Persephone
The Vulture Queen
- Joined
- Apr 12, 2014
- Messages
- 863
- Reaction score
- 211
And done with a more-or-less complete second reading. Thoughts are largely unchanged outside of how much better the fic was to read by skipping everything between Mount Moon and Celadon.
So I'm going to skip to the last chapter.
I wouldn't end it here, necessarily, like I previously suggested. Or at least not exactly here. You could definitely cut off before the league and have an epilogue with Keith winning or what not, but you've basically hit the climax of the story since the Rockets loomed over everything at least as much as the quest itself, if not more. Keith still needs to deal with how he wants to handle the future, but I'm not sure that actually having him beat the league in-story would advance that part of his personal quest. Criss, for all of the hints you say are there, is near impossible to figure out even when reading for the explicit purpose of figuring her out. So she could use a revelation. And by the time you've brought their arcs to a close (and maybe Tim's), there wouldn't be much point left to really ending the story. So I would still suggest ending before the league or at least cutting out most of those battles and just skipping to the Champion's match and maybe Keith v. Tim depending upon who wins first, since they've never actually had so much as a sparring match in the entire story.
Onto the chapter itself, I liked how Spencer and Silph's story lines were brought to an effective close to compliment the effective close of Reese and Nolan's a while back. It means half the cast is done, if you wanted it. And the Psyke scene was nice since it was maybe the first time that a trainer had really had a conversation or tried to connect with a Pokemon in a story that was nominally about people who could connect very well to Pokemon. And it also answered the "why haven't Metagross/Alakazam taken over the world?" question very nicely.
Overall, good chapter.
So I'm going to skip to the last chapter.
I wouldn't end it here, necessarily, like I previously suggested. Or at least not exactly here. You could definitely cut off before the league and have an epilogue with Keith winning or what not, but you've basically hit the climax of the story since the Rockets loomed over everything at least as much as the quest itself, if not more. Keith still needs to deal with how he wants to handle the future, but I'm not sure that actually having him beat the league in-story would advance that part of his personal quest. Criss, for all of the hints you say are there, is near impossible to figure out even when reading for the explicit purpose of figuring her out. So she could use a revelation. And by the time you've brought their arcs to a close (and maybe Tim's), there wouldn't be much point left to really ending the story. So I would still suggest ending before the league or at least cutting out most of those battles and just skipping to the Champion's match and maybe Keith v. Tim depending upon who wins first, since they've never actually had so much as a sparring match in the entire story.
Onto the chapter itself, I liked how Spencer and Silph's story lines were brought to an effective close to compliment the effective close of Reese and Nolan's a while back. It means half the cast is done, if you wanted it. And the Psyke scene was nice since it was maybe the first time that a trainer had really had a conversation or tried to connect with a Pokemon in a story that was nominally about people who could connect very well to Pokemon. And it also answered the "why haven't Metagross/Alakazam taken over the world?" question very nicely.
Overall, good chapter.