- Joined
- Feb 16, 2018
- Messages
- 5,087
- Reaction score
- 4,063
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I was reading a different thread and someone said that writing a League tournament is harder than writing an Elite 4 Challenge akin to the games. Why is that?
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.
Yeah. That makes sense. Would what you said about tournaments hold true for non-league tournaments?An Elite Four challenge revolves around four or five characters that already have some sort of default character with already stablished themes and teams, with the simple progression of “beat them, advance.”
A tournament forces the writer to come up with several different trainers and teams (if they haven’f been introduced yet, at least), think of matchups for each major trainer and the progression system, write the protagonist’s battles and give at least passing mentions to the other contestants’ results. If there are multiple major character competing, the writer has to decide who wins should they face off and how that affects either.
It’s certainly a longer process.
I guess it depends. If it’s a friendly junior tournament, it doesn’t hold as much weight as a league, but a big anual festival one will have more tension and stronger competitors.Yeah. That makes sense. Would what you said about tournaments hold true for non-league tournaments?
What do you mean it depends?I guess it depends. If it’s a friendly junior tournament, it doesn’t hold as much weight as a league, but a big anual festival one will have more tension and stronger competitors.
Yeah. Seeing as the League has high stakes and many trainers with powerful teams. Where as a small town tournment might have trainers that don't have as many Pokemon. Also, small town tournaments typically only consist of 3 v 3s or 1 v 1s. The League is going to have full battles near the end.Circumstances. A small tournament in some town with low ranking trainers won’t demand as much complexity as a huge one lime the league.
I have seen the Kalos League and enjoyed it. It certainly was good. I liked the battles. A Pokemon tournment is certainly harder to write than a tournament in something like Final Fantasy, where the humans are battling each other, not having creatures doing the fighting for them.If you do need some examples of a tournament done well, watch Yu Yu Hakusho's Dark Tournament arc. Another example from Pokemon would be the Kalos League
@Beth Pavell can probably give a better firsthand critique about the pros and cons of a tournament arc.
That is true. It's one thing to do something like that for a tv show, it's entirely different for a book.As kin hints, I fairly recently finished a tournament arc that ended up taking much, much longer than I expected. Major lesson learned - tournaments are big, and unless they're more of a setting than a plot point they will remain big.
The nature of the tournament means writing more battles, and this is inescapable. You can cut down on the number shown on-screen, by only writing pivotal ones in detail or skipping over some of the details of them, but you're still going to be writing more than usual. And, it has to noted, skipping over the action is not without its cost. The more of the battle(s) you skip, the fewer opportunities to show character development, conflict, drama, etc. More battles means more time spent devising ways to keep them interesting. I found the most difficult part of the writing was finding different ways for the battles to play out, given that the protagonists have an established style.
But it's the stakes that are really at the heart of the tournament. I didn't realise, in my initial planning, how much of that you lose by only really focusing on what the tournament means for the protagonists. There's no substitute for the reader knowing and empathising with what winning or losing means for their opponents - and so setting that up means time in the story, and more wordcount.
None of this is to say that a tournament arc is impossible to pull off in prose (Though I do think it is undoubtedly easier to do on TV). But it is surprisingly complex and certainly intense to write
I think they mean similar to the battle tournaments in Unova they didn’t really mean much but it was funCircumstances. A small tournament in some town with low ranking trainers won’t demand as much complexity as a huge one lime the league.
The reader's expectations are hard to get past. Readers tend to assume the protagonists will win, which limits your options as an author. If they do win then you need to angle for a way to make it an interesting win - it doesn't matter if, on paper, you think it's not a foregone conclusion, if the reader doesn't really believe you'll allow the protagonist to fail