   Glacial Eidolon
2009-10-18 . chapter 28First of all, it's late at night here and I don't have all the time in the world to do a review (and that I haven't reviewed in so long that I've forgotten a good amount of the earlier chapters), but I'll try to get everything into a short summary.
Chapter 22: Good, good. The Gym Battle was once again a little dry: beat down the opponent, except this time by using his moves against him. This is good, considering Koga is taking it easy on Ed and the challenger isn't terribly experienced, making elaborate moves somewhat of a foregone conclusion. However, this brings up a good thought: Ed's still young, and unless this story drags on for years it'd still be strange to have him planning extravagant tactics probably for the rest of the story.
I also noticed your rather shrewd hint by Carla – she was naming off some of the more “popular” Pokémon in a childish and naïve way. Perhaps this can be connected to the actual fandom? :P
Chapter 23: Not much happened in this chapter. Mostly just idle banter, and a little of deus ex machina in one spot I thought rather odd. It was evident from the beginning that William was lying to her when he said that Jason Dare would be there, considering he brought it up halfway into the conversation and he's already directly lying to his parents in the first place. A lot of the tricks are disturbingly obvious – I'm sorry, but I didn't like this sequence. It makes me think of the Idiot Ball trope – pass it around, make people screw up. Even then, Leah has often prided herself on not falling for things (or something similar) – you'd think she'd use that line of thought here.
Either way, I now believe that confiding in William what happened in the Seafoam Islands was an atrocious breach in rationality. I do not trust him.
Some more Chessmaster by William later, when telling Carla of him packing up. I'm expecting something rotten, no matter his actual motives.
Of course, it couldn't be too terrible as you actually said that William might have joined the trio if not for his leg, but perhaps he would be The Mole?
Perhaps I'm overthinking things.
Chapter 24: This was actually a fairly uneventful chapter. A short traveling scene, getting ready for the night, campfire ghost stories, and then the “mystery Pokémon.” Granted, the one thing that happened in this chapter was a fairly big event, but once again all signs point to Leah becoming a Pokémon Trainer again.
Not that there was really any doubt in the first place.
Chapter 25: Not much except until the eggseller incident. There's a thousand directions you could go with this one, many of which would be absolutely pointless or absurd due to the lack of information you gave about the seller. My personal guess is that it's a scam artist a la Team Rocket in the animé (as bad as that sounds). I know, however, that that won't be the last we see of her.
I'm thinking that guy in the truck was Blue or at least somebody affiliated with him. Given the amount of information on him, though, there's nothing to speculate on other than that.
That's the one thing I didn't like about this chapter: it gave us speculation without anything to speculate on. No little details (the eggseller's hair color would be nice, for example :P) except for the description of the guy in the truck's Pokémon, which you've already said to be vague.
I despise this phrase to the very core, but throw us a bone.
The rest of the chapter was decent. The Psychic-type thing was acceptable (though the way it's pulled off could use a little improvement in some areas), a unique twist in that the Psychic-types weren't some breed of prodigous Einstein-squared contraptions with literally impossible IQs and yet that still allowed themselves to be ruled by humans.
Chapter 26: If there's one thing you don't do, it's leave ancient artifacts vital to the harmony of nature wide out in the open, even if trapped. That's... somewhere along the lines of rule #46 on “Things You Shouldn't Ever, Ever do or Even Think About” as a fictional character. Extreme, EXTREME genre blindness there, and once again a case of the Idiot Ball. It was rationalized, yes, but that's one of the biggest storyline mistakes in the book.
Since Leah only knows basic stuff, I'd assume that Ally knows acidic stuff better than she does. Terrible joke...
...
Chapter 27: You skipped ahead of the battle, which is a shame, I believe. There was so much opportunity for character direction and development here (not to mention foreshadowing!). Ah well, what's done is what's done.
Ed and Ally left Leah, and aren't found anywhere on the ship. That, in turn, gets Leah to feverishly search for them after them – an Idiot Ball mistake on their part (not Leah's – she had to look for them). This is justified mostly in the fact that it's what little kids do, and I know that I've done it plenty of times before when I was a wee child. This is also doubly made rational because Leah really isn't a good parental figure or even a friend, making their slipping away justified.
Some second thoughts, I see, where Leah starts to see that William had been lying to her – a little late there. Eh... it's good if only for the fact that she didn't only find out after she'd been told.
Monologue by Giovanni, where he alludes to Team Rocket. I believe that if he had said that in real life he could actually – legally - have been tried by police if someone had reported it. Generally, even jokes like that aren't taken lightly. It's good for him, then, that nobody seemed to have been upset.
One thing that wasn't a stupid mistake: Blue killing the security guard before he could radio for help.
One thing that was a stupid mistake: Agatha not making direct moves at Blue. She could've just fired a Shadow Ball at him from behind the wall with one of her Haunters/Gengars and completely paralyzed him for the time being, and that's not even taking into account his limp arm, which was currently holding a knife (useless against Ghost-types). With the knife in his hand, he'd have had to drop that if he wanted to get out his Starmie or just struggle with his half-paralyzed arm, and if the other arm was hit with a Shadow Ball or even a Psychic, it'd have been likely he'd have been caught.
It's been stated later that Agatha didn't make the mistake of keeping all her Pokémon on her at a critical moment elsewhere, merely pretended to – I'm not counting that one.
Curiosity killed the cat, I suppose... proven with the last few paragraphs of the chapter.
An eventful chapter, but it's just getting a bit more obvious to me that you're relying on an Idiot Ball-driven plot perhaps a bit too much.
Chapter 28: I know that you don't want the thief to be caught this early, but in doing so Agatha is making herself look atrocious. I believe Ghosts have limited psychic abilities, and I don't think it'd be unfathomable if one of the Ghosts could use a form of limited telepathy not unlike the Drowzee was doing, not to mention the power difference.
It's also a terrible mistake to rely on illusions that can be destroyed by force. Idiot Ball mistake once again.
Confirmation soon that Blue was indeed the man in the truck outside of the ship.
Small typo: “he was trapped in never ending corridor”. There should be an “a” somewhere in there.
Once again, I'm not sure what the Drowzee was thinking. Maybe the illusion was screwing her up or she thought that Blue was Ally...? I have absolutely no idea, and alas, it wasn't explained.
Another small weird thing is that Drowzee used Hypnosis on Leah with no odd side-effects other than being immune to illusions. I'm not sure if it was just a weak Hypnosis or it was just a small absorption of psychic energy, but this was one thing I think could be easily and well-explained later.
Boring banter later – Leah thinks that the thief isn't actually the thief. I'm sorry, but there's too much Idiot Ball going around and this is another example of it. I know you're most likely getting tired of me pointing this out, so I'll stop – but the Idiot Ball is not something you want to rely on.
Avoiding the question some more, and then she actually volunteers to help Blue escape. Agh, I promised...
...and then Blue escapes.
That'd be it for the chapter review, then.
I won't say what I've already said numerous times again – you know what I would go here.
A lot of the description, it seems, isn't... channeled the right way. An example would be in the eggseller scene – there was no physical description of the “scam artist” herself other than what she was doing. This is only minor and appears in very little places but is noteworthy nonetheless.
I'd agree with you on Chapter 28's author notes: your character's motivations are sometimes for the sake of advancing the plot. This isn't very noticeable unless you're actively looking for it, but when that voice in the character's head which is something other than plain curiosity or wanderlust is urging them on into a deadly situation, then you know it's happening.
Your chapter's grammar and spelling is looking decent – the odd typo, but that's trivial and habitually overlooked. There is no complaints here.
And that wraps this review up. I suppose I did have time for a full review, then, seeing as I just did one. This is also my longest review to date, to boot!
Since I'm running out of room for this review, I can only say good-bye and that I'll be reviewing this story again hopefully sooner than I did before.
I tip my hypothetical hat to you and hope you'll continue to bring us updates for this story.
(P.S. - I don't mean to flame, once again. Any crankiness in this review – yes, I know there is some – stems from me being a tad tired. Please just bear with me – I don't mean to invoke fire at all.
Also, I don't think that your story is bad - much to the contrary. There's simply a few things that could use some ironin |
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godrick