The Quest for the Legends

Chapter 17: The Shark and the Serpent (commentary)

In this chapter, May leaves Mark behind, Mark finally learns about the Pokémon Festival that's like the biggest event in the entire region, Mark explicitly picks up on the fact Victor is lying to him but then does not react to this in any way whatsoever, there is a comedy routine pretty much straight out of the original, a sailor threatens to sue Mark, we see the sole appearance of the fic's most unnecessary fake Pokémon, and I muse on filler.

This chapter always felt really memorable to me despite the lack of serious progression. The whole thing always felt like a bunch of smaller, memorable scenes to me, plus a nice amount of worldbuilding.

Interesting! I guess it's a pretty memorable chapter for me too; I'd forgotten about the Relicanth, but other than that I could've recited pretty much how it plays out from memory.

I agree with SilverLatios! Reading these commentaries has refreshed me on a lot of things I'd forgotten, but I remembered this one perfectly! While, like you said, most of its content isn't plot relevant and could technically be classed as filler, it has some memorable character interactions and is one of the first chapters (other than the black desert of course) to go into detail about traveling from one town to the next, which gave Ouen a bit of life that it didn't have at the time. And of course, the shopkeeper.

So while we all might have been a tad overzealous on Serebii, I can understand why. ;P

Also I remember always being really confused by the sailor's super-negative reaction to what Gyarados did, because there was no indication that Gyarados prevented Sharpedo from legging go. It stuck me as a game of chicken, like "you're hurting yourself, how long you gonna keep that up?" A dirty tactic, but never struck me as murderous.

Ha, that's interesting, actually. In the previous versions, it's implied Sharpedo actually is stuck - afterwards it "finally managed to take its teeth out of Gyarados" - and then Gyarados actually holds it down and that's when the sailor recalls it. I guess here I took out the holding down because it was a bit hard to picture, and forgot to actually indicate Sharpedo was stuck instead. Didn't quite notice that on my own reread!