah, but I can start making money for articles I contribute once I'm a Researcher, so it's incrementally rewarding long before I reach the end."
"Still, you'll have to catch a lot of pokemon. More than Gym Leaders have, even."
"Or spend a lot o time with the a couple dozen, yeah. If I discover a new specie that would put me on the fast track, so let me know if you spot any."
She grins. "For a cut of the research funds, sure."
u/AmeteurOpinions [+1] Finally, everyone was working together. (11 days later)
Much better.
u/DaystarEld [+2] Pokémon Professor (11 days later)
Thanks, and thanks again for the feedback :)
u/DaystarEld [+1] Pokémon Professor (9 days later)
Also, that you aren't a fan of pokemon arguably makes your perspective even more important on certain things, as you're less likely to just enjoy it for nostalgia or just because it's pokemon. I actually wonder often as I write how much of what I'm writing will be understandable to someone that doesn't know more than the very basics of the world/concept.
u/The_Mad_Duke [+2] House Tremontaine (11 days later)
It took me quite a bit longer to finish this chapter than the previous ones. It's probably my least favorite chapter so far, I'm sorry to say.
One of the main reasons I love reading Pokemon: The Origin of Species, is the manner in which it addresses practical matters such as food, funds, sleep. The combination of outlandish lore and a focus on familiar concrete things keeps the story fresh and makes the world feel "lived in". This chapter felt a lot more cartoonish.
Apart from Kamal I found it difficult to care about any of the characters. I thought Janine especially lacked personality. As a result of this your treatment of vigilante justice felt rather bland too.
I have just devoured all five seasons of Boston Legal and loved Alan Shore's (the protagonist's) attempts to take the law into his own hands, because the mixture of moral indignation, hedonism, vulnerability, fearlessness, etc. that drive and characterize him makes these acts interesting. Vigilantism is the subject of many excellent stories (I also love Death Note, for example), but because it features in so many stories, I think it can quite easily become dull.
Looking forward to the next chapter!
u/DaystarEld [+2] Pokémon Professor (11 days later)
No problem at all, I appreciate the feedback!
I specifically took the time to build Kamal's character because I knew how easy it would be to side with and romanticize the vigilante. I wanted to show that a) the people she's targeting are not necessarily demons, and b) that she might actually be wrong to do what she's doing.
That said, if Janine herself comes off as uninteresting and the chapter as a whole is dull, then I definitely failed overall. I'll try to adjust the chapter when I get around to future edits and hopefully improve that :)