Table of Contents
Follow along with the video below to see how to install our site as a web app on your home screen.
Note: This feature may not be available in some browsers.
“I don’t really want to go back yet,” Zorua admitted, “nothing interesting ever happens there, and this has been such an adventure. But I promised Treecko I’d help him gather berries this week. Also…I suppose a few people are probably worried about me.”
“Almost there.” Arcanine stopped. “A few minutes more and this path will come out into the field above Meadow Town. Works the other direction too, if you want to come visit. Just don’t stray out of sight of the path, or you’ll end up in the mystery dungeon again.”
“Everyone was okay, but it took us all night to find Bonsly. I felt really bad and I wanted to apologize, but then they would have known I was Zorua, and I'd get blamed every time something happened”
“All done.” Arcanine announced. “And next time you thought things through, right?”
Hello The Desert Cat! I saw you were asking for feedback, and you have a cool MechWarrior avatar, so I thought I'd give this a read.
First, a bit of meta-advice: You're more likely to get reviews/feedback on your story if you leave reviews on other people's stories, the longer and more detailed the better. Both for the obvious reasons involving reciprocity, getting your name out there, etc, and also for the more categorical-imperativey reason that you're more likely to get a review in a forum where lots of members review regularly, and you're one of the people who helps decide whether or not this is a forum where lots of members review regularly. Also, you might want to check out the review game, where you're semi-guaranteed to get a review by reviewing the work of the last person to have reviewed someone else in the thread, and you might also consider putting a link to your work in your signature (although I've just started posting here, so I don't know if there's some post requirement limit to putting links in your signature or not).
Moving on from standard advice, there are some specific elements of your story that might be contributing to the lack of response. First, the title. The "Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Nouns Of X" format is a little generic (and your specific title also has the misfortune of being very similar to the title of an existing PMD fic on these forums, Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Hands of Creation), and although I wouldn't say it's a bad title exactly, it doesn't really help your fic stand out any, or give me any idea of what to expect from the story other than that it's a PMD fic and that it might have high-fantasy-ish elements.
Second, the "Author's notes on formatting" section. Having a dialogue formatting guide is generally associated with more amateurish works on Fanfiction.net, and although I'm not sure if it has the same connotations on this forum, it might be serving as a sort of 'red flag' that drives potential readers away. Also, it really is kind of unnecessary - quotation marks indicating dialogue is completely standard, using italicized text for flashbacks/dream sequences/internal thoughts is a common enough convention that you don't need to explain it, and people can probably pick up the parenthesis for telepathy thing from context.
Third, I think the opening chapter just has a really slow start. It starts with seven paragraphs of scenery description and Arcanine not really doing much of anything, then it switches scenes to Absol, where we get more scenery description and nothing important happening, then it switches into a flashback that begins with Absol just playing with other Pokemon and still nothing happening. (I did find the bit about Absol and Poochyena coming to the conclusion that they were both "half-it" sort of amusing, though.) Then when we get to what appears to be the actual plot (the vision of the future blizzard and the sky apparently disappearing, Ninetales thinking the stars look weird), it feels very vague and unengaging. The second half of the italicized vision didn't stir up any emotion in me, mostly because I already knew from the italics that it was some sort of dream sequence that wasn't actually happening, and also it felt like it just went by very fast and was narrated in sort of a detached summary fashion that didn't provide any indication of what Absol or her mother were actually feeling during the great disaster.
As a side note, I feel like just having Absol detect a vague 'sinister presence' in the vision is a missed opportunity. If you described some concrete, immediately recognizable Pokemon or entity, like a Hypno with a missing eye or something, then you could generate some easy narrative immediate tension when a Hypno with a missing eye shows up later in the narrative (even more so if they appear to be on Absol's side).
Also, in the part after Absol wakes up from the vision, Ninetales' vague "feeling of wrongness" really doesn't do much to generate any excitement. Now, if the stars actually had slightly shifted out of position instead of it just being "as if" they did, that might be interesting, but as it is, the whole scene with Ninetales just feels very generic and trope-y, what with the wise and ancient sage who for some reason can't actually go on the quest themselves, the vague omens of future doom, a legend about gods fighting in the distant past, the hero setting out on a quest. One thing I'm not sure of is why Absol is decided to be the one to go find and convince Team Go-Getters to help rather than her mother, given that her mother had actually traveled with them before. Ninetales says she could "use [her] mother's help", but what exactly does she need help with, and why is it more important than maximizing the odds that Team Go-Getters is actually successfully contacted? Reading through the scene a second time, I think the primary reason I was so bored with it was because of how matter-of-factly all your characters seem to be taking this supposedly terrible threat, calmly agreeing on a course of action to take without exuding any sense of uncertainty or danger, like they were planning a trip to the grocery store to pick up a carton of eggs rather than a quest to warn the world about potential doom. If the whole vision and omens deal is so unexciting your protagonist is nearly falling asleep, then what do you think the reader is doing?
For me, the part with Zorua is where the fic actually begins to get interesting. I like the dynamic she has with Arcanine, who starts to become fairly intriguing once we get to know more about him. I don't think I've ever seen a Pokemon fanfiction that used any of the clones from the first movie as characters before (excluding Mewtwo, of course), let alone have one of them as a main protagonist, let alone in a PMD fic! My main complaint about this section is that, important as it is, having two italicized dream sequences in the same chapter feels like a bit much, especially on top of how many other momentum-killing scene transitions there already are in the prologue. To be honest though, I feel like the best way to fix this would be to simply delete everything that came before Zorua's section, and just have Absol's plot thread start in medias res later.
Speaking of Absol's plot thread, I felt like chapter two was fairly weak. There was some repetitive sentence structure at the beginning, with a lot of clauses starting with "she [verbed]" in a row. Then it just doesn't really feel like much of anything happens in the chapter. Absol has nightmares about a vague threatening presence in a manner reminiscent of the previous future vision scene, but they just feel repetitive and don't really add any more detail. There's a tiny bit of worldbuilding about how the culture on Mount Freeze differs from that of the lands south of it, but its delivered in a very tell-y way. I think it would've been more effective to show this by having a scene where Absol speaks with an innkeeper and is surprised when they ask her for money, rather than just have it described by the narration. Despite the problems Absol has, it feels like her journey goes smoothly without any real obstacles, which I feel is due to the detached way the narration just sort of summarizes what's going on, having the effect of making everything seem trivial and unimportant. Then the chapter feels like it ends very abruptly, right before anything interesting might actually start happening.
I liked chapters three through five a lot more, but I don't have too much to say about them at the moment. One final thing I'll mention is that the use of double line breaks for scene transitions tripped me up in a few places. Maybe it's just me, but they feel too easily confused with the normal spacing between paragraphs, and often had me stop and go back to see if I missed something. Perhaps part of the problem is that a lot of them feel rather abrupt, like the one in chapter two where we go immediately from "Her vision blurred and her legs were weak," to describing the room Absol is waking up in, or this one here:
where we leap immediately from Zorua rationalizing deciding to go back to Meadow Town to Arcanine announcing that they're almost there.
Then there are a few which don't really feel like they needed to be scene breaks, like here:
where it feels like Arcanine's line about thinking things through next time is a direct response to what Zorua was just saying.