Razor

Razor is Mark's Scyther in The Quest for the Legends and the main character of Scyther's Story.

I originally decided to write Scyther's Story because I had made up one heck of a lot of backstory for Scyther in The Quest for the Legends already: he had been a member of a swarm near Ruxido; he'd had two friends named Stormblade and Shadowdart, with the former being older than him and the latter being younger; the Scyther had some sort of a ritual around the young's first hunt and his first prey had been a human; he'd been infatuated with a female he'd named Nightmare (and at some point mated with another one named Sickle); Nightmare had insulted him; he'd challenged her to a duel; she'd won, but inexplicably spared his life; she'd eloped from the swarm, and he'd come after her; a trainer had caught her and evolved her and he'd attacked a Pokémon Center in a fit of rage; the Mew Hunter had found him and nursed him back to health; and he'd eventually grown to be close friends with him before Mark came along and Rob returned to his old ways of obsessing over Mew. This was of course all made up because Scyther was my favorite character and I just kept on writing more and more chapters to focus on him, but eventually I started making up more and more in my head that just didn't all fit in; then I started to find Stormblade and Shadowdart interesting too, and I made up more about the Scyther society I had created, and so on until I realized I could probably write this backstory into a whole spin-off fic of its own.

Though Scyther's Story is obviously a very flawed piece, I'm glad I wrote it, because it set a lot of things straight and got me to stop going on about Scyther in the main fic so much. The most interesting thing about Scyther's Story in itself, though, was probably developing the relationships between Razor, Stormblade and Shadowdart. There are a lot of things I'd do differently today concerning the way they all met and so on, but I really enjoy the relationship dynamics that came out of it: Razor kind of bullies Shadowdart, so Shadowdart silently hates Razor, while Stormblade wants to be friends with both of them but ends up being more with Razor anyway because he's closer to him in age, resulting in Shadowdart always sort of getting left out even though he's nominally part of the group.

Their First Prey says a lot here, really. Stormblade is kind by nature but has the confidence to kill when he knows he must, so after the initial shock he is pretty quick to manage it. Shadowdart has a hint of potential to be cold and calculated, but at the time he sympathizes too much with his prey because he feels preyed on by Razor himself and therefore needs those nine tries to bring himself to kill something. Razor, on the other hand, has just the right combination of inherent cruelty potential and arrogance to disregard the boy's pleas and kill him almost without remorse. It is not until he has lost this confidence much later that he starts to lose this inherent cruelty.

Interestingly, once he's concluded he's a failure as a Scyther, Razor instead turns to Rob and, like all his other Pokémon, starts to behave increasingly humanlike. When Rob taught him to shake hands for the first time, Razor was puzzled and found it uncomfortable, but by the time he's with Mark in chapter eleven, he is the one to extend his scythe to the other Pokémon without thinking. Likewise, in chapter thirty nothing seems more natural to him than sitting down in a chair next to the kids at the restaurant and ordering a beer; it does not even cross his mind to eat with the other Pokémon on the floor. Essentially, Razor therefore ended up just like the first creature he killed, the humans he then considered so pathetic. There is a delicious irony in that that I love.