Dragonfree
Just me
6th-7th place TIE: When Pokémon Die by Poetry
Scoring
Dragonfree: 5th place (90 points)
Negrek: 8th place (60 points)
Phoenixsong: 7th place (70 points)
Psychic: 8th place (60 points)
Total: 280 points
Poetry requested not to have his entry posted.
Reviews
Dragonfree
This entry confused me. I assume the narrator is already dead and merely getting Drifblim to ferry his spirit across to the other side, judging from how he talks about his death like something that's already happened at the end, but then how is he interacting with the apparently-alive Katherine and the Lacunosa gym leader? I suppose it may be that the gym leader merely senses some kind of presence, since he just lashes out generically rather than reacting specifically to what the narrator says, but that doesn't explain Katherine - is she just randomly a medium who can communicate with ghosts? Why is there no indication of this? And Emboar gets tired walking up the stairs, talks about his chest being tight as if he has a physical body, and later throws up, which at least doesn't seem to match up with how ghosts are traditionally depicted.
I'm not entirely sure whether you intended the fact the narrator is an Emboar to be a twist and deliberately led the reader to think he was human before the reveal or not. If you did I don't think I understand what purpose that serves for this story - the new understanding that he's an Emboar doesn't seem to lend much of a new or illuminating perspective to the previous events, aside from Katherine's nickname for him making a bit more sense - but if not, it's really strange how the story is written entirely like he's human up until the end. And either way, his thinking throughout is really conspicuously human-centered - I mean, his opening musings are all about how humans deal with death and what you should tell human kids when they head out and how it's silly that human deaths aren't commemorated the way Pokémon's deaths are. A Pokémon shouldn't think in these terms unless the story is making some kind of a point of this Pokémon being obsessed with humans, which this story doesn't seem to. It's similarly odd for a Pokémon to be following human politics, to the point where if you include that in a story it should be to make a very particular point about the character or world.
I'm also confused by why Emboar, Drifblim and even Katherine herself all seem to think she decided to kill herself because of something Emboar said. Emboar said very little to her - memento mori, sure, but there doesn't seem to be any intrinsic connection between that and Katherine deciding to join her Hydreigon in death, and even if there were, Katherine explicitly disagrees with the concept so that can't have convinced her to do it. They all act like Emboar said something emphasizing that Melissa is gone forever to a better place, but he said absolutely no such thing. It feels like they're all talking about a different conversation than the one we actually saw. Maybe you originally wrote it differently, then changed it but forgot to change the bits that refer back to it? Either way it's very strange.
Overall this seems more like a simple portrayal than an interpretation, in a way - it's interesting to point out and show in a story how the Pokémon world seems to make a much bigger deal of the deaths of Pokémon than of humans and how these people in a world where discussing death is mostly taboo have difficulties dealing with it, but you don't really do much in the way of exploring why the world works this way. Similarly, you have Drifblim apparently acting as a psychopomp, but don't go into who told Emboar to meet Drifblim there or exactly what Emboar's current state of existence is - it's hard to get much of a solid idea of how you're interpreting the Pokémon afterlife. I wouldn't say it's not an interpretation, but it's a pretty vague one.
Your portrayal of Celestial Tower is wildly unrealistic - grotesque paintings of mutilated Pokémon? Blank canvases hanging on the walls? Mourners being free to destroy gravestones and attack visitors? Open graves with rotting bodies just sitting there unattended? - but that actually didn't really bother me as far as the story was concerned. The entire mood of the fic is kind of otherworldly, and the tower being shown as a bizarre, macabre structure around these different manifestations of Pokémon death rather than a realistically managed institution seemed to just fit right in. It does mean your interpretation itself has even less reach than otherwise, though - you're clearly not portraying a sensible interpretation of how these Pokémon graveyard towers are run.
Finally, you have a lot of proofreading fumbles (probably because you were rushing to get your entry in on time), and you frequently punctuate dialogue incorrectly - the punctuation should always come before the closing quote in dialogue. Your tense use is also somewhat strange. Generally, you use past tense for the actual events of the story but present for some of Emboar's general musings. That makes sense in first person if you're essentially imagining that the narrator is telling the story at some specific later point, where the present-tense portions are things that still apply "today", but the past-tense portions relate what happened and what they thought in the earlier timeframe where the story actually happens. But here, only some of Emboar's general musings are in present tense, without the past-tense ones being distinguished as "Once..." or "At the time..." or "Back then..." or anything like that - it's hard to tell why the first two paragraphs of the story are in present tense but the third is in the past, for instance. And Emboar seems to change his mind at the end regarding how people don't think about death enough and so on, which implies these are not things he "still" thinks at the time he tells the story, and thus not things that ought to be in present tense, either way.
The writing itself is pretty good, though, aside from some intermittent clumsiness (most of which is more an issue of polish than anything else). Your first person is overall smooth and readable, you have nicely evocative imagery and some otherwise memorable descriptions in there, and you manage to maintain a consistent somber mood throughout. And I do enjoy the musings on how the Pokémon world regards death and that vague interpretation; you make me want to hear more. I only wish I understood what's up with the narrator's story better, and that there was a bit more meat to the interpretation within the actual story.
Negrek
Hmm. I'm not sure what to make of this one. For one thing, I don't know what you're actually trying to interpret here. Something to do with how death works or is viewed in the pokémon world? Something to do with Celestial Tower? I mean, the title kind of says it all, and yet at the end of the story, I'm still left wondering, "So, when pokémon die... what, exactly?" I'm guessing you were trying to make that clear in the intro section... something to do with pokémon deaths being different than human deaths? I'm afraid I just really couldn't figure out what you were going for... or how that intro really fit in with the rest of the story, to be honest.
Overall, this reads like you were working too hard to make this seem tragic and affecting. This comes through in the overly fancy, pedantic language you use; you end up with convoluted sentences like this:
That's an awful lot of work to say that the building was much warmer and more enticing on the inside than on the outside (and really... and "enticing" mausoleum?). It gets worse when that kind of language works its way into dialogue; there's the emboar saying things like "curry your favor," which doesn't sound at all like how people really talk.
You also go really over the top trying to make the inside of the tower seem creepy/sad, but the overall effect strikes me as more ridiculous than anything. I mean, like, dang, those are some weird interior decoration decisions. Paintings of "pokémon in intense physical pain from wounds or dismembered limbs"? Seems a bit grim for a memorial.
Then there are things like the raving former gym leader the emboar runs across. I don't actually know why you put that encounter in at all; it doesn't seem to serve any purpose. I also don't really buy it. There are presumably caretakers for Celestial Tower; this is even implied at the end when Drifblim tells Emboar that somebody will come and ring the bell for him. I can't imagine them letting violent, grief-stricken people just wander around the Tower, terrorizing the other mourners. I don't know, maybe they all just don't give a crap, like Drifblim. But in that case, doesn't the gym leader have any family or friends or people who might try to stop him, get him to leave the Tower, go to therapy, that kind of thing? I mean, possibly not. But none of this is addressed; it's just taken for granted that it makes sense that this guy might be rampaging around unimpeded in the Tower for long periods of time.
Similarly, the whole "human body in the grave with a pokémon" is implausible on top of being rather overwrought. If scavengers had been at the bones, they wouldn't be all neatly together and posed the way they were. If you had anything like the "dust and dirt of decades" hanging out on them, they certainly wouldn't still have rotted bits clinging to them, and you wouldn't actually be able to make out the little scene anyway because of how deeply it would be buried. And then, again, why has nobody been along to clean this up? If absolutely nothing else, people do actually come here to mourn, and they install new graves as well--has nobody complained about the overwhelming stench up to this point? In general the world you've presented here seems like a carefully-constructed set piece intended to show certain things to the emboar, rather than a genuine world through which the emboar happens to be moving.
It looks like maybe you're trying to get at there being some special kind of bond between humans and pokémon that makes pokémon's deaths especially traumatic. Perhaps the reason the Lacunosa gym leader guy's there--to help illustrate that? I mean, you have Emboar running across Katherine, that gym guy, and the dead person in the grave, all of whom showed pretty extreme ways of dealing with grief. Again, it seems really over the top. Most people are not that devastated by the death of a beloved friend or companion, so either you're trying to get at pokémon deaths being special somehow or you're just laying it on super thick. If it's the former, I think you could do a better job of driving home your point; you do mention the bonds between human and pokémon once or twice, but it seems throwaway rather than central. And then wouldn't it have made more sense to show some indication of the main character's relationship to his trainer?
There are a couple of smaller things I had problems with, too. First, how did Katherine end up at the window of the upper floor before them? There's only one staircase, so she'd have to have passed them at some point, and you'd think the narrator would have noticed...
Then there was this bit:
Wait, what? On account of what that he said? Did you have him saying something else in an earlier version, then remove it and forget to change this reference here? I'm really not getting how Katherine's behavior here is supposed to be linked to their earlier meeting. Later on she claimed she knew what memento mori meant, yes, but this quote comes before she does so.
My final major complaint is that you really don't do a good job of representing that your narrator is a pokémon. I literally never would have guessed that he was if not for the "letting my trainer and fellow pokémon down" line. His perspective on life and the way he interacts with the world is entirely human, and then you have all the weirdness with Katherine referring to him as a "man" rather than a pokémon, and also him being taken aback that she'd come up with a nickname for him that involved his being "fiery." I mean, he's literally on fire.
I also find it difficult to believe that in sixty years he's never had anybody suggest that he might be missing out on something in life by thinking about death all the time. His little revelation also didn't have any actual bearing on the decisions he made in the end, so it left me a little cold. Not only did I not believe that he could have escaped having that idea thrust upon him for so long, he also didn't seem to react to it very much. In general, I didn't sympathize with the emboar much. He's obviously a major Debbie Downer, but other than that his reactions are pretty generic; he's awkwardly worried about Katherine, then horrified when she tries to kill herself; he's frightened of the Lacunosa gym guy; and he's mildly curious about what's up with the Tower. Nothing really special. What best defines a character is how they react to the things life throws their way, and when the emboar reacts it's exactly as you would expect anybody to react, not a particular unique individual, and he gets over everything rather quickly.
All that said, though, this story isn't without merit. Your basic setup is good; you've got the bitter old main character climbing to the top of a creepy mausoleum to be carried off into death (rather literally, even). The scenes you introduce are nice and creepy at their core, too: the weepy little girl who's driven to commit suicide, the violent, raving mourner, and so on; I think you have a good sense of what creates a real atmospheric story, but maybe have a bit of trouble executing on it at the moment. On the whole, I think you have good ideas here, but you worked a bit too hard to make your story super-dramatic and literary, and in the process kind of turned it into a mess.
Phoenixsong
An interesting entry, this one—the franchise's primary demographic is so young that we never see much about death in canon unless it's trying to be cute/"scary". It's pretty common for older fans to want to inject MORE DEATH into their fanfics in an effort to appeal to their own age group, but it's rare that I see a take on "death in Pokémon" that's more about mortality and our perception thereof than "look my OC's pidgeot died in a fight, that's so edgy", and I'm glad to see that.
I'm not so excited about the heavily passive writing style, though. This is hardly an action-packed thriller, granted, so it doesn't need a snappy pace, but using so many words and filler phrases to get your point across slows things down unnecessarily. Take the first sentence of a paragraph on page 2:
"Could say"? Was he surprised or wasn't he? It's his emotion, so he should be pretty clear on it. "At first I was surprised when I crossed the threshold of Celestial Tower." says the same thing but is less wishy-washy. The page 7 paragraph beginning "STAY BACK!" is another spot that would be helped by a more active tone. Even if the rest of the story is sedate and thoughtful, a man swinging a pipe at the protag's head is quick, dangerous, frightening. We'd get plenty of immediacy if the last sentence read "I turned and ran for the stairs" instead of stopping to tell us that he felt a sense of immediacy before anything actually happens.
I do like the end of the last paragraph in that scene, in which the protagonist calls Celestial Tower the place people go to run from their problems. In the next scene, however, things start to come apart a bit. Refuge for those running from their problems or no, shouldn't someone on staff at least attempt to remove that man from the premises before he hurts himself, hurts someone else or disrespects someone else's dead pokémon? I know your point is that he'll never be the same again, but you make it sound like it's normal for grieving people to come up here and waste away. If that's true, why isn't anyone trying to stop it? It sure wouldn't fly in a real cemetery.
Likewise, why has that body "been there for a while now"? Forget about ignoring a living mourner—the administrative and groundskeeping staff should not permit unembalmed, rotting carcasses to sit out in the open like that. It smells awful, obviously, and it's a serious health hazard for anyone who wants to visit a plot on this floor. Dramatic imagery is great and all, but don't ignore the logic of your setting just to facilitate it.
As I read I noticed a lot of typos and other small mistakes that could've been caught with more careful proofreading. The first page alone has several bizarre mid-sentence tense changes and strange/unfinished phrases ("...childhood innocence was used...in the end all ha came to terms with."; "If you looked into...you will have found..."). On page 3 "barely registered" is repeated twice, and you also have "getting my break back" and "at least five or ten minutes, at most". In general I think you did a good job evoking some powerful images, for example the aforementioned grieving humans (barring the fact that they shouldn't be left there) and the first paragraph's balloon being cut free and lost in the skies, but I wonder if you might be trying too hard to force more of that powerful imagery and ending up with sentences so awkward or complex that you're missing the basic typos they contain.
The protagonist has a nasty habit of trying to process everything he's just learned in one sitting, leading to some hefty infodumps. Yes, this is a short story that is trying to tackle a very heavy subject, and I kind of like his cynicism, but a reader can only take so much of his constant rumination. Some of his thoughts were just rehashes of things he'd mentioned before and can be cut, and some others can be distributed a little more evenly throughout the narrative instead of being loaded into three or four big chunks of "here is why (people are/I am) wrong about death".
Unfortunately, even after all of that I didn't feel like you'd interpreted anything about the Pokémon world. Some of the fic's characters were pokémon, it was set in Unova and the Celestial Tower, you tossed in some nice in-world tidbits (e.g., the pokémon center scandal) and you titled your piece "When Pokémon Die"... but it could have been called "When Anyone Dies" and it wouldn't have changed anything. None of the grieving humans did anything specific to the loss of a pokémon; nothing showed that the bond between pokémon and trainer is stronger or in any way different from a bond between close human friends. This story works as an examination of grief, but it's a very general examination that just happens to be wrapped in Pokémon paper. The protagonist is revealed to be an emboar in the end, but he thought about things from a very human perspective. If he had instead looked at things as a pokémon probably would—however you want to interpret that—you might have been able to explore this topic in a manner that really fit the setting you're working with.
Psychic
I was definitely not expecting a fic focused around death and how death is treated in the Pokémon world. I like that you tried to analyze it through a character who was detached and had big ideas, but was still shown to be flawed and wrong. Getting to see humans dealing with death and grief of friends is not something we get to see often, so I was interested in seeing how you handled it.
That said, I’m not really sure what this fic was going for. It talks a lot about death and the protagonist’s opinions on life and death, but I didn’t find it really explored the concept all that deeply. We see a couple instances of humans reacting to the deaths of their Pokémon friends, but those reactions are so exaggerated and have so little basis in reality that it was hard to take them seriously at times. The whole storyline with Katherine felt overdramatic, including Emboar’s reaction to her suicide. I think you had a really interesting idea with exploring the grieving process, but the way the characters deal with grief unfortunately didn’t feel all that realistic. For instance, if you don’t want to believe someone is truly dead, why have a gravestone erected for them only to smash it later? Denial is a stage of grief, but this was a weird direction to take it in. You could have researched how people deal with the deaths of pets, as a real-world equivalent, and used that as a basis for people dealing with Pokémon deaths. Research on types and stages of grief would have gone a long way overall, as a lot of the displays of grief described within the narrative don’t seem to make a whole lot of sense. In addition, some research on stages of decomposition would have been good, as a decades-old corpse would likely not have the qualities you described (though I guess it partly depends on if you have maggots or an equivalent in your Pokéverse).
I was also confused by the fact that human deaths are treated as inconsequential in your fic – you seem to use the fact that there are no human graveyards in the games to mean that nobody cares when humans die, which is ridiculous (especially considering how Pokémon deaths are treated in comparison, it would be a weird double-standard). I think it would have been best to simply not talk about the deaths of humans in that case.
What also confused me was this idea that kids should be taught about death from a young age, and that not teaching them about death is terrible. That said, there’s no reason given for why children, who likely won’t have to deal with death at a young age, need a specific curriculum to educate them on the subject. If you really thought this was important to teach, one solution would be to simply tie it in with battling, teaching kids not to push their Pokémon too hard to battle until their partners are severely injured and on the verge of death, which would be pretty logical. I’m also confused by the idea of having to frighten people into taking care of the Pokémon they supposedly love so much, or it being “propaganda” for trainers to be taught to heal their Pokémon so they don’t die. That seems more like common sense to me.
The protagonist was also a strange character. For one thing, it’s unclear that he’s not a human, considering that he perfectly communicates with humans and is even called a “man” by one. Some physical description could have been helpful hints, even if small, like using the term “paws” instead of “hands.” If there were a reason as to why you wanted to hide that he was a Pokémon until the very end it might have worked, but there doesn’t seem to be one. It also would have been nice to know his motivation for wanting to eventually die. Instead, he does a lot of pondering about death in the narration, but instead of feeling meaningful or deep it just feels overly long and soapbox-y without accomplishing much. I found that the story was a little too internally-focused in this way. There’s also some weird hypocrisy going on regarding how he views death. For instance, the protagonist is comforted by seeing the skeletons of a Pokémon and trainer in a grave and hardly reacts, yet is upset when Katherine is about to jump to her own death, with no explanation as to why. It’s very inconsistent. On that note, how the heck did she manage to get ahead of him and Drifblim without them noticing?
That said, there were certainly endearing parts, like Emboar trying and failing to comfort a little girl. You create some interesting vignettes throughout the story as Emboar encounters these different scenes of people dealing with death, and neat scenes, like of Drifblim extending a tendril to Emboar on the roof and then flying away like a balloon. Drifblim also seemed like an interesting mysterious character, though there were points during their conversations where the mystery kind of went away, and he was conveniently gone when needed most in order to make “preparations” that never actually materialize in any observable way. Be wary of turning your characters into mere plot devices!
Be sure to also show every so often – I wanted to hear more about the expression on the deranged man’s face and the sight of the sunset. Don’t be afraid to linger on certain poignant images.
Spelling and grammar was mostly fine. You main recurring mistake is that you tend to put punctuation outside of quotation marks during dialogue, when they should always be inside. There are also a number of small typos, such as:
Overall, I think this fic attempts to sound deep and meaningful, but it just doesn’t work all that well. The drama felt over-the-top, and there were too many inconsistencies and holes in all the wrong places. You had some interesting ideas and imagery, and I’d recommend focusing on those instead of getting caught up in trying to sound profound.
Scoring
Dragonfree: 5th place (90 points)
Negrek: 8th place (60 points)
Phoenixsong: 7th place (70 points)
Psychic: 8th place (60 points)
Total: 280 points
Poetry requested not to have his entry posted.
Reviews
Dragonfree
This entry confused me. I assume the narrator is already dead and merely getting Drifblim to ferry his spirit across to the other side, judging from how he talks about his death like something that's already happened at the end, but then how is he interacting with the apparently-alive Katherine and the Lacunosa gym leader? I suppose it may be that the gym leader merely senses some kind of presence, since he just lashes out generically rather than reacting specifically to what the narrator says, but that doesn't explain Katherine - is she just randomly a medium who can communicate with ghosts? Why is there no indication of this? And Emboar gets tired walking up the stairs, talks about his chest being tight as if he has a physical body, and later throws up, which at least doesn't seem to match up with how ghosts are traditionally depicted.
I'm not entirely sure whether you intended the fact the narrator is an Emboar to be a twist and deliberately led the reader to think he was human before the reveal or not. If you did I don't think I understand what purpose that serves for this story - the new understanding that he's an Emboar doesn't seem to lend much of a new or illuminating perspective to the previous events, aside from Katherine's nickname for him making a bit more sense - but if not, it's really strange how the story is written entirely like he's human up until the end. And either way, his thinking throughout is really conspicuously human-centered - I mean, his opening musings are all about how humans deal with death and what you should tell human kids when they head out and how it's silly that human deaths aren't commemorated the way Pokémon's deaths are. A Pokémon shouldn't think in these terms unless the story is making some kind of a point of this Pokémon being obsessed with humans, which this story doesn't seem to. It's similarly odd for a Pokémon to be following human politics, to the point where if you include that in a story it should be to make a very particular point about the character or world.
I'm also confused by why Emboar, Drifblim and even Katherine herself all seem to think she decided to kill herself because of something Emboar said. Emboar said very little to her - memento mori, sure, but there doesn't seem to be any intrinsic connection between that and Katherine deciding to join her Hydreigon in death, and even if there were, Katherine explicitly disagrees with the concept so that can't have convinced her to do it. They all act like Emboar said something emphasizing that Melissa is gone forever to a better place, but he said absolutely no such thing. It feels like they're all talking about a different conversation than the one we actually saw. Maybe you originally wrote it differently, then changed it but forgot to change the bits that refer back to it? Either way it's very strange.
Overall this seems more like a simple portrayal than an interpretation, in a way - it's interesting to point out and show in a story how the Pokémon world seems to make a much bigger deal of the deaths of Pokémon than of humans and how these people in a world where discussing death is mostly taboo have difficulties dealing with it, but you don't really do much in the way of exploring why the world works this way. Similarly, you have Drifblim apparently acting as a psychopomp, but don't go into who told Emboar to meet Drifblim there or exactly what Emboar's current state of existence is - it's hard to get much of a solid idea of how you're interpreting the Pokémon afterlife. I wouldn't say it's not an interpretation, but it's a pretty vague one.
Your portrayal of Celestial Tower is wildly unrealistic - grotesque paintings of mutilated Pokémon? Blank canvases hanging on the walls? Mourners being free to destroy gravestones and attack visitors? Open graves with rotting bodies just sitting there unattended? - but that actually didn't really bother me as far as the story was concerned. The entire mood of the fic is kind of otherworldly, and the tower being shown as a bizarre, macabre structure around these different manifestations of Pokémon death rather than a realistically managed institution seemed to just fit right in. It does mean your interpretation itself has even less reach than otherwise, though - you're clearly not portraying a sensible interpretation of how these Pokémon graveyard towers are run.
Finally, you have a lot of proofreading fumbles (probably because you were rushing to get your entry in on time), and you frequently punctuate dialogue incorrectly - the punctuation should always come before the closing quote in dialogue. Your tense use is also somewhat strange. Generally, you use past tense for the actual events of the story but present for some of Emboar's general musings. That makes sense in first person if you're essentially imagining that the narrator is telling the story at some specific later point, where the present-tense portions are things that still apply "today", but the past-tense portions relate what happened and what they thought in the earlier timeframe where the story actually happens. But here, only some of Emboar's general musings are in present tense, without the past-tense ones being distinguished as "Once..." or "At the time..." or "Back then..." or anything like that - it's hard to tell why the first two paragraphs of the story are in present tense but the third is in the past, for instance. And Emboar seems to change his mind at the end regarding how people don't think about death enough and so on, which implies these are not things he "still" thinks at the time he tells the story, and thus not things that ought to be in present tense, either way.
The writing itself is pretty good, though, aside from some intermittent clumsiness (most of which is more an issue of polish than anything else). Your first person is overall smooth and readable, you have nicely evocative imagery and some otherwise memorable descriptions in there, and you manage to maintain a consistent somber mood throughout. And I do enjoy the musings on how the Pokémon world regards death and that vague interpretation; you make me want to hear more. I only wish I understood what's up with the narrator's story better, and that there was a bit more meat to the interpretation within the actual story.
Negrek
Hmm. I'm not sure what to make of this one. For one thing, I don't know what you're actually trying to interpret here. Something to do with how death works or is viewed in the pokémon world? Something to do with Celestial Tower? I mean, the title kind of says it all, and yet at the end of the story, I'm still left wondering, "So, when pokémon die... what, exactly?" I'm guessing you were trying to make that clear in the intro section... something to do with pokémon deaths being different than human deaths? I'm afraid I just really couldn't figure out what you were going for... or how that intro really fit in with the rest of the story, to be honest.
Overall, this reads like you were working too hard to make this seem tragic and affecting. This comes through in the overly fancy, pedantic language you use; you end up with convoluted sentences like this:
Although it commanded a distinctly gothic and imposing nature from the exterior, the ground floor interior felt distinctly warm and enticing.
That's an awful lot of work to say that the building was much warmer and more enticing on the inside than on the outside (and really... and "enticing" mausoleum?). It gets worse when that kind of language works its way into dialogue; there's the emboar saying things like "curry your favor," which doesn't sound at all like how people really talk.
You also go really over the top trying to make the inside of the tower seem creepy/sad, but the overall effect strikes me as more ridiculous than anything. I mean, like, dang, those are some weird interior decoration decisions. Paintings of "pokémon in intense physical pain from wounds or dismembered limbs"? Seems a bit grim for a memorial.
Then there are things like the raving former gym leader the emboar runs across. I don't actually know why you put that encounter in at all; it doesn't seem to serve any purpose. I also don't really buy it. There are presumably caretakers for Celestial Tower; this is even implied at the end when Drifblim tells Emboar that somebody will come and ring the bell for him. I can't imagine them letting violent, grief-stricken people just wander around the Tower, terrorizing the other mourners. I don't know, maybe they all just don't give a crap, like Drifblim. But in that case, doesn't the gym leader have any family or friends or people who might try to stop him, get him to leave the Tower, go to therapy, that kind of thing? I mean, possibly not. But none of this is addressed; it's just taken for granted that it makes sense that this guy might be rampaging around unimpeded in the Tower for long periods of time.
Similarly, the whole "human body in the grave with a pokémon" is implausible on top of being rather overwrought. If scavengers had been at the bones, they wouldn't be all neatly together and posed the way they were. If you had anything like the "dust and dirt of decades" hanging out on them, they certainly wouldn't still have rotted bits clinging to them, and you wouldn't actually be able to make out the little scene anyway because of how deeply it would be buried. And then, again, why has nobody been along to clean this up? If absolutely nothing else, people do actually come here to mourn, and they install new graves as well--has nobody complained about the overwhelming stench up to this point? In general the world you've presented here seems like a carefully-constructed set piece intended to show certain things to the emboar, rather than a genuine world through which the emboar happens to be moving.
It looks like maybe you're trying to get at there being some special kind of bond between humans and pokémon that makes pokémon's deaths especially traumatic. Perhaps the reason the Lacunosa gym leader guy's there--to help illustrate that? I mean, you have Emboar running across Katherine, that gym guy, and the dead person in the grave, all of whom showed pretty extreme ways of dealing with grief. Again, it seems really over the top. Most people are not that devastated by the death of a beloved friend or companion, so either you're trying to get at pokémon deaths being special somehow or you're just laying it on super thick. If it's the former, I think you could do a better job of driving home your point; you do mention the bonds between human and pokémon once or twice, but it seems throwaway rather than central. And then wouldn't it have made more sense to show some indication of the main character's relationship to his trainer?
There are a couple of smaller things I had problems with, too. First, how did Katherine end up at the window of the upper floor before them? There's only one staircase, so she'd have to have passed them at some point, and you'd think the narrator would have noticed...
Then there was this bit:
Not only was this girl going to end her life and abandon her entire future just to be with her Pokémon, but she was going to do it on account of what I had said.
Wait, what? On account of what that he said? Did you have him saying something else in an earlier version, then remove it and forget to change this reference here? I'm really not getting how Katherine's behavior here is supposed to be linked to their earlier meeting. Later on she claimed she knew what memento mori meant, yes, but this quote comes before she does so.
My final major complaint is that you really don't do a good job of representing that your narrator is a pokémon. I literally never would have guessed that he was if not for the "letting my trainer and fellow pokémon down" line. His perspective on life and the way he interacts with the world is entirely human, and then you have all the weirdness with Katherine referring to him as a "man" rather than a pokémon, and also him being taken aback that she'd come up with a nickname for him that involved his being "fiery." I mean, he's literally on fire.
I also find it difficult to believe that in sixty years he's never had anybody suggest that he might be missing out on something in life by thinking about death all the time. His little revelation also didn't have any actual bearing on the decisions he made in the end, so it left me a little cold. Not only did I not believe that he could have escaped having that idea thrust upon him for so long, he also didn't seem to react to it very much. In general, I didn't sympathize with the emboar much. He's obviously a major Debbie Downer, but other than that his reactions are pretty generic; he's awkwardly worried about Katherine, then horrified when she tries to kill herself; he's frightened of the Lacunosa gym guy; and he's mildly curious about what's up with the Tower. Nothing really special. What best defines a character is how they react to the things life throws their way, and when the emboar reacts it's exactly as you would expect anybody to react, not a particular unique individual, and he gets over everything rather quickly.
All that said, though, this story isn't without merit. Your basic setup is good; you've got the bitter old main character climbing to the top of a creepy mausoleum to be carried off into death (rather literally, even). The scenes you introduce are nice and creepy at their core, too: the weepy little girl who's driven to commit suicide, the violent, raving mourner, and so on; I think you have a good sense of what creates a real atmospheric story, but maybe have a bit of trouble executing on it at the moment. On the whole, I think you have good ideas here, but you worked a bit too hard to make your story super-dramatic and literary, and in the process kind of turned it into a mess.
Phoenixsong
An interesting entry, this one—the franchise's primary demographic is so young that we never see much about death in canon unless it's trying to be cute/"scary". It's pretty common for older fans to want to inject MORE DEATH into their fanfics in an effort to appeal to their own age group, but it's rare that I see a take on "death in Pokémon" that's more about mortality and our perception thereof than "look my OC's pidgeot died in a fight, that's so edgy", and I'm glad to see that.
I'm not so excited about the heavily passive writing style, though. This is hardly an action-packed thriller, granted, so it doesn't need a snappy pace, but using so many words and filler phrases to get your point across slows things down unnecessarily. Take the first sentence of a paragraph on page 2:
Walking across the threshold of the Celestial Tower, I could say that my initial reaction to the place was surprise.
"Could say"? Was he surprised or wasn't he? It's his emotion, so he should be pretty clear on it. "At first I was surprised when I crossed the threshold of Celestial Tower." says the same thing but is less wishy-washy. The page 7 paragraph beginning "STAY BACK!" is another spot that would be helped by a more active tone. Even if the rest of the story is sedate and thoughtful, a man swinging a pipe at the protag's head is quick, dangerous, frightening. We'd get plenty of immediacy if the last sentence read "I turned and ran for the stairs" instead of stopping to tell us that he felt a sense of immediacy before anything actually happens.
I do like the end of the last paragraph in that scene, in which the protagonist calls Celestial Tower the place people go to run from their problems. In the next scene, however, things start to come apart a bit. Refuge for those running from their problems or no, shouldn't someone on staff at least attempt to remove that man from the premises before he hurts himself, hurts someone else or disrespects someone else's dead pokémon? I know your point is that he'll never be the same again, but you make it sound like it's normal for grieving people to come up here and waste away. If that's true, why isn't anyone trying to stop it? It sure wouldn't fly in a real cemetery.
Likewise, why has that body "been there for a while now"? Forget about ignoring a living mourner—the administrative and groundskeeping staff should not permit unembalmed, rotting carcasses to sit out in the open like that. It smells awful, obviously, and it's a serious health hazard for anyone who wants to visit a plot on this floor. Dramatic imagery is great and all, but don't ignore the logic of your setting just to facilitate it.
As I read I noticed a lot of typos and other small mistakes that could've been caught with more careful proofreading. The first page alone has several bizarre mid-sentence tense changes and strange/unfinished phrases ("...childhood innocence was used...in the end all ha came to terms with."; "If you looked into...you will have found..."). On page 3 "barely registered" is repeated twice, and you also have "getting my break back" and "at least five or ten minutes, at most". In general I think you did a good job evoking some powerful images, for example the aforementioned grieving humans (barring the fact that they shouldn't be left there) and the first paragraph's balloon being cut free and lost in the skies, but I wonder if you might be trying too hard to force more of that powerful imagery and ending up with sentences so awkward or complex that you're missing the basic typos they contain.
The protagonist has a nasty habit of trying to process everything he's just learned in one sitting, leading to some hefty infodumps. Yes, this is a short story that is trying to tackle a very heavy subject, and I kind of like his cynicism, but a reader can only take so much of his constant rumination. Some of his thoughts were just rehashes of things he'd mentioned before and can be cut, and some others can be distributed a little more evenly throughout the narrative instead of being loaded into three or four big chunks of "here is why (people are/I am) wrong about death".
Unfortunately, even after all of that I didn't feel like you'd interpreted anything about the Pokémon world. Some of the fic's characters were pokémon, it was set in Unova and the Celestial Tower, you tossed in some nice in-world tidbits (e.g., the pokémon center scandal) and you titled your piece "When Pokémon Die"... but it could have been called "When Anyone Dies" and it wouldn't have changed anything. None of the grieving humans did anything specific to the loss of a pokémon; nothing showed that the bond between pokémon and trainer is stronger or in any way different from a bond between close human friends. This story works as an examination of grief, but it's a very general examination that just happens to be wrapped in Pokémon paper. The protagonist is revealed to be an emboar in the end, but he thought about things from a very human perspective. If he had instead looked at things as a pokémon probably would—however you want to interpret that—you might have been able to explore this topic in a manner that really fit the setting you're working with.
Psychic
I was definitely not expecting a fic focused around death and how death is treated in the Pokémon world. I like that you tried to analyze it through a character who was detached and had big ideas, but was still shown to be flawed and wrong. Getting to see humans dealing with death and grief of friends is not something we get to see often, so I was interested in seeing how you handled it.
That said, I’m not really sure what this fic was going for. It talks a lot about death and the protagonist’s opinions on life and death, but I didn’t find it really explored the concept all that deeply. We see a couple instances of humans reacting to the deaths of their Pokémon friends, but those reactions are so exaggerated and have so little basis in reality that it was hard to take them seriously at times. The whole storyline with Katherine felt overdramatic, including Emboar’s reaction to her suicide. I think you had a really interesting idea with exploring the grieving process, but the way the characters deal with grief unfortunately didn’t feel all that realistic. For instance, if you don’t want to believe someone is truly dead, why have a gravestone erected for them only to smash it later? Denial is a stage of grief, but this was a weird direction to take it in. You could have researched how people deal with the deaths of pets, as a real-world equivalent, and used that as a basis for people dealing with Pokémon deaths. Research on types and stages of grief would have gone a long way overall, as a lot of the displays of grief described within the narrative don’t seem to make a whole lot of sense. In addition, some research on stages of decomposition would have been good, as a decades-old corpse would likely not have the qualities you described (though I guess it partly depends on if you have maggots or an equivalent in your Pokéverse).
I was also confused by the fact that human deaths are treated as inconsequential in your fic – you seem to use the fact that there are no human graveyards in the games to mean that nobody cares when humans die, which is ridiculous (especially considering how Pokémon deaths are treated in comparison, it would be a weird double-standard). I think it would have been best to simply not talk about the deaths of humans in that case.
What also confused me was this idea that kids should be taught about death from a young age, and that not teaching them about death is terrible. That said, there’s no reason given for why children, who likely won’t have to deal with death at a young age, need a specific curriculum to educate them on the subject. If you really thought this was important to teach, one solution would be to simply tie it in with battling, teaching kids not to push their Pokémon too hard to battle until their partners are severely injured and on the verge of death, which would be pretty logical. I’m also confused by the idea of having to frighten people into taking care of the Pokémon they supposedly love so much, or it being “propaganda” for trainers to be taught to heal their Pokémon so they don’t die. That seems more like common sense to me.
The protagonist was also a strange character. For one thing, it’s unclear that he’s not a human, considering that he perfectly communicates with humans and is even called a “man” by one. Some physical description could have been helpful hints, even if small, like using the term “paws” instead of “hands.” If there were a reason as to why you wanted to hide that he was a Pokémon until the very end it might have worked, but there doesn’t seem to be one. It also would have been nice to know his motivation for wanting to eventually die. Instead, he does a lot of pondering about death in the narration, but instead of feeling meaningful or deep it just feels overly long and soapbox-y without accomplishing much. I found that the story was a little too internally-focused in this way. There’s also some weird hypocrisy going on regarding how he views death. For instance, the protagonist is comforted by seeing the skeletons of a Pokémon and trainer in a grave and hardly reacts, yet is upset when Katherine is about to jump to her own death, with no explanation as to why. It’s very inconsistent. On that note, how the heck did she manage to get ahead of him and Drifblim without them noticing?
That said, there were certainly endearing parts, like Emboar trying and failing to comfort a little girl. You create some interesting vignettes throughout the story as Emboar encounters these different scenes of people dealing with death, and neat scenes, like of Drifblim extending a tendril to Emboar on the roof and then flying away like a balloon. Drifblim also seemed like an interesting mysterious character, though there were points during their conversations where the mystery kind of went away, and he was conveniently gone when needed most in order to make “preparations” that never actually materialize in any observable way. Be wary of turning your characters into mere plot devices!
Be sure to also show every so often – I wanted to hear more about the expression on the deranged man’s face and the sight of the sunset. Don’t be afraid to linger on certain poignant images.
Spelling and grammar was mostly fine. You main recurring mistake is that you tend to put punctuation outside of quotation marks during dialogue, when they should always be inside. There are also a number of small typos, such as:
I’m not sure what the “ha” is supposed to be.It was a world where childhood innocence was used by the state as an ideology to gleefully cover up the harsh reality of truth which we, in the end all ha came to terms with.
Number disagreement due to “an” and “humans.”Some depicted cheerful scenes of Pokémon playing with an embracing humans,
Should be “was.”Perhaps music as her way of saying things
I would go with “empathic towards” instead of “empathetic to.”It felt wildly out of character for me to feel empathetic, even more so to a child.
Overall, I think this fic attempts to sound deep and meaningful, but it just doesn’t work all that well. The drama felt over-the-top, and there were too many inconsistencies and holes in all the wrong places. You had some interesting ideas and imagery, and I’d recommend focusing on those instead of getting caught up in trying to sound profound.