Pokémon [NO AUDIO]

[NebulaDreams]

So, apologies for the late Catnip review, but now the cat has been nipped, here are my thoughts!

Firstly, I really like the set-up of this story. The descriptions of the different convenience store items, as well as the random customers that come into the store and Nami’s actions throughout the story, make this feel like a real, lived-in setting. It’s not just any convenience store either, the mentions of the frosted biscuit sticks and the claw machine gives it a lot of flavour as a Japanese-style konbini.

It is kind of funny that the camera POVs overlooking the gas pumps and the focus on specific cars gives it more of a grimy, dusty Americana backdrop. It’s not a knock against it since Pokemon settings often feel like a chimera of Japanese and American influences, just something I noticed.

It’s been a while since I last worked in retail, but of course, Nami is a very relatable character, caught up in the doldrums of running an empty store, and abusing her power in a way that gives her enough flaws while not turning me off from her perspective entirely. I mean, if I had some shadow Pokemon able to summon portals at my beck and call, I would totally use it to sneak some chips from behind the counter. But she also has her kind moments like using the portals to give the teenager trainer the claw machine toy, much to the Teddiursa’s befuddlement (they were adorable by the way!).

I feel her perspective grounds the story while not detracting from the detached POV of the security cameras, as well as adding to the intrigue and alienation when the supernatural stuff rears its head, especially the further it gets to its ending. Having this story told through timestamps and security camera footage is a novel approach and is mostly done really well, especially since it plants the idea in the reader’s head that we’re looking through this footage together along with the unidentified narrator and are left to our own devices to piece the story together.

I do admit that I don’t entirely understand what happened even after two reading sessions, but I don’t think that’s the story’s issue. If anything, that makes it a bit more memorable and gives me a lot more to chew on as opposed to having all the answers. Having said that, I enjoyed the atmosphere of the story and the sense of immersion more than the plot and characters itself.

I hope I’m not too off base, but my interpretation of the events is that there’s some sort of power play going on between Dialga, Palkia, disguised in human forms, and Giratina. I can’t tell whether Nami is the human form of Giratina or if Giratina is just dicking around with some random human, but considering they all disappear at the end, it feels like the story was just Giratina hanging around in Eterna City in some gas station for a while before getting escorted back with Dialga and Palkia, presumably to stop causing chaos and attracting unwanted attention from the police.

Feel free to correct me if you wrote the story with a complete answer in mind, or don’t if you want to keep it opaque. I didn’t want to read anyone else’s reviews since I wanted to make my own mind up about this story.

My only minor gripe is the story’s overuse of adverbs, like ‘hastily’, ‘puzzlingly’ and ‘accusingly’. Although the narrative device is cold and detached, you were able to get a lot of personality out of it by focusing on what’s unsaid (fittingly because of the title) rather than what’s stated in dialogue. That made the instances of repetitive language stick out more in certain segments, particularly in one paragraph where ‘hastily’ appeared more than a few times.

Other than that, I really don’t have much else to say. I enjoyed reading and re-reading this and it will probably linger in my head long after this review. Thanks for the story!

 

[Spiteful Murkrow]

Heya, continuing my tour of my review responses for those stories of mine that I consider done and dusted-ish, even if this one’s almost certainly a bit less “-ish” there. Anyhow, let’s get right into things:

So, apologies for the late Catnip review, but now the cat has been nipped, here are my thoughts!

Firstly, I really like the set-up of this story. The descriptions of the different convenience store items, as well as the random customers that come into the store and Nami’s actions throughout the story, make this feel like a real, lived-in setting. It’s not just any convenience store either, the mentions of the frosted biscuit sticks and the claw machine gives it a lot of flavour as a Japanese-style konbini.

Glad to hear, since that was exactly what I was aiming for vibe-wise for the inside of the convenience store. (It helped inform some fine detailing like the drink brandings that pop up here and there.)

It is kind of funny that the camera POVs overlooking the gas pumps and the focus on specific cars gives it more of a grimy, dusty Americana backdrop. It’s not a knock against it since Pokemon settings often feel like a chimera of Japanese and American influences, just something I noticed.

I was admittedly aiming more for “rural Japan” with stuff like the kei truck, but I suppose that’s might be my inner American leaking over a bit.

It’s been a while since I last worked in retail, but of course, Nami is a very relatable character, caught up in the doldrums of running an empty store, and abusing her power in a way that gives her enough flaws while not turning me off from her perspective entirely. I mean, if I had some shadow Pokemon able to summon portals at my beck and call, I would totally use it to sneak some chips from behind the counter. But she also has her kind moments like using the portals to give the teenager trainer the claw machine toy, much to the Teddiursa’s befuddlement (they were adorable by the way!).

‘Had a shadow Pokémon’, eh? Well, I’m not fully sure whether everything clicked together at the end thanks to the found footage format, but Nami was doing one better there. :V

I feel her perspective grounds the story while not detracting from the detached POV of the security cameras, as well as adding to the intrigue and alienation when the supernatural stuff rears its head, especially the further it gets to its ending. Having this story told through timestamps and security camera footage is a novel approach and is mostly done really well, especially since it plants the idea in the reader’s head that we’re looking through this footage together along with the unidentified narrator and are left to our own devices to piece the story together.

I do admit that I don’t entirely understand what happened even after two reading sessions, but I don’t think that’s the story’s issue. If anything, that makes it a bit more memorable and gives me a lot more to chew on as opposed to having all the answers. Having said that, I enjoyed the atmosphere of the story and the sense of immersion more than the plot and characters itself.

I hope I’m not too off base, but my interpretation of the events is that there’s some sort of power play going on between Dialga, Palkia, disguised in human forms, and Giratina. I can’t tell whether Nami is the human form of Giratina or if Giratina is just dicking around with some random human, but considering they all disappear at the end, it feels like the story was just Giratina hanging around in Eterna City in some gas station for a while before getting escorted back with Dialga and Palkia, presumably to stop causing chaos and attracting unwanted attention from the police.

Feel free to correct me if you wrote the story with a complete answer in mind, or don’t if you want to keep it opaque. I didn’t want to read anyone else’s reviews since I wanted to make my own mind up about this story.

Your take was basically accurate, though the intended take was that Nami is Giratina, just going around in disguised form, much as the “old man” and “old woman” were, which is a thing that pops up from time to time in @Umbramatic’s writings which were the inspiration for this piece. As for why Nami was doing her best impression of Persona 4’s final boss, the story intentionally leaves it up to reader interpretation, even if it’s strongly implied that there’s a healthy degree of “because it amused me” involved.

My only minor gripe is the story’s overuse of adverbs, like ‘hastily’, ‘puzzlingly’ and ‘accusingly’. Although the narrative device is cold and detached, you were able to get a lot of personality out of it by focusing on what’s unsaid (fittingly because of the title) rather than what’s stated in dialogue. That made the instances of repetitive language stick out more in certain segments, particularly in one paragraph where ‘hastily’ appeared more than a few times.

Yeeeeeah, I’ve gotten that critique in some prior reviews. I can definitely see where they’re coming from, but the amount of effort it’d take to properly reflow all those little moments will probably be the preserve of a [NO AUDIO] (redux) if the fancy ever strikes me for writing it.

Other than that, I really don’t have much else to say. I enjoyed reading and re-reading this and it will probably linger in my head long after this review. Thanks for the story!

And thanks for the review and for your patience for hearing back from me! It was a lot of fun to read. ^^

 

[Goolix]

Hello, I am here for Review Blitz! Decided to do this one first since I was intrigued by the concept and form. I'll start with the line-by-lines:

The automatic doors slide open, as a balding man wearing a purple shirt with a black flame logo over its chest pocket enters followed by a gray-haired young woman with a cap similarly bearing the same logo, proudly marking the gas station as a franchisee of Altru Incorporated and the pair as employees.

This sentence is quite long and complex! We've got:
[A balding man wearing [a purple shirt [with a black flame logo [over its check pocket]]]]
and then we have:
[a gray-haired young woman [with a cap [similarly bearing the same logo [proudly marking the gas station as a franchisee of Altru Incorporated and the pair as employees.]]]]

I would definitely recommend chopping this up into two or more sentences. Having this many modifying clauses makes it confusing to read. Also, here:

a gray-haired young woman with a cap similarly bearing the same logo, proudly marking the gas station as a franchisee of Altru Incorporated and the pair as employees.

That "proudly marking the gas station..." is modifying "the same logo", right? The logo "proudly marks" the gas station. However, it's not uncommon to have a participle phrase like this modify the subject e.g. "The logo shone on the door, marking the building as a franchisee." Because of the ambiguity of the participle phrase, it could be seen as modifying "young woman" even though logically it should be the logo. I would split this up or use "which marked" instead of "proudly marked" for clarity.

A black shadow forms under a pink box of frosted biscuit sticks on the shelves immediately to front left of the store's counter, which exits out another shadowy portal that forms on the ceiling by the refrigerators.

The woman throws her hand up, catching the pink box in midair before turning a pair of red eyes up at the camera with a devious smile, waving it tauntingly as she begins to help herself to the snacks inside.

Totally normal human activities are going on here!

The camera shows the young woman back behind the counter, lazily kicking her feet up as she points off at the aisles. Every time she does so, a black, shadowy patch forms, before items emerge from them. A box of chewing gum, a few bottles of Altru-branded motor oil taped together, the process repeating here and there across the shelves until they are once again filled.

The security camera shows the pumps from a camera mounted just above the automatic doors of the convenience store, revealing a simple layout bathed in sterile white light with a pair of islands with two pumps each, and a bike rack near the windows for cyclists going to and from the nearby Cycling Road.

I would specify these are "gas pumps." I know it says earlier that this is a gas station, but I was wondering if there was a different type of "pump" i was missing at first.

The camera overlooking the pump rolls as an orange hatchback with rounded curves and tall, strip-like taillights is parked at the nearest island with a woman pumping gas into it, when an older, blue sports coupe with a spoiler and large two-tone taillights slowly lurches in from the dark and into the white light of the station's lights.

You have these two clauses stating that a temporal event is happening ("as X...." "when X..."), which makes it harder to understand the sequence of events.

Also, having "The camera [...] rolls as an orange hatchback [...] is parked" is a bit odd - usually when we have "X [verbs] as Y [does something]", Y should be performing an action. Instead, we're describing what Y is. If it were "The camera rolls as an orange hatchback comes to a stop," that would make more sense.

Splitting these up would make it easier to understand what happens when:

The camera overlooking the pump rolls as an orange hatchback with rounded curves and tall, strip-like taillights comes to a stop at the nearest island. A woman pumps gas into the vehicle when an older, blue sports coupe with a spoiler and large two-tone taillights slowly lurches in from the dark and into the white light of the station's lights.

Alternatively, if you're saying that the action was already happening when the camera rolled (as in, the footage begins and the woman is already pumping gas), you could do this:

The camera overlooking the pump rolls. An orange hatchback with rounded curves and tall, strip-like taillights is parked at the nearest island with a woman pumping gas into it. An older, blue sports coupe with a spoiler and large two-tone taillights slowly lurches in from the dark and into the white light of the station's lights.

From behind the counter, the attendant finishes passing change across the counter to a young boy and girl as they buy a pair of Rage Candy Bars.

Ah, Rage Candy Bars! Such a subject of annoyance when I was a kid and I didn't understand why I couldn't pass through Mahogany.

The attendant turns her attention back, her motions stiff and uncomfortable as she takes the bills and makes change, passing it back across the counter with the map and compass.

tfw you actually have to do your job and not just rearrange mart items

The woman from the elderly couple loses her temper and slams a fist against the counter, which makes the camera and shelves shake and the lights overhead flicker, a nearby rack of postcards along the wall toppling over which the attendant hastily stops by casting a shadow under its leg closest to the counter, making it wobble in a circle before coming to a stop.

Getting the impression these two may not be entirely human either! Either that or that's some arm day workout this elderly lady's got!

The attendant and the manager walk down the rightmost aisle, the manager looking around as the attendant talks with him with a forced, bubbly atmosphere while occasionally casting glances leftward

"atmosphere" doesn't seem quite right here - I think "expression", "tone", or "demeanor" would capture it better.

The station attendant stares up at the camera in the corner and contorts her face in front of it. Sticking her tongue out one moment, then pulling her mouth wide, then pulling her eyelid down as she cycles through a few expressions to amuse herself.

:P Who among us doesn't like to make a silly face when we see ourselves in a security camera?

a black, towering shadow rears up, glowing red eyes gazing down as a pair of black wings unfurl open with six red spikes and shadowy globs strike the pavement around the truck.

Black wings? Six red spikes?? HIM???

The camera's angle just managing to capture a brief clip of an overturned green light truck on the television

Did you mean "light green truck"?

She lifts it up to inspect it, revealing a doodle of a banded serpentine figure trailing six arms behind its head, along with unflattering caricatures of a four-legged creature with a tall head and a bipedal creature with shield-like shoulders.

I went back to look at this part and 😩 Giratina's drawing unflattering caricatures of Dialga/Palkia is so petty and funny. And then the teen seeing it and chatting Giratina up about it is even funnier.

I want to start by saying wow! This was a really bold formal choice for a one-shot! It's not easy to tell a story like this. To say it has "no dialogue" undersells it - there is clearly dialogue, but we as readers don't get to access it, which is even more tantalizing. The format inherently invites ambiguity as we are missing information that clearly existed. I think you do a good job with the framing; it doesn't feel gratuitous but makes sense when the target of the footage is a gas station mart. And we could have had everything actually narrated as it happened, but where's the fun in that? In a way, we're not seeing the world through Nami's eyes, but through the security officer or manager who is tasked with reviewing this footage to make sense of it. But that character is also entirely silent. And so we have this double vision - we see Nami but not her inner world; our gaze is the camera/reviewer's but we also don't get access to an inner world through there. All inner states must be inferred entirely through actions and body language. The effect is both detached and curiously intimate.

So my take on what happened is that Giratina decides to get a job as a mart, perhaps out of boredom? Dialga and Palkia, acting as guardians, find out and are not happy about it. Giratina needs information about the security camera's timestamps (to erase afterwards?) and then decides to peace out with Dialga and Palkia. I feel like I'm missing something, but I don't want to "spoil" this review by reading other reviews/responses, so I shall leave it at that.

There's a nice mix of the utterly mundane and the whimsically supernatural. Giratina/Nami acts like you'd expect a bored teen with superpowers to ask. Many days pass by with little of interest. And sometimes you get robbed. But it helps when you can send your would-be assailants to the Distortion World. I like the touch (obvious in retrospect but I totally missed it at the time) that Dialga/Palkia wear blue/pink and diamonds/pearls respectively. I was thinking at first they were really rich and this was a sort of class thing until Palkia fist slammed and the whole place vibrated.

The concept is solid. There were some prose issues, like the two I singled out, where the length or complexity of the clauses made it hard to tell what was going on. I don't know if you've since changed your writing style (this fic is a few years old after all!) so I didn't want to harp too much on that. I really applaud the decision to commit to this format, and I was on the edge of my seat trying to figure out what was the deal with Nami - I thought at first she'd made a deal with some demonic Pokemon to get access to superpowers and was wasting her deal with the devil on free snacks! I did not expect the turn it took. Very cool writing!