The Quest for the Legends

The Ouen League - Chapter 50: Friendly Competition

In the final chapter of the labeled League arc, the League fails to conform to dramatic expectations and pits Mark and May against each other in the second knockout round, Scyther's issues make a return, Mark has a silly dream, I spend time talking about Mark and his Pokémon strategizing and then they go on to not make use of any of that for the whole first half of the battle, Mark has amazing paralysis luck, and Mark makes a decision for his future.

I really enjoyed this battle! I like the fact that Mark gets emotional when May is just utterly thrashing him, but then manages to turn it around in the second half, plus Dragonite finally got to do things! :D I can see how maybe his failure in the first half could be more interesting, yeah, but otherwise I liked the flow of it.

I'm not sure if I agree that having Mark and his Pokemon come up with specific strategies on-screen would add much though? I dunno, I'm always iffy about having characters talk about what they're going to do prior to doing it when I could just… show them doing it. I guess it feels like the reader knows what's going to happen before it happens (though of course there's always the fact that things can go wrong.)

Also I was surprised to learn that you hadn't come up with May's full name until this chapter! It feels like that's been her name since forever, lol.

Oh, no, I didn't mean I should've had them come up with specific strategies on-screen - I said I wish I'd sat down and thought through how those conversations would've gone, as in, I wish I had actually come up with strategies for them to use, instead of going "they totally strategized for days, guys" only to then just write whatever came to mind off the top of my head. That's kind of why you get these incongruities where Mark and his Pokémon are supposed to have been working on strategies but then in the actual battle they don't actually do anything that seems at all pre-planned or strategized about.

ahhh, okay, that makes way more sense yeah. ^^; That would probably be a big help then!