unrepentantAuthor
A cat who writes stories
- Joined
- Feb 6, 2012
- Messages
- 1,631
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- #21
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Oh man. Starting off with some easy topics, right? I like this direction, though. Morphs are always a neat way to study humanity and what we ascribe as monstrous or human-like; tying in the debate of pokemon sentience seems like a logical (and yet usually ignored) leap. I’m not entirely sold on the handwave for “people feeling uncomfortable” if fully sentient pokemon are commonplace in the world, though? Does training still exist? How do we approach the concept of ownership in this world?This perspective is unsupported by modern research, but it persists nonetheless, perhaps because people are uncomfortable believing otherwise.
Quick grammar thing, you actually want to use em dashes (—) instead of hyphens (-) here. Hyphens are used to join two words together, like lickety-split; em dashes are used to indicate breaks in sentences—and sometimes to join two ideas together. (Their middle sibling, the en dash, is used to indicate spans of time, such as 1992 – 1996).she was a feline pokémon - a purrloin - and she would have to resort to using a pokémon shelter
Oh! If you write in MS word, it'll autocorrect for you! Just type this--and then this with no spaces between the words and the two hyphens, and it'll correct for you!Thanks for the em dash catch — I didn't realise that hyphens weren't an acceptable substitute and was too lazy to copy in proper dashes every time. I'm now memorising the alt-0151 code for future use, and I'll fix this in the eventual revision of the early chapters.
oh my god the subtle burns here. thank you.[BAD HUNTER.] An accusation.
She replied with mirrored gestures and a turn of the head. [NOT HUNTING.]
A brief, shrill chirrup, a certain blink: [YES, THAT’S IT.] By this he meant, “exactly, a good hunter would be hunting right now.”
dropped a double-spacing here“Salem, huh? Good name for a black cat, I guess. Or black-white-and-tan, close enough. A witch’s cat, named for a town of witches.”
Salem didn’t really understand, but those were definitely colour words. He was describing her for some reason. She flicked both ears back and forth as she ate. [OKAY.]
Normally (as a non-cat owner who mostly learns about cats from the internet), you've got me sold on this as realistic catlike behavior/establishing Salem as a clear non-human narrator, but I'm wondering why you had Salem scenting the mienshao's gender later but not here? Animals are actually pretty good at recognizing genders almost instantly from scent because it's so critical to a lot of their socializing/territorializing/mating/interacting, so idk if it's a matter of first impressions or an overreliance on visual descriptors when this would actually be a great opportunity to explore the non-human sensory things that Salem has here (and will later lose)? Unless this is actually deeper commentary on how pokemon are sapient and transcend genders and pronouns, and it's just humans who need to assign labels on them, in which case lmao I suck.While Salem peeked inside out of simple curiosity, a fluffy white rockruff spotted her, and was immediately wagging their tail and perking their ears.
oh man this is one of those things that I feel horrible for laughing at, isn't it please be nice nowConkeldurr boss, he says, please be nice now! Gave you strong stone! People say, you conkeldurr boss, not the boss of me! Forgetting strong stone gift!
Implying they've made accidental morphs! Sure, accidentally producing abominations against god and nature happens in science all the time. I wonder what the hell they were researching originally for the morphing process to be an offshoot of that.Salem would be among the first to be made deliberately.
And I mean, considering spoilers spoilers I can only imagine this was intentional.She and the white-coated woman with her explained various things to Salem, carefully, but with growing impatience on the part of the stranger. Alisha admonished her more than once for this.
“You ready now, kitten? All decided?”
[YES!]
She signed so forcefully that she almost tripped herself in doing so. Alisha laughed to herself, and lead the way.
I absolutely adore those. What a treat!"(...)Have you ever had those kind of thoughts, Salem?”
A soft rumbling showed her admission.
She was given a spot for her sleeping mat on the front desk. Jamie’s gaze lingered on her when he locked the door, his non-feline expression difficult for her to interpret. She met his stare evenly until he turned away, climbed into his car, and left. She had the night to herself at last, it seemed.
I'd argue it'd have been more effective to cover multiple nights with Jamie from the beginning. Is Salem so quick to judge and run that she'd risk the loss of what appears to be a decent human in her eyes (Jamie)?
My concern was over the lack of coverage on consent. I'd at least suspect some research going into reversing the process to not cause lasting damage on a morph's life after they've developed full sentience.
Chapter 5 was near flawless indeed. The entire chapter flowed as smoothly as liquid, and I couldn't look down from the page for a second.
I think Salem's wish of being human is gonna be the thing she most regrets but also the thing she least regrets.
beautiful, detailed description
The other two secret indgredients of DE are missing.
I don't think trimming would do Ch5 a service so naturally both of these will end up extending the chapter
POV switch
your story is clearly meant to be told from Salem's POV only
dreams (or nighmares)
Thanks for the read and good luck with next chapters!