farla

So that second reviewer I mentioned yesterday who reviewed the first chapter of Butterfly Wings has returned...to review the first chapter of Tribulations.

This wouldn't be so irritating if I was getting negative reviews.

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5468393/4/A_Journey_of_My_Own

"The Wool Pokémon"

See, it's this sort of thing that makes me so militant about not capitalizing any of it. Sometimes the slippery slope isn't a fallacy.

"Flying types are weaker than electric types." I reminded him. "Did you forget that from school?"

Uh, 'weaker than' and 'weak to' are very, very different things.

"Soon, we arrived in a clearing where a giant robot was scooping up Mareeps in giant nets. The Mareep were trying to escape, but it was no use.
"What is going on?"I exclaimed. "Spykes, use Swift!"
The Swift cut the nets, setting the Mareep free. The robot started thrashing and kicking. It was about to step on one of the smallest Mareep, but I quickly threw a pokeball at it. The Mareep went into the pokeball. It was my first catch. The pokeball returned to my hand.
"Now use Flamethrower, Spykes!"
"Cyndaquil!"Spykes blasted the robot into the sky."

Okay, so let's run through what's wrong with this:

It's horribly jarring and out of place.

It's referencing things that work much better in a visual medium, where you can actually see the giant robot.

It's copying the same Team Rocket filler that's overdone on the show itself, and doesn't need to be repeated even more.

Seeing a giant robot is not a reason to attack it, so now your characters seem to be doing things that make no sense.

While everyone reading surely is familiar with the filler you're referencing, your characters aren't. They have no reason to assume the giant robot is going anything wrong here. It's not illegal to stuff wild pokemon into nets - it's only wrong if they're owned by someone/protected (making it poaching) or if you know the people doing it are already criminals (and therefore should be stopped in general even if what they're specifically doing is not a crime). If it's okay for her to catch one of them, it's okay for someone else to take them.

It serves absolutely no purpose beyond stretching the chapter a few extra paragraphs.

Speaking of such...

"In two days, Claudia Bloomwood, the well known Pokestylist and Pokémon Idol, will be in Dandelion city for her fashion show."

Look. Does this matter? A story needs a coherent plot, not a string of nonsense. (OT fics are already going to be long by nature, the absolute last thing you want is to make them longer) In the extremely unlikely situation something interesting actually does happen once they check it out, you still don't need to set it up this far in advance. Having them learn about it once they're there would have been fine.

Incidentally, there's more dragcave shenanigans going on, which is admittedly kind of like saying water is still wet.

Anyway. There's this big fuss about a particular dragon and so there's a lot of trading right now. Now, you can sort of trade eggs by giving someone else the code and then abandoning the egg, with the idea that the person refreshing the code link is probably going to get it faster than someone else who has to see it pop up and then click on it for the link. But trades are lost all the time, and it's generally considered the responsibility of the tradee when this happens.

The obvious hack here is to give a friend or two the same code, so there's a good chance they'll get the egg rather than the person you're trading with. I doubt I'm the only one this has occurred to, since there's a lot of complaining on the forums about people sniping trades, which in theory should be hard to do but in practice seems to happen often. (Interestingly, there's a sizable chunk of people opposing the site adding an actual trade system because they think the current way makes the "game" more "fun", despite the fact the forum stance on it is that actually sniping trades is wrong and despite the fact that in general people are far more likely to be burned by a missed trade than to snipe something else for free.)

I start to see why people insist on referring to it as a game - it certainly chews up game theory fast.