Writers' Workshop General Chat Thread

[unrepentantAuthor]

What would be the best way to work with talking Pokemon? I personally just want to do that because it will make things easier to work with.

You got four basic options for a conventional setting.

1. You just don't think about it too hard and don't invite the reader to either. This is suitable for a 'soft' realism story.

2. You carefully think through every detail about how society would look and behave, accommodating for people's treatment of pokémon as sapient beings.

3. You have a subset of trainers with the rare gift to understand pokémon. Of course, pokémon 'language' should be appropriate to their sapience. If they had the same level of existential awareness as humans, it's basically the same as #2 with the proviso that most humans just don't know that pokémon are that cognitively developed.

4. The existence of translators. Of course, if the translators let pokémon 'talk' to humans at a level beyond "I'm hungry" and "follow me" then it runs into the same problems as above if you're trying to worldbuild at all. If pokémon can 'talk' at a human level, what right do we have to treat them as anything other than equals?

You could also have a small number of pokémon that speak, and not others. Human-like pokémon like gallade and medicham are good examples for this.

You could also have pokémon communication of a limited sort. I spend a lot of effort in my fanfic having pokémon use standard vocalisations and sign language to indicate simple concepts, with most pokémon not being able to manage anything sophisticated. Throh are just barely able to tell stories in a very simplistic way.

I guess I could do an AU where Pokemon being able to talk is normal. It's always been like that.

I don't know what the alternative was that you were considering.

Although, look at Digimon, the creatures can talk, they are sentient and are owned.

They're not part of the human world. Only a select number of children have access to them, and those children have bilateral 1-1 bonds with them. It's a very different scenario that doesn't seem to imply ownership.

Well done, @UselessBytes! Happy for ya.

 

[BackSet]

3. You have a subset of trainers with the rare gift to understand pokémon. Of course, pokémon 'language' should be appropriate to their sapience. If they had the same level of existential awareness as humans, it's basically the same as #2 with the proviso that most humans just don't know that pokémon are that cognitively developed.

4. The existence of translators. Of course, if the translators let pokémon 'talk' to humans at a level beyond "I'm hungry" and "follow me" then it runs into the same problems as above if you're trying to worldbuild at all. If pokémon can 'talk' at a human level, what right do we have to treat them as anything other than equals?

Both of these are technically canon in some form with N shwoing that humans have the potential to understand Poke Speech and the Rotom Dex showing that there is technology that is capable of at least translating some Pokémon.

 

[unrepentantAuthor]

Trainers with the gift of understanding pokémon go way back to Yellow in Gen 1.

The Rotom Dex is news to me, I've not watched any anime for some time now.

 

[MisheardWhisper]

Rotom Dex did show up in SM as well, though, so it is game canon also.

 

[BackSet]

Trainers with the gift of understanding pokémon go way back to Yellow in Gen 1.

The Rotom Dex is news to me, I've not watched any anime for some time now.

But aren't those trainers of debatable sanity?

 

[unrepentantAuthor]

N's a pretty odd guy himself.

 

[Nitro Indigo]

Reminds me, there's a fanfic where Hilda and N can both talk to Pokemon, but N can't understand artificial ones. What was it called?

 

[Ereshkigal]

Now I want to do a story where Hilda can't talk to Pokemon, but pretends to be able to just to troll N and others.

 

[Nitro Indigo]

To cut a long story short, I got an idea for an overarching conflict in a Pokémon/My Little Pony crossover that finally gave me the motivation to start writing it, thanks to an episode of Power Rangers SPD.

Does anyone else find it hard to begin a story? I put The Tides Have Turned on hiatus partially because I was getting bored of getting through the exposition. (I was also stuck on trying to build up suspense at the beginning of a chapter, and watching the movie made me realised that it barely felt like a My Little Pony fanfiction.)

EDIT: I also used "mojo" as a synonym for "motivation", only to discover that it wasn't.

 

[BackSet]

It helps if you build your story off of events in the actual media itself.

For An Unwanted Journey I used Red's defeat of Team Rocket as a stepping stone and went from there. All it took was a bit of timeline revision (Team Rocket took longer to reform) and I was set.

Though, there was one thing I wished I had been able to incorporate into my story that I never got the chance too.

 

[Nitro Indigo]

The Tides Have Turned was almost entirely OCs, that was a problem. Your Heart Is in Two Worlds, meanwhile, is one of my first serious attempts at writing canon characters as the protagonists.

 

[BackSet]

Yeah, writing OCs can be hard.

A mix of OC and canon is usually good.

 

[BackSet]

I just realized that the only canon characters whose personality I've left mostly intact are the Rocket Trio, Prof Oak, and Koga. And I guess Brock too. But he only had a cameo.

 

[Nitro Indigo]

There's probably only going to be one canon Pokémon character in Your Heart Is in Two Worlds (and even then, he's a game protagonist), but at least eleven canon My Little Pony characters will appear.

 

[Ereshkigal]

I know what you mean, @BackSet . If game Cynthia and my version of Cynthia ever met, they would be shocked at how different they are from each other. And that's not counting the areas where things ended differently than in the games (Diamond, Pearl, and Platinum end very differently, given the PCs don't return from Distortion World).

But, sometimes, altering personalities is what the story requires. It's what best fits the setting. A darker, more real-world story like I write is going to mean someone like Cynthia is going to be a bit more screwed up than they are in the games.

 

[Nitro Indigo]

The Cynthia I wrote in The Tides Have Turned was a dignified, verbose character with a strong sense of honour. "Still... it would be a disgrace for me to abandon one of my comrades!" She was also the Straight Woman to her rather immature-acting Milotic. And she missed having limbs.

 

[BackSet]

LT. Surge is boisterous and friendly as opposed to his asshole drill sargent thing in the game (which is just an act as part of him being a gym leader). Sabrina is pretty emotionless. Koga is pretty much the same. The Team Rocket Trio is exactly the same. I'm good at writing them and their antics. Prof. Oak is the same. We don't see enough of Brock but he's got his woman swooning over thing from the Anime. And Misty is lonely but with a peppy facade. Also Misty erased Serena from canon due to using Serena's outfit as a disguise so that people don't crowd around her.

 

[Ereshkigal]

Cynthia is somewhat hardened, often trolling people for her own amusement, known for her tendency to bring disaster (she just is usually nearby if it's going down), and has to deal with myths about her that have far outstripped her actual capabilities... and which impact how people react to her. Oh, and she's also becoming increasingly known for being a dirty old woman (she's 36 at the beginning of the story, so this frustrates her even more). Cynthia is also married to Red's adopted sister.

Professor Oak is known as a pure troll, though showing signs of Alzheimer's (he's 67 at the beginning of the story). No one is certain how much of that is legitimate mental disorder and how much of it is him messing with them for the lulz. Everyone is certain he's why the Pokedex contains more fiction than a fanfic database.

Red is... broken. It shows in him a lot. It's commonly accepted his not speaking is because of the trauma he went through. It basically took Lyra curbstomping him and then dying to get him off that mountain. He's one of the biggest advocates for reforms to how Trainers are educated. It's also common knowledge Red is Giovanni's illegitimate son, but no one brings it up near him out of respect for what he went through to stop Giovanni. In Japan, it's considered extremely impolite to even discuss it.

Elesa and Skyla end up in a relationship together, and they both troll Elesa's aunt (Cynthia) as much as she trolls them. Elesa is also close friends with Sabrina, as the two star frequently in movies together.

I actually have some rather complex family trees for some of these characters. But, there's a reason why people view Cynthia's family as increasingly dominating the League.

 

[Nitro Indigo]

I like coming up with ideas for things that are "blank slates". The lore of Phantom Hourglass, for example, has a lot of untapped potential that's ripe for embellishing in a fanfic.

 

[BackSet]

I'm planning on bringing red into the story eventually.

And usually I wouldn't tell you guys about stuff that'll come up but this isn't really a spoiler.

Once everything is over Red turns back to stand stoically on Mount Silver again but before he can go Blue grabs him by the ear and drags him off to alola.