TEEN: The Island of Dr. Fuji [Part 5 of 5]

[MisheardWhisper]

As is my wont lately, I'll be going through this piecemeal in a sort of stream of consciousness, and then bring it all back together at the end to form something resembling actual feedback. Let's go!

Part 1

I like Agatha's attitude, even if I don't entirely understand it. There's obviously an established and complicated relationship between her and Oak, and that's communicated clearly before she even gets to his lab. If anything, it's a little too heavy-handed, but on balance I'd say it works. She admired him, admired his strength, he threw away all his potential to be a researcher instead, but he's still a force to be reckoned with and she needs him, dammit, but it galls her to ask, probably because of the circumstances under which they parted. Sound right?

‘Cut the crap, Oak. I need your help. Something’s going down in Cinnabar.’
Oak chucked slowly.

Okay, she was kinda rude, but he didn't have to throw up. XD

This is something that just becomes exacerbated by posting stories on forums - with a wide screen and no indentation there's only so much you can do - but it's pretty obvious when conversations are falling into a pattern. This whole interaction between Oak and Agatha reads really strangely because there's *counts* 17 lines of dialogue and minor action, all pretty much the same length, before something happens. The length of the conversation isn't bad, Arceus knows I have the talking-head problem myself and this is nowhere near that level, but there's not a lot of variation in the lengths of the paragraphs, which is a touch jarring and breaks up the flow of the story a little.

I'm just nitpicking really, because I am enjoying this interaction. The tension between the two is palpable, and I enjoy how Oak doesn't seem to be feeling it.

It had three horns on its head rather than the usual two, and all of them were much longer than usual, even in relative to its large size.

Should probably be 'even relative to' or 'even in relation to'.

‘Ha! You better have Burn Heal!’

...

Part 2

I find the sudden tonal shift interesting. It's obviously more than a little sinister, but it brings up a number of other questions. Why is Blaine so... he seems like a child. Fuji's obviously pulling his strings, but Blaine scans like someone brainwashed, hypnotised, mentally disabled or juvenile. Very Igor, which is in blinding contrast to the sharp-as-a-tack (if slightly mad) Blaine we see in the games. Interesting characterisation, and of course not necessarily wrong; I just look forward to seeing what the implications are.

Bringing Mega Evolution into Kanto - and decades before the games' setting, to boot - is an interesting choice (I know we saw Zard-Y in the last part, but I'm just thinking about it as Fuji carries on now). Between fossils and Megas, something is telling me Mew/two is involved in some capacity. I'm not intimately familiar with your other work, so I may be missing some context here (as other reviews seem to be alluding to earlier works) - but I don't mind it, since this story seems to be standing well enough on its own so far.

Agatha, Blaine will take you to the mega evolution chamber while I take Professor Oak to the fossil revival lab.’

...I've played enough D&D to see where this is going.

Part 3

I love how nerdy Oak is when he's going through the lab. In his old age you can see his passion for Pokemon, but it's tempered by age and wisdom to an extent, whereas here his obsession is clearly in full swing. My one gripe with this is that you've spent quite a bit of time telling us this (mostly through Agatha's eyes), whereas simply allowing his personality to shine through in scenes like this would have clearly got the point across.

Inside, two men in white lab coats whispered and made notes on clipboards while looking at...

I do appreciate the living scenery as always; makes the setting feel more alive. However, these guys are doing pretty much the most cliched faceless-scientist thing they could think of, almost as if to drive home the point that they're not important.

Its tentacles were black like those of a Tentacruel rather than the usual blue Omastar tentacles and rather than the small beige beak of an Omastar it bore the large blue pincers of a Tentacruel on its face.

Hrmm, minor quibble really, but I feel like the 'usual blue Omastar tentacles' is a) a bit of a misnomer since this is an incredibly rare - or indeed, extinct - Pokemon and there's nothing 'usual' about it and b) doesn't seem like something Oak would know. If Omastar is extinct but known from fossil records, there should be no way even a researcher like Oak would know what colour it is, especially the fleshy bits that don't survive fossilization. I'm just drawing comparisons to how it took us well over a hundred years of digging up bones to realise that many dinosaurs probably had feathers. But like I say, minor quibble and pretty much inconsequential to the flow of the story.

Oak seems to get over his qualms quite rapidly, which disturbs me somewhat. For someone who loves Pokemon so much, it seems a little out of character that he would accept literal torture in the name of progress. I suspect he's still having doubts, but if he 'tried to summon his previous outrage, but it would not come', that sounds pretty damning.

Also, this is SO not how reviving fossil Pokemon is supposed to work. Obviously. It's quite horrific, and I love that. I'd never thought of... well, whatever Fuji is doing here to twist regular Pokemon into bastardized copies of the ancient ones, but it's certainly a novel take. And I confess it did set me on edge when the narration was so very insistent on pointing out that half of Kabutops was literally a Scyther.

Okay, so Oak's got his moral compass back on track. That's good to see. I appreciate the fact that he struggled with his desire to see the ancient Pokemon brought to life, but I didn't quite buy the struggle. Like I said above, he just kind of went from 'oh no that poor Pokemon' to 'actually this is kind of cool' and back. The internal conflict makes sense, and I'm glad it was included, but I'm not sure it was given enough attention to really feel real.

Part 4

It was some time before Fearow was finally hit by a Toxic, and it let out a crow of pain.

I'm not sure I like this. The terminology chosen makes the manoeuvre sound straight out of the video games, and blunts the otherwise quite successful edge of realism in the story. Same goes for the description of Pursuit in a following paragraph - very gamified, especially terms like 'knocking out the Gengar on contact' - and the Venoshock. All in all, the battle scenes are probably the weakest part of this fic so far.

Part 5

Blaine grinned and let out a laugh, his badly burned chest bouncing up and down as he did.

Okay, I'm sorry, but I inadvertantly chuckled at this. I don't really think of 'bouncing up and down' as a thing that men's chests do when they laugh... I get the imagery you were going for, though.

...I know enough about Mega Evolution to see that this part of his research, too, is sick and wrong. Sick and wrong! Speaking of, I'm not entirely sure what sort of... well, fuckery is going on in this part of the story. The swarm of miniature Spooks, the weird dissociative episode and subsequent transition to purple dreamscape... feels a bit random.

Now that said, I do like the scene with dream-Oak, but I'm not a huge fan of how it's implemented. I'll go back into this in my general comments later, because it's one of the core strengths/weaknesses of the story in my opinion, so it deserves its own section. The tl;dr however comes down to the same 'show, don't tell' as I touched on with Oak before.

‘Spook?’ she managed.

‘He’s gone,’ answered Oak, ‘When I shut off the machine he escaped from it, and flew away.’

Agatha nodded. Of course he had.

‘Where’s Spook?’

All three men look to her, their faces showing shock at the unexpected noise.

‘Gone,’ said Oak, ‘When I turned off the machine he flew away.’

‘Yes,’ said Agatha, ‘Of course.’

I'm not sure whether to attribute this to an actual mistake, or a simple case of writing the same scene twice while distracted and forgetting to delete one, but you have two almost identical conversations back-to-back. I could maybe understand a shellshocked Agatha refusing to believe it the first time, but that's not the vibe I'm getting here - especially since Oak doesn’t seem to react either.
Hmm, Fuji's sudden change of heart is another one of those things that I wish had been shown rather than informed. While we saw Agatha's torment and felt its emotional impact, we didn't see Fuji's. We gather that he faced the same or a similar hallucination through Spook's possession, but it's not really explicitly given to us.

Okay, let's wrap up.

Characters: I’m going to start here because, at its heart - to me at least - this is a story about Oak and Agatha. I like their relationship, I really do; there’s a majority of bitterness on Agatha’s side, tempered with just enough sweetness and nostalgia to make it sting a little bit. What I don’t like is that these feelings are just... given to us. A number of times, you outright mention that she felt angry with him and tell us why, which... cheapens it somewhat. And just like Oak’s personality, you told us first and then later, you showed us anyway! And those scenes were good, but they had the wind taken out of their sails by the fact we already knew the deal. The fic would be a lot stronger in this regard, in my opinion, if you cut the explicit emotional cues and just lay the relationship out in front of us. I suspect you fell into the trap of wanting to make extra-super-duper sure that your readers Got The Point and overcompensated on the telling.

From the first half of Part 1, maybe even before a word was spoken, I think I had a solid read on Agatha and Oak’s history, and that made the following scenes a lot weaker when we got to see some great interactions between the two. And they were great! As a character study, I’d say you had some success in the later half of the story with the scenes between the two, but laying everything out so explicitly sort of cheapened it. I’m repeating myself quite a bit here, but a) I think this is quite central and important to the fic and b) I’m trying to make it clear that I did in fact very much like the relationship between the protagonists, but just felt a little let down by the framing.

Plot: It’s a tale as old as time, really. Everyone thinks it’s a great idea to torture and exploit helpless beings until you’re forced to walk a mile in their shoes, and then the evil scientist sees the error of his ways. Mm, as I touched on before I wasn’t really buying Fuji’s instant heel face turn, largely because we only see the aftermath of the dramatic climax. Agatha blacks out and faces her own demons, completing the requisite protagonist arc, but the antagonist arc feels abortive and incomplete. Again, we are told that Fuji experienced the same agony and guilt that Agatha did, rather than shown.

That said, I enjoyed the plot as a vehicle for the character drama, which as I’ve said, I believe to be the crux of this piece. Putting characters with a complicated existing relationship through an extreme trial that pits them against each other and forces them to reconcile is a tried and true formula, and I feel like you were very successful with it in this regard.

Prose/dialogue: Hmm, I touched on the battle scenes already and there’s not much more to say in that regard. In both instances of battle I felt like I was watching set pieces using an altered game engine rather than a dynamic, thrilling combat.

With regards to dialogue, other than the weird Twilight Zone feeling I got from reading quite a long conversation in one-liners of the same length, I didn’t find this story lacking at all. The four characters were all sufficiently distinct with voices that were fit for purpose, and I wasn’t confronted by any major contradictions with my hazy memory of Gen I games - except perhaps Blaine, who sort of struck me as a little more shrewd. I mean yes, he’s hot-headed, but I wouldn’t expect him to make such a lapse in judgement as to attack Oak and Agatha. Fuji’s rebuke reminds me of a scene from Star Trek or something, where an android with perfect logic and no emotions has to be given incredibly specific instructions or he’ll do something completely crazy by human standards.

I don’t know, perhaps age tempered him somewhat.

Overall: Yeah, I liked it! What can I say? I think I’ve covered everything, but at the end of the day and after all those nitpicks it really was a very enjoyable read. The start was a little bumpy and perhaps didn’t draw me in as much as it could have, but I found myself going through the rest all in one sitting - even while taking all these notes. I think you have a great character drama on your hands here, one that has the potential to be excellent with some tuning. It was held back somewhat by the issues I mentioned, but not enough to be anything close to poor. Still an engaging read. Big props!

 

[Instrutilus]

Okie dokie, I've read the story and I've got one major thing with it.

It lacks description.

Now, I know what you're thinking, you described the appearances well enough. But the story lacks proper descriptions about the world it's in. As such, it has caused confusion about the world it's set in, the upcoming war causing some confusion. I assume it's supposed to be the same war that Lt. Surge fought in, in the background of Gen I?

The lack of description has also resulted in rather direct and pointed sentences, which don't draw a person in. For instance:

The boy hesitated for a moment. Agatha scowled at him. He nodded, and disappeared into the lab. Agatha didn’t bother to wait for him to come back and invite her in. What an unnecessary waste of time that would have been. She marched through the lab, doing her best to keep her eyes directly forwards. An accidental glance at the endless books lining the walls was all it would take to send her into a fit of fury. Her three Gengar continued to circle above, now right up against the ceiling of the lab. At the back of the lab, her old friend sat at a large desk, making notes about some trivial matter or another.

The actions are all well and good, but it's just that: actions. We don't get the proper emotions behind them. Now, were I to give it a shot, it would read more like:

The boy hesitated at her abrasive tone, unsure how to respond. Her responding scowl prompted him to action instead, a curt nod and a retreat into the lab. Inviting herself inside instead of wasting time awaiting an official invite, she marched on through toward the back while pointedly ignoring the books that would only draw currently unnecessary ire. The Shadows that continued to follow her giggled to themselves, spines, feet and a tongue from one of her particularly playful ghost were tracing along the roof as they moved.

At the back of the lab, her former comrade sat at a large desk. He was more preoccupied in his work than he was at whoever had knocked at the door, but that changed when he took note of her footsteps. With a startled flinch that knocked him from his focus, he looked toward the source and saw Agatha's diplomatically straight face, prompting his own to change to a broad, handsome smile.
​

I've continued to describe the people, how the aide is unsure and responds specifically to the glare, or elaborated on emotions a person is expressing, instead of just the actions of the person. Actions may speak louder than words, but words are needed to express actions.

Sorry I can't give you any more notes, I'm not the best with reviewing. Hopefully I've gotten my point across. It's still a really good story, a really interesting twist on Mega Evolution and the Fossil Revival thing from the games and a horrifying look at what else Fuji and Blaine were up to, and I look forward to seeing more from you, Gama!

Also, hi everyone else, long time no post beyond Christmas and New Years greetings!

 

[diamondpearl876]

The whirring from inside the mega evolution tank became deafening. Bolts of electricity began passing through the tank, occasionally hitting Spook. Each time Spook was hit, he let out a shriek of pain and struggled against his chains. Each shriek struck Agatha’s heart. How could she have done this to her own Pokémon? She steeled herself against these feelings. Spook himself would see this pain was worth it when he emerged as a Mega Gengar.

So we see even Agatha is effected by this negatively and feels conscientious about what's happening. That's good. Oak doesn't need more reasons to run away from her as far as possible, lol.

She cried out again. Oak looked her directly in the eye, and nodded slowly. Why was he allowing this to happen to her? At this point, the pain became unbearable. It was like nothing she had ever felt before. Surely her body would give, and she would die at any moment, but no, she continued, the unbearable pain only growing. Through it all, Oak maintained eye contact with her, uncaring. The pain grew so much that she could see, hear, and feel nothing but the pain and Oak’s uncaring eyes.

I would've liked to see some flashbacks/memories of them from when they were in love or at least more intimate than they are in the time period of this story. It might've made this short fic have a bigger impact, since a big focus is the relationship between Agatha and Oak.

‘Where’s Spook?’

All three men look to her, their faces showing shock at the unexpected noise.

‘Gone,’ said Oak, ‘When I turned off the machine he flew away.’

‘Yes,’ said Agatha, ‘Of course.’

Hmm, any reason to have her ask where Spook is twice? Is it out of confusion? There doesn't seem to be much difference between the two times she asked, though I'd understand after such an ordeal why she'd be worried about Spook specifically.

Anyway, this was a short fic that had a lot to offer in terms of characters, worldbuilding, and plot. While the execution could've used with a bit more polishing, I'm glad to see you're back in action and look forward to seeing more of your ideas in future fics. :3 Keep it up!

 

[AceTrainer14]

I got a bit sidetracked and wasn't able to keep up with this story, but I am here now!

Overall, it was a pleasant read with some nice character interactions and a strong concept behind it. I liked how you portrayed Oak and Agatha and the differences between them; their relationship felt very realistic, not just for the Pokemon world but ours as well.

I guess my biggest issue is the pacing. There were short, punchy chapters that were easy and fun to read, but there was a part of me that wanted a bit more. You had a lot of elements in there; Oak's fascination with Dr Fuji in the second chapter morphed well into his reactions in the third. But for a lot of the story, I felt things could have slowed down a bit more. It goes back to what I said in my first review about how a lot happened in a few sentences. These chapters, since the events were more spread out, but some more backstory or worldbuilding details could have helped so it wasn't entirely plot and character.

One minor niggle I had in the third chapter was the use of 'thousands of years' multiple times. It quickly became overused and almost seemed comical by the fourth use. It is important to try a variety of words so that things don't become stale, particularly in moments like that as it really pushes you out of the story.

Oak and Agatha's battle was well written and had some nice moments - Fury Chase was a good way to utilise Fearow and make it a more effective opponent, and I applaud your imagination there. Agatha willing to kill Oak seemed quite extreme and off-kilter with her character, but I am happy to let that one slide. It was perhaps a bit of an undersell though to have Fuji just kick Oak out; it would have sold their crimes and evilness a lot more if he had had him hauled away or something sinister like that.

The final was good, especially how you described the nightmare sequence. It was probably the best part of the whole story; it was moving, well written and had a lot of character development and revelations in it. I think it was a bit let down though by how things were relatively neatly resolved. Oak somehow getting back in wasn't really explained, he just sort of turned up. I also thought that Agatha was far too accepting of Spook leaving her, when a few paragraphs earlier she had been quite happy to transform him into the most powerful Pokemon ever. Some more nuance in that respect might have been nice, and less blubbing from Fuji and possibly some more reflection so that he truly accepts his crimes. Similarly to Fulcrum, I found the double-up conversation from Agatha very distracting.

True disappointment: not enough of Blaine's magnificent hair XD

This was a solid story and I hope it means we will be seeing more of you soon! I'd recommend a slower pace and more worldbuilding for your next story, but your plots and characters are as intriguing as ever.

 

[Flaze]

Well then, let's close out this 5 part story with this shall we.

Right off the bat I have to say that I myself didn't spot any big grammar mistakes in the story, though I'm admittedly not the best when it comes to consulting that unless it's something that's like absolutely obvious.

The other thing I wanted to comment on is your style but I'll do that in more detail below.

Chapter 3

Chapter 3 felt...really rushed. For one I feel like the chapter was a little too short and like it went through events really quickly, it's a five part story yet the third chapter really only focuses on Oak finding out what Fuji is doing and having a quick reaction to it before he moves on to the next room. This is without counting the fact that it took two parts to get to the lab itself in retrospect.

The rushed feeling also does the story a disservice. Because of this the description is also lacking, as everything feels more told rather than shown, with most events and situations being relayed to the reader through a quick sequence of events. There's no clear-cut description of emotions that aren't direct and to be honest, not much nuance either. In fact, Fuji ends up coming off as a very one-dimensional villain here and just from this chapter it's already easy to see what exactly is going to happen with the story.

This was also the point where I realized that...Oak doesn't actually have much weight in this. Sure he's the co-protagonist alongside Agatha I guess you could say, but his personality seems kind of bland going forward from this chapter, and when I think about it most of what we know about Oak we do from Agatha's remarks about how he used to be compared to who he is now.

Chapter 4

This chapter also suffers from a lot of similar flaws that chapter 3 did, mainly the villain and weight problem. Like, I can buy Agatha being convinced to try it out but it would've been fun to actually see how she got convinced and what she was told, considering she's our POV character for all chapters but chapter 3 and 4, again it's a change that makes sense but it still arrives a little too quick for us to feel anything. Like, I get that the chapter should give us this vibe of old friends (maybe lovers) fighting over mixed ideologies and views, but it feels a bit empty when it's all happening so fast and we're blowing past it so quickly.

That being said, I did like the fight scene between the two and I think this is where your particular style excelled the most as you demonstrated the different moves that Oak's Fearow performed along with Agatha's own Pokemon. The battle was also pretty quick so it didn't drag out, though I have to say that it felt a bit predictable once you got the rhythm down like a Pokemon would get taken down once every paragraph.

Again, I took issue with the way you portrayed Fuji and Blaine. I get that what they're doing is amoral but the way they're shown is practically cartoonish. It would've been great if the story explored why they were doing it in greater detail. We know Fuji is doing it to stop wars revolving around extinct species, but what motivated him towards this? what drove him to become this kind of mad scientists that doesn't even care for the wellbeing of others? the same could be said about Blaine too who pretty much does nothing after his introduction in chapter 2.

Chapter 5

The final chapter. I think this one actually does a good job of closing the story and the Agatha nightmare sequence was actually really well done. You really know how to turn up the tension and I'd say you even have a knack for doing horror as I was shocked when I read what Spook was doing and what that caused Agatha to go through. Similarly, I think this chapter does a better job of getting us into Agatha's head and figuring out why she did what she did, even if most of her problems end up revolving around Oak when we could've focused on other aspects of her life that might've influenced her.

Unfortunately, once the sequence breaks things kind of go back to a pretty hectic pace, in fact I'd say that it kind of loses its magic around the time Agatha appears in Spook's place. I can see what you were trying to do here and I think that for the most part it works, but it ends up coming off a little undercooked by the end with how quickly and rushed the description about Agatha's situation is, not to mention that the metaphors get pretty obvious to the point that it's a bit strange that the story itself has to point out later, I'd understand it if the characters did but the story is different since you already did a good job of showing us what was happening, even though more description on how Agatha processed it all outside of how painful it was would've helped, though describing the intense pain was also well done.

This all leads to the actual conclusion of the story which...kind of just ends. Like, Oak just walks in, turns off the machine (though we don't even see him) and then we cut to everyone sitting together feeling bad for what they did. But like, that's it? Like Fuji and Blaine were cartoonish villains up to this point, I don't' see why it took them getting to see the kind of torture they put the Pokemon through for them to understand...especially since they were already shown to be self-aware of this fact. I understand that saying it and feeling it are different things altogether, but it's still a bit off. The way the story closes also feels a little underwhelming since it hinges on Oak and Agatha's friendship apparently being rekindled even though the two of them didn't actually spend that much time together and less time actually getting along.


Overall, I think this story has great potential but I think it crumbled over it, the message is interesting but cliched which is why exploring it in a nuanced and more defined light would've worked, but the story kind of goes through it quickly which ends up making it predictable and underwhelming. We don't get to really spend too much time getting to know the characters outside of their basics personalities and at points it seems inconsistent, the same could be said about their motivations which either feels underdeveloped or not even looked at.

I'd say the first two chapters and chapter 5 work pretty well, but chapter 3, 4 and the last part of 5 end up weighing the story down a lot with stylistic choices and a lot of undefined variables.

 

[99unownoak]

I enjoyed reading this very much with the fast pace and the ending of each chapter drawing me into the following one. The questions it brings up of scientific testing and abuses by authority in the name of progress, science or desire got my mind thinking.

The ending solution, with the characters who erred made aware of their actions, was probably fitting though I thought it was a bit too quick and easy. Could Dr Fuji's mind really be changed just like that after everything he has achieved?

The hint we got of a wider back story and history were very nice and the story as a whole left me wanting to read more.

 

[kintsugi]

a random prenote

Hey there! Long time fan; I don’t think I’ve reviewed your work ever/at least not for a long time, so let me know if I could be more clear on things. Admittedly, I read this all in one sitting, so that probably changed how I read certain cliffhangers or suspenseful moments a little bit.

premise/themes

Overall, I did like the direction that you took with this. The overarching plot is an intriguing mystery and you took a neat direction with the evil-science route. There’s a lot of hints in S/M that Mega Evolution is an actively horrible thing (Mega Kangaskhan being afraid that her Mega-child is a mindless fighting machine, Mega Gyarados being affected to the point that it loses all brain function except the destroy button), so it’s pretty neat to see this interpretation over the fun-and-rainbows of anime Mega Evolution. Choosing Kanto as a setting is an interesting choice given the historic lack of MEvo’s, but it does play to your strengths and also plays up the genetic-fuckery aesthetic that Kanto has going on, so it’s a neat combination and I think it worked out really well.

setting/worldbuilding

I think how you approached the setting was actually the root of my biggest concern here. BUT WAIT I JUST PRAISED THE SETTING

What confused me as I was reading this was how inhumane everyone but Oak was. Blaine is literally cackling as he roasts people alive, Fuji’s clearly gone off the deep end, and Agatha starts off saying she’ll kill her old best friend if he traded off a Pokemon of his. Everyone here is purely transactional and pretty irredeemable until the last part, but at that point your conflicts are pretty much settled and I think it’s too late to spin moral ambiguity out of the story.

I think you were trying to spin the “we did what we had to to win [a thing]” angle -- and I think “torturing Pokemon to win Pokemon wars” would be a logical extension of “smashing Pokemon together to win Pokemon battles” in extenuating circumstances. I think, coupled with the gruesome way that you spun Mega Evolution, this would be a really realistic and compelling conflict to have: people forced to push their friends to insane limits to prevent an even bigger war/bloodshed. But the version of Kanto that you give us doesn’t really seem troubled, so this becomes hard to believe. Agatha and Oak drop a few hints about there being a war waged in the background, but there’s no real sign of it. In fact, the main antagonists/conflict initiators of your stories are:

Part 1: Blaine + burning people alive with Mega Evolution
Part 2: arguably there’s no conflict here, and that's okay
Part 3: Fuji + torturing Pokemon with Fossil Revival + Mega Evolution
Part 4: Agatha + trying to murder her best friendo to get Mega Evolution
Part 5: Spook + getting back at the idiots who thought it was a good idea to try Mega Evolution

The justification for Fuji (and later Agatha’s) intense desire to go through with this is loosely attributed to this predicted conflict, but at no point is this upcoming war ever a major antagonistic force in the story, and maybe I’m reading this wrong, but I do think you meant for the upcoming Kanto war to be a major motivator for everyone’s actions. But the main thing that’s causing these people to go off the rails at every turn is Mega Evolution, which, okay, could be the moral of your story, but then it kind of undercuts the arc of your story. And this in turn leads to:

morals/conflicts

In Part 5 you seem to be trying to wrap up the story in a more nuanced way that takes the purported setting-based war above into account:

‘I have seen… what we put… those poor creatures through. I just wanted… to make the world… a better place… prepare Kanto… for the wars… that might come…

And I think this could actually be really, really interesting -- in a world where people already pit their Pokemon-friends against each other + cause them bodily harm to solve major conflicts, and in a background where Agatha and Oak already disagree on the validity of this premise, where does the line get drawn? Oak hands children Pokemon (presumably) with the knowledge that they’ll probably be used in increasingly more violent and high-stakes battles, so why is it okay when those Pokemon get hurt for their Trainers, but it’s not okay when it happens here? Fuji mentions that the Tentacruel-Omastar will suffer for its entire life, but does anyone in the room have the right to judge him when they’re all complicit in a pretty violent system that causes Pokemon around the world to get pitted against each other? Hell, when Agatha gets mad at Oak for not wanting to go through with Mega Evolution, Oak doesn’t choose stand up for himself and suffer for the stance he’s chosen to take, he chooses to send out Fearow to do that for him. The person who actually makes Oak accountable for his choice is Agatha when she eventually aims Arbok at Oak after Fearow is physically unable to stand between them, and it’s pretty clear that we aren’t supposed to agree with that call.

So when the moral of the story is that Mega Evolution was bad all along, it kind of feels like a letdown: this could’ve been the conclusion we took away from Part 1, where Mega-Charizard is a brainless barbecuing machine, and this conclusion doesn’t really dive into the deeper issue of why this particular instance of causing Pokemon a ton of pain while their Trainers stand by idly is any different from the other ones where that also happens. What I found strange was that Parts 2-5 do go into some more nuanced things, but these lines end up getting dropped for the “Mega Evolution is bad” conclusion, which, again, we knew all along.

prose/style

I really like how you convey thoughts and ideas here. You’ve got a pretty no-frills method of narration that conveys the basics of every situation really well, and I found myself breezing through the story. There are some genuinely humanizing moments for Oak that I think you pulled off very well, too -- his idolization of Fuji and his fear when Agatha is gonna murder the death out of him were really well-written.

I also think you’ve got a really solid grasp on dialogue: the conversations feel pretty natural, and each character has a distinct voice that makes it pretty clear who’s saying what even without dialogue tags. Good stuff!

overall

There were a lot of individual parts here that I think were really good -- the premise and stylistic aspects were solid, but I think you got tied up with how you approached the central conflict, which ended up undercutting your character drama a bit. That being said, I think this was still a really enjoyable read, and it was a lot of fun to go through!

 

[Drakon]

I get that this is a miniseries but there's simply not enough background to really get what's going on with this setting; especially with regards to "the wars… that might come" line. That implies that there are conflicts brewing or that the geopolitical situation is unstable and there's really no indications or even implications that is so.

Also, I do like how Spook forced Agatha and Dr. Fuji to experience what he was experiencing when he was forced to Mega Evolve and how it prompted them to change their minds about this whole thing. Not to mention, the whole Island of Dr. Moreau take on fossil revival is an interesting variant of fossil revival.

On that note, I am a bit puzzled as to how Blaine doesn't seem to notice or even care that his chest is severely burnt.