farla

Continuing our examination of why pokephiles can't have nice things (because just NaRe is tiresome), there's Sin, by that person who told people to flame me because they were outraged I didn't reply to their review so there'll probably be explosions shortly.

Anyway.

The story can be summed up in the word "fursecution". It's all about how the noble pokephiles with their pure love for their pokemon got exterminated by the evil religious prudes, and now it's a hundred years later and presumably the banner of pokephilia will be taken up again.

The author states at the beginning of the story they don't know or care about religion or history, nor about how broken arms work. But that's okay! It's just the entire subject matter of their story.

We go on to learn that the great purge involved killing six million innocent pokephiles and dear god do I hope that number wasn't intentional.

Then we get a brief history on pokemon fucking.

Basically, a huge subset of the population is fucking their pokemon. No, there's no explanation why. It's just assumed that if there were pokemon, everyone would want to fuck them. In fact, pokemon fucking is so popular there are pokemon brothels all over the place for people who aren't the noble pokephiles and just want it to be all about sex. (Considering the world is in the rest of the story divided between noble pokephiles and those who think sex with pokemon is wrong, it's unclear who was going to these brothels.) Anyway, the brothel-runners (not the noble pokephiles!) are abusive and evil and feature such things as pokemon being raped to death. So the pokemon rights people start saying pokephilia is wrong! But they just don't understand the noble pokephiles and how it's not about sex, man, it's about free love, they have a deep connection as well as the papers designating their legal ownership of the pokemon so back off, okay?

"Pokemon-rights groups spoke out, saying Pokephilia was abuse toward pokemon. Pokephiles, the ones who were with their Pokemon through love, spoke out about how Pokephilia should be. How the two could be in love, and how pokemon weren’t just used for sex."

No, the next line does not give the pokemon's opinion. That's the end of it. The noble pokephile does not suggest treating their partner who they're in love with as an equal and letting them make their own decision. Nor do the noble pokephiles care about the whole rape-to-death thing until it means they get unfairly persecuted for their own pokemon fucking, at which point they start insisting they're totally different, stop persecuting me!

Meanwhile pokemon are still getting raped to death, but why should the pokephiles care? They're being persecuted here!

So in sum, pokephiles = NAMBLA*, if the people of NAMBLA could legally own the kids they were fucking and kill them if they felt like it. Not creepy at all!

At this point, apparently because of pokemon-rights groups, the government starts to take action. They stop giving hybrids the same rights as humans (why hybrids had the same rights as humans in the first place is unexplained, given that they're half a group that seems to have fewer legal rights than your average chicken). And they annul all marriages (again, why there was legal marriage in the first place is not explained, and no, there's no mention of any other types of marriage than totally heterosexual ones. By god, marriage is meant to be between one girl and one male pikachu you sick freaks!)...

...and then they suddenly decide to kill everyone.

Because as we all know, social service's standard way of dealing with incest is to hunt the family down, kill the guy, then kill the daughter he raped and the little kid she gave birth to. So logically, if pokemon rights groups oppose pokephila because they think it's abusive, they will institute a mass slaughter of all the pokemon involved.

Nor is it like we have hundreds of hundreds of years in human history detailing many times when human society gets repressive and crazy, and have a pretty good blueprint for how it should work. And of course if all they were doing was stuff like taking the pokemon away, it wouldn't get the message across, because apparently the pokemon weren't actually in a mutual relationship and the only way to express the persecution is by killing your property along with you.

Disturbing infodump over, we return to our pokephile in training. She's feeding scraps to stray pokemon, because it helps the pokephile's case so much that they keep treating their beloved pokemon like they have the same ability to give consent as a pet cat. Then she runs into a talking psychic type, and it just gets worse, because now it's confirmed that they do have human cognition and are capable of talking and understanding, it's just that no one, including the pokephiles fucking them, cares. She goes on to feed him pidgey soup.

Yeah.

*Today's question, if you are able to ponder it: do you think members of the North American Man/Boy Love Association think it's wrong, sick and immoral for men to have sex with underage girls?

Oh, and a bonus review from Mightyena26:
Oh, wow, that's a really good question. I'll be awake half the night because
of this. LOL. The writing style wasn't the greatest, but I still enjoyed
reading it because of the interesting question. Pokemon names should always be
capatalized, just so you know. Such as Eevee, Vaporeon, Jolteon, Flareon,
Espeon, Umbreon, Leafeon, and Glaceon. It was okay, not the greatest thing
I've ever read. But the question is just mind-bogging.

Time to kill, so…

Last time on Starr Region, Boring!Elliot and crew wandered into a pitch black canyon while Main Character Amy whines.

( Continuing… )

More of this later, maybe.

So. As many of you are likely aware, the submitted character genre has been a popular one recently.

(And yes, I do need to work on Reality)

One such is Starr Region:A whole New Ball Game by GamerGirlGG . On its own, it's rather unremarkable, with pretty much the only thing standing out that it's made it to eight chapters and it has far worse mechanical problems than most.

Except for one thing. Facia submitted her Elliot to it.

Now, this starts being amusing when you look at the other characters, such as silver-haired, lilac-eyed, umbreon-owning Danny Moonler (subtle, huh?), a extra-badass fourteen year old Team Rocket member; Kirra the black-haired red-eyed owner of two absol; Rain Skylark the trenchcoat wearing fourteen year old dragon trainer with six fully evolved pokemon and, well, this girl:
Name:Mary Karson
Age:13
Hair:Fiery red, with orange streaks. down to waist.
Eyes: Red
Heighth: Tall for her age.
Clothing: Red tangtop, blue jeans, red high tops,and butterfly hair clip.
Favorite saying: Fires the way I use pain, and trainings my game.

Personally, I was sort of expecting the author would twitch a bit at how boring Facia's character was, then pretend she'd never seen it for her own sanity. The boy's eleven (two years younger than anyone else) and has a jigglypuff. No more need be said.

Surprisingly he does show up. In Chapter Five (Titled New friend) Elliot's attacked by one of the Team Rocket characters and previously introduced characters help him. This segment is interesting because it so aptly demonstrates the point about how characters are interesting because of their personalities, not characteristics. (More succinctly, it's yawn-inducing.)

Then in Chapter Six (Titled poke'love) the group discusses names rather than fighting, and otherwise act smart-ass and too cool to care about any danger. Pretty much the only interesting thing was a snickerworthy moment in which one character comments Elliot's name is weird. To put this in perspective, the group contains a girl named Rain at the time, then they meet up with a girl named Kirra. Yeah. I think this says a lot about fandom naming conventions.

Next comes Chapter Seven (Titled Evolution, and Ryan) the group has decided to have a double battle. There's then a double evolution, of a sentret to furret...and a shelgon to salamance. Ow.

Finally we get to the best chapter, Eight (Titled Eevee's & Lucy). In this, Main Character Amy is whining about wanting more pokemon. And Elliot decides feeding his now-very-boring, poke-chow eating persian is less interesting than helping her. So of course, they run into two eevee, one white and one black. Amazing, that. Elliot gets to name the black one (Coal...this from a kid who christened his spearow Sono.). And even better, because he helped catch it, he gets to use it whenever he wants.

...Anyone else want to inform Facia her character's now a special eevee owning stu who must be killed for the good of the fandom?

Anyway, I found the whole thing hilarious, and would like to conclude with a request for the rest of you to start submitting characters and dropping me links. Me, well, I'm tempted to start submitting Ice to these stories and seeing how long it is before she's giggling at jokes and falling in love with Generic Stu #3.

The fourth chapter of Pokemon Fanfiction Academy is up.

It may just be my imagination, but this chapter seems far worse than usual. Previously the author was at least capable of capitalizing reliably, but this chapter only seemed to have a 50% chance of getting any word right. I counted thirty-seven proper nouns, nineteen of which were uncapitalized (And several of which were at the start of a sentence yet still not capitalized -_-;). The first word of sentences was usually capitalized, but by the end, about half of those were lower case as well. There's also some pretty abysmal punctuation (come on, doesn't everyone know all sentences have to have a period at the end?) and the sentences are so convoluted and painful it makes earlier chapters look like prize-winning prose. And this is in addition to all the errors she's made in previous chapters.

We meet the author Mystic Wolf (or Mystic, or mystic, or mystic wolf, as she is alternately called), who's looking over books on canon. I checked but the only mystic wolf I could find on FFN has only one story posted, and it's Escaflowne. (The next closest is a Mystical Moon Wolf who's written one pokemon story, and I doubt it's them, unless LadyUmbra really screwed up the name.) I have the time but not inclination to check other sites to try to find if the person exists.

Anyway, Sabrina shows up while Mystic Wolf is thinking about how hard school is. "a small smile crept onto Sabrina face " relax mystic wolf I wasn't upset. Yes this school will be hard but that is the point. If you work hard here to learn the laws and facts the figure out what can and can't be done then you can write new stories filled with the pride at the knowledge that you know what your writing is true . that if someone disagreed with something you could back your story up with solid facts ." the smiled widened as Sabrina watched the girl thinking.

The school may punish the authors for having been bad enough to have to attend in the first place and for any trouble they caused while they were here but the entire staff knew the only way to make true progress with the authors was to plant the seeds of proper self-esteem and desire to do well."

Uh, that's Sabrina? It can't be manga-Sabrina, because it says earlier her expression was "inscrutable" and manga-Sabrina was pretty open, but I also don't see show-Sabrina acting like that. Possibly game-Sabrina might, but as far as I can tell, the author doesn't seem aware the games exist and there are only two sets of characters, the show and the one manga the author knows of, mentioned in the first chapter.

I'm very amused by the thought that the author in question is supposed to be learning about the way characters are supposed to act and their personalities. Ah, the irony of LadyUmbra assigning others to take courses she needs to take herself.

Anyway, I show up again. If we can all agree LadyUmbra's job is to teach by showing what not to do, her characterization of me is perfect, because it would be hard for me to be more OOC even if I were writing this.

Being in the Academy seems to be lowering my IQ. As shown in my dialogue, I no longer know the difference between your/you're. When Kayla asks me if Ho-oh can mate with a rapidash to create her special pokemon, I say no, and explain it in possibly the most stupid fashion possible. "farla blew at her bangs while struggling to find the right words for this " bird and mammals can't mate"" Yes, that was the complete sentence (And cool, I have bangs! I wonder when I got them?). This despite the fact I'm pretty sure I used to know that, for example, ekans and houndour can breed even though mammals and reptiles don't breed (for that matter, mammals can't generally can't breed with other mammal species) and that pretty much anything can mate with anything else, it's the 'having kids' part that's usually the problem. Also, if birds and mammals can't mate and this is reflected in the game, how come delibird can breed with seel? God, I'm an idiot. I don't even think to point out that gamewise, Ho-oh won't mate with anything, even though usually I rely on game-canon first. Then Kayla stumps me with her response.

"" then where did the platypus come from?' Kayla retorted she knew it was possible after all shed had her rapidoh in almost all her fics if it was so bad more people on would have said bad things,

farla shrugged and looked thuoghtfull " .... ... .um.... good point go for it""

I apparently know nothing about platypus, despite being born in Australia (I've even got some platypus stuffed animals) and previously knowing enough about them (and their evolution, ie, where platypus come from) to argue down a creationist. (As well as having taken care of a duck once so I know that a platypus doesn't actually have a duck's bill any more than a duckbill dinosaur did.) I'm full of 'thuoght', so maybe that's what's causing the problem.

The story ends with Kayla happily writing up her essay on her created pokemon, and then this beauty of an ending author's note.

"Am I evil? And where the bleep did the platypus come from anyway?."

Well, LadyUmbra, you shouldn't research it to find out, that's for sure. Instead, just assume that you're the smartest person in the world and that if you don't know anything, no one does.

Oh, yes. The story currently has twenty-five reviews, and the closest anyone's gotten to criticism is Seatbelts (who doesn't even write pokemon stories) pointing out that the author has forgotten game canon, which is the original canon.

(And readers of this, please don't go bother the author with reviews. I want to see if anyone will complain on their own).

We have chapter three up of Pokemon Academy up.

Bwahahaha…

Anyway, remember how I mentioned I was thinking of submitting myself? I did.

I never thought I'd get to say this (^^ I'm so happy): The author writes me OOC.

Yay! Yay! Yay! I don't know why I find this concept so completely, hysterically funny, but I do.

Anyway, for some reason I'm friends with Kayla ("both girls had bonded over their extreme desire to go home after the first too days before classes"). All of you who've seen my reviews may recognize how very odd that idea is. Even if for some reason I'm me rather than Farla ('me' being how I relate to people normally, which is more toned down) I'm still not friends with her. I'm sitting in a corner drooling over my pretty, pretty umbreon, completely unaware anyone exists. 'Me' tends to avoid noisy or especially friendly people and makes friends with calmer ones. 'Farla' doesn't like authors like Kayla.

…don't give me that look, okay?

At any rate, apparently I'm unhappy about being there. I feel like kicking myself for being stupid. I have an umbreon! They can do what they want! They can tie me up and drag me behind rapidash as long as I have my umbreon! If they made me leave and took away my umbreon, I would write whatever badfic it took to get back in!

But enough about me.

The story still drips with errors and such, but I won't harp on it.

I lied. LadyUmbra misspelled 'regice' as 'regiice' when describing the mutant misspellings. Oh sweet, sweet irony, how I love you.

But okay, now I won't harp on it.

We're also introduced to some authors, two of which tell us what their charges are. Evanarious, (whose account I cannot find) says what he's in for:

"It says here that my length needs improving and that I seem to be unable to finish fics…" he blushed slightly ant the last comment, “yeah, I suppose that's true."

Can we say 'minor', boys and girls? How about 'the author is a wimp and won't say anything that's actually bad'? Since I'm unfamiliar with the way these work, I'm not sure if this is A) made up by Evanarious, B) made up by LadyUmbra, or C) based on LadyUmbra reading his stories, thought I doubt the latter. Whatever it is, it's stupid. Really, how often is length the main issue with the bad fanfiction you encounter?

See, watch it's not hard: My stories have poor description, I'm bad at portraying people normally, I can't use canon characters unless I change them somehow in my story, my stories tend to get out of control due to poor planning, I procrastinate horribly, I've often gone overboard trying to show off how nonhuman the pokemon's perception is while inadvertently writing them as completely human, I keep messing up affect/effect and I used to be unable to use than/then properly, I overuse dialogue, I can't write anything even slightly related to romance, and that's just the stuff that comes to mind immediately and bothers *me*. Judging by reviews, I also don't give enough clues in my stories as to what's going on.

Next we meet Obsidian (Blade). I'm pretty ambivalent about her main story. On the one hand, I don't like it much. On the other, I feel bad about not liking it since she didn't really do any one thing wrong. Raven's a perfectly good character, the description is decent, but the plotline is scattered, the chapters full of deus ex machinas, and the pokemon's personalities grate horribly on me. She says: "I got shifting description quality, and unbalanced character personality, I too have been unable to finish some fics, and worst is failure to keep accurate track of where characters are." Which is better than just 'length', but still very meh. Like I said earlier, I'm not really sure who's thinking up the charges. I didn't think she did that bad a job of keeping track of the characters. Obsidian Blade's main problems, at least in my never-in-any-way humble opinion, is that she needs to plan out the story better and rethink the pokemon's speech and behavior. The pokemon thing may be subjective or it may not be, but definitely, planning the story is a real issue.

My two cents. Okay, way more, but I'm not sure how much it adds up to.

You know, I think it would be pretty interesting to see a sort of round-robin style OFU, where multiple authors submit themselves and have their work reviewed by each other, making the charges, then interact. Of course, the more I think about it the more I imagine it'd only work well as an RPG.

While I'm backseat driving, I'll also comment on how I'm disappointed with the regice. I know there was the whole mini-balrog thing in the original, but c'mon, it's pokemon. That was LOTR, they had one basic monster. Pokemon has almost four hundred. And most of them have descriptive names. So a lot of the misspellings would be very interesting if they were taken literally (Ninetails as a ball of tails, for example, Starme as…a semi-duplicate of the author who shows up and is always the center of attention, Laprass as a donkey-thing, Cinderquil as a feather giving off cinders…you get the idea. To say nothing of Gayrados.)



Side note: there are a lot of constructive reviews showing up recently, aren't there? Yayness. (And Act seems to have improved greatly) Admittedly I doubt how long this will go, but it's good while it lasts. There also seems to be a sudden influx of badfic, I guess to make up for it and balance the cosmic scale or something.




And Zanna Taru just gets better and better. Apparently she just turned eighteen (so why has her profile said she's eighteen for a while now?). In her most recent reviewer response, she says she's writing for the readers, not for herself…but says she doesn't care the character is a sue because she likes Zara. So she's writing for them, but doesn't care what they'd like to see, only what she wants. I love this, I really do.

One of her very loyal, submissive reviewers said: "There's only one thing that I find is a problem. In the games a Vulpix can only evolve with a Fire Stone. So, did you just decide to change that or did Hermosa actually use one before but it (strangely) didn't work until now", then submitted a second review saying 'sorry, I missed the explanation in the author notes' (which was basically that Zanna Taru said she knew but didn't care). So Zanna Taru says in her next chapter: "Apology accepted". Because saying 'hey, I'm confused over something' is something only jerks do, and you'd better apologize quick and hope to god that the other person isn't mad. No, really. Get going. Some of you have said something in my story confused you before, and if you don't apologize RIGHT NOW I'll whine and whine and say I hate you and whine and…and…I'll tell my MOMMY!!!!!

Then, and she does this in order, she answers one reviewer with: "I really don’t care if she is Mary-sueish, I like her and I won’t change a thing for you. My leagues are like the show, with trainer against trainer. FINE WITH ME IF YOU NEVER READ IT AGAIN"

And then the next with: "That is your opinion. I am doing this fic for all of you. It isn’t for me. If you don’t like it, don’t read it."

Emphasis mine, of course.

It's just…beautiful. You can watch her slowly imploding. Anyone want to take bets on how long it'll go before she uploads an author note as a chapter telling off all her reviewers?

Oh, it's a glorious, glorious thing, truly it is...

It opens with "All around the earth, a momentous event was about to begin; the world was about see the beginning of a form of salvation. Of course, to the saviors… they didn’t know that, and to one savior in particular it was too early to even be awake."
I could understand if LadyUmbra was just mentioning salvation as an extreme synonym for what will happen to the writers, but nope, they'll be the saviors somehow.

Next, an abra teleports off our dear protagonist, Kayla. When this happens, they "glowed a sparkling blackish purple" for some reason, despite all the times in the anime that teleportation has not involved that.

At this point we're introduced to a couple more mistakes (your/you're, words that should be capitalized but aren't). I won't keep mentioning them, but I feel the need to point out that no, there isn't improvement.

We continue along into the story and come across the line "then in anime fashion, her cheeks reddened". Because of course in the real world people don't blush.

The story continues along. Another character mentions that ralts were also used in teleporting the writers in. This irks me because while abra automatically know teleport and seem to specialize in it, ralts learn it at L16 and there's no sign they're especially skilled. Besides, if abra work, why would they also be using another kind of pokemon too?

The author refers to 'the manga' -_-;. Nevermind there's more than one and there are different characters and storylines.

Then there are a bunch of lines about how everyone has to help everyone because they're going to fail or pass as a group. Why? Let's have LadyUmbra's own grandiose dialogue explain! "Fanfiction is an art and can only prosper when the artist has talent, skill, and means. However, our art is dying and becoming a black hole of bad fanfiction. As each of you pass here having learned all the lessons necessary and hopefully having regained the spark to write well again, you must remember you are but one person. If everyone hear strives to improve not only themselves, but their fellow writers until there is no one who fights to improve alone, then, and only then, can you quell the tides of bad fanfiction and restore our art to it glory!" Because LadyUmbra certainly takes it that seriously ::rolls eyes::

It continues and we come to the line "Gary, she noted, looked a cross between smug and nervous." Liek, OMG!!! Look at the author reduce the character to his most basic feature, making him a cardboard cutout and utterly ignoring his later character development! It's incredible!

And then there's "The Cleffa can sense a stalking fan from a mile away and they’ve been trained to literally ‘pound’ you into submission.”

The rest of the students laughed. A great deal of them had no fondness for baby Pokémon, but they had to admit that the idea was unique… although some of them were now wondering how they would get close to their favorite characters…"
Note LadyUmbra's use of the characters to praise herself, and that subtle burst of irony when you realize that the idea is far from unique, considering anti-glomp creatures are used in just about every one of these stories.

We continue and come across this passage: "“They can attack us? But isn’t that against the rules of Pokémon? That a Pokémon can't attack a human?” a young girl called out.

"Minis aren’t Pokémon per say, they’re name mistakes and this is learning through pain, young lady."
Inability to tell the difference between canon and fanon? Checkity check check.

When I saw the first chapter I was worried, but now I realize the story will serve a vital purpose in teaching authors. Don't do what LadyUmbra does.

Continuing on the 'oh god my fandom oh god' line, today I see we have a Pokemon Fanfiction Academy story up. This is now the second to appear (the first seems to have vanished). And, following in the path of the first one, a quick look at the author's profile and stories leads me to ask, "Why the hell should I listen to you?" The first author had a 'children of canon characters inexplicably given Japanese names'. The new author…I'll let her profile speak for itself.

Hello all this is LadyUmbra speaking err typing.
I am a lover of anime and base most of my fanfics off them but have been lured by my muses into writng for a few book series as well.

Fandoms I write in:Inu-Yasha,Harry Potter,Gundam Wing,Vision of Escaflowne ,Yu-Gi-Oh,pokemon,DBZ,Animorphs

Great punctuation there, LadyUmbra. Love the use of commas. Bonus points for the muse reference which makes half the experienced authors run in fear. The fact that 'pokemon' is the only fandom you don't care about enough to capitalize adds that delightful touch of irony to the idea of you writing a Fanfiction Academy story. And you also managed to misspell 'writing'!

What stories does this author write? A Gundam Wing/X-Men crossover (she actually uses the hated 'orbs' to refer to eyes ::shudder::), and the ridiculous story of a ditto being told by its trainer to become a pokemon master in her place. The ditto-story isn't that badly written, but its lack of reliable characterization, rampant errors, and continually contrived events ruins it. And is she experienced? Hell no. She's been on Fanfiction.net for about three months. She wrote her first pokemon story last month.

But back to the Fanfiction Academy story. It claims to have been beta'd by DF. The number of spelling mistakes alone frightens me. Here is the first sentence: "This story is an offical spin- off of Miss Cams OFUM ." Miss Cam seems to have very low standards. We have a misspelling, two inappropriate spaces, and a lack of an apostrophe, all in the first sentence.

It goes downhill from there.

The story contains all kinds of problems. Aside from the mechanical, which I think I've harped on enough for you to get the idea, there's also, well, "It was going to be hard enough keeping the students from breaking out into random matches over shippings ,english vs japanese and manga vs anime. neither Red nor Ash was going to be much of a role model if they were doing it themselves. The fact was that the two had been fighting since they'd met when Umbra had assembled the characters to staff the school."

Red and Ash…fighting. Way to butcher characterization there, 'lil author. Okay, they like pokemon battles, but they also make friends with everyone in a hundred yard radius. And they don't keep fighting. They fight ONCE.

Also, for those of you in the pokemon category, how many arguments do you see about English vs Japanese? Hm…none? Occasionally you'll have someone using the Japanese names and very rarely there will be a story that says in the author notes it was based on something they saw in a Japanese episode. That's all. Half the writers don't even know manga exists, and those that do don't, to my knowledge, get into fights over manga being more important than anime (possibly because there are what, seven separate manga timelines? I think we can all accept that there isn't one single correct canon). The closest the category gets to arguments are over 'ships, and even there I don't see flamewars erupting in stories about different pairings. So the author is just making things up to have her story on.

You know what a Fanfiction Academy needs to address in the pokemon category? The lack of canon, the sues, the ignorance of what they're writing about and the AUTHORS WHO THINK NOTHING OF WRITING UNSPELLCHECKED CRAP AND POSTING IT.

I'm almost tempted to submit a character just to have a better seat for the trainwreak. I'm also almost tempted to email Miss Cam to ask what the hell she was thinking. Tempted…tempted…yes, I think I will.