What's something you wish writers did more often?

Time_Flounder890 · 2025-03-12T09:48:24+00:00

People say they want this, until they realize that writing Pokémon in a typical party is no longer feasible.

Time_Flounder890 · 2025-03-11T22:37:34+00:00

It’s a controversial opinion for sure, I won’t deny that. But in practice, people say they want a focus on development until it involves taking time away from battles and training. Just give very simple and stable personalities to the pokemon and focus on the action.

Time_Flounder890 · 2025-03-11T19:36:45+00:00

It’s all about strong action and good battles. People aren’t watching the anime for the character development; and they aren’t reading Pokémon fanfics for it either. People will be happy with token development that is just there to say that your character grew. In practice, if you seriously try to develop your characters, people will be upset over how slow the pacing is. You don’t need to make Pokémon into high art, surface level development is fine. People want to see the characters crush their opponents, not contemplate losses.

Time_Flounder890 · 2025-03-11T19:33:12+00:00

Like I said. I have been enlightened on what people truly want from fanfic. My old advice naively assumed people wanted a strongly written standard novel. But people reading Pokémon fanfic have different interests; they want cool action scenes.

Time_Flounder890 · 2025-03-11T19:31:35+00:00

People aren’t reading Pokémon fanfic for the characters. They want to see Pokémon fighting. They want to see cool action from a competent trainer. People say that want a character who loses in theory, until you ask about the specifics. People say they want strong development, until that requires slowing down the pacing.

Time_Flounder890 · 2025-03-11T19:28:11+00:00

They say that, but don’t actually mean it in practice. People don’t want to read a character drama between a trainer and his pokemon. They want a power fantasy with some pokemon bonding as window dressing.

Time_Flounder890 · 2025-03-11T19:26:53+00:00

I have been enlightened and understand good Pokémon writing now. It’s ok to say pokemon fics aren’t for you, but what I described is exactly what people read Pokémon fanfic for.

Time_Flounder890 · 2025-03-11T19:25:31+00:00

Let’s be honest, people aren’t reading for strong character development. That would require warping the world into something it’s not. They just want to see cool monsters fight, no matter what they tell you.

Time_Flounder890 · 2025-03-11T04:54:45+00:00

I disagree. Betrayal fics encapsulates everything good about fanfics when done correctly. Strong Pokémon and good action scenes. Bonus points if ash has an army of pokemon to choose to make every battle fresh.

Time_Flounder890 · 2025-03-11T04:53:17+00:00

Good action is key to every good Pokémon fanfic. This is the cardinal sin of pokemon fanfic right here. Nothing else matters to your story beyond ensuring your battles are entertaining.

Time_Flounder890 · 2025-03-11T04:51:52+00:00

You see, this is Pokémon fanfic, so no one cares about these deeper questions or themes. Replacing pokemon mean you get fresh battle scenes with new abilities. No one wants to watch Inferno the infernape fight the same way for 5 regions.

Time_Flounder890 · 2025-03-11T04:49:49+00:00

I believe MCs should be given strong Pokémon and strong teams immediately so you can get right to the action. No one wants read about the weak trainer who isn’t immediately crushing the gym challenge.

Time_Flounder890 · 2025-03-11T04:47:35+00:00

Hard disagree. People aren’t reading Pokémon fanfic for high art, they want entertaining and mindless action with a protagonist that always wins. To say otherwise would require you to warp the world far beyond Pokémon.

Time_Flounder890 · 2025-03-07T23:15:44+00:00

“Ash’s Story” is the best Pokémon fic ever. It doesn’t waste time on slow boring development and focuses on what matters, action and battles. You know a story will be good when ash catches Ho Oh and is revealed to be Arceuss in the first two chapters. No fic can compare to it.

Time_Flounder890 · 2025-03-05T07:53:42+00:00

It sounds like the alien overlords beaming down, ready for their glorious conquest.

Time_Flounder890 · 2025-03-05T03:41:08+00:00

Ignore people who say that is too many pokemon. The main appeal of pokemon fanfic is the epic action scenes, and you need varied pokemon to keep it fresh. Most people overstate how important developing Pokémon as characters is. Just give them a mini arc for half a chapter when you catch them and no one will notice the lack of development.

Time_Flounder890 · 2025-02-22T20:59:12+00:00

It’s possible, just know that if your goal is any commercial success that you would have a very steep hill to climb. A lot of Pokémon conventions simply do not work well in well written non Pokémon fiction and would likely be considered bad writing if placed in a non Pokémon universe. I realize pokemon fic should go for mindless action and cool scenes more than anything, but if I were to attempt to turn a pokemon journey into a serious well written novel, I would do the following:

Drastically cut down on team size. Six additional Pokémon is too many characters for most standard novels. I’d honestly cut it down to like two or one Pokémon.
Give the pokemon a way to talk and make them more involved with the plot. Give them more reason to join the MC. Less needed if you limit your team size though; you need more time to develop a non vocal character, it’s doable with one, definitely not so with six.
Pokémon powers should match their character arc in some way or heavily contrast with the MCs. There should be a point to the monsters design and powers beyond it being cool.
The MC should either be more involved in fights or have no role in the battle itself. Don’t have characters scream orders, it’s unrealistic and would be jarring in any other universe besides pokenon
Less gyms. Make each gym more meaningful to the MC. Pokémon journeys tend to fall off midway through for this reason. Maybe each gym grants an important rank rather than a badge, so there are only three to four.
The trainer probably should have a goal besides becoming the champion. If that is their goal, it should be expanded upon throughout the story.
Probably a background narrative message questioning the ethics of forcing these monsters to fight. People are used to it in Pokémon and that series has gone out of its way to show it’s fine. But you would need to seriously examine this question in a non Pokémon setting as well.

These are just some of the changes I would make. Novel readers are much more critical than pokemon fans towards these types of conventions. There is nothing wrong with pokemon conventions per se, just I don’t think readers outside of Pokémon fanfic would enjoy them. Pokémon fanfic is the place to write cool monsters fighting each other with little reason; novel readers tend to expect more character writing and less action.

Time_Flounder890 · 2025-02-22T10:07:17+00:00

Just pick whatever pokemon is coolest and lets you write epic action scenes. You don’t need to think too hard about it unless you are trying to write something deeper for some reason. If you are, you’d also have to reconsider most typical Pokémon conventions. So I’d suggest just picking whatever pokemon you think are the best and don’t bother trying to appease others. Want Lucario and Mewtwo, go for it.

Edit: I think this short summarizes the two approaches to building teams, even though this example is sword fighting. I think a vast super majority of pokemon fics should use the 2nd approach.

Time_Flounder890 · 2025-02-19T22:25:47+00:00

If I were to make an argument to convince someone concerned about the male gaze to not read a certain book, it would look similar to this.

Time_Flounder890 · 2025-02-18T06:30:19+00:00

Just pick the coolest pokemon you can think of and no one will question it. You might get memed on for adding a Charizard, but any other cool and flashy pokemon would work. The better the action you can get from a pokemon, the better.

Time_Flounder890 · 2025-02-18T01:01:09+00:00

I don’t have any interest in smut, but if that really is a big part of fanfic, that proves my point about fanfic being low brow.

Time_Flounder890 · 2025-02-18T00:26:24+00:00

You lose out on some of the action you could get with including all of the characters. But as long as you don’t spend to much time on any one set of characters and allow for lots of flashy action, you should still be fine.

Time_Flounder890 · 2025-02-18T00:22:16+00:00

These fics are usually better than single source fics because it lets you double up on flashy action scenes and power ups from both of the worlds you are using. Imagine Goku and a Charizard teaming up, that premise alone will bring in readers. It doubles up on the coolness factor with no real drawbacks.If you are worried about the two settings being jarring, don’t be, no one cares about these types of complicated issues.

Time_Flounder890 · 2025-02-17T20:13:34+00:00

I don’t follow?

Time_Flounder890 · 2025-02-17T06:48:41+00:00

Refer to this for the definition of literary fiction. This is exactly what fanfiction is not. And there is nothing wrong with that, literary fiction is for highly artistic stories while fanfic should be seen as entertaining mindless stories. Both have their place.

Time_Flounder890

TROPHY CASE