The Quest for the Legends

I'm actually kind of planning on reconsidering the legendary roster already in the IALCOTN. Molzapart will probably be replaced with a fourth counterpart to Uxie, Mesprit and Azelf, Mementity, which would basically serve the same purpose in the plot. Rainteicune will be taken out altogether. Odds are I'll at least cut down the numbers of the color dragons and the unicorns, leaving perhaps three or four color dragons and one unicorn with some sort of a special ability that lets it change types at will or something like that.

No, I think it's more that they've read both and get it mixed up. I got it mixed up myself for the longest time until somebody asked me about it.

They probably read the IALCOTN and skip ahead to the ILCOE too sometimes, but if they do that, they're going to get confused about much more important things than whether there is an Effect draining the energy of Pokémon in northwest Ouen.

…um, are you sure you don't have that the other way around? The IALCOTN is the newest one that's six chapters so far; the ILCOE is the one I'm writing chapter 52 of. Obviously the IALCOTN isn't about to get finished anytime soon, and definitely not before the ILCOE, so as it stands your question doesn't really make sense. o.O

Assuming you got them switched, I'll probably be continuing with the IALCOTN once the ILCOE is done, since pretty much all major plot changes that have been planned are already accommodated in the IALCOTN so far, although I might make some more minor tweaks to the first chapters.

Where did you get that idea? To quote my Fanfiction.net profile, "I was rereading [Scyther's Story] the other day and am not sure what I was on." I'm a lot happier with The Fall of a Leader, but there are still sections I'd like to reword a lot. I've toyed with the idea of rewriting Scyther's Story from scratch for NaNoWriMo 2010 (although it was never material enough for 50,000 words, but then I could use the rest of the month to fix up The Fall of a Leader or something). That would have the advantage of allowing me to post both revisions at the same time to avoid one being inconsistent with the other even if I make significant changes.

Because as a rule, I'd rather be writing completely new stuff than rewriting the same chapters for the umpteenth time. I'm just not that excited about the IALCOTN now that the ILCOE is actually new - I've been thinking up stuff I'm going to tweak in it, but I haven't felt much motivation to actually write it in a while.

The HMMRCIG used to have a special extra explaining stuff like that, but I thought it was kind of stupid to have it there, so I took it out again.

You do know some things about Chalenor, though, mainly from what Chaletwo told Mark in chapter 25.

This minipage isn't actually coded with includes, and with the large number of pages that would have to be converted and added to the system it has going on, it would be a bit inconvenient. Plus, it would seem to give them a more 'official'-looking status, which I don't really want.

I was thinking more along the lines of "attachment-to-the-silly-idea-sense," but it seems like you'd have to take in account both senses when you change something. So, um, describing the closest thing to a method you use when that happens would probably be best.

It's pretty much a matter of thinking very hard about the new way I want it to be and why it's strictly superior to the old way. After a while, the new way starts to feel familiar and I can push the cringeworthy old one out of my head in the knowledge that the new way is much better.

…Do you really expect us to believe that you haven't had an interesting dream since early August?

I've had plenty of interesting dreams, but none that were long and vivid and sensible enough to make for a good journal entry. I believe I've posted a couple on Twitter, though.

Will Isshu Pokemon start popping up in the IALCOTN? (Like how you added Hoenn and Sinnoh Pokemon into the fic as they were revealed) Do you have any ideas for which ones you might use and for which characters (as in, Flora might use Mebukijka, for example.)

Isshu Pokémon will start popping up in both the ILCOE and the IALCOTN, just like Sinnoh Pokémon and Hoenn Pokémon before them, the moment Black and White are out in English. They won't necessarily be given to existing characters, however - it tends to be more of an add them where they weren't before thing than a substitute them for some other Pokémon from the previous versions thing.

why are you rewriting The Fall of a Leader? Scyther's Story I can understand, but FoaL seems completely separate from the QftL mythos. Unless it's not, of course…

What does its relevance to the QftL mythos have to do with whether it should be rewritten? o_O I want to rewrite it because it could be better, not because of anything having to do with TQftL.

In fact, it is relevant to the "QftL mythos" (one chapter in part IV retells the meeting in chapter 29 from Stormblade's point of view, and the main fic will revisit the swarm in a later chapter, after the events of The Fall of a Leader have taken place), but yeah, that doesn't really have anything to do with it.

Frankly, I wasn't all that enthusiastic about the rewrite of Scyther's Story; it's been several years now since I read it, but I remembered it as being well written (especially later on). Yet seeing these random excerpts and your own criticisms, I'm actually excited to read the new version, this "Razor." Hopefully it or the next chapter will get finished through NaNo.

See? You guys will never just trust me when I tell you something needs to be rewritten. :P

Also yay for establishing in the background where Descith and adolescent Scyther get their meals from.

It's actually addressed explicitly several times in the new version, from formalizing the real role of parents into the acceptance ritual to it just repeatedly mentioning Razor getting food from his mother or father (and later, Stormblade). I think it's going to be quite abundantly clear how they get their food now.

I'm at 331,417 words now - unfortunately not caught up yet, since I only managed 1743 words today, but hopefully I can continue to whittle that down in the next days (I'm at 29,539 words right now for November, where I ought to be at 30,000, so I'm 461 words behind).

This is a really nostalgic part of the story - basically everything happening right now is calling back to some of the early chapters. On the one hand, this made me reread some of those early chapters and discover gems of my fourteen-year-old self's writing such as "A bearded man, most of his bearded face hidden in shadow" and "She didn’t say anything to him and they just walked down the stairs, ignoring each other very ironically." On the other hand, when I was going to reference how May came with Mark to confront the Mew Hunter largely because he'd also stolen her Larvitar, I discovered that that never happened, because apparently the version I was remembering was the UMR and I took that part out in the ILCOE. (Originally, they had a full five-on-five battle in Rainbow Woods, leading to all of Mark's Pokémon fainting, and May lent him Larvitar for the rest of the journey, leading to the Mew Hunter stealing him when he stole Mark's Pokéballs; in the ILCOE, I decided the full battle was unnecessary, cut it down to just Dratini vs. Larvitar, and removed the bit about Mark having Larvitar entirely.) It was pretty strange; the ILCOE has been the official version of the fic for so long that things that used to be in the UMR - like Mark randomly encountering the Waraider herd near Ruxido sometime in chapter 28 or so - tend to slip my memory entirely until I start thinking about that version specifically. This weird reversal of that principle has never happened before.

It is so weird to be writing this. It's seemed like this way distant vague future something for so many years.

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.

The one with the Mew Hunter. I wrote a little retrospective on my first few plans for the ending of the fic on Tumblr here.

I went out of my way to give him his own taste in Pokémon in the HMMRCIG, i.e. to establish that he's got his own favorites and so on, which he didn't really have at all in the previous revisions as far as I can remember. Obviously that didn't change his actual team, which is indeed just shamelessly composed of a bunch of Pokémon I like. :P

The IALCOTN is definitely vastly better written and very on point most of the time with its changes. I mean, see the commentary for chapter five. There were some missteps (unavoidably, I think; I'd be pretty concerned if I didn't want to change anything about a revision started when I was fifteen), but the Eevee thing is pretty much the only thing I think the IALCOTN plans made worse (aside from the bigger-picture concern that it takes even more chapters to get to Stuff Actually Happening).

In theory, I would absolutely like to do another rewrite. I don't know when/if I'd actually get around to writing that - it's at least not top priority at the moment - but at the very least, one of the things I want to accomplish by doing the commentary is a good look back at the progression of the story that'd let me map out more clearly how I'd go about a rewrite. Maybe by the time I finish the commentary I'll be so ablaze with passion that I'll just start the rewrite; maybe I'll feel satisfied just knowing what I'd want to do in it. Who knows.

As for what it'd be called, who knows. The Version Where I Actually Know What I'm Doing? TVWIAKWID, pronounced tvee-aquid, has a nice QftL revision name ring to it.

I haven't decided exactly what I'm doing with it yet! Still mulling it over as I work on the commentary. Recently, it's occurred to me that I could still keep Mark being killed publicly at the Pokémon Festival, if I either:

1) have Mark be the first kid Chaletwo kills in public. There can be a scheduled Chaletwo appearance, where he scouts for potential subjects, but he hasn't murdered them right there and then until now, when he knows this is his last scheduled appearance before the War and just goes screw it, I need to get this last kid initiated as soon as possible. Thus, Mark can show up for Chaletwo's appearance without this being an invitation to be murdered! Unfortunately this'd mean no building tension about Chaletwo and what he's up to, unless I, like, also had a rumour mill where somebody's Pokémon says they know a Pokémon who witnessed Chaletwo killing a human out in the wilderness somewhere, or something like that, and obviously Mark doesn't believe that stuff because a legendary Pokémon would never do that, right? Hrmm, could work.

2) Chaletwo has been killing kids in public, but not on a schedule; it's just known that a few times now, he's appeared suddenly in crowds, killed a kid, and then teleported away. Chaletwo appearing at the Pokémon Festival is a surprise to everyone, and Mark is simply there by coincidence. This does allow for looming Chaletwo menace, and I can picture the scene being pretty intense, but since nobody knows he'll appear at the festival, there wouldn't be the whole aspect of the countdown to it.

But yeah, this isn't something I developed for the IALCOTN since I didn't start thinking I needed to change it until after I'd stopped actively working on that, and for something this major and significant, coming up with a complete idea that I'm happy with is going to take longer than the time it takes me to write a chapter commentary or blog comment off the top of my head! So don't expect a definitive answer anytime soon.

The ILCOE patch version was made to post it on the Thousand Roads forums, as mentioned in the post - basically, it's a fanfic community I was in, I talked about this story a fair amount in it but it always felt a bit awkward that it didn't actually exist on the forums, and eventually I figured I could accompany the 20th anniversary chapter art project by posting the fic itself on Thousand Roads. Making light edits to the chapters in the process was just sort of what I itched to do when posting it in a new place - fixing grammatical errors and easily fixable continuity goofs from when I was fourteen, little bits that I just found particularly embarrassing, sentences that really stuck out for being clunky, polishing up little bits that weren't as effective as they could have been.

Ultimately, as I said, these were light edits; it didn't have much of an impact on the overall narrative, besides making a couple of moments play out a little better. I had a hard rule that if I couldn't pretty much immediately come up with a fix off the top of my head, I would let it go, because otherwise I would just be here forever. It came with author's notes and commentary about some of the silly bits but generally did not try to make them less silly.

The more extensive chapter 76 edits mainly involved adding and expanding upon some scenes to better develop Mew and Chalenor's relationship.