I've been meaning to actually review this for a looong time now. Like *squints at post dates* oh God, almost three years now. It's crazy that I never left feedback on this after waaaay way back in the original thread. But I've got the time and the energy now, so... let's fix that!
The story breaks down pretty nicely into bite-sized arcs, so let's take a look at them...
Virc-Dho (Chapters 1 & 2)
It's fun coming back to look at this opening knowing that Grosh is a steelix. For some reason in my head I'd had it that Jal'tai was somehow Solonn's dad, and Solonn had gotten his communication ability from him. Total failure to remember or a theory I'd had for that old, old version that never got far enough to confirm or deny it? No idea. One way or another, way to be a jerk, Grosh.
One thing I really like about the opening part of the story is the real sense of physicality the snorunt have, how sort of ridiculous their anatomy is. Like Solonn's first act in life being to fall over and roll around on his cone-head, unable to get up. Snorunt look so top-heavy, I just have to imagine them doing that
all the time. Or the glalie picking snorunt up by the tops of their head to carry them around, or snorunt drilling their way out of their eggs.
Also, I don't know if I've ever said it, but I love how you name pokémon and pokémon-related things. The glalie's names sound different than names like Oth, Sei, or Sophie, while at the same time sounding
right for big toothy balls of ice. Likewise "Zyzir" just
sounds like a perfect zubat name.
These chapters are mostly introduction, giving a nice sense of the relatively peaceful life Solonn had as a snorunt, outside the occasional bully or childhood escapade. Of course, there's also Solonn's mysterious abduction and the emergence of his Speech abilities, but iirc we don't learn more about that until much later. It's cool that the story brings questions about how pokémon manage to live in their native societies right to the forefront with Solonn's uneasiness towards glalie's need to consume other pokémon to survive. You kind of dive right into a lot of difficult worldbuilding questions in this story, and it's really cool to see this fic going places that most kind of handwave in the interest of focusing on whatever the primary plot is. But these are some of the most fascinating questions in the franchise, imo, so I'm definitely here for fics that try to get messy with them.
Lilycove (Chapters 3-8)
Annnnd here the difficult questions continue with the introduction of Morgan and the whole human/pokémon relationship (specifically the trainer relationship). I like how all of Solonn's assumptions about Morgan, which would be classic behavior for someone who approached training the way most people do in the video games, turns out to be wrong, though as other characters point out later on, he's lucky he got the trainer he did... It's also, of course, Solonn's Speech ability that ultimately allows he and Morgan to resolve the issue and move forward as a team. Really emphasizes how difficult it is for an ordinary pokémon that doesn't have those abilities to work with a human. Like, such a pokémon could probably still have gotten across that it didn't want to do contests, and Morgan would presumably have been okay with that, but they wouldn't actually have been able to negotiate as such or hit upon the agreement Solonn worked out with which worked out best for both of them.
I am kind of surprised that Morgan didn't just try to sell Solonn on the contest idea before catching him, since if he isn't interested, it's a lot less work to simply move on and look for a new snorunt in the cave than to have him already captured and in Lilycove and have to go all the way back to the cave to release him. I guess her other pokémon have all kind of agreed with what she wants to do, so she wouldn't really have considered rejection a possibility, but it seems like asking
before the capture would work out best for everyone.
Ultimately we never really see anything but a positive spin on training in this 'fic, even considering somebody like Daron. Daron might not be the most scrupulous guy, but he seems to get on quite well with his pokémon, and you get the sense that he'd be as cheerful about kidnapping a human as he would a pokémon--it's not that he thinks of pokémon as lesser, he's just looking to make a buck. (Also, Xi is a delight.) So it does kind of make, for example, Jal'tai's disdain for humans rather theoretical because, like Solonn, we only meet nice ones.
Returning to names, I also think it's pretty great that Morgan's nicknames are somewhat terrible. "Enchantress" would just be such a mouthful to use all the time (same with "Ominous"), and it's just kinda over-the-top, heh. Or Azrael. So melodramatic!
One thing I might have liked to see a bit more is Solonn's interactions with the other pokémon on Morgan's team. You don't want to drag things out, and ultimately most of them are extremely minor players in the story as a whole. It is strange, though, when they get stolen, and Solonn's mourning over his lost friends... but we never really got to
see them be friends. Most of Morgan's mons apparently spent the majority of their time in their balls, and Solonn seemed like he was pretty much doing his own thing throughout. So the personal nature of his worry for Morgan's team fell a little flat for me, even though of course anyone would be worried in general about their teammates vanishing.
It also would have been nice to see Solonn exploring the human world a little more, although I guess that's not really in his nature. It seems like he spent quite a bit of time in Morgan's backyard! The way you describe the routines he was working on was lovely, though. Your descriptions of what he forms out of snow and ice really does make his displays sound beautiful, and the way you talk about his connection with his element and the
experience of working with ice is very evocative. It makes it all the more painful when he ultimately loses that connection, because we really had a chance to see how meaningful it was for him.
Convergence: Trapped (Chapters 9-15)
Of course Convergence is a setting we've seen plenty of over the course of your various stories, but it's always been a really neat place, and it's too bad that Solonn's condition in these chapters means he isn't very interested in all the cool stuff the place has. Even as it is, the details that we get about e.g. the unown script combined with more traditional pokéworld elements like teleportation tiles and advanced communication devices.
The transformation to human here is still great, with "Good gods, they keep that
out?" remaining a
fantastic line. There are so many stories about humans turning into pokémon, but it's so rare to see the reverse, even though it has just as much fun potential. And Solonn reacts just about how you'd expect for someone who's been stripped of his own body and told that his future has been planned for him and has absolutely no say in the matter.
I love how much of a human nerd Jal'tai is. Like, he clearly has a great deal of resentment for humans
themselves, but he clearly loves their stuff. Him proudly showing off the entertainment system and the special wardrobe he's prepared (how long did you spend picking out all the perfect outfits? Neeeeeerd) while Solonn's trailing along all like "idgaf" is super cute. While Jal'tai is obviously a manipulative scumbag, I think to some extent he may kind of envy Solonn, and wish he could be properly human himself... Perhaps some of his general dismay and anger at Solonn's otherwise 100% predictable reaction is as a result of frustration over the fact that Solonn gets this AMAZING OPPORTUNITY and then TOTALLY DOESN'T APPRECIATE IT. Like, who wouldn't want to try out being human? You want to wear all the pretty clothes yourself, don't you, Jal'tai?
I also liked the little detail that Solonn's used to wearing clothes because glalie are usually coated in ice anyway. With pokémon I at least kind of tend to think of whatever we see of them as being "their body," unless it's obviously modelled on human clothing, but it makes more sense that the ice on a glalie is just an outer covering and we don't actually see most of their anatomy/the outer surface of their body. Also a neat detail was Solonn's flash-freezing his steak before eating it; it makes sense that glalie would need their food to be frozen, but again it's something that would be so easy to overlook and just makes things seem more
real when you have it in there.
I think this section is probably my favorite of the earlyish parts of the 'fic. I think it plays to your strengths as a writer, as well as your interests, with the brutal transformation, all the neat worldbuilding, and the introduction of a character as complex but hateable as Jal'tai. There's just so much going on! Also, unrelated to anything else, I really love the stinger at the end of the chapter where Solonn escapes from the theater, where Morgan comes home to find him gone, while "Morgan" has spent all this time talking about how
all her mons had been stolen. I remember the first time I read this going, "Wait, wat???" and being completely floored but also intrigued about what was going on.
Convergence: Brainwashed (Chapters 16-20)
I love how Jal'tai's edited version of Solonn's memories are basically what he
should have done if he were a decent (or even, like,
reasonable) person. Actually trusting Solonn with knowledge instead of deceiving him from the very start? Actually presenting him with options instead of immediately forcing him to do what you want? Whoever could have predicted that
that would work out well?? In a more reflective person, this could totally be the catalyst for an important realization and personal growth, but of course Jal'tai doesn't even consider it. What did we learn, Jal'tai? Hmmm?
Hmmmm?
It's a bit creepy and also a bit sad how Jal'tai behaves towards Solonn after the whole memory restructuring thing--basically like a parent, even though Solonn would at that point have been fine preparing to be mayor without anyone breathing down his neck. They become close friends, but of course it's all bulit on false pretenses. You get the sense that Jal'tai doesn't really understand how to relate to people without manipulating them, and that he must be quite lonely, lying to everyone. Solonn certainly doesn't know
everything about Jal'tai, but he knows more than, it seems, almost anybody, so he may be one of the closest things to a "true friend" that Jal'tai's got. And from what we see in that little preface on Chapter 20, Jal'tai's got even more shady things in his past, and his pattern of lying and manipulating people and generally carrying out these elaborate plans rather than engage with his actions is kind of the theme of his entire life. Like, he does obviously care a lot about human/pokémon relations, but there's also the wrinkle that Convergene is at least in part his attempt to attone for something Really Bad that he did, so even that has elements of half-truth to it. So Jal'tai's tendency towards lying and steamrolling over people and so on has probably caused him to pretty much wreck his own life, and caused him all kinds of heartache, and left him wandering and alone in his old age. You can almost feel bad for the guy, even though his life being super screwed up appears to be almost 100% his own fault.
Still a manipulative piece of ****, of course. I also love the potential suggestion that the wandering Latis you find in the games are also exiles from their society, since it appears that "go off and wander the regions" is a punishment that that society readily metes out.
what you possess is a gift; you should be honored for it, not exploited…
Ah, the irony...
Whatever else had to change, he could still keep his memories.
Oh nooooooo
I think it really is a shame that we didn't get a chance to see Solonn actually acting as mayor, except kind of briefly at the beginning of the chapter where he reverts. Again, we get to explore Convergence more in other contexts, but we never
really get to see what it's like as it was "supposed to be": when there were both humans and pokémon living there together. It also leaves kind of this weird gap in Solonn's life. Presumably he learned a lot from handling that sort of responsibility, but what, exactly? Likewise, he must have made friends, maybe even enemies during his time there, but we don't hear anything about them, and Solonn never brings them up again later. For all the build-up it gets, Solonn's time as mayor is just kind of left as "that thing that happened, but we're moving on to other things now." I imagine that even the few years he was actually serving as mayor would probably provide enough material to write an entire other long chapterfic, though! But it seems like it might be more meaningful to explore than e.g. the Convergence Academy section, which is interesting enough but I think has less potential and less long-term impact than looking at Solonn's time as mayor would have.
Virc-Dho Again (Chapters 21-25)
This is where elements introduced in the beginning of the story start to come back around and reassert themselves, which is always cool. And Solonn gets a little bit of a breather, reuniting with his father and seeing his brother hatch--settling into an uneventful life as a fairly unremarkable (albeit overlarge and hybrid) glalie. Though, of course, this section involves not one but
two people who were very important to him dying, so despite the respite in the middle, it really isn't all that relaxing!
I think you handled both Morgan's death and Azvida's death well in particular, although they were very different kinds of scenes. Melancholy scenes that involve characters literally fading away are pretty much certain to get me every time, and this one definitely did. The imagery of the sitrus tree with its falling blossoms was beautiful and added the perfect serene and yet sad backdrop to what was going on in Morgan's mindscape, and you did a great job of her final meeting with all her pokémon. That Solonn never got to properly see her again outside of this brief moment on the verge of her death makes it hurt all the more, though of course it's better than her simply dying passing away without ever knowing if he was okay... The classic, perfectly
bittersweet way to usher a character off stage left.
On the other hand, there's the brutal attack on Virc-Dho's temple that ultimately claims Azvida's life. After a couple of quiet chapters, you really do a great job of having the attack come out of absolutely nowhere, surprising the reader probably almost as much as the glalie caught in the middle of it. You do a great job of all the frantic, brutal action; it occurred to me after reading this that this is really the first big action set piece of the story, isn't it? Ultimately,
Communication doesn't really focus on action-y kinds of things, so it's a testament to your range to see a scene like this executed so nicely alongside all the more quiet moments. I like how you slip in the bit about the group that bullied Solonn having vanished... given how it's framed compared to Solonn's experiences, you pretty strongly implied that they were captured by humans... But then all these aggressive glalie come roaring back here, and it becomes clear that absolutely wasn't the case!
A thin, pale, silvery mist hung low in the air, vapors from the blood of the fallen; his stomach lurched hard at the thought that he was actually breathing it.
Glalie blood literally boiling when outside their bodies is another one of those details that I just really love, and then you totally
went there in this scene with it. Love it!
And of course Grosh and Oth get blamed for the whole thing, even though a number of glalie could see the real attackers clearly. We're back to really digging into the wild pokémon societies here, and it's great to see you adding more complexity to them as time goes on. Some of Virc society Solonn probably just didn't realize earlier because he was still a snorunt, but now, being older and with what's happened to Azvida, he can see some of the close-mindedness that society has, how their isolation can make them mistrustful and at times actually blinkered. It's a nice change from "pokémon is taken from utopic wild society to dystopian abusive human one." The pokémon here have their own problems, which makes perfect sense given how you've portrayed them.
In the middle of it all, of course, Solonn gets to meet his dad, is forced to reckon with his aversion to hunting, and gains a half-brother. I would have really enjoyed seeing more of Grosh here, although of course he'll be around later, too. From the way you introduce Grosh it seems like a very different situation between him and Azvida than it actually is, and it's cute to see how he and Solonn interact now that they've finally met up. (This is another thing I'd like to see more of! Grosh and Solonn hanging out doing family stuff, without imminent danger hanging over their heads.) There's a little breather here, but the story's about to ramp up again in a big way. This is really the last bit of respite the characters get before all hell breaks loose, and
continues breaking loose, isn't it? Let's get into that part!
Fugitives (Chapters 26-35)
I guess this is really two sub-arcs, the first being rescuing the snorunt and the second being the fight against the Sinaji.
I got a little confused at the part where Grosh teleported the snorunt to Haven, because the previous chapter he'd said he would teleport to get the snorunt and bring them to Haven, and then we jump directly to the Haven teleport without apparently stopping to pick up the snorunt on the way? I got a little disoriented and thought that meant the snorunt had been
held at Haven for a while there, and that Haven was somehow complicit. But nope, Adn definitely had ulterior motives, but the snorunt had been picked up from somewhere else off-screen, I guess.
There's a real sense of hopelessness and danger while the group is wandering the tunnels, trying to find their way back, and the additional pressure of Oth no longer being able to warp them away from danger really sells it. You get a real sense of Shoal cave as this mess of narrow, claustrophobic passageways, with few landmarks and with the potential that you'll stumble across something hostile at any turn. Great atmosphere. It's a good thing Grosh came through to save the day!
What was up with Oth's teleport getting deleted, though? I assumed it was something Adn must have done somehow, because otherwise it strikes me as super random, but it's never actually addressed. Maybe a plot point that'll come up in Worldslayers?
And then the big battle's finally here! Again, you do a great job of the action. The battle's appropriately brutal and chaotic, but it never becomes overwhelming or confusing. You also do a good job of kind of organizing it around these neat little moments, like the golduck giving Solonn the healing items. It's all just very well done and a treat to read, and you even know how to bring it to a close before it overstays its welcome, heh.
Love the little aside about Solonn finding opaque blood weird.
Here yet again I'd love to learn more about basically all of the Wisteria 'mon. You have some very interesting characters in Valdrey and Quiul in particular, and they must have pretty dynamic lives, scraping out an existence in an abandoned human settlement. FWIW, you made what little of what we got to see of Mordial sound really pretty, with the ocean and the jungle and the mountains. I guess a lot of the regions are probably going back to taht wild, untamed state now that humans are gone. But Mordial has that sense of lonely beauty that I really dig. And, again, there seems to be so much cool stuff here! The fakemon and the abandoned cities and this whole new region to explore. Would absolutely like to see more.
One thing I was a little unclear on was how many Sinaji there were. Evidently there were some glalie that had been released into the wild after traveling with humans, there were what sounded like a handful of Rannia, and then there were the exiles from Solonn's childhood. That doesn't sound like it would make for a very large society, like maybe forty tops? But then through all the fighting it seemed like there must have been many more than that, to have held off all the pokémon on Solonn's side.
Are the Rannia some kind of glalie variant or an entirely different evolution? They almost sound like a different evolution, a form that's now dying out and being replaced by the "modern" glalie.
Back to Convergence (Chapters 36-42)
And here we meet up with
The Origin of Storms at last! It's fun to see the events from that story playing out from Solonn's perspective, since he was initially introduced as something of a villain in that 'fic. The action from the previous arc continues here, and we get some satisfying city-destroying (and house-destroying) fights to cap things off.
The title of this story is
Communication, but I almost think that a theme it tackles more deeply is
consent. A lot of the conflict in the story arises out of people
doing unto others without their agreement and often without their knowledge, treating them like tools they can extract value from instead of people to be respected. It's there straight from when Morgan abducts Solonn from his home through Jal'tai's deception and forced transformation through all kinds of shady psychic ****... In a sense I suppose that's all about communication, too, since if these people actually talked to each other maybe they wouldn't feel the need to be so coercive. In any case, it's powerful to see it coming up again here, where ultimately DeLeo's treatment of Esaax, even in the interest of reviving an entire species, potentially people that Solonn loves, is what ultimately breaks Solonn out of his desperate hope to realize that he can't support someone who would do that kind of thing in pursuit of their goals. And then, of course you have pokémon like Evane for whom, well... maybe it would be worth it. Maybe one person suffering
is worth it when the benefits are so great. And it's so hard to blame her for thinking like that.
“Okay,” Cain said in the quietest voice he could muster, “okay.” After casting another furtive glance into the audience, “…Do you think I could get away with cutting the puppets from the program?”
Oh, Cain and his puppets. The children are never going to let you give them up, Cain.
Never.
Solonn knew for a fact that he’d never commissioned a statue of his human self, alongside one of Jal’tai’s mirage and another of a porygon2, during his time as mayor.
Heh, I can't remember if he's ever told the others that he was Convergence's mayor for a time. Is he ever going to bring that up, or is he always just going to fast-float past it pretending to totally not notice the memorial to himself someone cast in bronze? XD
“The nanites didn’t take,” Ren went on.
Release the nanobots!
I am a bit curious why Ren chose a young, wild snorunt of all things for his language experiment. It seems like they would be hard to find and not necessarily the best suited to that kind of surgery? I'm guessing Ren would have needed a young pokémon because its brain would be more plastic, but why go out looking for one in the wild, and all the way out to Shoal Cave at that?
Based on the little Jal'tai interlude waaaay back, I wonder whether he had anything to do with Ren "getting in the tube," as it were. Since it sounded like he was . But of course, his plan could have been something completely different and/or failed entirely! I'm also wondering where Ren is actually from? Evidently he was living in Convergence for a while, since he had that lab long before Solonn was ever mayor, but of course he can't have been from there originally, unless the city's much older than I got the impression it was. I thought he might have been a gym leader at one point?
It's lovely to see Solonn get some closure on one of the stranger and more frightening aspects of his life. And, ultimately, despite everything, he and his slightly-weird family are together and at least physically okay, with the exception of his mother. It's a nice, hopeful sort of ending, with the feeling that maybe everybody can be okay now. Despite everything, you get the sense that they may be able to move on and heal from all this craziness. That's another thing that I really like about this story: a lot of bad things happen to the characters. Often the characters do terrible things
to each other. And yet they're able to forgive each other for their mistakes and move on. Solonn can forgive Grosh for not being there in his childhood. He can forgive Ren for experimenting on him all those years ago. And because of that forgiveness, there's the sense that they might be able to move forward and actually become close friends/family and have their lives enriched by each other. The 'fic gets quite dark at times, but ultimately it has this really positive message.
Of course, we now have
The Worldslayers, so we know that Solonn and company aren't really getting that much of a break and there's no doubt more heartache to come. Sorry, guys. But for someone who hasn't read that yet, it's a nice, hopeful ending! XD
So, the fic as a whole, then. It's already been commented on that the story arcs can feel a bit disconnected from each other, which is true, but in a way I think it's kind of nice... It makes the story feel a bit more like Solonn's life than a story
about Solonn, in a sense. Life doesn't have a neat central plot thread that you can follow, not everything gets resolved, and the characters that come and go from it have their own life stories that dictate how they behave, rather than acting in service of the protagonist's narrative. It gives the story a very open-ended feel, like you could spend your whole life, if you wanted, digging deeper into it, telling new tales to flesh it out further or to take a deeper look at some of its characters. I don't know what your plans are after
The Worldslayers, if any, but if you have any intent of revisiting this world or the characters in it, I'll always be interested to see it.
I guess if there's anything I would say about this story it's that it leaves me wanting
more. More about Solonn's time as mayor, more about Convergence itself, more about the Rannia, more about Jal'tai... which I think is a testamet to how interesting a world and characters you've put together here! It also makes
Communication feel to me almost like a "backbone" sort of story from which you can spin off any number of other stories if you want to. In a way it does kind of seem to function that way: OoS came first, but is basically encompassed by
Communication, so it feels almost like an expansion, and
The Worldslayers of course builds on the foundation laid down here. As I mentioned earlier, I think you could write an entire other story just on Solonn's time as mayor, and that's true of a lot of other arcs in the story. It feels like we get kind of tantalizing glimpses at a bunch of different things, but in the interest of keeping things moving along, we don't get to spend a great deal of time fleshing them out. So in some ways that's a negative, I guess, but if one of the primary complaints about a story is that there isn't
enough of it yet, I think that's at least a relatively nice problem to have. No worries about whether you're interesting or exciting your audience!
I also mentioned a couple times, I think, that this story really demonstrates the range you command as a writer, since it has so many different elements, from big action pieces to quiet character moments to pure worldbuilding, drama, and humor. It's definitely a different kind of story than OoS or what Worldslayers is shaping up to be, and that's pretty cool. You are able to work with a lot of different ideas, and although some elements appear in pretty much all your works (dem horrifying involuntary transformations, not that I'm complaining), you aren't at all
limited to any particular kind of story. I love seeing people experiment and explore different kinds of stories rather than sticking to a single formula or way of storytelling.
I think that your stories would be great candidates for their own wiki, if you had any interest in creating one. Of course it would give you a place to put information about your fakemon, but it would also let you kind of collect info on the world and the characters all in one place, which I think might be helpful for readers. I definitely came across multiple places where I
thought I remembered something but wasn't sure if it was in OoS or Worldslayers or a side one-shot or if I'd just made it up entirely, and it would have been nice to have some way to reference that sort of thing without having to trawl multiple fic threads.
And this is probably one of the most ambitious stories in the depth that it goes into with the pokémon POV. You not only look at how pokémon live in their own societies, but also how they relate to humans, and consider what a real equal, integrated pokémon and human society would look like. Things are often far from perfect, but you get that across without demonizing either side: humans can be monstrous to pokémon, but pokémon are often monstrous to pokémon as well, and on both sides there are good people trying to find a way to bridge the gap and work together in a fair and responsible way. It feels like good poké-POV stories are even harder to find today than they once were (I probably haven't been looking in the right places!), and it's so nice to have one that does so much with the POV but also tells a nice story and doesn't get bogged down in the worldbuilding details.
I think I said it before, but I definitely can't say it enough: huge congratulations on finishing this 'fic and also managing to continue on with
The Worldslayers. It was so awesome to see you return with a final draft after working on this for so many years, and I hope that you find joy in your writing for many years to come. This story is definitely something to be proud of. Thanks for sharing it, and all your other stories, with us.
He's definitely one of those I'd have liked to have had more opportunities to work with. He's rather like Jal'tai that way.