Title: Tales From The Pokemon Universe: The Lights of the Burned Tower
Author: The Bricklayer
Genre Tags: Romance, Adventure, Drama, Crossover, AU

Rating: 6/10 (Reject)

The Review

Tales from the extremely long title is a short story about how Rainbow Dash, as a Pokemon trainer, has aspirations of catching the legendary Pokemon Entei whom she had a chance encounter with when she was younger. Her main reasons for catching the Pokemon are simply that following her encounter she made it her mission to find the beast later in life when she felt she was ready and eventually capture it. 

This is all done against the advice of her closest friend, Fluttershy, who has now taken on a job as one of the many Pokemon nurses. 

Role-wise I’d say that if you were to pick any of the main characters from the show to portray as people in the Pokemon universe, both of these ponies fit their job descriptions pretty perfectly. Rainbow Dash’s brashness is put on spotlight here and Fluttershy’s willingness to care for animals makes her perfectly suited for the job as a Pokemon nurse. 

The writing itself was largely inoffensive. You’d be surprised how many times I’ve run into fics that don’t know how to use punctuation properly or are uninteresting and deadpan in terms of their delivery. Here it’s fairly lighthearted and slightly raunchy thanks to how the story translates all of the Pokemon speech into plain italicized text. 

“Honestly, can’t they just spit it out? Personally, I’m so glad Pokemon mating rituals are so much easier,” Raijin muttered. “Just drop your balls and let the females or males know your intent.”

The characterization lends itself to a slightly deeper understanding of how trainers and their Pokemon communicate with each other, when all you ever hear in the anime is the Pokemon calling their name over and over again. It’s a fun touch and surprisingly the interactions written between the Pokemon were the highlights of this fic for me.

Where the writing starts to fall apart is in the action sequences that follow later in the fic. I do feel bad for saying this because I saw that this fic was written in a short period of time for a contest, but this is where things in the story start to feel incomplete.

The Espeon created globs of energy in its mouth and fired them at several of the Litwicks. Several were hit and knocked out, but that’s when things took a turn for the worse.

Several of the Litwicks fired Night Shade at the Espeon, doing some damage and sending it sliding back against the wooden floor.

The use of “several” in three sentences back-to-back-to-back is redundant as there are many words that you can use to describe a crowd, herd, cluster, or even multitude of the same kind of Pokemon. 

The writing also tells us that “that’s when things took the turn for the worse,” which is almost as comical yet irritating as a character in a movie looking into the camera to tell you what’s going to happen next. 

The way I see it, sections like the excerpt I’ve used above (and there are a handful of others like it) I would like to excuse because of the short timeframe that this was clearly written in, but then again I have to consider the property that this fic crosses over with: Pokemon. By far the most exciting thing about Pokemon in its anime was the battles that it contained and when battle sequences lack descriptors or a proper flow between actions, it’s more like I’m reading off a grocery list of events that are happening. 

Finally, while Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy do fit their descriptions well and this ultimately ends up being a cute shipfic, their characterizations don’t feel quite as strongly employed as they could have been. Again, possibly a result of how quickly this was written, but Dash is more than just stubborn and Fluttershy is more than just really, really good at caring for animals. 

I was even surprised that Flutters was the one to curse at all in this fic (reviewer’s note: she says “damnit” twice and it’s the only cursing to be found), as mild as it was, and for Rainbow to not even curse back at her despite the opportunity to do so. It’s a weird thing to get hung up on, I know, though I’ve always seen Fluttershy as more reserved unless pushed to her absolute limits whereas Rainbow Dash dropping an f-bomb would be a part of her regular conversation.

My point is that with the avoidance of certain defining characteristics of these two characters, their identities here lose pretty much all meaning. If you had told me it was just a couple of OCs having beef with each other it wouldn’t have crossed my mind that either one of them was at all like Rainbow Dash or Fluttershy. 

I’d say that the fic is still enjoyable and that it still warrants a read from any person casually interested, but based on my critiques I don’t think it’s a good idea for the Cafe to be accepting this one. 

That is all,

-TK