Eh, more introspection.

[farla]

I was just looking over my last bunch of one-shots and realized that for a lot of them, some or all of the reviewers totally missed the point. Okay, I can actually see the (stupid) reasoning for Hatred, that's just militant shipping in action. But there's also Knowledge, where even the couple people who figured out the pokemon was dead either thought the girl had made a mistake (totally not the point) or tried her best, or something; Strife of Mere Immortals, where I don't think anyone got it and about half of them seemed to think one of the two was good, plus they seemed to miss the bit about twins, as in, same-species; and Absolution, where people actually argued against the point as if I believed it, and I don't know if anyone got that the absol was talking about a causal, karmic sense of suffering, which was why there was no point in saying sorry. And then there's the whole thing with The One Who Moved with most of the reviewers thinking it's a metapod for some reason, despite the poochyena.

So...are my stories too hard to follow? Are my reviewers just not paying attention? Do I really need ending author notes explaining the situation?

Comments

[farla.livejournal.com]

Well, Strife of Mere Immortals is one of my heavily trivia influenced stories that worked a lot better when there were fewer games and the anime series was still in Orange Islands. It requires that you know that mew could learn transform, for example. The reference to kabuto will only make sense if you watched a throw-away episode that mentioned kabuto have some sort of elixir of life making them immortal. So the characters in question are a pair of mew who both managed to figure out a way of getting that substance out of kabuto in sufficient quantities to make themselves immortal, and are now trying to kill each other. They outlived the rest of their species, and ended up claiming to be gods - the first instance of legendary pokemon/pokegods - to try to get enough followers to break the stalemate. When that didn't work, they learned to transform into new forms, based on fantasy stories they'd been told as children, and repeated their claim of being gods. All the legendary pokemon are based on these different attempts to kill each other.

Absolution is based on the idea of absolution, being forgiven for your sins by doing something else, mixed with karma's inevitability. The key bit there is that the action precedes forgiveness. Slightly extended, you could say the action is forgiveness, or being forgiven. Suffering is forgiveness.

The absol, therefore, is the earthly agent of this, bringing down disasters to absolve them of previous sins. From this perspective, there's no point in "sorry". You're going to be sorry (feel regret) inevitably when those disasters hit. Just saying you're sorry, therefore, is a bizarre action, because you're only forgiven after suffering and it's inevitable that you're going to be sorry, so what's the point of saying it?

With The One Who Moved, it doesn't at all matter which particular pokemon. However, it's annoying when readers decide it's referring to a particular cocoon pokemon, then somehow decide it's a metapod despite the poochyena having a pretty prominent mention.