Ssooooooo!
Good thing is, I get to give feedback on these reviews! Before everything else, thanks to you two for taking the time.
Torn from the Heavens
I suppose what strikes me most about this one is the weird dichotomy of portraying its protagonists like gods, and yet still beholden to the kindness of humans. Given the usual easy answer of portraying a Legendary Pokémon as above humans or below them, it stands out to portray the relationship as more nuanced and symbiotic, with both sides having things they're capable of that the other is not.
Thanks! And yup, there's that "little" element of "each species is good at its own thing" which I like to place emphasis on in my stories. I guess from this perspective, what humans are capable and good at is "free socialist healthcare for Pokémon" which, well, it's quite good for them! :p
It's fun worldbuilding that probably ascribes a more stable and believable relationship between "man" and "god" than most Pokémon settings achieve.
Prose is pretty, and does a good job of attributing itself to something old and wise. Pretty.
thanks again~ o3o
You mention "gods", and the prompts do are fit for various legendaries or pseudos, but truth be told, when I wrote this particular entry which was for the "illness of a loved one" prompt, I started it as intended for a bird Pokémon like Fearow or Corviknigt, and only after a first pass did I settle on what by all means should be a Latii or or a Miragebird or something like that: even among Pokémon perceived as supernatural or even divine, but they can still get a cold (let alone a FRZ) every once in a while.
...Well, "lesser Pokémon" still works as "gods", too. The Inca civilization revered condors, aka: Fearow, as the creatures "closest to Hnan-Pachá", which is what they called their concept of heaven. And much of Pokémon is built on animism!
Into the Fire
As soon as the hatchlings seemed to prefer the "food" for its warmth I assumed they'd go seek out the live ones. But I imagined that they'd end up cozying up to them and treating them like warm pillows as opposed to chasing and terrorizing them. Admittedly, not sure why they were doing that besides children just being terrors.
Children these days are so impatient! smh
But yeah this went... directions. "Cozying up to the live warm" was not in the plans, but who knows, maybe in an AU... The "original" idea was for the children to steal an egg / kidnap a young Charmander to make them (warm) company, but that got a bit longwinded.
And then I got an idea for a more
Monster Hunter vibe...
Also Kommo-o just knew exactly where this Charizard den was and his toddlers were able to just stroll on over... Did he hunt and eat his neighbor's kid?! Yikes! Can't even blame the kids for this one-- two predators feasting on eachother in this close proximity was never going to be stable.
Oh well. Time for children to homicide.
CHILDREN ARE SO IMPATIENT!!!!
As for the earlier question, a dutiful parent has to keep an eye on threats and competitors, so if anything he knows where competing mons like Charmander or more reasonable prey <_< like Buizel, are nested. Plus Charmander nests might not be
too difficult to locate, a potential Charizard mother would want a nest that has burnables like patches of grass but is also secluded and reachable by flying...
A Force in Time
Very tonally different from the others. Not sure what wearing on hammerspace means, but rest-in-piece to those two children. And possibly the fate of the world? Eh, she'll go back and fix it later.
> Fix it later
Word! "Do it later" or "Too late" are underused lines in time travel stories! But yeah it's good that this particular onion is an onion with time travel powers. Does things to one's psyche tho, which perhaps explains the itching for telenovelas....
Primary body of this one is just expositing what occurs in the fake TV show, which is unsurprisingly amusing to a Celebi given that time-travel media is already hilariously corny to most of us that can't time travel. Started to lose track of what was going on in it, or what the joke was supposed to be though. If certain lines were actually supposed to have been said in the show, or if they were an unreliable narrator somehow?
It's more an element of the TV show in the story being basically a time travel telenovela (read more on that below!). Moody with the "emotions" and the tryhard leader, corny as a telenovela plus corny as a time travel story (as you mention!) and exaggerated to a point, for passing the time between the lunch news and the evening news. No wonder a Pokémon like Celebi would like it!
I guess at some point a Pokémon with time travel capabilities gets so bored with linear casualty that they just... find solace or amusement in comedy and dramedy, I guess?
This Celebi in general comes across as... dangerously morally untethered. With the willingness to abandon her allies, to alter the timestream and manipulate people for petty reasons, the weird distance from any human emotions. Type of character that only works in comedy where you can overlook it. Truly a terrifying onion.
Yup... it's one kind of Pokémon not to cross. Makes one wonder how the Shiny Celebi in PMD: Sky seems so good-aligned and... uhm, stable?
Basicallt, we're all happy so long as they don't go altering timelines themselves to get their fix...
Of One Land
And while a fic using this approach has a ton of time to clarify, the drabble has woefully little to make much sense of everything going on. There's a war, and as I understand it this is a refugee camp where Gliscor is reuniting with a long lost friend from his wartorn home.
Idea is more or less expats meeting at a refugee / training camp, but yeah it was dangerously high amount of ground to cover in the little room afforded to a drabble. Does suggest going for the one-shot format tho...
That said, sets a pretty potent atmosphere and a pretty impactful moment for just a short drabble. As an outside observer it's a bit harder for me to appreciate because of how much it circles around implications of a greater setting that I have woefully little insight into, but at the end of the day if it lets you get practice with that sort of potent atmosphere, for a drabble that's a success.
Thanks! I try (it's my curse and bane).
I'll have to get better at those since drabbles and oneshots are a much more convenient format to do stuff like introduce settings and characters, but for the most part it only works well after-the-fact when you have published enough amount of stuff that the connections become visible. In the meantime, I'll be covering whatever ground I can and try for the stories to at least be inviting or inspiring.
Well, I still owed you a review that I unfortunately wasn’t able to drop at the end of the Review Blitz, so here it finally is! Figured I’d go take a look at the four drabbles you wrote.
No worries, it was difficult times for everyone.
Torn from the Heavens
This is a nice Pokecentric little story. I always find xenofiction to be pretty interesting to read, and I enjoyed seeing it from the perspective of a bird ‘mon instead of the usual Nidos (even if they are great too and I definitely wanna check out your latest Valentine’s fic at some point).
Thanks! Pokécentric is what I do (insert Michael Ironside / Darkseid voice here) and I try for it to feel lively and "its own thing". Touching upon creatures other than Nidos is good too for the kind of... hmmm let's call it introspective xeno? that's going around here.
Don't worry about the Nidos tho! You'll have a lot of time to catch up on them at your leisure, given that by virtue of it being a Valentines it updates only/mostly on Feb 14ths :p
It makes sense these wild Pokemon would have learned to seek out help from humans when sick or injured. I mean, even in real life there have been instances of animals doing it.
Yeah I've been reading the news about various kinds of creatures approaching humans for help (or simply to get adopted, cats know where it's at!). Helps that lots of Pokémon qualify as "charismatic megafauna". Like, really, who wound't want to get a free Swalot?
Into the Fire
First off, I love the Jangmo-o line, so choosing to focus this drabble on them already earns it bonus points. That said, them hunting Charmander is definitely not something I was expecting. In fact, I’m actually curious why you ended up choosing Charmander instead of a different Fire-Type that’s an obvious herbivore. The choice seemed a little odd to me.
Yeahhhh as I was mentioning above, this one went places. Original idea was not to hunt the Charmanders for food and I was this close [ ] to once again using Rockruff as my usual victims du jour, but whole the father was exposing on stuff, I got an itch for a more
Monster Hunter vibe to the story.
I wanted to emulate a bit of the inter-species competition in there and having something like a setting with some cliffs and caves (Moga Island), big lizard mons living in packs with a parent leader (Jaggis) and fire breathing flying dragons wyverns nesting about (Rathian/Rathalos), well, the story kinda rewrote itself.
Now now, the more proper food for Kommo-o in this biome would
probably be riparian creatures like... let's say Buizel. But we
don't want anything bad happen to a Buizel don't we? We like Buizel! So....
...Yeah, poor Charmanders. Note taken for the next one! :p
Not gonna lie, when I saw this I figured the kids were gonna end up going over and befriending the Charmander. It’s kind of a shame it didn’t, but at least one of these things ended up happening? ^^;
Yup
one of these things! :p
50/50 is not a success record to be happy about!
To be fair original plan before the story rewrote itself was more or less "kidnap a fellow infant to keep as warm friend" as mentioned above. Hey, children gotta be mean!
Either way, I have a feeling momma Kommo-o is gonna kill dad when she finds out what happened on his watch lol
It's the kind of thing that was open to be in the plans (for both versions, actually) with a
very angery mom butting in at the tail end, but it got cut for time. Ya know, the usual!
Who knows, maybe for an eventual oneshot expansion or a new story written in this same vein. Maybe featuring Jangmo-o too, since you like them! (takes notes)
A Force in Time
Aaaaaand, this is how Riolu and Shix’s “kill all the Legendaries” villain arc started.
...If I end up making this canon - maybe forr
Blink, Slowly and its overarching character storyline, I'll blame you :p
Anyway, this drabble obviously isn’t meant to be taken too seriously, although I was still surprised to see that Celebi can’t just travel through time, but also through space and alternate universes, as she goes from a PMD setting to a mainline one.
...Ya know that's something I didn't catch up on at first. From a PMD-like world to a mainline-like world, this kind of time travel if it is *only* time travel would imply one is a far future of the other! Iiiinteresting. But dunno if I'll make something of that. To be fair if you can travel in time nothing really bars you from "time travel to an available dimension portal, cross over, time travel around at destination".
Onions are tricky like that.
And yeah, time travel stories are not really to be taken seriously. Look at what they did with
Terminator! And there's not even an angery Riolu in that one!
I also wonder if the show Celebi is watching is a parody of any specific show, or if it’s simply meant to parody sci-fi shows in general.
Fun thing, it is! Actually it is actually a respectful parody to
Sentai Timeranger /
Power Rangers Time Force, the first arc of which was basically written as a "teenage telenovela with colorful spandex" up to and including two lovers getting separated by time travel :p Hence why I mentioned above that yeah, this time onion has a liking for the corny time travel dramedy.
Which is dangerous!
Hey, at least they found a way to travel through time. More than what any Pokémon not named Dialga can say.
Humans have their own thing going on and they can be good at it! When it's not "free socialist healthcare for Pokémon" it's "invent diabolous machines that edge into the boundaries of physics" I guess? But it's
good that this worked out for them, in that story at least. How would we have a moody teenage leader pining for a perfectly reversible past time travel future death otherwise???
(And this remind me that this is not the only case I've seen of "humans are given their due respect due to time travel", if you are familiar with
Dragon Ball Z and Super, Bulma, the character there who invents a time machine, gets some subtext respect there too)
Birb! Unnamed yes, but over time I'll be able to do more with that! Since there's at least one other story in draft stage that should feature him, provided I can get it past the backlog...
It shows this war torn setting that I definitely think has the potential for a good story. That said, I unfortunately also think this story doesn’t really work with the drabble format. The worldbuilding makes it feel like we’re reading a snippet of a larger story, rather than a drabble.
Yeah the format is... something I have to work on. Easy to flow and work with if one can do
more, but doesn't really work standalone. Definitively should aim more for "one-shot" rather than for "drabble". Maybe even "two-shot" even considering
Forever Catch got quite good reception on its exposition of the setting. As for this one... Wanted to give it a bit of a "post-guerrilla rebuilding efforts" vibe. Dunno if it works. But in the meantime I promise to not make Alba's life
too unhappy!
Maybe this can be reworked into a multi chaptered story someday, or at the very least a proper one shot. I’d read it.
Of course you would, it would have best guest birb and his friend Gliscor that I recall is a mon you like too. o3o
But yeah it's... part of the plans. Am not developing this whole setting for nothin', but it does take its sweet time and it does compete with Gates (my new beloved, underappreciated PMD game).
All in all, thanks for the reviews, it's interesting to read the different perceptions of what works and what doesn't. And you two give me very clear ideas of where to expand things into oneshot format!
Here's hoping you can find some more material in my portfolio to your liking.
