Originally Posted by
Negrek
Hey there. I'm going through and reading various 'fics before I vote in the Fanfiction Awards this year. Yours was first on the list, so I guess you get to see a) how horrifyingly behind I am on this and b) a review! How nice.
Anyway, I do have to echo everybody else and say that character development is definitely your strongest points. The banter between Sam and Tommy is some of the most genuinely funny/heartwarming I've seen from two OC's, and I definitely enjoy the scenes where they feature the most. You do dialogue well in general, with Barry being another particularly good character in that regard. It's unfortunate that, for a pokémon fanfic, the pokémon don't factor into the story all that much, but at least when they do show up they have some glimmerings of personality. The humans are by and large handled very well, though.
On the other hand, I do think your plotting is a little more spotty. The Phoenix Corporation subplot in particular doesn't feel like it hangs together all that well to me. The company seems to act pretty dumb a lot of the time, which doesn't make it feel like much of a threat. Bulldozing on protected lands using equipment with your logo plastered all over it? Sending Carlos and company off with Sam to collect the legends, despite the fact that they'd already managed to screw up both the operation at Lake Acuity and the ship battle against Barry and Sam so badly (i.e. I hope Alonzo has some better employees out there somewheres)? Keeping trainers locked up in your basement because... because? I'm still not sure what Mr. Alonzo was hoping to accomplish by kidnapping Barry. You've also already lampshade-hung the fact that if Mr. Alonzo was lying about what Rowan was going to say at the press conference, it would be pretty much the worst lie ever (so I do hope there will turn out to be more to what he said than just a particularly pathetic last-ditch attempt to get Sam on his side, though it's not so much looking that way at the moment). One thing and another, it's hard for me to see Alonzo as a real threat--his operation just doesn't seem competent enough to pull off anything truly dismaying. Yeah, they were able to find and accost Uxie, Mesprit, and Azelf, but as I'll complain about later, that seemed to be more a function of it not being all that difficult to get ahold of them than that he's especially skilled at it. As a whole, Mr. Alonzo is an interesting character who attempts to use legitimate channels (e.g. the justice system) and manipulation of people like Sam rather than going the cult leader route that antagonists in the games and, consequently, a lot of fanfic. At the moment it just doesn't feel to me like he has any real teeth.
Rowan and company don't seem to be much better in the competence department. Apparently the best they could do to protect the legends was stick them in a conspicuous cave in Celestic Town, where they were so well-guarded that a bunch of construction workers who had no clue of the cave's layout or nature could blunder in and, with a little dynamite, have the legends out of there in approximately fifteen minutes. Cynthia and her grandmother serve as a deterrent, sure, but it's not like they can stand out in front of the cave 24/7, and you would hope that Rowan would be able to come up with a defense that couldn't easily be defeated by a plan like, "Well we'll just wait until they go to sleep, then." There's also the fact that Cynthia evidently has issues with just walking around people who get in your way and demand a pokémon battle (and didn't simply consider sending her other pokémon off to hold down the fort while she finished up the battle) and her grandmother is unable to do anything but stand there and tell Sam to get out of the way because she can't just walk around their battle to go do something about the cave situation herself or, you know, run into the town proper and summon the cavalry. The whole episode feels very contrived, and it just seemed ridiculously easy to locate and release the legends: Sam makes some quick and shaky inferences about where (or rather, with whom) Rowan might have stashed them--and is correct! They go off to investigate the first town Mr. Alonzo suggests, on the basis of some fog in the background of a single photograph--and it turns out to be right! They show up there and, as previously mentioned, within half an hour have already found the legends. Yeah, they then proceed to fly off--to find and heal Tommy, thus preventing Sam from having to do any further actual work towards his ostensible goal. It's not that Sam's journey through Sinnoh hasn't been difficult, it's just that this whole "finding-the-legends-and-getting-them-to-heal-my-brother" thing that everyone was like, "Whooooah no, impossible!" about actually turned out to be, well... kinda trivial. It feels a little cheap to me.
That's also why I'm a bit puzzled as to Tommy's return in this chapter. It's very rewarding, certainly, and I'm sure it will be a lot of fun to see him working together with Sam in the future. It's a big emotional high point for the narrative, though--I mean, this is what Sam was striving for the whole time, after all. He's reached his stated goal, so what's left for him now? There's obviously the mess with the Phoenix Corporation and with Rowan, but that subplot really doesn't feel as compelling as Sam's original quest. On the other hand, you say you're expecting to get another nine chapters out of this, which is essentially an entire third act--so the only thing I can imagine is that you're planning a large twist that will throw a wrench into everything and set up another rising arc. That could also potentially solve the problem that I mentioned above, where it feels like Sam's quest ended up being a little bit too easy. So, I guess I look forward to seeing what you come up with--I'm not sure how you could draw things out for more than three chapters or so otherwise. Now that you've got everyone feeling all warm and fuzzy since Tommy's turned up all right, it's the perfect time to crush the reader's spirit with something horribly depressing, yeah?
There are some other, somewhat more minor, weirdnesses as well--the police going bonkers and roughing Sam up in the process of not-arresting him, despite the fact that supposedly he was the one who had been kidnapped and was therefore the victim being one of them. It's also not clear what kind of justice system you're going for in this story, but keeping someone in prison as a "person of special interest" or whatever, i.e. not formally charging them with anything, is hella illegal in many countries--and I'm still not sure why the police would even have done that. Barry is actually supposed to be a terrorist, but why exactly do they care about Sam. Also that bit where there was the delcatty that hadn't properly been quarantined and then it spread leukemia everywhere, despite the fact that leukemia isn't transmissable...
Oh, small thing. When you have dialogue ending in an elipsis, as in this exerpt:
You don't actually want a comma after the elipsis:
Also as far as that particular passage goes, well, even if Rowan's retired from the position of regional professor, he should presumably still have his doctorate if professors in the Pokémon world are credentialed like they are here, so Mr. Alonzo should still be calling him "Dr. Rowan," not "Mr. Rowan." Unless he's just trying to be extra-disrespectful to Rowan, heh.
On the whole, though, this is an enjoyable read. The plot kind of teeters dangerously if you look at it too closely, but watching Sam and Tommy interact is worth the price of admission alone. On the whole your writing is pretty solid; no complaints there really. I also enjoyed how differently this story played out than your standard trainer 'fic--I mean, the premise is entirely different, so you'd kind of expect it to, but still. You have characters getting arrested, Professor Rowan doing something other than just giving out pokémon at the beginning of the story, and trainers actually facing some realistic consequences of getting caught up with criminal(?) organizations. While on the one hand, it would be nice to see more participation from the pokémon and how their presence influences the way the world works (for example, why would you even use bulldozers when you could have something like a rhyperior instead? Much more portable.), on the other it's nice to get away from the trainer scene and see how the rest of the world keeps running while the kids are out teaching monsters to beat each other up and stuff. You have a nice and unusual premise, and on the whole I think it works out pretty well. I'll definitely be sticking around to see how everything turns out.
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