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So someone's just deleted their story from the review exchange. Ugh. I think there's a real disconnect between my intention and what people think it's about. The point of the review exchange isn't to generate reviews for poor beleaguered authors, it's to make people SHUT THE HELL UP and actually do something. "Farla, people aren't reviewing my story! Farla, badfic isn't getting criticized! Farla, you don't review enough good stories! Farla, you have to review perfectly because it's probably the only serious review authors will ever get! Farla, I'm going to ignore 99.9% of what you said but keep reviewing because you might say something useful and you're the only one who mentions these things!"
So screwing up the balance bothers me, because the idea is not "lack of reviews is a sad and tragic thing for the poor authors" it's "the authors need to suck it up and review other people if it's such a damn big deal to them".
http://www.fanfiction.net/s/4869936/1/Renegade_Pokemon
[Chapter Review Exchange]
"I’ve made some major changes in my characters (*CoughDESTUINGcough*) but have tried to leave other characters untouched and stay true to the way they were, or at least how I remember them. Izzy, Gatomon343, Lizerd, Hijackers, BOB, that one guy who role played Giovanni all the time, and everyone else I can’t recall the names of… I really hope I do your characters justice. "
So this note worries me a bit. Saying you changed your character is good and exactly what I want to hear going into an RP based story. Indicating there's stuff you don't want to change because it's RP based is exactly what I don't. How this actually works out will depend on if there's points in the story where the characters don't work properly and would be better served by altering them, it's not really clear if you mean "the other characters were great, so I'm not changing them" or "I'm not changing them, so I hope they'll be fine". Even if the RP went flawlessly it's going to take some adapting to alter it into story format, and I always cringe when I hear any indication at all the author is going to prioritize "the way things went" over "the way things should go".
On to the story itself, the scene feels a bit awkward. It actually seems a lot like you're using a format for the dramatic cartoon opening, where people can hear the dramatic tension in the voices. Those often have voices/images being separate, and often open with dramatic lines. There are a lot fewer cues in regular text. If nothing else, I'd advise opening with narration to set the scene, then going into dialogue. Even an exclamation mark doesn't convey much on its own - someone might be scared or defiant or angry, there might be exhaustion or triumph. It's also pretty vague. I realize that's done for suspense, but again, in text you can sort of describe around bits that you don't want people to know - it's not like images where you're committed to showing someone or not. I'm not really much of a fan of monologuing either. If you're making it vague so people won't know what's going on until much later, it's good to keep things to a minimum, just showing a couple cool facts for people to speculate, not a short lecture on good and evil. Especially when it's something general - he's basically just reciting general villain lines here. It's okay to have a villain with this attitude, but it shouldn't be the centerpiece of his introduction instead of whatever original, interesting features he might have.
"Even so, he let his thoughts on the matter spill out of his mouth frantically, thoughts that had been confirmed from a long journey, a journey he’d only started."
Your sentence structure is also a bit stilted. If nothing else, a long sentence like this is horribly at odds with 'frantically'. I'd suggest trying to rearrange your sentences so they're shorter and flow better, and possibly break them into multiple sentences. Focus more on short, concrete verbs and adverbs for action scenes.
It's hard to be specific because I don't know what's happening here, but even just changes like "Even so, his thoughts spilled out of his mouth" seems like it'd be an improvement. Alternatively, you could drop the entire feel of speed and change it to be more of a ramble (he's just gotten smacked in the head, so that's reasonable), keeping the current long sentences and changing the shorter ones.
http://www.fanfiction.net/s/4869936/2/Renegade_Pokemon
[Chapter Review Exchange]
"He spun the pencil in his hand. It was considered a skill, pencil-spinning. That showed how bored the scientists were, who competed in pencil-spinning contests. That, of course, was only when they were really bored, like right now."
Uh...probably not, no. This reads like you were bored, wrote something, then fixated on it and decided to expand on it beyond all reason. Also, again, overlong sentences and not quite right word choice, as well as a weird sentence of distance considering he's one of them. "That was how bored the scientists were, they competed in pencil-spinning contests." You don't even need that last sentence - you've established that they do it when extremely bored in sentence three, and that he's doing it in sentences one and two, so it must be very boring right now.
A more reasonable paragraph here might be more like "By now he was particularly skilled at pencil-spinning. That was how bored..." You might also want to avoid reusing "spun" and have something like "twirled" in the first sentence.
...and I really dislike Mark immediately. He's coming off as one of those jackasses who tries to be offended about something. I think the problem here is a disconnect between what you've got the other character saying and what Mark is responding to - you seem to intend it to be one thing, but it's technically not. The result is Mark jumping on the guy for saying something he didn't.
For starters, it's not entirely clear what's going on. There's a guy doing the whole "As you know, Bob," thing. I'm sure boring meetings can be quite repetitive, but I don't even see what he's leading up to. If nothing else, summarizing it as tightly as possible would help "A year ago, we began work on cloning mew," has more of a retrospective feel than something that includes parts that they shouldn't have been involved with, like finding the eyelash.
Next is Mark's bitchiness with "attempts". I can kind of see, I think, what you were getting at here, but if they were attempting to clone *mew*, and *did not get mew*, then *the cloning attempts were failures*. Nothing in the statement is making any judgment about if the results were alive or not. This is like if a scientist was hired to create mouse-human crossbreeds then got bitchy when he was told the attempt was a failure and went on a rant that he totally had living mouse embryos for a whole day there. He would be laughed at, and then fired.
I'm not even clear on if he's insulted by his work being dismissed or if he's insulted the pokemon are being dismissed - the second seems like it's what you're going for with Mark's focus on the pokemon, and being alive, and how they shouldn't be dismissed, instead of something like "our successes in the matter...", but then he's bitching that the death of the guy's daughter doesn't count because she's just a clone. So not-actual-clones count by virtue of being alive for five minutes even if they are failures at everything they were meant to do, but near perfect daughter clones don't?
So the end result is that Mark is just one of those guys who likes to be offended assholes about things, and doesn't have any internal reasoning for why it's bad to dismiss Thing A or why Thing B is meaningless but just picks it based on which best serves his goal of being an asshole by acted offended.
It doesn't help that absolutely no one involved in genetics and cloning, and I mean this without exaggeration, would be using the "but they were alive" argument, ever. Because very good, yes, cells are alive. So what? There may be pro-life scientists, but none of them are involved in this kind of thing because it means being very, very familiar with the fact that a human being is a mass of cells and one of those cells, while it can easily be kept alive or killed, is not a human being. In order to care those cells need to add up to something - simply the fact cellular respiration is going on isn't going to cut it. So even if Mark's argument here wasn't incoherent the entire premise doesn't make sense. I mean, do you even understand that cloning involves taking a cell and removing the DNA, the bit that governs the cell and determines what it is, so that the cell (assuming it hasn't just collapsed completely from the process) will fall apart? And then you stick it in another cell that's had its DNA removed and discarded to denature in the air? It's really hard to act like "life" has inherent meaning under these circumstances. This is like some guy who works at a fertility clinic bitching that his boss doesn't mourn every failed implantation as a person in between dumping old frozen embryos in the dumpster out back.
"Mark leaned back in his chair, arms crossed. "Debbie, the day I let a man treat the dead like a statistic is the day I let you scold me while having PMS. Like right now." "
I mean, really. I'm not getting anything but faux-offended asshole in terms of characterization here. At this rate by the end of the chapter I'm going to be hoping Mark dies horribly so I stop having to hear him be a faux-offended asshole.
Anyway.
"Creating life wasn't easy, and Mark had only joined them halfway amidst their 'attempts', but as of now they hadn't been closer. Out of a batch of eleven embryos- some not related to mew, one related to Dr. Fuji- two clones had survived to this point. This was considered a great success, for their last attempts had died in much earlier stages. Hopefully there wouldn't be any more roadblocks in preserving these lives, and at least one of the clones would live to adult age, which would only take a few more months, at most a year... if neither lived, they would have to start from scratch, and Giovanni was an impatient man. "
Okay, so...why? Their stated goal is "clone a legendary". They do so with eleven embryos only, rather than hundreds, and multiple ones aren't even the legendary clones? Look, I am happy to assume TR scientists are a bunch of crazy people not following proper protocol, but it needs some sort of rationale. "There are like five hundred different tanks, so Dr. Fuji took one in the back to try to clone his kid and everyone just doesn't talk about it" = okay. "Dr. Fuji make the case to the research department that in order to work out the problems with cloning they needed to try a lot of different species including human ones and the guys in charge were convinced" = okay. "Team Rocket has an existent cloning project for working on super pokemon and human clones, and the mew clone thing got folded into that department" = okay. "We decided to do less than a dozen embryos, some of which weren't even mew-based, even though even growing them to adulthood is a crapshoot let alone the odds that they'll be at all useful, and if they all die we'll have absolutely nothing to show for it, because we thought wasting Giovanni's time and money was a great career move that could not lead to our horrible deaths in any way" = less okay.
I mean, real world genetics labs use hundreds to thousands of embryos for this kind of thing, exactly because most of them die. If they'd done that, only for steady attrition to have whittled it down to a few hundred, to eleven, to two, (as would happen - the further the cells develop the more likely they'll hit some insurmountable genetic defect and die horrible) their attitude here would look less like moron suicide and more like they're competent scientists unfortunately hampered by a new and imperfect branch of science.
I'm not sure if you're using a canon timeline or not, but one year seems incredibly rushed for this, especially if you want them to be having failures. Also, you don't want Mark coming off as a sue? Having him be a wonderkid within six months is not how to do that. Since you've got Mark joining in later, it'd be better to have this take place over a longer period - if nothing else, a long term project is a lot more likely to believably benefit from getting new blood. Say they've been working on this a couple years, have a bunch of kinks worked out but Mark, with his new perspective, happens to solve one they've missed because they're too used to how things are...that kind of thing works, and also makes it clear that other people ALSO did lots of useful things before this.
""Will you get to work?"
"Only if you say the magic word."
Dr. Fuji raised an eyebrow.
Mark raised his own. "Don't remember? It starts with a P, has two syllables when you beg...""
...and yeah, I want Mark dead so I don't have to listen to this.
http://www.fanfiction.net/s/4869936/3/Renegade_Pokemon
Eh. This chapter just feels...vague. It's not clear why events are happening. They were having trouble just keeping the embryos alive, but were perfectly find tinkering with the finer details to cause all sorts of targeted changes? I know mewtwo variants are a staple of fanfic, but this really needs some sort of better reasoning. In fact, if you really want it, you'd be better off removing the whole business with them having trouble, or saying they'd fixed the problem perfectly before starting on the current batch. (That'd also explain how they could be working with such a horribly low number of embryos) Discarding the successful prototypes would also Mark something to legitimately complain about living things being dismissed.
Similarly - no clear reason why the tranquilizer would have a bad effect. No clear reason why, if they're so worried, they've keeping the clones close to each other in the first place. No clear reason why, if they're so worried, they aren't keeping the clones drugged to start so they won't wake up at all. (No clear reason why they'd have multiple weak barriers rather than a couple combined ones, either, or how a psychic shield even works in the first place.) If you really need this drama, you'd be better off saying they are knocked out and even that's not enough to prevent these kinds of flareups - that'd also allow for a situation where they can't drug them any further without risk of damage. And I'm not sure you do anyway - I'm really unclear on what this whole chapter scene was about. It introduced the pokemon, but the conflict seems just there for the sake of livening things up.
Also...what saving lives? Were the pokemon actually dangerous? In that case, Mark wasn't trying to save lives, he was trying to protect one pokemon at the potential cost of everything and everyone in the lab. At least he's not being a total ass right now, so that's a step up.
So screwing up the balance bothers me, because the idea is not "lack of reviews is a sad and tragic thing for the poor authors" it's "the authors need to suck it up and review other people if it's such a damn big deal to them".
http://www.fanfiction.net/s/4869936/1/Renegade_Pokemon
[Chapter Review Exchange]
"I’ve made some major changes in my characters (*CoughDESTUINGcough*) but have tried to leave other characters untouched and stay true to the way they were, or at least how I remember them. Izzy, Gatomon343, Lizerd, Hijackers, BOB, that one guy who role played Giovanni all the time, and everyone else I can’t recall the names of… I really hope I do your characters justice. "
So this note worries me a bit. Saying you changed your character is good and exactly what I want to hear going into an RP based story. Indicating there's stuff you don't want to change because it's RP based is exactly what I don't. How this actually works out will depend on if there's points in the story where the characters don't work properly and would be better served by altering them, it's not really clear if you mean "the other characters were great, so I'm not changing them" or "I'm not changing them, so I hope they'll be fine". Even if the RP went flawlessly it's going to take some adapting to alter it into story format, and I always cringe when I hear any indication at all the author is going to prioritize "the way things went" over "the way things should go".
On to the story itself, the scene feels a bit awkward. It actually seems a lot like you're using a format for the dramatic cartoon opening, where people can hear the dramatic tension in the voices. Those often have voices/images being separate, and often open with dramatic lines. There are a lot fewer cues in regular text. If nothing else, I'd advise opening with narration to set the scene, then going into dialogue. Even an exclamation mark doesn't convey much on its own - someone might be scared or defiant or angry, there might be exhaustion or triumph. It's also pretty vague. I realize that's done for suspense, but again, in text you can sort of describe around bits that you don't want people to know - it's not like images where you're committed to showing someone or not. I'm not really much of a fan of monologuing either. If you're making it vague so people won't know what's going on until much later, it's good to keep things to a minimum, just showing a couple cool facts for people to speculate, not a short lecture on good and evil. Especially when it's something general - he's basically just reciting general villain lines here. It's okay to have a villain with this attitude, but it shouldn't be the centerpiece of his introduction instead of whatever original, interesting features he might have.
"Even so, he let his thoughts on the matter spill out of his mouth frantically, thoughts that had been confirmed from a long journey, a journey he’d only started."
Your sentence structure is also a bit stilted. If nothing else, a long sentence like this is horribly at odds with 'frantically'. I'd suggest trying to rearrange your sentences so they're shorter and flow better, and possibly break them into multiple sentences. Focus more on short, concrete verbs and adverbs for action scenes.
It's hard to be specific because I don't know what's happening here, but even just changes like "Even so, his thoughts spilled out of his mouth" seems like it'd be an improvement. Alternatively, you could drop the entire feel of speed and change it to be more of a ramble (he's just gotten smacked in the head, so that's reasonable), keeping the current long sentences and changing the shorter ones.
http://www.fanfiction.net/s/4869936/2/Renegade_Pokemon
[Chapter Review Exchange]
"He spun the pencil in his hand. It was considered a skill, pencil-spinning. That showed how bored the scientists were, who competed in pencil-spinning contests. That, of course, was only when they were really bored, like right now."
Uh...probably not, no. This reads like you were bored, wrote something, then fixated on it and decided to expand on it beyond all reason. Also, again, overlong sentences and not quite right word choice, as well as a weird sentence of distance considering he's one of them. "That was how bored the scientists were, they competed in pencil-spinning contests." You don't even need that last sentence - you've established that they do it when extremely bored in sentence three, and that he's doing it in sentences one and two, so it must be very boring right now.
A more reasonable paragraph here might be more like "By now he was particularly skilled at pencil-spinning. That was how bored..." You might also want to avoid reusing "spun" and have something like "twirled" in the first sentence.
...and I really dislike Mark immediately. He's coming off as one of those jackasses who tries to be offended about something. I think the problem here is a disconnect between what you've got the other character saying and what Mark is responding to - you seem to intend it to be one thing, but it's technically not. The result is Mark jumping on the guy for saying something he didn't.
For starters, it's not entirely clear what's going on. There's a guy doing the whole "As you know, Bob," thing. I'm sure boring meetings can be quite repetitive, but I don't even see what he's leading up to. If nothing else, summarizing it as tightly as possible would help "A year ago, we began work on cloning mew," has more of a retrospective feel than something that includes parts that they shouldn't have been involved with, like finding the eyelash.
Next is Mark's bitchiness with "attempts". I can kind of see, I think, what you were getting at here, but if they were attempting to clone *mew*, and *did not get mew*, then *the cloning attempts were failures*. Nothing in the statement is making any judgment about if the results were alive or not. This is like if a scientist was hired to create mouse-human crossbreeds then got bitchy when he was told the attempt was a failure and went on a rant that he totally had living mouse embryos for a whole day there. He would be laughed at, and then fired.
I'm not even clear on if he's insulted by his work being dismissed or if he's insulted the pokemon are being dismissed - the second seems like it's what you're going for with Mark's focus on the pokemon, and being alive, and how they shouldn't be dismissed, instead of something like "our successes in the matter...", but then he's bitching that the death of the guy's daughter doesn't count because she's just a clone. So not-actual-clones count by virtue of being alive for five minutes even if they are failures at everything they were meant to do, but near perfect daughter clones don't?
So the end result is that Mark is just one of those guys who likes to be offended assholes about things, and doesn't have any internal reasoning for why it's bad to dismiss Thing A or why Thing B is meaningless but just picks it based on which best serves his goal of being an asshole by acted offended.
It doesn't help that absolutely no one involved in genetics and cloning, and I mean this without exaggeration, would be using the "but they were alive" argument, ever. Because very good, yes, cells are alive. So what? There may be pro-life scientists, but none of them are involved in this kind of thing because it means being very, very familiar with the fact that a human being is a mass of cells and one of those cells, while it can easily be kept alive or killed, is not a human being. In order to care those cells need to add up to something - simply the fact cellular respiration is going on isn't going to cut it. So even if Mark's argument here wasn't incoherent the entire premise doesn't make sense. I mean, do you even understand that cloning involves taking a cell and removing the DNA, the bit that governs the cell and determines what it is, so that the cell (assuming it hasn't just collapsed completely from the process) will fall apart? And then you stick it in another cell that's had its DNA removed and discarded to denature in the air? It's really hard to act like "life" has inherent meaning under these circumstances. This is like some guy who works at a fertility clinic bitching that his boss doesn't mourn every failed implantation as a person in between dumping old frozen embryos in the dumpster out back.
"Mark leaned back in his chair, arms crossed. "Debbie, the day I let a man treat the dead like a statistic is the day I let you scold me while having PMS. Like right now." "
I mean, really. I'm not getting anything but faux-offended asshole in terms of characterization here. At this rate by the end of the chapter I'm going to be hoping Mark dies horribly so I stop having to hear him be a faux-offended asshole.
Anyway.
"Creating life wasn't easy, and Mark had only joined them halfway amidst their 'attempts', but as of now they hadn't been closer. Out of a batch of eleven embryos- some not related to mew, one related to Dr. Fuji- two clones had survived to this point. This was considered a great success, for their last attempts had died in much earlier stages. Hopefully there wouldn't be any more roadblocks in preserving these lives, and at least one of the clones would live to adult age, which would only take a few more months, at most a year... if neither lived, they would have to start from scratch, and Giovanni was an impatient man. "
Okay, so...why? Their stated goal is "clone a legendary". They do so with eleven embryos only, rather than hundreds, and multiple ones aren't even the legendary clones? Look, I am happy to assume TR scientists are a bunch of crazy people not following proper protocol, but it needs some sort of rationale. "There are like five hundred different tanks, so Dr. Fuji took one in the back to try to clone his kid and everyone just doesn't talk about it" = okay. "Dr. Fuji make the case to the research department that in order to work out the problems with cloning they needed to try a lot of different species including human ones and the guys in charge were convinced" = okay. "Team Rocket has an existent cloning project for working on super pokemon and human clones, and the mew clone thing got folded into that department" = okay. "We decided to do less than a dozen embryos, some of which weren't even mew-based, even though even growing them to adulthood is a crapshoot let alone the odds that they'll be at all useful, and if they all die we'll have absolutely nothing to show for it, because we thought wasting Giovanni's time and money was a great career move that could not lead to our horrible deaths in any way" = less okay.
I mean, real world genetics labs use hundreds to thousands of embryos for this kind of thing, exactly because most of them die. If they'd done that, only for steady attrition to have whittled it down to a few hundred, to eleven, to two, (as would happen - the further the cells develop the more likely they'll hit some insurmountable genetic defect and die horrible) their attitude here would look less like moron suicide and more like they're competent scientists unfortunately hampered by a new and imperfect branch of science.
I'm not sure if you're using a canon timeline or not, but one year seems incredibly rushed for this, especially if you want them to be having failures. Also, you don't want Mark coming off as a sue? Having him be a wonderkid within six months is not how to do that. Since you've got Mark joining in later, it'd be better to have this take place over a longer period - if nothing else, a long term project is a lot more likely to believably benefit from getting new blood. Say they've been working on this a couple years, have a bunch of kinks worked out but Mark, with his new perspective, happens to solve one they've missed because they're too used to how things are...that kind of thing works, and also makes it clear that other people ALSO did lots of useful things before this.
""Will you get to work?"
"Only if you say the magic word."
Dr. Fuji raised an eyebrow.
Mark raised his own. "Don't remember? It starts with a P, has two syllables when you beg...""
...and yeah, I want Mark dead so I don't have to listen to this.
http://www.fanfiction.net/s/4869936/3/Renegade_Pokemon
Eh. This chapter just feels...vague. It's not clear why events are happening. They were having trouble just keeping the embryos alive, but were perfectly find tinkering with the finer details to cause all sorts of targeted changes? I know mewtwo variants are a staple of fanfic, but this really needs some sort of better reasoning. In fact, if you really want it, you'd be better off removing the whole business with them having trouble, or saying they'd fixed the problem perfectly before starting on the current batch. (That'd also explain how they could be working with such a horribly low number of embryos) Discarding the successful prototypes would also Mark something to legitimately complain about living things being dismissed.
Similarly - no clear reason why the tranquilizer would have a bad effect. No clear reason why, if they're so worried, they've keeping the clones close to each other in the first place. No clear reason why, if they're so worried, they aren't keeping the clones drugged to start so they won't wake up at all. (No clear reason why they'd have multiple weak barriers rather than a couple combined ones, either, or how a psychic shield even works in the first place.) If you really need this drama, you'd be better off saying they are knocked out and even that's not enough to prevent these kinds of flareups - that'd also allow for a situation where they can't drug them any further without risk of damage. And I'm not sure you do anyway - I'm really unclear on what this whole chapter scene was about. It introduced the pokemon, but the conflict seems just there for the sake of livening things up.
Also...what saving lives? Were the pokemon actually dangerous? In that case, Mark wasn't trying to save lives, he was trying to protect one pokemon at the potential cost of everything and everyone in the lab. At least he's not being a total ass right now, so that's a step up.
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Student: "Were any of the experimental embryos viable to adulthood?"
Teacher, looks at student like he's just asked a completely irrelevant and tangential question: "They don't have any ribs."
Student: "Well, were they?"
Teacher: "They would die in the birth canal. I mean, you could do a c-section, but something would kill them pretty quickly anyway. And the mother would probably eat the mutant. They do that with all your best experiments."
= actual geneticists' conversations. Mark is talking nonsense, but so is everyone else. I laugh.
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I admit that's exactly the sort of thing I always want to know. I mean, if you aren't always wondering in the back of your mind if you can use horrible perversions of nature as part of your mutant army, what are you even doing in a biology class?
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Use snakes as a base. It might be a bit harder but most lizards don't have long enough necks and short-necked dragons are ugly and if we finally get dragons only for them to be ugly I will cry. Snakes probably still have enough vestigial DNA to plug the wings into.
Alternatively, bird wings. Quetzalcoatl!