The Quest for the Legends

So I'm responsible for not one, but two reasons that the new styles aren't up yet? D: I feel important yet bad.

Which is the other one? o.o

While I'm here, I may as well attempt to use the thread for what it's for: Which characters from Morphic would you be able to bring to our hypothetical Exile of the Author-Fangirled Characters? 8D

Dave. :P And Mia and Gabriel.

Ahh, I accidentally deleted elyvorg's post! :< And I haven't built anything into the script to undelete deleted posts. At least I'm quoting it:

I was expecting Mia and hoping for Gabriel, but damn, you fangirl over Dave too? xD

Yes, Dave. He is such an adorably messed-up little jerk! How could I not love him? :D Seriously, he ranks way up there with Shadowdart.

I would make a speech about all his layers of psychological defense mechanisms, but analyzing one's own work is sort of odd. <_<

…Do I honestly creep you out?

No. I know truly creepy people and you are not one of them.

What's the stressed syllable in Descith?

The first. I actually pronounce it DES-kith, which makes no sense in light of how Scyther is pronounced, but hey.

Who is your favorite morph to write about in Morphic?

Mia. I love writing characters with serious issues, if you haven't noticed, and she is so delightfully inhuman. That said, I also love Gabriel quite a lot because I get to put him through all this fun stuff.

If it's bad for Pokémon to own Pokémon, how come the Pokémorphs can?

Because they seem human. They have some Pokémon features, but they walk like humans and talk like humans, and Dave's been doing everything in his power to have them in all respects treated as human.

Do you like berries?

No.

Are they even readily available in Iceland?

Sure. We have greenhouses, plus some berries grow wild all around the country.

There's no vitamin C to speak of in corn flakes as far as I know. How I don't have scurvy is a mystery for the ages.

Have you ever considered making a page for The Quest for the Legends on Tv Tropes?

I'd never make a page for my own work; it feels wrong and egocentric to me. If somebody else wants to, though, be my guest (somebody made one for Morphic the other day).

A while back (and I mean, a long while back) you mentioned a fanfic called Tangled Web, by Chicrocketjames. Do you know where I could read it? I found the first three chapters somewhere, but nothing more.

I'm pretty sure the only place all the chapters he wrote are still available is here. Still got abandoned a tragically short way in, but it's quite a bit more than what you found.

Hey Butterfree, I took a Mary Sue Limitus Pokemon test on Mark and I got:

61+ Points : Irredeemable Sue. Did you base your character off Ash or what?

What do you think of this? I doubt you did base him completely off of Ash.

That wouldn't happen to be the one that makes you tick a box for every legendary the character comes into contact with, would it? Because I've run him through plenty of Mary-Sue litmus tests, and that's the only one where he didn't get graded as something between a normal, healthy character and an outright anti-Sue. And that is not a coincidence.

Mary-Sue litmus tests are inherently flawed because they can't test what actually matters, namely the mindset of the author. They can be nice clues that something could be going on behind the scenes, but for this fic, that particular question simply isn't indicative of anything at all. Sure, sometimes I guess seeing a bunch of legendaries is done to make the character more special, but the whole point of the plot here is seeking out many, many legendaries and, yes, catching them. It simply has nothing to do with the characters who are doing it, and exponentially less so with each subsequent legendary box the test forces you to check after the first one, because how in the world can the precise number of legendaries that haven't already been caught by the other kids magically affect Mark as a character?

But really, to be honest, I don't need a litmus test to tell me that no, Mark is not a Stu, because as I said, Sueism is about the mindset of the author, and the fact is I simply do not have the mindset that would make him one. Compared to the characters I find interesting in this story, I really don't give a damn about him, I don't expect you to give a damn, he's emphatically ordinary and not special in any way whatsoever except that he happened to be there when Chaletwo was looking for recruits, and as far as I'm concerned his most fun moments are usually when he's being pathetically passive and failing to do the right/noble thing. The only things vaguely Stuish about him are his Pokémon team, which is a silly artifact from the past, and the fact he's out catching legendaries to save the world, where it's made abundantly clear that he's nowhere near the most useful person involved and the basis on which he was picked was terribly flimsy and had little to do with his ability at anything. I delight in Mark's sheer unremarkableness and lack of outstanding or heroic qualities. If any character in this fic is a Sue or Stu, it's most definitely not him.

I'm not offended and all valid points to be made about the characterization in this fic are gratefully welcomed, but I think I have very good reasons to consider this test result simply inaccurate. If you would like to argue otherwise, do so by all means.

Oh, my poor precious neglected fic.

So here's the deal. I'm writing the last chapter of Morphic (after which I can then rewrite the whole thing). And a series of Morphic-related… things. And working and doing university homework and trying to work on my site and so on and so on and long story short, I still haven't started chapter 56, or done much in the way of planning it or the like. Even that explanation of the Waterberg principle is sort of hanging in limbo right now.

So I suppose I owe you at least a little bit of an apology for making you wait. At least chapter fourteen of Morphic will hopefully be up sooner than later if you read that, and after that I may be in a more TQftLy mood. And I may still rewrite Scyther's Story/The Fall of a Leader in November.

If you found chapter thirteen that shocking, are you sure you should have been reading it in the first place? :/ How old are you?

Oh, I'll finish it first (no more of this tortuous delay before you can find out how it ends), but after that, yes, it's rewriting time. After all, when I started that thing my idea of what would happen in it amounted to "Some religious fundamentalists want to kill them at some point" (…and one of its primary genres was supposed to be humour, and nobody was supposed to die, but that's another story). I introduced important-sounding things that ended up never being brought up again (the random boy Mia takes a liking to in chapter 5/6, for instance) and spent literally the whole first half of the fic just introducing the morphs, before anything actually happened. And then there are logic issues like whoa.

Also, don't put Cave of Dragonflies above university stuff.

Pssh. Prioritizing is for sensible people. I've spent eight years of my life writing the nonsensical Pokémon fanfic I started when I was twelve; therefore I am not one of those. QED.

I can't wait for you to write more fics. Get it? More fics? Because it sounds like Morphic? Okay, I'll shut up now.

Of course! There definitely will be more fic coming soon. But after that, since it's the last chapter, there will be no more fic.

I CAN MAKE LAME PUNS TOO.

Huh, apparently I have some unanswered questions here. I guess they're unlikely to be seen, but I might as well answer them anyway.

After all this time, and given that you've practically finished the ILCOE (which I think is a damn good version), do you still plan to continue with the IALCOTN?

I'll have to see how embarrassing I find the IALCOTN by the time I've finished the ILCOE. I might rewrite those chapters again. But I'm likely to continue rewriting it in some form. (Probably not very fast, though.)

Anyway, so someone is going to have to say it: how bout dat Yveltal having a near exact description of The Destroyer (the exception being, of course, the backlash The Destroyer causes and only draining other legendaries)?

It was pretty amusing. I'm glad Yveltal didn't come about until now, though, because at a certain stage in the fic's creation I would have actually made the Destroyer be Yveltal, and that would have been so much less interesting than what I actually ended up with.

Morphic question: how (as in, with what toppings) do Dave and Mia eat their hot dogs?

Dave gets one with everything. Mia only really wants the actual hotdog, and initially she'd get it with no toppings at all (and leave most of the bun), but Dave has attempted to get her to appreciate the combination of flavors that is the real point of a hotdog, and though she doesn't really see the point, she doesn't care so long as the hotdog is in there somewhere. So by now, depending on her mood, she sometimes orders it bare and sometimes with seemingly random combinations of toppings just because. Dave has stopped trying to convince her the toppings matter.

That… that answer fits perfectly. I wonder how "Dave and Mia Discuss Hotdogs" would've gone if those two were actually talking about hotdogs and the socially acceptable means of eating them for the whole extra.

Pff. Now I want to write that.

I do have one more question- could you clarify how Mia's scythes are designed? Their only description in the actual fic is fairly ambiguous as to how they look.

Basically, they grow out of her ulna, from shortly below the wrist to the elbow. They're triangular in shape, essentially - the ulna forms one side, a short side extends outwards at a ~90° angle by the elbow, and the main blade is pretty much straight from there until it rejoins the ulna near the wrist.

They're basically designed on the assumption that the green part of a Scyther's scythe is the equivalent of a forearm that evolution has curved into a scythe shape; the same genetic formula that makes the scythes proper acting on a straight arm makes a straight edge.

I have no idea how clearly I'm describing this, so you should probably just look at this attempt I once made at drawing Mia (she has her sheaths on, but you get the idea).

If you read Morphic, you'll be delighted to hear the ever-amazing Negrek has written "Dave and Mia Discuss The Quest for the Legends" in celebration of my QftL half-life day (I'm calling it that now, okay). It is the best thing ever (not to be confused with this or this). :D

(If you don't read Morphic, be advised that it contains stronger language than TQftL usually does, and Negrek has faithfully reproduced that aspect.)

I'm afraid the world is rather lacking in Morphic art. I drew Gabriel around the same time as that Mia, but it doesn't show you much since it's a hastily colored rough sketch (his skin basically looks like it's covered in very thick, orange slime, though). I've made a couple of attempts at drawing a couple of the other morphs since, but they were generally unfinished and terrible and I haven't scanned them.

Somebody asked me to just do basic references of the morphs the other day, which is a good idea, but I haven't gotten it done yet.

In first place, I will ask about TQFL, but I will also ask something regarding Morphic (I think there's not a proper forum for it, and even if it has ended, you haven't said there wouldn't be a sequel) with this mentioned, I will ask:
-Does Morphic and TQFL happen in the same universe?
In case they do:
-Are the Pokemorphs related to Pokemon from the fic? (i. e. Mia related to Stormblade)
-Would there be a possibility to include TQFL in Morphic 2?
In case it did, would there be a possibility to revive Will and Mia?
You probably hadn't thought about it, but maybe you could make that fusion taking this idea, I really know you want to continue Morphic, you just need an idea. (I don't consider the Mewtwo and Mew morphs a secuel since it was just created for a replacement to the April's fools)
Hope you take this in count, or at least make Dave and Mia have more discussions.

No, they decidedly do not take place in the same universe. TQftL happens in, roughly, the same universe as the Pokémon anime (I've taken some liberties with legendaries, since the anime has drifted towards a pretty different idea of them in the time since I started this fic). Morphic takes place in an alternate universe that is intended to closely resemble the real modern world, except that there are Pokémon instead of animals. They are practically night and day.

Perhaps most crucially, as hinted in the April Fools' Day sequel chapter, legendary Pokémon in the Morphic universe are cryptids: there exist people who believe in them or swear they've seen them, they're common fodder for fiction, and there are even occasional cults that worship them, but there is no credible evidence that they exist, and they're generally regarded as simple myths. Technically they could exist, but I don't ever plan to canonically establish the existence of any legendary in the Morphic universe, because that would change the sort of universe it is into one further from the real world, and I very deliberately want it to feel as close to the real world as possible. Obviously this is quite incompatible with the QftL universe.

I did write a very silly non-canon crossover ficlet in which Dave has been transported into the QftL universe for unspecified reasons, which might amuse you, but yeah, a canonical fusion of the two would be quite impossible.

Happily, though, I already know what the sequel to Morphic will be about. If I didn't, I wouldn't be planning a sequel; looking for excuses to continue stories just for the sake of continuing them is the bane of good storytelling. I still need to develop my ideas better and plot it out properly, but I don't need someone to come up with a concept for me.

And Dave and Mia definitely will have more discussions.