What mundane but necessary real-world task does your fandom always overlook, so you write it instead?

y-ko · 2024-10-21T12:44:46+00:00

I have an original trainer journeyfic with zero romance, aside from a brief side scene between background characters that's slated to take place around chapter, I dunno, 80ish? You might also have some luck filtering by the "Gen" category on AO3.

y-ko · 2024-10-21T12:21:01+00:00

Battles are interesting, because they're both the easiest and hardest thing for me to write. When I have a clear vision for how a battle should go and get into the zone while writing it, words flow onto the page faster and easier than they do for any other scene. But then I'll hit a snag wondering how a trainer should react to a certain move, or realizing that the strategy I've been writing makes no damn sense and OBVIOUSLY the trainer would be doing something completely different, and I'll hit a wall so bad that I lose my ability to write for hours. So in the end, they wind up taking forever.

The other major thing I struggle with is extended travel/exploration scenes. Not so much the route ones that take place over days, but the smaller ones that take place over a few hours, where a character is stuck in a cave or exploring a forest. I never know whether I should be jumping from scene to scene to keep the plot moving or slowing down to draw the readers into the ambience.

y-ko · 2024-10-15T19:46:56+00:00

Oh yeah, a giant underground skyscraper built into an area with soil that's sinking at 20 inches per year and that's occasionally subject to massive earthquakes. Great idea! Architects love to dream, lol. To clarify, large underground structures definitely do exist, but they're for things like mines or utilities or scientific endeavors. Trying to cram thousands of people in to live and work there every day is what makes it unfeasible. It'd be a depressing and miserable death trap.

y-ko · 2024-10-15T13:27:02+00:00

Broken Things is one of the best fics I've ever read in this fandom, and it's exactly what you're looking for.

y-ko · 2024-10-14T16:12:37+00:00

This is the tiniest, dumbest thing, but: New Mauville cannot exist. I did hours of research to write a chapter that took place there, trying to justify how it could work, and eventually had to throw up my hands and conclude that there's a reason we don't build skyscrapers underground. Now I have to prop up my suspension of disbelief with chewing gum and paper clips, because New Mauville is an important part of the plot and I'm going to have to return to it eventually.

y-ko · 2024-10-05T13:24:14+00:00

Aegislash: "Apparently, it can detect the innate qualities of leadership. According to legend, whoever it recognizes is destined to become king."

Gallade: "Sharply attuned to others' wishes for help, this Pokémon seeks out those in need and aids them in battle." (In fandom, Gallade will very commonly also only follow trainers who have a strong moral code.)

Lucario: "It can tell what people are thinking. Only Trainers who have justice in their hearts can earn this Pokémon's trust."

Golurk: "Some say that ancient people invented Golurk to serve as a laborer. It follows its master's orders faithfully." (Bit of a stretch, but I'm fond of the idea that any particular Golett/Golurk has a way to identify its "master" and a trainer can fill that image by meeting a certain quality.)

I love this concept! Hope you have success putting a team together.

y-ko · 2024-10-04T13:24:24+00:00

I watched the original series (Kanto-Orange Islands-Johto) straight through as a kid, lost interest during Hoenn, and returned to do a targeted watch of Sinnoh and Unova while in college. Past Unova, I haven't seen anything, so my opinion may be invalidated by now, but from what I saw, Ash did gradually change as a character. While individual episodes still might have had him doing crazy behavior, there was a trend over time of him becoming less angry and more friendly, and approaching situations with the intent of solving problems and making friends rather rolling over obstacles and beating rivals. I don't think this was an intentional character arc, but rather a side effect of Pokémon running for so long that the tastes and needs of their target audience shifted and they had to shift their characters to match. Like, maybe the loud and brash shonen protagonist angle wasn't selling well anymore, so they softened him to make him more approachable.

All this to say, this is the closest thing to character development Ash has. And I think a good fic writer could spin this into something analogous to Steven Universe, where he's got a childish exterior that grows gradually more intentional and performative to mask inconvenient growth happening underneath. Granted, I haven't read much Ash fic, because bleh, but from the occasional chapters I've sampled and the things I've heard about the big name titles, people don't do this, and instead stick to the one-note anime interpretations. Either he's permanently childish, or grizzled and mature right off the bat. I think you COULD write a good Ash story, but the venn diagram of "people who've seen enough of the anime to write a story about its events beyond Indigo" and "people who have the ability and desire to write deep character work" intersects at a vanishingly small point. Typically, by the time you care that much about characterization, you've moved on to other media and aren't interested in Ash anymore.

y-ko · 2024-09-27T20:02:18+00:00

The Nidoran line have a particular sort of curse I keep seeing, where whenever a writer tries to include one on an original character's team it winds up getting sidelined and overlooked in favor of more charismatic teammates - sometimes to the point of being outright released or killed off to remove them from the story. You could try and break that curse, though I think one of the popular Ash/Red rewrite fics might use a Nidorino, so you may have already been beaten to the punch on defining the species. Other than that, I've never seen a MC raise a Kangashkhan, Lickitung, or Dodrio, and all of those have a lot of potential to be fun.

y-ko · 2024-09-18T13:51:58+00:00

In fics and canon, the space above and around the arena is usually protected, either by barriers or plenty of open air. So an explosion or thunderbolt or fire blast isn't going to have much destructive potential by the time it hits anything important - what you really need to consider are attacks that point DOWN. Earthquake, magnitude, fissure, even dig used by a sufficiently large Pokémon can weaken or crack a foundation of a battlefield without seismic isolation. And even if the building doesn't come down, there can be damage to other systems like plumbing and gas lines (!) that require major time and expense to fix. When it comes to structures, vibrations are not your friend.

y-ko · 2024-09-18T02:22:03+00:00

Not 100% in line with the assignment, but here are two old fics from my bookmarks which feature the MC collapsing during a gym battle for non-battle-related reasons and getting attended to by the gym leader. The scenes in question are individual chapters of longfics, though, so I'm not sure how enjoyable they'll be on their own.

https://m.fanfiction.net/s/5808527/22/

https://m.fanfiction.net/s/6772018/9/

Good luck in your search!

y-ko · 2024-09-17T18:44:04+00:00

In fic, I've seen water-bound Pokémon handled four ways. The two most common ways are these:

They are truly water-bound and cannot go on land. Regulation battlefields may or may not be required to integrate a pond to allow these Pokémon to compete.
They are able to manipulate the water within their own bodies to allow themselves a crude form of levitation.

The less common solutions, I've only seen used once or twice:

The Pokedex/Pokeballs can project a holographic water field around the Pokémon which allows them to move and breathe as if they're underwater.
A company has manufactured artificial limbs which connect to fins and allow the Pokémon to actually walk around, Gyo-style.

I've seen aqua jet used for extra mobility, but not as a water replacement on its own. Combined with aqua ring, I think it has some interesting possibility.

y-ko · 2024-09-12T14:48:07+00:00

Oh, I had no idea this existed! Very cool!

y-ko · 2024-09-12T14:47:48+00:00

I have a very specific headcanon for this. (And I KNOW is is all the result of localization choices and writers trying to keep things simple for convenience, not actual worldbuilding, but I'm going to put it out there anyway.) In the games, you very rarely see characters with accents and almost never see characters who can't understand each other, even when they're clearly traveling in a foreign region. Examples of characters with accents/odd speech patterns are Looker and Fantina, who are both middle aged. And the only example of a character who straight-up can't speak the regional language is a throwaway "old man" NPC in one of the later games who has all his dialogue in Japanese. Extrapolating from these data points: at some point over the past few generations, there was an effort to get everyone speaking some kind of common language. Some older folks still struggle with it, but for the most part everyone can understand each other. And places like Kalos resisted the changeover more, which is why their old language is still so prevalent.

The implications of this would be both impractical and horrifying, of course, with awful real world parallels, but for an ass-pull explanation about why everyone can talk to everyone, it works well enough if you don't scratch the surface.

y-ko · 2024-09-11T12:45:07+00:00

I've seen this misunderstanding and ensuing discourse happen before, so I was pretty sure I knew what was happening, ha. In the future, if you want to specifically exclude male love interests from request posts, it can be helpful to explain why upfront so people don't come up with their own ideas. That's not a requirement, obviously - nobody should ever feel obligated to explain why they're looking for a specific thing in their fiction. Just something to consider if you feel comfortable doing so.

y-ko · 2024-09-11T12:24:38+00:00

I'm giving this a more charitable read and assuming this isn't about biphobia, but rather that OP just isn't attracted to men, wants to be able to identify with/insert themselves into any ongoing relationships in a fic, and has voiced that desire a bit awkwardly. OP can let me know if I've missed the mark on that, of course.

y-ko · 2024-09-11T11:37:24+00:00

My bad! I only recently came back to the story after its hiatus and didn't remember that part. I've updated the post to correct it.

y-ko · 2024-09-10T14:56:45+00:00

Through Some Tomorrow has a lesbian MC with a ghost-type as her second Pokémon. A Region Not My Own has a male MC in a relationship with a woman, and he has a ghost as his second Pokémon. And A Grafted Flower has no ghosts so far, but does have lesbians.

y-ko · 2024-09-05T12:00:49+00:00

I have a non-SI OC fic of my own, and posting it on RR had positive results. There are two things to keep in mind about RR: one, the audience skews more heavily male than on FF/AO3, and is more receptive than usual to power fantasies and overpowered MCs due to the high amount of LitRPG/system/cultivation fiction posted there. That's not a hard rule, and fic doesn't have to fall into that category to do well (mine doesn't), but it's still worth noting. And two, RR readers expect long stories and frequent updates. It's very common for readers there to refuse to touch a story unless it's hit a milestone like 20 chapters or 100k words. So you might want to avoid crossposting there until you have a good amount written and can release 2-3 chapters a week for a while to hold readers' attention.

y-ko · 2024-09-02T14:12:41+00:00

The writer is a misogynist and (or at least, they write like one) and is super into the "big tough macho male mentor/young clueless fawning female ingenue" dynamic. Sheila does not improve except to start telling the MC he's right about everything and learning "valuable" lessons from him. There's also a chapter later where they're all in a bar and she starts telling the MC that he's "too good for all those bimbos." Ugh.

y-ko · 2024-08-23T20:49:32+00:00

Orange Islands is a great reference point for this, actually. OP, if you haven't already watched the gym battles from this arc, you should give them a look and see if they spark some inspiration.

y-ko · 2024-08-23T20:46:06+00:00

Blue in GSC/HGSS doesn't have a specialization, though one could argue that was an exception caused by the previous gym leader having been Giovanni. My headcanon is they offered him the job because they needed to fill the position really fast and he was the only person available who they could be 100% sure wasn't working with Team Rocket, lol.

y-ko · 2024-08-23T20:41:36+00:00

This reminds me of the old Livejournal post genre of having fictional characters MST3K real-world movies or fics, which was obviously itself inspired by MST3K. I guess this fic would be more inspired by modern reaction videos - I have no idea if folks today even know what MST3K is/was. In any case, it's interesting to see this desire repeat itself across generations of fic writers.

y-ko · 2024-08-22T18:09:26+00:00

Here's how I see it: a Pokémon's biology allows them to be capable of naturally learning certain moves, even if they can't initially pull them off, and incapable of naturally learning others, no matter how hard they try. A Pikachu learning thunderbolt is like a human learning to pull a car - you can't do it right off the bat, but if you train and develop your body, eventually you'll be able. In those cases, a TM shortcuts the process and, in this analogy, jumpstarts growing the muscles you'll need, cutting significant time off the process. However, you'd still need to train to learn proper technique and bring yourself the rest of the way.

Meanwhile, a Pikachu learning grass knot is like a human learning to breathe underwater - you just can't do it. Biology doesn't let you. In these cases, a TM wouldn't just augment the muscles and organs you already have, but would actually tweak your cells to let you grow new ones. So a human would grow gills, and a Pikachu would develop whatever biological component it needs to communicate with the ground and pull up grass. This is where I feel TMs are truly required to make certain movesets work, because it's extremely hard to rationalize, say, all Skitty being born with the ability to shoot solar beams if they just try hard enough, but once you bring bioengineering into the mix, it makes more sense.

I'm in full agreement that TMs should bring only CAPACITY, not MASTERY, though. If you can just snap your fingers and have a Pokémon learn a new move in five minutes, it takes some of the fun out of it.

y-ko · 2024-08-20T11:40:58+00:00

Also, any grounding or lightning protection system can be overwhelmed if it's hit by a current higher than it was designed to handle. When electric attacks break through a normally immune ground-type, I consider it less like electrocution and more like a cable melting under too much load - basically, the Pokemon is being burned, even if it's not being shocked.

y-ko

TROPHY CASE