Posts tagged "Entei"

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Butterfree

  • Posts: 1784
Mew: No, but it was what they asked about.

Mutark: *bats at them*

Meh, I guess you can ask Entei anyway. :/ He does have an established character and is not really keeping any more secrets you shouldn't know.



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Butterfree

  • Posts: 1784
Entei: A Pokéball might protect us just as well from the Destroyer, but submitting ourselves to the whim of the human who carries the ball? Hardly worth the risk. And what if the legendaries that remain merely find and destroy the Pokéballs? Protected only by human children, it would be easy, and we would be sent out again to die or go mad, but the soul gems are protected by powerful Pokémon, and should they be destroyed, there might still be time for us to be resurrected before our souls leave the world. In all respects it is safer than Chaletwo's silly idea, while the latter has no discernible advantages. This is not even a choice.



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Butterfree

  • Posts: 1784
Well, they're not exactly main characters - seeing as right now Leah has appeared in one chapter and the others haven't appeared at all, it would be a bit odd to make bios for them, wouldn't it? But perhaps they'll play a bio-warranting role later on, hmm? :P

Will suicune and enteis ressurection be put in the fic.
Always with those questions making unwarranted assumptions! Who says Suicune and Entei ever get resurrected in the first place? Who says it will happen before the end of the fic? You can't assume like that and I can't answer it without thus spoiling those details.



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Butterfree

  • Posts: 1784
There have been a lot of queries regarding the fact Mew is referred to by both 'he' and 'she' in chapter 61 - most of them noticing one instance and assuming it's some kind of a typo.

It is not a typo: Mewtwo consistently uses 'she', while Chaletwo and Mark's narration consistently use 'he'. (And May, you may also notice, uses 'it' - which means in this chapter the same character is referred to by all three standard English third-person singular personal pronouns, something I quite enjoy.) This is because in the world of this fic, all legendaries who are genderless in the games are biologically sexless single-individual species that don't have a gender as we know it. Some of them - like Chaletwo - prefer to be referred to by one particular pronoun anyway; others don't, and much like with Pokémon nicknames, the pronoun used in any given instance is up to the speaker. Mew is one such legendary.

This is not a new thing; I've been consciously writing it that way since at least the beginning of the HMMRCIG if not longer, and outside the fic I've been explaining this to readers for about that amount of time. The first time I found occasion to actually bring it up in-story, however, was the first time the opposite of the usual pronoun was actually used for a legendary: chapter 51, where Entei used 'she' for Mew. I threw in a paragraph of Mark remembering that Mew has no grammatical gender preference - kind of out of nowhere, but it was at least intended to introduce the concept to readers so they wouldn't be confused. And it seemed to work: I can't recall anyone expressing confusion over it then, so I actually was kind of surprised by how many people were completely puzzled when the same thing happened in chapter 61.

Now, I said I'd been consciously writing it this way since at least the beginning of the HMMRCIG. If this were a newer concept, it would probably be a bit more refined and informed by modern ideas about gender - but the fact it is old means that pronoun use has been an active part of the characterization for ages. So now that I've found an excuse to ramble about that, I will! :D

If you were to reread chapters nine and ten or Mew's random appearance in chapter 13 (but please don't), for instance, you'd notice Mark's narration awkwardly avoids using any pronouns for Mew as far as possible but goes with "it" where a pronoun is absolutely necessary. However, Chaletwo has always referred to Mew as 'him' - in fact, Chaletwo uses 'he' for every legendary that doesn't expressly prefer the feminine. It just seemed like what he'd do: he wants things to be simple and easy and doesn't like to think about them too much, so he made a rule - using the same pronoun he prefers for himself - and just sticks with that. And Mark, since chapter 25, has simply gone along with Chaletwo's pronouns for everyone, including Mew. (When he started not going along with everything Chaletwo said and did, it didn't occur to him to change his pronoun use in protest, but on reflection that would have been rather amusing.)

May, meanwhile, uses 'it' for all such legendaries, because as far as she's concerned that's just the correct pronoun for something genderless. Its potentially 'dehumanizing' properties don't bother her because she's not the most tone-sensitive person in the world. (Who would've thought?) I don't think anybody has ever commented on May's use of 'it' for legendaries Mark and Chaletwo are calling 'him', which just goes to show that people are perfectly capable of seeing the same character referred to by two different pronouns as long as they don't happen to be 'he' and 'she'.

Entei was an interesting case - it felt like he would refer to Mew as 'her', but as I wrote him I started to realize that as part of his general condescension he has shades of a kind of pseudo-sexism - he uses 'she' for smaller, less imposing legendaries. Although Suicune for instance also has no preference, my mental simulation of Entei found it absurd to call him 'her', because Suicune is his equal. He goes through all the motions of respecting Mew, but doesn't think anything of just going and making a plan to stop the thing that Mew doesn't want to be stopped - where Chaletwo keeps justifying his decision to disobey Mew with the greater good and Mew just being tired and not wanting to live anymore, Entei has no real impulse to care about Mew's opinion in the first place. In some way, calling Mew 'her' is because he doesn't think much of her and uses it as a kind of way to designate her as a different class from himself that he can be elitist towards.

Mewtwo, on the other hand, began to use 'she' for Mew to differentiate himself from her as part of his journey towards realizing that he was his own person with a right to exist independently of Mew. (Side note: I really liked writing Mewtwo and how he's dealt with his issues in the twenty-seven years since he was created.)

I've also written some backstory material from Mew's point of view that alternates between using 'he' and 'she' in the narration between scenes. If you found it confusing in chapter 61, just wait until you read that.



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Butterfree

  • Posts: 1784
Entei did pick Spirit out because she was the most promising candidate who'd made the best use of her power - but the higher meaning that she imagines that has isn't there. Entei doesn't care about or approve of her as person, and that's not what it means. She's confused that Gyarados could have ended up with the 'mark of approval' while killing Suicune, because in her mind that must mean Suicune was giving his blessing to Gyarados and his actions, but actually it's just literally picking them out for a practical purpose and Suicune simply went with Gyarados here because he was closest at hand at the time.



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