"Swamping Ground" by Flyg0n
Warm, thick mud cocooned Marshtomp up to his neck. He twitched his two tail fins restlessly, flexing his arms as he peered from his spot in a marsh, scanning the area for trainers. He narrowed his eyes, then sighed, blowing a thick mud bubble. Despite sticking near a main route not far from one of the towns in hopes of meeting a trainer, he hadn’t seen anyone particularly interesting for the past two days.
There had been a few travelers, but when he challenged them and they didn’t send out a pokemon for him to battle, he sent them running with a blast of muddy water. The nerve of some humans, just walking
! Didn’t they know how rude it was to decline a challenge? Especially traveling along a route like this.
Read the rest on: Thousand Roads
Judge Comments
Dragonfree
This was an interesting one! I liked how you show the POV of a Pokémon with a strong sense of agency, who wants a trainer but wants specific things out of that relationship and makes his own calls and choices about it until he finds someone he likes, and that the
other Pokémon shown all broadly have a sense of agency too rather than any of them being throwaway silent extras - the wild Zigzagoon raring to fight and annoyed when it's interrupted, Taillow choosing to stay when Marshtomp leaves, the Electrike who tells Marshtomp he needs to keep his trainer in check. All in all you pretty clearly portray a world where Pokémon are in control of their own fates.
You also get across very clearly from the start how much Marshtomp just wants some good intense battles; many of these sorts of stories of unhappy wild Pokémon becoming happy when caught by a trainer kind of just take it as a given that the Pokémon will be better off with the trainer who catches them because it's a trainer, but you really take the time to establish why Marshtomp is exactly the sort of person who would vibe with how Simon trains in particular, and that's absolutely crucial here.
I really appreciated Felicity and the whole section about her. It's fun that she's doing pageants but insists on doing it with Pokémon that
aren't commonly considered cute or charismatic (love her tsundere Voltorb), and the fact Felicity herself
notices Marshtomp isn't happy, apologizes for getting carried away when she captured him, and encourages him to find somebody who'll make him happier is great. Characters who are openly and enthusiastically 'girly' are frequently cartoonified and made obnoxious, and I worried you were going that direction with her initially, but actually she's just a genuinely good, sensitive person whose enthusiasm is infectious but still cares and respects when someone's just not into it, and that's pretty cool.
And along those lines, I also liked a lot how Marshtomp was skeptical of this pageant thing from the start, found the idea baffling and the appeal nonexistent, but still gave it a fair shake anyway - before deciding it still wasn't for him. The common tropes, when it comes to this sort of thing, tend to be either to ridicule it throughout and have the character refuse to participate and hate it if they're forced to, or to have the character turn out to love it when they try; it's weirdly rare to see fictional characters willing to try things they're skeptical of without it necessarily changing their opinion! Dunno, it's a small thing but it stuck out to me.
I was a lot less enamoured with the Karina section, however. She feels very much like a one-dimensional caricature, rather than like a genuine person who's overcorrected in her efforts to be maximally ethical, and I couldn't shake the feeling she was there as some kind of veiled jab at other fanfics or authors. Her character is treated with great contempt by the narrative, and while the way she trains is obviously making her Pokémon miserable and she's not paying any real attention to what they actually want and need, some of the ways the story actually 'argues against' her strike me as pretty weak, undermining the point the fic is making.
"If we didn't want to fight, we could just stop" is a pretty naïve oversimplification, for instance; if one party in the battle wants to keep fighting and the other doesn't, they may not in fact be able to just unilaterally stop, even without getting into the more complicated quagmire of how people do often do things they don't actually want. Karina is absolutely being overzealous in stopping every battle early when both participants are obviously still enthusiastically into it, but it's really not in principle unreasonable to think a battle might ever go too far! Marshtomp has every right to be annoyed by her inattentiveness, her absolute refusal to notice when the Pokémon
are enjoying themselves and want to continue - but instead of focusing on what she's actually doing wrong, he's breezily acting like a Pokémon ever fighting longer than it really wants to simply
could never happen, and that just really doesn't pan out.
And when she chides Marshtomp about not getting consent before starting a fight with the Zigzagoon - well, again, clearly she's completely incapable of reading Pokémon's body language, but it sits wrong with me how the story seems so scornful of the notion that maybe sometimes a passing Pokémon might
genuinely not be up for a fight (in which case it
would be pretty rude to attack them out of nowhere). You write the story
around Karina so that she is always obviously and obnoxiously wrong in thinking a Pokémon may not want to fight, but realistically, without the author's hand choosing to arrange events so that every Pokémon they encounter is itching for a battle, sometimes she
wouldn't be wrong about that. Marshtomp repeatedly calls Karina insulting and demeaning and says she has no respect for Pokémon's ability to make their own choices - but what she's
actually doing is being extremely over-cautious about trying to make sure they
do make their own choices, while also simultaneously being very bad at recognizing when a free choice has in fact been made, and seemingly having no conception of this or interest in understanding them better. Once again, that's plenty of reason to leave her, but instead, Marshtomp continually frames her as if the very notion of any Pokémon ever not being up for a fight is just ludicrous and irritating - at one point he even retorts that
this is what they were made for, as if Pokémon are just a homogenous mass that all inherently want the same thing.
It's fine for a character to think like that, of course - a Pokémon whose true love is battles, in a world where most Pokémon feel that way, might easily think not wanting to fight is just weird and silly. But because Karina is such a flat caricature who is obviously being ridiculed by the narrative, it feels like we're just meant to agree with Marshtomp. And while Karina
is a terrible trainer, that's
not because it's silly to think a Pokémon could ever not feel like fighting. By presenting Marshtomp's opposition to her in such absolutist terms that don't really hold up to scrutiny, it kind of undermines the real reasons she's bad - hence why I'm feeling compelled to 'defend' her here, even though she really is a cartoonishly incompetent caricature!
Later, we get Ember, who's got a similar deal going on - loudly, wrongly concerned about Pokémon's wellbeing when they're actually fine and having a great time. Marshtomp is absolutely incensed that he'd act like a situation where a trainer has several of his Pokémon gang up on another is worrying:
Being talked about like they all hadn’t chosen this? Like they were just stupid? Too dumb to think for themselves? And this just
bugs me. Ember
doesn't know anything about whether they chose this. Marshtomp's take here relies on the idea that it's just
impossible that any of them would be there if they didn't want to be - but it's simply a fact, in the real world, that sometimes people
do wind up in and stay in abusive situations, for all sorts of reasons, and it's
not because they're all just too dumb to think for themselves. It's
perfectly reasonable to be at least a little concerned that someone you see being pummeled by several others is not necessarily consenting and able to stop it of their own volition: what exactly
would Marshtomp actually be able to do here if he really
were being forced into it, when he's thoroughly outnumbered? And the fact Simon's response is not any form of clarification but rather "Don't tell me how to train my Pokémon" really doesn't help matters - that's an
alarming response, one that implies Simon thinks he just
has the right to subject them to whatever he wants because they're his Pokémon. While obviously the story tells us that's not actually what he means and he's just being defensive and hostile because people keep doing this (which is fair - people getting exhausted with having to explain themselves to annoying strangers is absolutely a real thing that happens), it should be entirely unsurprising that Ember would take it as confirmation that he doesn't care.
Again, it's fine for Marshtomp's
character to be annoyed by Ember even if his actions are perfectly reasonable; he's easily the sort of character who would be. But it feels like we're meant to be cheering for Marshtomp attacking this kid whose only crime is
speaking up and offering to help when he legitimately thinks someone is being abused. And I really just can't cheer for that as it stands.
This all brings us to Simon. I actually enjoyed a lot how you essentially took the stereotypical asshole rival character and reinterpreted him to just be kind of aloof and socially awkward and hyperfocused on becoming stronger. Simon is talking and responding
exactly like the mean rival who treats his Pokémon as tools, but through his Pokémon you establish that it's really just that he's guarded and hostile and awkward and has a hard time making friends, and they feel he does in fact respect them. The moment where he looks hurt, and the slight bit of quiet vulnerability that he shows when he thanks Marshtomp for defending him at the end, suggest understatedly that he's not very used to anyone actually standing up for him, and it's sweet that Marshtomp does and that Simon's able to express his appreciation for that even if he's not very good with social skills.
However, I really wish the depth to him were more shown and not just told before that point. It kind of came as a surprise to me when Marshtomp started insisting that Simon was his friend - because as far as we could see onscreen, Simon had at that point literally not done
anything to suggest he particularly valued or cared about his Pokémon or their choices! I'm sure he
did, but you haven't actually shown it, and that makes it come across pretty weirdly when Marshtomp is suddenly ready to throw down to defend his honor - Simon really
has been acting like kind of an uncaring asshole
as far as we've seen.
After all, he's introduced calling Marshtomp a "weakling" - not exactly a great sign of respect towards anyone, but definitely not toward a stranger. Then he silently throws a ball at him when he's on his last legs and unilaterally declares he has a new name now when he doesn't break out - he makes no effort to verify whether Marshtomp is up for or would be into the kind of really intense battle training that he does, and is just kind of immediately acting like he owns him. (Felicity rightly apologized to Marshtomp for getting carried away with getting him into pageants without consideration for whether that was what he wanted - but the only difference between what she did and what Simon just did is that
by coincidence Simon's niche just
happens to be the one Marshtomp actually prefers, so Simon doesn't actually have to own up to it.) Marshtomp seems to decide that the fact Simon used a "fancy" ball means he "really cares" - but it sounds like the one thing that's fancy about it is that it
breaks less easily, so the thing it shows he
cares about is basically just that it's harder for the Pokémon to break out, right? Which, again, suggests if anything that he
doesn't respect Pokémon's agency much. And then you describe them
having battles, and Simon approving of
his battle performance obeying Simon's orders. Hardcore battling is obviously what Marshtomp wants, so it makes sense he's fine with this and it's exactly what he was looking for - but by itself it does nothing to show Simon respects or cares for his Pokémon beyond the fact they can win battles for him. All in all, I half-expected the point of this section was going to be that Marshtomp's initially taken with his effective training techniques but then reluctantly leaves him when he realizes he's a terrible person, all the way until you had the Pokémon start to explain that he's just misunderstood.
I think to make this work well, we really need to see Simon
actually treat Marshtomp with respect. That doesn't mean changing his personality, or making him less aloof or battle-focused - just showing at least some bit of Marshtomp
not wanting exactly what he wants and him still respecting that, in his own way. (Say, Marshtomp disagrees with his judgement in battle, does something out of line with what he commands, and Simon looks impressed and changes course, coming up with something new that fits into Marshtomp's strategy, until they win through their combined efforts.) Without that, it feels empty when Marshtomp insists Simon respects him - he's just pulling it arbitrarily out of thin air. A trainer who's superficially offputting but actually a good person, who loves and respects his Pokémon in ways they can see but the world can't always, is a good concept and I really dig it; I just don't think you actually do enough here to
show that he's actually a good person, other than having his other Pokémon just declare so.
Finally, there are some typos and mistakes, especially in the second half - may want an extra round of proofreading.
So all in all, this story was a mixed bag for me. I love several of the things you're doing, and it's an interesting and different exploration of the theme - we don't all that often see Pokémon really
choosing their trainers based on their own firm standards, nor Pokémon who actively
prefer trainers who push them hard over the goody-two-shoes. But I disliked the caricaturized approach to it - it feels like in your eagerness to write the "good guys" who act very concerned about the treatment of Pokémon as condescending and annoying while the "bad guy" who acts like he doesn't give a damn is actually good, you wound up with something that ultimately just feels kind of incoherent to me. I think with a more nuanced approach to these characters this could be a great little story exploring Pokémon agency and choices, but as it is I think the way it's presented is just a bit frustrating.
HelloYellow17
Marshtomp time, let’s GO!! Also omg is this title a pun? I LOVE IT AHAHAHA.
Lololol how DARE people walk and mind their own business without fighting him! He does have a bit of a point though—in a world of Pokémon, it’s probably not smart to travel without one for protection.
Aw this trainer is so sweet! Very soft and considerate of her Pokémon—hopefully not too protective, but that’s to be determined.
Hmmm yeah I’m detecting some overprotective vibes here, and Taillow isn’t a fan. Don’t think Marshtomp will be, either!
I’m enjoying this so far. I’ve seen a handful of fics that show what it can be like when a trainer
forces their Pokémon to fight or pushes them too far, but I’ve never seen it from this perspective where a trainer is constantly holding them back.
Oh boy. This next trainer is a contest participant, I’m calling it. Also—love the description inside the Pokéball!
Hahaha CALLED IT. Can’t tell if Voltorb actually dislikes being there or if he’s just a tsundere. xD
Awww good on Felicity for noticing and giving Marshtomp the choice. She’s a sweetheart. And props to her for giving Swalot a chance to shine!! I love that her team didn’t consist of the conventionally “pretty” or “cute” Pokémon, but was more unique than that. Honestly, respect.
Aaaa okay I LOVE LOVE LOVE the direction this story took! Just gonna dump out my thoughts:
I adore that, at first, Simon was kind of portrayed as your stereotypical bully of a trainer with how he behaves and talks. The training is harsh, but that’s why his team
likes it. I adored the fact that Thel defended his trainer, and that they all knew him well enough to know, without a doubt, that he cared for them.
I really love all of the takes here, and the way you’ve portrayed Pokémon and humans. To be honest, it’s really refreshing to see a story where tough battles are a
good thing—nothing against the edgier stories that say training is
all wrong and abusive, but it’s not my flavor and, frankly, I feel like that argument is overdone.
This is my preferred take on the Pokémon world: it’s really not about the battling, it’s about taking what each individual Pokémon wants into consideration. The first girl protected her Pokémon and others from getting hurt, but completely disregarded her team’s wishes and did not respect them. Felicity had a great balance of enjoying things with her team, but also respecting their wishes and giving them the choice to leave or stay. And Simon, despite the fact that his methods are harsher than the norm, still deeply cares about his Pokémon. If a Pokémon didn’t want to be on his team, I have no doubt that he would have let them leave if they desired.
A really lovely story, and I love the way it portrays training culture and where Pokémon fit into the picture! I’m absolutely in love with this take, aaaaa. Great job!!
kyeugh
I have very mixed feelings about this entry. I’ll start with the good.
My favorite part of the story was Marshtomp’s time with Felicity. There’s a lot to love about what’s going on there. I got a solid chuckle out of the way that Marshtomp tried to commiserate with Voltorb only for it to turn out that Voltorb secretly likes the pageants and is just too embarrassed to admit it. The notion overall that a trainer can be perfectly compassionate to her pokémon and still not be the right fit for an individual pokémon is a good one, and I really liked hearing her own pokémon’s takes about it. Marshtomp’s attitude here was interesting too, I think—I liked the way he was willing to stick it out for his trainer just because she was nice and he cared about her, even though he didn’t really like the pageantry all that much.
But Marhstomp is a rough-and-tumble kind of pokémon, so obviously that didn’t work out for him. Simon is an interesting character, and different from the sort of trainer I usually see in fanfiction. He’s not an outwardly compassionate or loving guy, but he does care for his pokémon. That care is demonstrated in the way that he gives his pokémon what they want, and it seems he’s careful to choose only pokémon whom he’s sure are compatible with what he’s able to provide, which is stern, intense battle training. That’s what Marshtomp wants, and he thrives in that environment. There’s nothing wrong with that, necessarily, although it’s easy to see why people might think otherwise—I’ll talk about my feelings on that later.
I think Marshtomp’s jumping between trainers feels a bit like job-hunting, and his time with Felicity reinforced that feeling. It’s a neat take. Here, the relationship between pokémon and humans feels transactional—Marshtomp is willing to deal with the pageant stuff even though he doesn’t care about it because the love he receives in return makes it worth it to some extent, in his view. But it’s not his favorite thing, and he’s willing to seek a better arrangement when the opportunity arises. That seems to be a focus of this story: Marshtomp evaluates his compatibility with a trainer based on what he gets out of the arrangement, and obviously the trainers are doing the same at the moment that they catch him. If it sucks, he hits da bricks, and this is a world that’s pretty conducive to that. This transactional relationship is interesting and honestly makes sense for a setting in which pokémon and humans are “equals” for some value of equal. Humans feel a bit like employers, and pokémon employees, except pokémon don’t need to be employed, strictly speaking—they just receive benefits for doing so. It’s nice worldbuilding, and while I don’t think it’s really the thesis of this entry’s take on the theme, I wanted to be sure to comment on it!
I got kind of fairytale vibes from this story; the plot itself has sort of an iterative structure to it, sort of reminiscent of the Goldilocks story, and the characters involved are very archetypal. I think whether this fable-y quality of it was intentional or not, Simon is the trainer that’s “just right,” in the end, and the other characters seem to exist as foils to him. I think Felicity is a particularly effective foil—both are good trainers who want to bring out their pokémon’s potential, and so the different ways in which they go about doing this are emphasized. However, I found Karina (and Ember, who feels of the same ilk) a bit puzzling on a couple fronts, and that’s sort of my main issue with this entry.
The first and most obvious thing is that Karina’s schtick is just conceptually kind of hard to wrap my mind around. I don’t find it unbelievable that someone would exist who thinks poké balls are messed up and that fighting to the point of fainting is unethical etc.—in fact I’d expect quite a few such people to exist whether it’s “objectively” the case or not—but I have trouble believing that someone would hold this set of beliefs but also... still run around capturing pokémon and forcing them to fight? I don’t know, that just seems fundamentally at odds to me, and it’s not like hypocrisy is impossible but it’s just not really addressed in any way here. Her worldview, which is really the main component of her character, is incompatible with pretty much every single one of her actions, and the result is a character that just feels wholly unbelievable to me.
Furthermore, this character doesn’t exist in a void—this is a contest that calls for examination of the bonds between pokémon and humans, and additionally Karina exists largely as a foil to Simon. The fairytale-like structure of this story and archetypal feelings of the characters makes it feel like Marshtomp’s experience and evaluation of each one constitutes a judgement that goes beyond the individual, internal circumstances of the story. Taking all that into account, I had a really hard time figuring out what the take-away was supposed to be with Karina. The way Marshtomp and the other pokémon treat her, combined with her exaggerated, neurotic characterization really makes it feel like the takeaway here is something like “it’s bad if trainers care too much about their pokémon’s wellbeing,” which... I don’t know, I’ve read this a couple times and it just feels regressive and a bit condescending to me every time. This strange take doesn’t end here though—at the end, Ember challenges Simon on the grounds that it appears that he’s abusing his pokémon. While it’s clear from our perspective that he’s misled, Marshtomp and his fellow pokémon’s reaction is one of outrage, going so far as to suggest Ember’s concern implicitly suggests that they’re
stupid. It just feels really extreme and unfounded to me. Between the two of them, there’s a pattern here of introducing these kind of flimsy characters with the sole intent of dumping on their compassion and portraying it as excessively weepy or actively malevolent. It felt weirdly pointed to me, and setting up the story specifically to repeatedly hammer home the point that caring about a pokémon’s welfare is bad and disrespectful left a bad taste in my mouth. It’d be one thing if the story was simply examining these types of relationships, but it isn’t—the narrative carries a clear bias in one direction. Particularly in the context of a contest examining the bonds between humans and pokémon, I found that direction a little bit strange and off-putting.
That said, there are some good insights in this story. Like I said before, I really enjoyed the segment with Felicity. I think the bones of a good story are here—I think it would be a lot of fun to see Marshtomp switching between radically different trainers who are good but just not quite right for him, in the vein of his relationship with Felicity, before finding the one that suits his needs and desires. There’s a storybook charm to that iterative structure. However, as-is, I found the repeated depiction of pokémon welfare as not just unnecessary but actively
bad and insulting to be an unsatisfying angle for the context of this contest.
Umbramatic
Something something what are you doing in my swamp.
Oh this one is up my alley. Some of the themes on display are right up my alley, and it seems like an excellent sendup of some fandom attitudes (and canon Nitudes) toward Pokemon fighting. Also I definitely empathized with the protagonist in not being able to catch a break and being talked down and demeaned to all the time. Glad he was happy in the end - and ironically with the stereotypical edgy tough dude trainer that in the anime or something would be a gold standard of Pokemon mistreatment.
I do feel like this story's biggest weakness is that a lot of times bit kind of screamed THIS IS ME SHOWING OFF HEADCANONS in a way that was a little TOO blatant to the point I kinda rolled my eyes. Similarly the way the ending was written was a little too on the nose.
But still, this was cute. I hope your marshy boi has more fun battles ahead of him.
