Worldbuilding Fails

[Negrek]

I recently spilled way too many words about why pokéball shelves are bad, which got me thinking... Have you ever accidentally screwed up your own worldbuilding? Are there elements of the pokémon canon you find it really hard to write around? Or are there problems you've seen in other stories that you try to avoid in yours? Confess your sins (or other people's sins)!

Aside from shelf issues, teleport has always given me a lot of grief. I don't think I've missed any obvious "why don't they just teleport?" moments yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if a reader managed to find one. Usually I deal with the problem by making teleport unavailable, which isn't really the best way to go about it... in Little God I had to get rid of an entire character so the others couldn't just use his powers to escape.

As to problems I've seen in other stories, a pretty common one is forgetting that pokéballs exist. Pretty often something horrible will happen to a character's pokémon, in-battle or out, or their pokémon will otherwise get into a dangerous situation, and the character never thinks of recalling them. Of course, things can happen quickly, and in the moment a person may be frozen or act stupid out of panic. But if your character is watching their pokémon slowly bleed out, angsting about how tragic it is that they are too far from a pokémon center and there's nothing that can be done about this, no! NO!! Use the pokéball! The tragedy here is your character is a moron.

 

[Namohysip]

Oh, oh! I have a big worldbuilding fail that I see a lot of novice writers (and even some experienced ones) do! But first, I want to respond to teleporting.

I think teleporting is something that I work with a lot in my work. Hands of Creation pretty much relies on teleportation so the story doesn't last two or three million words. Along with that, it helps to tie the world together--teleportation makes it smaller, and therefore easier to unify (After all, it's all under the Thousand Hearts' rule at this point in time, and adding the Waypoint technology was a part of that unification.)

But I do agree that you can get a bit out of teleporting when you take it away. It limits the characters and you don't have to worry about how easy it would be to just remove a problem by running away in a literal blink of the eye. But at the same time, similar to Metroid and Castlevania, sometimes you can get some use out of having a nice power... and then, for one reason or another, taking it away, such as their badge running out of power from using it before, and so on.

But it's still a risk-reward system. It's safer to just ignore Teleport... but where's the fun in that~?

Anyway, I'll add a fail:

This is a bit nuanced, and it sort of applies similarly to how one would apply rule-utilitarianism, but:

Fail: Applying a crazy power implied in the Pokedex to the entirety of the species without thinking about the implications.

The biggest ones are when they have superpowers that can move mountains (Tyranitar) or "burn souls" (Lampent line) -- seriously, those races would either be extinguished or the world would be total chaos if those were true and taken literally. It's never acknowledged, and when it is, it never follows through with what that means for the whole world--especially since Pokemon, as it's presented, isn't a place that's really of a truly nightmarish variety. If it was, the world might not even be able to last a few years before collapsing into itself.

Here's another big one--a rant of mine that was apparently so pronounced that @NebulaDreams eventually paraphrased it in his fic.

Cubone.

How in the ever-living white god's llama bottom did that species exist beyond a few generations if their 'dex entry is true? Each Cubone wears its mother's skull. Therefore, all mother Cubone can only have one child (or two, at most, if they also use the inner skull, assuming they have one.) They can, at the very best, replace their population each generation, and halve it if it's only one child. The species literally cannot survive.

Anyway, that's the abridged version, and also why I generally pick and choose or otherwise be very careful about what I take seriously from that thing.

 

[Chibi Pika]

Ohhhh boy this is a fun one~

So yes, by now I think we all know the tale of my legendary teleport debaucle. The long and short of it is that after enduring many hardships onboard the S.S. Anne, the protagonists wind up teleporting to their destination, which of course raised the question of why they didn't teleport there in the first place. It delayed the fic for two years, and then got sidelined for another four years before I finally fixed it. Teleport then proceeded to ruin my life take over my fic.

And now for a couple of others I've run into:

Forgetting healing items exist

This one used to happen a lot, lot more often in my older revisions. No one ever seemed to have healing items ever. If a Pokemon went down, it was just down for that entire sequence, no way around it. Later on, I got better at justifying it (Jade is broke as hell and mostly relies on berries for healing throughout most of Book 1.) And more recently, the fact that healing is not a free action (better go find a good spot out of the line of fire if you wanna use a revive.)

Granted, it can go the other way too. I always have to throw up my eyebrows when a 10-year old goes out buying 10+ revives/max potions/full restores without breaking a sweat, unless they have rich parents or like, a pile of League endorsements. (Revives are $20. I have a hard time getting myself to spend more than $5 on cough syrup.) By all means, every trainer should have one for emergencies, but why do all these 10-year-olds have infinite money.

Just how far apart is everything, anyway?

In early versions of LC, I was very determined to have my Kanto feel like an actual place and not a video game world. Cities that you can quickly travel between are silly and unrealistic, I decided (me... a child who grew up in the American West where everything is 389253 miles apart.) To get from Viridian to Celadon requires A PLANE.

...Then later I decided to base my Kanto on Actual IRL Kanto and found out that Viridian and Celadon are no more than 80km apart. :T

So yes, maybe cities you can walk between in all of five minutes are a tad video gamey. But I miiiiiight have gone a bit far in the opposite direction...

 

[NebulaDreams]

So, I want to point out something I don't think a lot of readers have picked up on, which is the economics of the Pokedollars system. In the first chapter of The Curious and the Shiny, I put heavy emphasis on this when Shine is debating which mode of transport he should take (train or dragon) so he can get to Dendemille the fastest. Never mind how he's a Pokemon that's trusted enough by his trainer to use money. The method he takes is dragon, and when he gets to the ranch, the rates are judged by how fast the Pokemon is, what availability there is for that part of the area, and how much distance one would need to go to.

I think in hindsight, I should've made it a bit more vague, since @Virgil134 pointed out something that doesn't make much sense: the price of the dragons in relation to how remote the area is (Ambrette is just a coastal town). The dragon rancher's own logic is this:

'“I might as well mention this is a very generous price around these parts. You might get cheaper further east, but in the boonies, that’s a bargain.”'

She's essentially telling this to Shine, since he's short on cash and the dragon he's looking to rent for a return ride costs 30k Pokedollars. I will quote what Virgil said verbatim here:

'Yeah Dragonite are rare, but she already has one. A whole bunch even. Since there aren't a bunch of high costs associated with keeping them, there's no reason for the prices to be so high. Sure you can argue that being the only one in the area means you can get away with charging higher prices, but only to a certain extent. If the prices are too high, people are just gonna pass up on riding a Dragonite all together, meaning you got 6 of them just loafing around and doing nothing while they could easily be making you money. It's not like they'd be gone for long anyway.'

So, that's one aspect I'd gladly change. I think the problem was I tried to base Pokedollars off of Japanese yen, but severely overestimated how much it would convert to in the Pokemon world. The point of that scene isn't how much it costs, but rather, engineering the plot so Shine can teach with the dragons, which is the B-plot of the fic. So changing it would be minor, but since I am putting emphasis on the worldbuilding, it would be better for me to fix that so it isn't so overpriced. And this is why I don't do economics, lol.

 

[canisaries]

The thing I run into the most problems with in my TPP fics is absolutely the fact that I made pokémon way too intelligent. You can argue that this is somewhat of a problem for all pokéfic writers that base their works on the human world, as making the creatures mentally above animal level (or sometimes that isn't even needed) brings all kinds of ethical questions to the setting that the fic is not set to be about, and thus have to be handwaved or straight up ignored so that they don't get in the way of the actual story.

Well, what did I do to excuse my human-intelligence mon capable of English or whatever language Kantoans actually speak? By making them actual citizens of the country with full rights, as long as they pass the sapience test to qualify for it. And so in the background of my works, you see independent pokémon walk around on their way to work, pokémon with clothes in their very non-human sizes and shapes, smartphone touchscreens calibrated to different species' touches, special saddle chairs for birds and so on. Humans have mostly given up eating mon with the potential for sapience in favor of vegetarian alternatives or lesser animals like small fish or crustaceans. All hunky dory, right?

Oh wait, except that battling, trainers and pokéballs still exist and have to exist or else the source material and its events completely fall apart.

I luckily haven't explicitly bumped into this problem yet within my stories, but that basically makes the worldbuilding like a house that looks fine and works fine but will collapse the moment you go and adjust the heating. I've been quietly trying to justify the battling system to myself, coming up with some explanations and compromises. The most obvious one is that trainers do not "own" their pokémon, but the mon stays around and battles of their own free will. Trainers become more like coaches and managers. Even teachers and caretakers, actually, if the mon is from feral origins and wants to become a real citizen! Of course it's a bit of a gray area when capturing not-yet-sapient mon that can't really communicate that they don't want to be there or don't know of all the opportunities they could have if they left, but we do need to accept some gray areas for an adaptation of a magical dogfighting game.

What about starters, though? Are we really going to let a kid choose a baby to adopt and raise? No, let's make this more responsible. Let's make starter pokémon be species that need battling to evolve more than some others that simply do it by aging, and let's have the starters be free, sapient mon and old enough to volunteer. Perhaps the equivalent of 10-15 themselves so that they can grow up alongside the kid? This journey could be a kind of partnership program over the course of a summer or something, a learning and growing experience. If the two find that they both enjoy battling and the company of each other, they can continue with the sport - and that's a key word, sport. Boxing has two people beat each other up, but it's still just a sport, and the people are there because they want to be there.

But there's still an awful lot of gray area and potential for abuse here, right? What do we do about that? Well, we could make the world a crapsack hellscape... or we could have people acknowledge this and be moving away from the sport as a society. Protests and social movements from free pokémon and ally humans to outlaw battling or at least pokéballs due to the crimes and mon rights violations they allow humans to do. Only in the past hundred years or so has the real world begun to see minorities gain the rights that they, in our eyes, should always have had. Why couldn't the pokémon world have remnants of more oppressive eras, too?

It's true that this requires some skill to pull off, which might scare people away from taking this route... and there's still the fact that fanfic is really written more for fun or personal expression than to make a statement. It'd be silly to demand tackling of real politics or analogues of it in what's typically an escapist fantasy world - though I'll say it'd also be silly to tell people they can't do it. It's their fic, let them be expressive and exploratory with it. If you don't like it (and it's not alarmingly hateful), just don't read it, it's that simple.

With that said, I'm personally not really interested in exploring these themes deeply in my works despite thinking about the system a lot. I just like having things seem plausible and grounded. It's why the mentions of these topics and systems are pretty brief and surface level in my fics - and, well, also because I don't want to end up stumbling on new problems I need to somehow come up with solutions for. Either way, I'm more interested in the characters of my stories than the world, and so they'll get more of the spotlight.

Okay, that was a lot of writing on a pretty wide problem. Now it's time for one more specific and concrete.

I realized this problem when first starting to revise Seiren was that I'd made Helix die of old age. Now, when looking at the timeline of events, I've said that Helix died for the first time on Mt. Silver when the Godslaying happened (TPP event, second run aka Twitch Plays Pokémon Crystal, big event, over a million arts) and this really messed up Red big time, as he didn't know at the time Helix could reincarnate the way He does, which then leads to the events of HIM and Red becoming the cultist we all know and love[citation needed]. Now, Red's original journey takes place when he's 12 (since it's catchier than 11 and marginally more responsible an age to let your kid wander the region), and that's when Helix is first cloned from the fossil. We also know Crystal takes place 3 years after Red (the game not the guy), making Red 15 when Helix first dies and Him 3 years old before His demise.

However, the prologue of Seiren, where Helix dies again, takes place when Red is 17 and in the rest, he's 18, as there's a timeskip of a few months before the first chapter. With advanced maths, we can determine that this has Helix die at the age of 2-3. Yet He was still kicking it just fine at the age of 3 years back at Mt. Silver before a feraligatr had to go and totally poop the party.

Well, maybe Helix just did better at his first lifetime? Had a better diet and exercise? Yeah, that sounds good. Everything's fixed now, right?

Wrong.

In Seiren, we also have Helix going to school. As consequence of my intelligent mon decision, there is necessary education for free mon just like humans. It's already strange to have several different species learn in the same classroom when who knows how different their rates of maturation and ways of thinking are, but we'll assume they just make it work somehow.

What doesn't work, though, is requiring at least several months long education for a creature that drops dead at 2 or 3. There's very little that they can contribute to the workforce due to their anatomy already, and then the jobs they can do are limited to ones requiring no higher education. Add in the time spent looking for the job, and you should basically have the creature retiring by the time they get into their work life. Well, maybe their physical condition doesn't start to deteriorate at the same point it does in humans' lives? Even then, you're getting like 2 years of work at best. And it's not just this creature - how about all the other species with short life spans? Dragonflies spend only months in their adult form, what does that mean for yanma?

Oh, hold on, Google tells me the ammonite lifespan can be up to 36 years. So having Helix's life be short doesn't even give much of Genius Bonus?

Here we finally spot Mr Occam wiggling his razor at the edge of our sight and we decide to take it. Helix's life span is now not ridiculously short. Bug pokémon either live much longer as well or just don't have the potential for sapience, being stupid icky little crawlies. At the start of Seiren, Helix now dies from an illness rather than old age. Are we good now?

Well... so far, seems like it. And I hope it stays that way.

Wow, I didn't expect to write so much in this post. Thanks for reading if you made it all the way to the end, lol. Maybe you got something out of it and I didn't just ramble for no reason.

 

[Equitial]

Oh god. My current project is basically made of world-building fails that I only noticed two or three years after I started writing. Can I just take over this thread to endlessly rant about the countless faults I have to work through? I'll try to stick with one topic for now, what Canisaries previously discussed: the ramifications when you write Pokemon as completely intelligent.

The funny thing is I explicitly went in with the intention that humans and Pokemon would be equal, all while having my fully sapient Pokemon characters owned by the twelve-year-old protagonist. My thought process was that if a Pokemon really wanted to leave they could just scorch the trainer and fly away, so everything's fine, right? Right??? Riiiiiiiiiight??????

Honestly, this is something I only realized I needed to completely overhaul about three-quarters into the story, so there wasn't much I could do with the chapters I had remaining. When I finish it, I'm going to take a lot of time to figure out how the world works with humans sharing the planet with hundreds of other equally intelligent species. There's a lot I still need to work out, but I do think I have at least one thing figured: Pokeballs.

Basically, there's exactly one thing I did kind of decently from the first, and that's having the Pokemon characters out of their balls unless there's a specific reason otherwise. Humans still controlled the Pokeballs, and would return the Pokemon whenever, but Pokemon had constant presence and personality. I also constantly forgot that they were in scenes, but a nominal effort.

Later on, when I realized that Pokemon had a crappy deal in my universe, I made it so that any Pokemon could release themself from their Pokeball as long as they weren't completely beat up. As well as giving Pokemon more autonomy, that allowed me to feel better about trainers controlling Pokemon because it supported my "well if they didn't want to be with a human they could just leave" justification. If a kid beat up and caught a Pokemon, as soon as the Pokemon was healed they could pop out of the ball and walk away if they wanted. Then I added in a line stating explicitly that if a human tried to force a Pokemon in a Pokeball without prior approval, that was abuse and illegal. So, yeah, things are fine now. It's all good that children can own other children based on species. The Pokemon has to agree first. That's totally fiiiiine.

When I realized that, actually, I cannot go on with having sapient beings owned, I just tried to change things nominally at first. I got rid of any mentions of Pokemon being owned, changed mentions of Pokemon being "stolen" to Pokemon being "kidnapped", and other things like that. My first wide change of how the Pokemon world worked was nixing the idea of the PC system. That concept was terrifying in my universe, if you thought about it for more than a few seconds. Then, I moved onto Pokeballs. I initially worried because I couldn’t just remove Pokeballs from existence like I could with the PC system. However, the solution to deal with it came pretty easily.

I just had to transfer the control to Pokemon. All Pokemon, whether or not they have a human partner, have Pokeballs in my universe, at least if they live close to humans. If a Pokemon has a ball, they can’t be caught again, so that gives them some protection, but Pokeballs also come with perks. If you’re in a Pokeball, you’re able to be healed in healing machines. Pokemon already have healing capabilities and durability way beyond the average human; with healing machines, minor health problems are non-existent health problems to them. Sprain something or get a minor break? You could wait a couple weeks for it to heal, or you could just visit a Pokemon Center, recall yourself, and sit in the healing machine for 20-30 minutes. I think healing machines would even be able to deal with mild illnesses, so if a Pokemon gets the equivalent of a common cold they can just quickly get that taken care of. If you completely shatter your leg or contract something serious or something, a healing machine won’t fix all your problems, but it’s convenient. Pokeballs could even save your life, if you’re a Pokemon who’s been seriously injured. You could be recalled and saved from bleeding out.

Of course, healing machines were invented long after Pokeballs. Pokemon would know that Pokeballs weren’t intended so that Pokemon could be healed. They also would know they don’t just have Pokeballs in care of injury but also for protection, so that no one else would be able to capture them against their will. And that’s pretty ugly, but, yeah.

Making Pokemon too intelligent was actually one of the best things I did, despite it being an accident. Thinking about these things is giving my story a lot more depth than it would otherwise. Like, Team Rocket is a major part of my story, so I also have to consider how their goals would be different in a world where Pokemon are all sapient, how Team Rocket would be viewed by different portions of a mixed-species society, why a Pokemon would work with a group who considers them lesser. This all has given me many a headache, but ultimately a better story, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

 

[Umbramatic]

OKAY SO I'm gonna go on a bit of a rant here and so would like to preface it with the following:

1. This is not some objectively bad thing, just kind of a thing that's a pet peeve of me specifically, and there's technically nothing wrong with doing it I just kinda roll my eyes at it whenever it comes up.

A. This thing isn't enough of a dealbreaker for me to not read any of your fics that feature it.

But the thing I'm talking about is edgy grimdark "Pokemon Training is b a d and p r o b l e m a t i c" interpretations which I find kind of annoying for the following reasons:

1. It kind of flagrantly spits in the face of the themes of the franchise in a way I really dislike
2. There were a lot of edgy "pokemon rebellion" deconstruction fics in the early day of the fandom that ran on this shit and leave a bad taste in my mouth to this day.
3. Most of these grimdark deconstructions of Pokemon training operate on heavy assumptions about how it would work or how 1=1 things are to the real world
4. I have a friend who has a burning hatred of the "pokemon training is slavery" angle after studying actual slavery and given his reasoning I do too.
5. It's just... there are so many better ways to fantastically satirize the many excuses humans come up with to be shitty to each other within a Pokemon context without falling on a dead horse deconstruction.

To prevent myself from ranting too much I'm going to go on about how I try to avoid this!

-The Vow exists. It's an ancient magical pact for humans and Pokemon to not be shitty to each other specifically. The exact events that led to the Vow were prehistoric and lost to time but it's ramifications echo through culture and society to this day.

-"catching" a Pokemon is essentially a ritual for a Pokemon and a human to form an unspoken (or spoken if they really wanna sell it) pact. Wild Pokemon are not part of societies. The pact is essentially welcoming Pokemon into society.

-Wild Pokemon have no care for ethics and will hunt and kill and eat each other willy-nilly. However, due to the Vow they know to respect humans and make pacts with them. Living with humans for them is a process in learning ethics. (Granted if the human has bad ethics...)

-Pokemon/human societies are pretty integrated - Pokemon can have jobs and other important roles.

-There were more flaws in the system in the past - like humans eating Pokemon (mmmm, Farfetch'd) - but they have largely been ironed out by the present. ...Largely. Cloned meat helped, though it tastes a bit gritty due to being much the same tech as fossil revival.

-The ritual to "catch" a Pokemon is often a test of strength, which Pokeballs are a recent part of.

-That said Pokemon can break out of Pokeballs at will and smash them. Even before Pokeballs, as said by Drayden, they can turn on or run away from abusive Trainers.

-Support networks are set up for both humans and Pokemon in abusive situations.

-The average battle scenario is set up so that Pokemon only get minor bruises, burns, and scrapes thanks to their regenerative abilities. Official battles are tightly regulated so that Pokemon don't get too hurt.

-Pokemon are not truly owned by their Trainers - any Pokemon registered as being with a human has its own legal rights and all.

-Breaking the Vow somehow is considered a serious taboo and crime. Humans that harm Pokemon or Pokemon that harm humans are often hunted down and punished.

-And more I probably can't think of right now

Is this perfect? No. Is this more idealistic than our world? Yes. Is this kind of society a thing I wish our society could work toward? Yes. Is this the interpretation of the Pokemon world I'd rather work with? Definitely yes.

 

[Dragonfree]

I did a lot of general failing in especially the first third of TQftL, but possibly the failiest was that I managed to simultaneously establish that

1) legendaries have incredible power and important roles to play as guardians of the world
2) the Pokémon-trainer relationship is based on the idea that the trainer has bested the Pokémon in battle and can help them grow stronger, while Pokémon have explicit legal permission to attack and murder any trainer who tries to keep them against their will
3) AND YET the main character, and lots of other people, apparently feel this irresistible drive to try to capture legendaries?? The Pokémon that are clearly not going to get anything out of being with a trainer, and also are supposedly regarded with respect and reverence?
4) also for some reason people can just buy Master Balls but they come with warnings about how you shouldn't try to catch legendaries with them because they will murder you dead
5) ~but even despite this, IRRESISTIBLE DRIVE TO CAPTURE LEGENDARIES~

This entire thing is bizarre and I'm just... what was even going on in your head there, fourteen-year-old self.

(also Pokémon being sapient is not a worldbuilding fail guys, Pokémon training is way less ethical if the Pokémon are not intelligent)

 

[DawningWinds]

Tale of Legends is full of mistakes

-Characters can talk to Pokémon, but only if they were 'Chosen' by a Legend

-Professor Finnar is the rival from XY, yet still has Xerneas.

-The simple fact that Xerneas and Yveltal go by X and Y respectively, even though there are millions of different, better names they could've picked

-The whole concept of Legends "Choosing" humans

-The fact that I wrote the whole giant Ultra Beast invasion.

-Finnar was able to create a Z-Crystal.

-Faererwell and Cerberaet are enemies but I don't know why

-Tep(Tepig, Pignite) and Yem(Elgyem, most of these names are intuitive) taking forever to evolve (Yem still hasn't)

-Roman still doesn't know the other main characters' names and they've been in the same place at the same time on multiple occasions. Yet he was able to use Ches' name when he commanded him during the battle against the Malamar. I think I probably did that for the sake of the place I was originally posting it because it sensored the word "Chespin" in battles. Not really a worldbuilding fail and it's not quite major, but anyway.

-I gave Chosens the ability to look through their Pokémon's eyes and hear through their ears temporarily. If I ever go back and revise anything, that'll definitely get edited out

-Darkrai doesn't have any attacking moves. I did this for the sake of the plot, because I didn't want to make Roman absolutely useless against the Ultra Beasts, because Vire(his Turtwig) still hasn't battled; and also the Nihilego thing needed to happen to start the Ultra Beast invasion to put Kenya in a certain position later on

-Why was Finnar getting Sinnoh starters sent to her? Like, come on, I know I wanted Iona to have a Piplup, but why did I have the starters get sent in?

-The fact that Roman is in Kalos at all. And the way he got there. Definitely could've written a better backstory for that.

-The Malamar somehow got to multiple alternate dimensions

-The Meeting of Legends is in an alternate dimension

There are definitely other issues, but it would take far too long for me to list them all. Half of this stuff isn't really "world building," but it's all major mistakes I made when writing Tale of Legends. All the mistakes.

 

[GrayGriffin]

This is technically RP, but once I had a character make a joke about 666 being the number associated with Vivillion, but later on played her as not knowing any of the Gen 6 Pokemon.

 

[WildBoots]

in Little God I had to get rid of an entire character so the others couldn't just use his powers to escape.

Ohhhh yeah, you did! If it makes you feel any better, I didn't notice that's what you were doing. I totally took it as simple disdain for weaker psychic types and trolling.

Forgetting healing items exist

Just how far apart is everything, anyway?

I've struggled with these too, especially that first one. I really want injuries to pokemon to feel like real threats, not just something you can fix with a potion. But doing that leaves some questions... a lot of them ethical. And in my other fic, the protagonists are criminals using aliases, so they can't really heal at pokecenters, leaving potions as the only viable option most of the time. Still not totally sure what I want to do about that spectrum of problems.

1. It kind of flagrantly spits in the face of the themes of the franchise in a way I really dislike

I live to spit in the face of the franchise. But, really, I think there's a lot of wiggle room between "pokemon are magical friends that like to fight when I say so yay" and "pokemon training is slavery." I actually really like fics that try to complicate that relationship a little.

 

[SparklingEspeon]

OMG several... Luckily I'm still early enough to run with them. They're fairly minor things anyway.

To restrict communications and go with the theme of analogue technology for the pokemon world, I wrote in that the connection orbs (spherical devices that act like smartphones when plugged into the right device) couldn't be used to communicate with other pokemon without an electric-type to patch them through first. I then had character use a one-way wireless connection between two orbs as a plot point. Someone who reviewed pointed out that at that point the only thing stopping the connection orbs from being proper smartphones is the fact that they aren't a two-way connection.

I also used Pokémon Plaza (Square) as a location, but (somehow) forgot to account for the fact that it's been around for almost two centuries at that point and is definitely much more just a plaza... unlike what I wrote, which implies that it is.

 

[Katanaeyegaming]

The ones I see frequently when helping to edit longer works are.

1. Contrived plot points that are meant to create the illusion of power (Stuff like Onix getting watered down and getting shocked by pikachu to win).
2. Out of character scenes that flip the continuity of the world entirely (aka reverse progression)
3. Most usage of legendaries (This can lead to problems 1 and 2)
4. Needlessly drug out arcs or chunks of stories.
5. Filler.

There are more but they are variations on these 5

 

[MikaelBrigman]

I write The Alchemist, all I do are worldbuilding fails, lmao.
But yeah, I don't state it explicitly but Pokémon have tiers of sapience (Not necessarily rights, but that's just because I try to stick to the setting). Psychic-types are incredibly close to humans and all of them are sapient, no matter what. Most humanoids are sentient but not sapient (I don't know the technical term, but they can learn things, but they can't build on those things. Intelligence vs. wisdom?) Pokémon that are based on actual animals, I treat them like animals. Legendaries are also always sentient, because they have the most precedent, except for maybe the Legendary Birds (which is probably early installment weirdness in canon). Domesticated Pokémon, or other Pokémon that spend a lot of time around people, have a high chance of becoming sapient through aura overlap or whatever. Consciousness is a weird topic, because we're not even aware of how sentient real animals are, so how do we apply that to Pokémon?

 

[Spiteful Murkrow]

I'd like to think that that I'm pretty good about keeping my worldbuilding internally consistent, but I still have a few oopses here and there. The main ones I can think of would probably be:

• Not being more familiar with alt-localization terminology and depictions in settings that lean on them. For instance, in Fledglings, there's a point in Nida in which she mentions in passing that a local traditional name for Apricorns are Bonguris, yet somehow it just never occurred to me to have her or any of the locals refer to their local Mystery Dungeon as a Mazmorra even though that was the Spanish-localization term for it prior to PSMD and with how prominent it is in local life, it likely ought to have gotten namedropped at some point.

Once a Thief isn't immune to this one either even if I was more aggressive about trying to avoid it, since I somehow managed to go 4 chapters thinking that the German PMD localizations shared 'Sheriff' as a term with the English one, when apparently it uses 'Oberwachtmeister'. I mean, I found a decent tap-dance around it in the upcoming chapter of the story that pokes a little fun at how it's a relative mouthful. I will also say that had I known my German localization better back in the day, I would've probably hesitated a bit more in calling the lands of the setting with nominal importance 'Varhyde' and 'Edialeigh', but meh, that's easily handwaveable as "something something, it reflects in-setting language drift", the names arguably roll off the tongue a bit better for Anglophone readers than their more appropriate alternatives, and I found a use for the things that ought to have been more on my mind from that localization anyways.

Usually I just handwave the terms as being disused in common speech or translation conventioned for one reason or another. Probably a net wash, though. Since I've gotten enough reviews from enough readers know that the use of foreign language terms writ large isn't everyone's cuppa.

• Flatly not knowing about neat things that would've been nice to have around for worldbuilding purposes or else would've been logical to have in a setting. Cloth-based armor with regard to Fledglings is probably the biggest one of these, since it is something that quite logically ought to have been around in that setting with how metal-poor that setting it is, but somehow both Virgil and I went like five years after initial release completely ignorant that there were honest-to-goodness styles of armor that flatly didn't need metal or setting no-no materials like leather in order to be made. It's since been retconned in, if deliberately in a "it's scarce because small world with not a lot of land or resources to spare" fashion since we didn't feel like having to touch up every single scene with guards in the story, but it's definitely the most memorable worldbuilding fail of that nature that I've encountered.

 

[bluesidra]

Very recent one, also kinda touchy.

So, I'm currently deep in the trenches writing a PLA fic. One of my worldbuilding cornerstones is what happened to the Celestica people, namely those who built the temple of Sinnoh. The bottomline is, they are still around, but very few have not mingled with the clans. Those can be picked out easily since they are taller than most Hisuians, have very fair skin, light eyes and blonde hair. (I mean, look at Cogita, Volo and Cynthia. They are basically clones of each other. Some very strong genes run in this family)

Here's the issue.

I now have an ancient, very advanced people. Like, they knew a lot about the deities, science, had advanced architecture and whatnot. Basically, everything was good back then (and if it wasn't, no one can prove otherwise). But then tragedy hit them, when dark haired, dusky skinned invaders overran their lands and eradicated their culture. Unable to pick up where they left off, the aggressors tried to mimic this advanced civilization, but to no avail. Centuries later, the descendants of these invaders now live in squalor and in relative backwards-ness. Oh, and also, they discriminate against everyone outside of their own clan, which is experienced by every neutral party across hisui, but because of the story's pov, their discrimination against the few remaining, "pure-blooded" celestica people is most prominent.

Yeah. Everything was well in Celestica, truly. Where this proto-aryan people ruled supreme in their eternal wisdom. Now the same -- dare I say? -- race is at the brink of extinction because of uncivilized, dark skinned savages. YEAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH...

This might sound like my own worldbuilding, but it's the lore the game gives us, interpreted through the lense of a celestica descendant and with a bit bleaker of a setting. But damn, GameFreak, does your lore have to make me look like a fascist???

 

[Blackjack Gabbiani]

To be fair it looks like the ancient hero and the founders of the clans were pretty pale skinned as well.

 

[Joshthewriter]

But damn, GameFreak, does your lore have to make me look like a fascist???

Historically, many many cultures were incredibly racist and downright genocidal at times. It’s not you sounding like a fascist, it’s human history reflecting all the nasty, dirty parts of the human psyche (and all the really shitty ways people act).

It’s also an interesting point. Yes, it can be a shame that these people and their culture are gone. But at the same time, they could have kinda avoided it had they been willing to change.

 

[K_S]

A poor sense of math, forgetting to write out the timeline of two main protags who are in and out of each other's lives over a very long term lead to some contradictions that luckily no one but me seems to have noticed in one of my old fics (Two Paths). I wound up realizing it, and having to rewrite swaths of the original source material to synch things up, and then I started springing very vague timeline excuses.

Some prime examples... one where I was able to squeak out a fix....

Oak really needed Gio at one point back in the day during some legal issues that when realizing Gio was utterly NOT available he messily resolved via an unprofessional lawyer. Unfortunately, the event is being dragged up again in the present to cause heck... To avoid number dropping I used the rather lame "you know, back in the day, when, around the time Daisy was doing her journey", as Oak's excuse/time frame. Daisy is established as a young adult well past her trainer days, which gives a 10 to 15-year blanket for this event to have happened.

When Oak rather loopily won't budge on the date/time beyond his lame evasion... and he didn't keep the bills (something that happens before and is established as a trait), and he's estranged from Daisy and so he's not 100 percent when she went because she won't talk to him so he can't find out. and her Journey details are out of his reach/legally private since he didn't send her off and her journey wasn't mainly in Kanto....

Well, that dodges that bullet.

But previously Daisy had whined about Gio's availability and cruelty as a Gym Leader. The toss-away comment means they encountered each other during her journey as Gym Leader and Trainer... So the source/police go to Gio. He shrugs it off, he was busy and in blackout hunting Aqua and Magma insurgents in Kanto for almost a full two years in that time frame. And in and out of contact per his "work" regularly, and he didn't keep logs. When pursuing illegal activities Gio invoked a blackout. untraceable untrackable. It's established that the attacks in the League during the anime's first season and Oak's pokemon reserve were launched during those times, so established trait rather than.. ah pulling it out of the air.

When I wasn't able to pull a save...

Spoiler: major plot spoilers

Gio and Delia enter a carnal relationship and the expected happens. Furthermore, Delia was a teen mom, and Gio "knew her for some time". His initial flashbacks indicated they were close in age but the main plot pointed that there needed to be a major age gap for it to work. So I have Gio be an on and off "friend of the family" until she was of age, they met under circumstances when he was playing "everyday joe" and hit it off despite their age gaps and experience gaps. At least that's how the later/end chapters addressed it, or rather how Gio explained it. Delia refused to talk about anything Gio related, adjacent, or roundabout. The original stories and chapters have yet to have it cleaned up so the error still exist if you're paying attention to the right parts...

 

[Extension_Driver]

I recently spilled way too many words about why pokéball shelves are bad, which got me thinking... Have you ever accidentally screwed up your own worldbuilding? Are there elements of the pokémon canon you find it really hard to write around? Or are there problems you've seen in other stories that you try to avoid in yours? Confess your sins (or other people's sins)!

Aside from shelf issues, teleport has always given me a lot of grief. I don't think I've missed any obvious "why don't they just teleport?" moments yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if a reader managed to find one. Usually I deal with the problem by making teleport unavailable, which isn't really the best way to go about it... in Little God I had to get rid of an entire character so the others couldn't just use his powers to escape.

As to problems I've seen in other stories, a pretty common one is forgetting that pokéballs exist. Pretty often something horrible will happen to a character's pokémon, in-battle or out, or their pokémon will otherwise get into a dangerous situation, and the character never thinks of recalling them. Of course, things can happen quickly, and in the moment a person may be frozen or act stupid out of panic. But if your character is watching their pokémon slowly bleed out, angsting about how tragic it is that they are too far from a pokémon center and there's nothing that can be done about this, no! NO!! Use the pokéball! The tragedy here is your character is a moron.

This is interesting, because in Rain Fall, it's post-apocalypse and with most of civilization being ruined after Team Aqua's victory, pokeballs are in short supply. Digitized Pokeballs would be left in old systems, be slightly corrupted, or the materializing machines may refuse to work after being left for >10 years. Even the backup generators should have long since failed.

So yes, there SHOULD be emergency backup shelves in my fic, for the sole purpose of severe catastrophe (seriously, the Pokemon world goes through them every couple years, they should have fail safes)