Read chapter 2 and boy, was that depressing 😭. The chapter was an emotional thrill to read from the beginning of the end, and I'm sad Rin ended up dying after all. I really liked how you showed her life in small segments. It went from her living in a happy world as a three year old and then everything just went down hill from there. Even after she was the only survivor in her village, a random Astra showed up out of nowhere and went for the head. FeelsBadMan.
fate has a funny way of not letting my characters be happy
I didn't understand it all that much, but the ending bit implies she fused with the golurk? Or at least her consciousness now resides in Shy's shell as well, which means Rin is technically still alive, though it'd seem her identity did die nonetheless. For a story about a broken world, I'm surprised I'm enjoying it this much lol.
but! she will be coming back! she is 1/3 of the narrative voice of this story when she's not, like, lying facedown in a ditch somewhere...
thank you for reading! even though it's probably a bit more grim than your usual fare, haha
Been too long away from this one! Unfortunately I started a review earlier, but it got eaten, so there won't be so many quotes from chapters 3/4 in particular, I'm afraid. Still loads to talk about, though! Obviously a thing or two has happened since I last was reviewing here...
this may seem very weird, but I am so so blown away by your review. Thank you for thinking so hard about this story and taking the time to write up all your thoughts like this; it really means a lot.
...I'm a bad person, because my primary thought during all this was why the mightyena wouldn't eat Rin/the electivire/the dead mightyena. They might not be scavengers, but this lot has been dead for like 15 minutes tops, it's perfectly good food. :P
oh no, you're totally right... looks like I can't have my grim starving world cake and eat it too. I picked mightyena since I wanted something wolfish, but looking at the name I'm pretty sure hyenas would have no qualms lol.
I was a bit surprised by how little Shy seemed to react to Astra's behavior after she killed Rin. He was kind of sitting there, narrating it in a fair amount of detail, but didn't seem to react to it at all. Which, yeah, he was a bit distracted by having to handle Rin's soul at the moment, but even after she leaves and it seems there's a bit of downtime, nothing. How does he feel about Astra's apparent remorse? Does he feel some sympathy for despite what she did? Is he angry or disgusted, thinking that her display is hypocritical, or bitter because no amount of regret on her part can undo what happened? The chapter starts on a good melancholy note, with Shy grieving what happened to Rin, but most of Shy's narration is rather detached.
Definitely something I'm still trying to balance. I think Shy is by nature really detached from these vague human concepts of life and death; he doesn't like not-knowing, but he also doesn't really
understand. I wanted to capture that feeling of clinical observation/information gathering, but I do think his chapters end up rather aimless.
With this new development, this story is actually reminding me quite a bit of Ninefox Gambit... rather different genre, rather different circumstances with the body-sharing, but similar tone and some similarity in the prose style, I think.
ooh! this looks fun. I will try to check it out from a library once the world is back to normal
But does it have its own angle besides wanting blood and to survive? Is the sword necessarily malicious, or is it also not too pleased to be stuck with this constant hunger thing? Asi seems a lot less loquacious than Shy, so perhaps it doesn't have as much of a real personality or spirit, or perhaps it/Astra are simply not as good at communicating as Rin and Shy. In any case, it's a fun dynamic between these two, where they don't necessarily like each other, and Astra at least is in fact rather uncomfortable with Asi, but they're stuck together and have to cooperate, at least to some extent. And it seems like of the two of them... Astra's the one who has less say in what they do, at least in the heat of the moment.
Asi doesn't talk much, haha. The rest of the points you touched upon do get explored in later bit, so I don't want to spoil too much, but they're definitely things I considered! To me the dex entry here (it drains the soul of the wielder) is just too tempting to not use as an exploration for what violent paths do to those who choose them.
It seemed odd to me that Asi would announce Fati as "witch" and let Astra quietly freak out over who might be coming, when Astra knows Fati, and Asi is presumably aware of this and that Fati's not a threat? Or perhaps the sword has a rather different opinion of Fati than its owner/knows more than she does, heh.
Mostly the second thing! Unlike Shy/Rin, Asi/Astra don't really have a deeper communication beyond what gets shown here. Asi senses Fati, she is ~~weiiiiiiird~~, and that's really all Asi knows.
Very cool to see Fati here, in any case; she definitely felt like a character that the Orre games could have done a lot more with, so it'll be fun to see her get more screentime here.
she's actually in Orre! Fateen just has 0 screentime and I really have a soft spot for prophetic characters haha.
Verrry interesting that Shy, a ghost, is the soul of a pokémon that now inhabits a robot shell. He goes by a three-letter name that derives from something longer. Meanwhile, Asi is a ghost inhabiting a sword, with a three-letter name. Does it come from something longer? Does Asi also have a history from before it was a sword, and are we ever going to learn more about it? I wonder whether all ghost pokémon are literally the ghosts of former pokémon, or whether they can arise independently, be their own unique souls with no previous life. Might just be a coincidence, but I'm definitely curious!
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The next chapter is a bit of a departure, although having already read six I'm guessing this is what Kala was talking about with regards to Rin "time-traveling," although if that's actually the case I'm not sure why you put this one before six instead of after. One way or another, we appear to have both the future and either the distant past or myth going on here--maybe an alternate future where Shy and Rin are still stuck together, maybe a look at the actual future of this story.
Haha, the more I read people's feedback on Rin's chapter, the more I'm torn on it -- I wanted her to be trying to escape this shitty narrative that she's stuck in, to the point that she's literally refusing to participate in the shitty narrative that she's stuck in and is instead telling fairytale stories. They're the ones that Shy told her when she was growing up, so they're in the past (I think on rewriting I'll make that more clear). But she can't quite get away from
all of it, so she's still drawn in to the ones that are darkly relevant to the reality she's trying to escape.
The tenses in these sentences are pretty tricky, but I believe it should be "isn't much to say [...] she might have had a happier life."
oh yup I'm bad at grammar
I cannot believe you made this pun, lol.
95% of what I write precipitates on puns that I should not have made :')
Hmmm, is that a little self-shade I see?
Orre is the land of shadow pokemon it DEMANDS shade
The story here is interesting, but I don't know that I buy the central conceit about humans being more inclined to wear masks/more reckless about doing so, more likely to try to become whatever they pretend to be. I mean, one of the primary characteristics of pokémon is that a lot of them evolve, thus permanently and irrevocably changing their nature sometimes multiple times during their life. It's not quite the same thing, since this story is more about acting and that's about literally becoming, but it still didn't sit quite right for me. I would tend to say that pokémon are more changeable than humans!
The central conceit I wanted to convey wasn't that pokemon have an inability to
change, but an inability to
pretend. (Or at least that's what the pokemon who made up this story thinks...) I think the flowery prose at the end definitely covered that up though, so when I do rewrites I'll probably cull that.
Also a very cool interpretation of cubone... Given the mask and the ghostly themes of this story so far, I was definitely expecting Triss to end up as a yamask instead!
oh shit that... would've been smart lol
Not totally sure what to make of the framing scene here. "Kana" instead of "Kala" makes me think, again, that this is some kind of alternate future Rin's picking up on somehow, but too early to say, really. On to the next chapter!
Ah! My bad since there was so long between updates and there is conceivably no way for anyone to remember it -- Kana is Rin's mother (she gets mentioned in ch2). There is no AU here haha.
Your description makes Kala sound *tiny* here, which is honestly a very fitting way to go for a forest god sprite thing; adds to the magical, fae sort of atmosphere that pervades this scene. In general I thought the descriptions of Kala's realm were very nicely done, vivid and appropriately otherworldly. The door that ages out of existence I thought was a particularly neat touch. And this scene did give you a chance to go big with your description, which was a joy to read. This scene has a rather fairytale atmosphere to it, which combined with the literal fairytale in the previous chapter make for a very different tone than the sort of gritty cyberpunk tone that the rest of the story has had. Makes sense, in a way, since Agate Village is its own isolated place, a kind of respite from all the rest of the region.
!!!
(If pokémon communicate primarily through battle, shouldn't these two have fought instead of having a fairly normal conversation?)
Yes! I think I'll add dialogue to point on it more, but basically -- the golurk body is humanmade and can't heal in the same way pokemon do. Rin used to repair it, but now that she's not physically there, that's somewhat out the window. As such, Shy
can't really express himself through battle, and fighting has to be a only-when-necessary thing for him -- a physical limitation on his long list of physical limitations that really grinds his proverbial gears.
Interesting that Shy went to see Kala, the sustainer, instead of what I'm presuming is Ho-Oh, since resurrection is kind of that guy's thing. And Kala thought that Ho-Oh might behind the pokémorphs, too... What's up with that guy, then? Are the other pokémon wary of them for some reason, are willing to believe they might be causing some of the problems that plague Orre, maybe? Or is it maybe more that nobody knows where they've gone off to, and they could have been captured/corrupted by Cipher, or something along those lines?
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I love how complicated the relationships are between the characters. We actually haven't seen too much of Rin and Shy interacting, since Rin's been pretty out of it the whole time we've been in one of their POVs, but I think it'll be fun to see how they come to terms with their situation and try to move forward from here. I think I'm even more interested in the relationship between Astra and Asi, and what it's going to mean for Astra in the future. And, since I assume Shyrin and Astrasi are going to cross paths again at some point, I imagine that's going to be a lot of fun--and very, very Complicated.
I feel! this is very much a fic about people disguised as a fic about the apocalypse
Things have moved a little slowly so far, I think. Part of this is because 1/3 of the chapters so far haven't taken place in the present (or at least the majority of the chapter hasn't). I'm not totally sure what's up with Chapter V, and I'm willing to reserve judgement if you think it's important for it to be as and where it is now, but I think you definitely want to be mindful of how you introduce all of your background lore while still keeping the A-plot moving at a reasonable clip. For example, I enjoyed Chapter II and definitely appreciated getting to learn more about Rin and Shy, but where I am now I think if that chapter hadn't been there I honestly wouldn't think I had missed anything. Perhaps some of that backstory could have been spread out a bit over multiple chapters, or perhaps that exposition could have come at a different time. Part of it's the length of the chapters--we aren't actually that far into the story, word-wise--but it feels like while we've covered a lot of background material, we only have a sketchy idea of where the main characters' story is going to go from here, especially in Astra's case.
No, I definitely feel this too! This is very relevant feedback. I think originally I had ch2 where it is because it's like, hey, hey, it's okay this girl isn't ACTUALLY dead -- but have been hitting my head against the wall for pacing on this. I think in the future I'll rewrite to make this intro arc more streamlined/get to the good stuff faster, but for now I don't want to lose what little writing momentum I have left, if that makes sen.
Anyhow, this continues to be a super interesting story, with a fantastic setting and fascinating characters. I will do my best to keep up a lot better from now on, but I resolve to do that a lot, lol. I will try! And I hope you'll have a good time putting more of this story together. I'm definitely in for the long haul with this one.
!! ahhhh. thank you again for writing so many lovely thoughts here; I really appreciate it and I'm sorry I didn't respond earlier!
First and foremost, love the chapter titles. Juicy stuff on the horizon. Wondering why the title for this one uses “your” though.
All of Astra's chapter titles (like the title of the fic) are quotes from "The Wasteland", actually! All of the other chapter titles are quotes from other works as well, but since they're less obvious I won't give them away just yet 👀
Something tells me the girl will survive the attack. A battle of wills incoming.
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Specifics (grammar and line-by-line reactions):
I took pretty much all of these into edits lmao. Thank you for continuing to call out my overly-loquacious prose!
Passive voice — suggestion: she yanks her blade... (Also eliminates confusion with “it” at the top of the next sentence. As-is, wasn’t sure if “it” referred to the creature or the blade.)
okay actually I kept this one -- it isn't actually Astra doing the yanking, or at least she likes to think of it that way. Fixed the "it" stuff though!
The use of golem threw me because I immediately thought of the rock/ground type, but it sounds like this is a literal golem — a human construction. I’m seeing golurk in the tags, but it’s not what I’m picturing from this passage.
Yes, I've finally run into the one place where capitalizing Pokemon would really help, fml. I... don't really know how to get around this though? It is a literal golem and I can't find a good synonym that conveys what I want.
I love ladies in steel-toed boots!
these wardrobes are OSHA approved!
[In the ten seconds afforded to her before her neck bleeds out into the dirt, she remembered ten years.] “Her neck” is getting too much agency here. Could just be “before she bleeds out into the dirt.”
Oh yup that's a fair one. I gotta stop attributing human's actions to objects; that's becoming an unfortunate tell.
[There was the little boy who flew a small biplane and discovered a floating castle in the clouds.]
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:quag!:
Ugh this kills me. The patience to hold in a story, the preciousness of stories when the world is crumbling. Also UM HI Giving Tree. Very interesting hint at the real relationship between people and pokémon that’s happening outside and under and beyond the stuff with shadow pokémon.
I'm glad you enjoyed this bit! Shy/Rin dynamics are hard to write for me fml; metal boi is too pure for my heart
I hope you don't think I'm being snooty or that I dislike the story because I'm picking at individual lines, because those are not my feelings at all. BUT, I think this would be stronger if it read In the ten seconds before Vajrin bleeds out, Shy weighs... Still gives you the call-back to the semi-delirious impossibly stretched-out 10 seconds, but reads a little cleaner. (Because they're Shy's 10 seconds too -- he's deciding, and there's loss involved.)
No no that's totally fair! I think that's a better change.
Because the shadow pokemon phenomenon has messed things up, or because it's a desert? IDK what part of the world you live in, but I did grow up in a desert (adjacent to Orre if it = Arizona) and I can add that in mid-summer there are usually daily thunderstorms in the afternoon. Not much rain though. And it doesn't necessarily conflict with this sentence -- this is Orre, not Arizona, and clearly things Are Not Right here.
there is a Reason for this that doesn't have to do with my subpar understanding of weather patterns in the american southwest haha
This is a really interesting way of looking at the reason pokemon are willing to fight for humans.
I gotta figure out SOME way to justify it :'))))))))))))
It'll also get delved into later, but casual pokemon battles are a lot less common than they are in the larger game canon. Orre has some hints at battling for sport, but it's literally called a colosseum fight; outside of that, a huge portion of the battles you fight are specifically to stop evil people; the regular fun of gym/e4 challenges doesn't really seem to be a thing.
I hadn't quit realized until this chapter that Shy was partly sharing a body with Rin -- I thought he was more hovering over her shoulder. It seems like maybe Rin thought so too, and Shy seems to think that's how she saw it... And it does explain why he was misread ad her imaginary friend at first. Except she does admit to being a pokemorph at the end of chapter 1, so there's either something additional going on, or she was more aware than he realized.
Mmm, I see why this would be really difficult to understand haha. I think I will try to edit this one out shortly.
Finally replying to Ch4 --
finally replying to YOU :')
I really enjoyed seeing more of the relationship between Astra and Asi. The way it "talks," but only in impressions. The way she definitely is forced into action by it... but killing Rin was clearly her own mistake. She's out of control. She seems really torn-up about it, and yet also has no recourse.
Ahhhh! This was a dynamic I really wanted to figure out. I knew early that Astra was going to kill Rin, but I wanted a way to have her be a protagonist still, but how do you have a protagonist who is also getting over being a childmurderer? And the answer appears to be: they don't get over being a childmurderer haha.
I'm also noticing, again, the importance of names. Vajrin meaning one thing, Rin meaning something else -- original meaning divorced from her. Shy a temporary name because his real one is unpronounceable. Astra a burdensome prophecy. And Asi? (Wondering if the Spanish meaning of the word is a happy accident or if it was chosen.)
You've caught me in my central weakness for storytelling where all of the names are intensely symbolic and horrible, yes. In this case I'm just going to pretend that the parents are all really obsessed with baby-naming books.
Asi is named by Astra.
actually, that one is intentional. everything else, not so much
Can't tell yet if Astra is "dream-woman" or not.
This was a common source of confusion. I think I wanted to have my cake and eat it too -- Rin is dissociating from what's going on, but it's not like the readers can recognize her mother either lol. I think I will change this to be more clear.
Unclear if this is aimed at Astra or Shy.
This one too -- it's Shy, not being forgiven by Rin's mother for turning her daughter into an inhuman.
This one felt vague, not in a helpful way.
yeah I agree! axed lol
Should this be the inside world?
Yes and no? Rin can't control the golurk body very well, so when they're walking across Orre and there are things she doesn't want to see, she cannot look away.
And interesting twist on the usual once upon a time.
Rin is an A++++ storyteller she'll have you KNOW
She stubbed her toe on it first,
yup there I go again making body parts do things -- I changed it to "it stubbed her toe" since I wanted to dichotomy between not-Triss instigating/Triss responding, but yes, toes gotta stop.
I enjoyed this, but I wish there was a little more intrusion from Shy / confusion in the sections bookending the Cubone-girl story.
I feel that too! A main critique I've been getting is that nothing is actually happening in this story, lol, which is not helped by the fact that 1/3 of the narrators refuse to tell the story.
Unsure of the tenses in this. Sounds like this is from before they lost her body, pre-Agate visit, but also it doesn’t seem like emerald necklaces would be common in the wastes.
They are not common, but Shy does know about them from before being in the wastes.
Nice — feels very true. And I like the cosmology. Those roles make sense to me. Tense slippage earlier in this paragraph too though. You’ve got a description of who’s worshipped most, present tense, and then how humans “tended” to think.
oh yup caught that!
Celebi, Giver of 0 Fucks, is the only headcanon I stan harder than N lol.
This feels like not Shy’s POV.
It's kind of not? He's explaining how he knows how the Celebi views the world. I changed the language at the beginning of that paragraph to flag that better.
Symbolically very fitting! Also reminder if our conversation about oil execs flexing with giant fossil displays — I guess there are many reasons to keep a fossil. Loved the description of Shy trying to see the aerodactyl in it and seeing his own reflection instead.
yes or maybe they can sneak into tombs for dream runes!!
haha yes this was something I actually am happy with -- Shy sees his own reflection! And then later: {I only see my reflection from every timeline, every angle, a monument to all the things long past that I can experience, but that I cannot share with others. All the fractured things I cannot mend.}
So I guess it remains to find out if Shy can do it! He’s good at gently showing her things with stories. And I can imagine ways Astra needs to change too...!
gentle iron giant! will! help the babies be happy!
jk they're all fucked
I can’t help but feel like I’m missing something in the chronology between this chapter and the last. I’m unclear about when the visit to mom happened and why that happened first. I’m also surprised that Shy is heavily mixed into Rin’s inner monologue now but not vice versa. I guess he’s got a better handle, but still. I forgot she was mixed in there with him a few times throughout.
Yes, big old mixed back here of trying not to over-explain and not explaining enough. I'm sorry haha; I think I'll have to iron this out in edits.
Rin's narrations are before the current story -- she's the only narrator in the past tense because she's only talking about things that happened before the story began. She's remembering the last time she saw her mother before the events of the first chapter, where her town gets attacked. There is a lot of unspoken guilt mixed in with me not wanting to tip all my cards at once, but I don't think I juggled it very well.
Shy intrudes on Rin's dialogue and not vice versa because he's more adept at screening her out, yeah -- he's spent the past decade aware that he's stuck in someone else's brain while she just think it's normal to have headfrens tell you bedtime stories. Also, she's very much not in the present right now -- she's frankly not interested in what Shy's doing .-.
Thank you so so much for reading and leaving all of these comments though! I'm glad you enjoyed this rambling passion project of mine, and thank you for taking the time to write out all of your thoughts so nicely. <3
