The Quest for the Legends

All the cringeworthy plot aspects that don't make sense. Molzapart, Rainteicune, Alan finding Rainteicune, May's finding of Spirit and her subsequent kidnapping by the unnamed rich kid. And the poor writing in the first half of the ILCOE.

Sparky: Because a sheep. ;)

Mitch: *raises eyebrow*

Gyarados: I don't care.

Spirit: It is a disappointment to be barred from participation, but I cannot say it surprises me. I will live with it.

That would depend on the situation; generally I'd only kill off a character when it makes sense for that character to die.

If I just specifically wanted to kill off one of each of their Pokémon and would engineer the situation once I'd chosen the Pokémon, I'd probably pick Sandslash from Mark's team because he is nice and loyal and his loss would be tragic without being quite as downright cruel as if it were Jolteon, plus that he is the least interesting to write and so as the author I'd miss his presence the least. May would probably lose Spirit because I'm mean like that and it's the one that would affect her the most by far, though Floatzel would also be a possibility in that regard if I didn't want to give Spirit the axe, and Flygon would be a possibility if I wanted to go for the nice-and-loyal-and-didn't-deserve-it death. For Alan it would be Charlie, because he would be so utterly crushed and horrified and it would be adorable and fun to write.

Spirit: Hmph. I will not participate in your silly game. *cleans self*

Spirit: You cannot harm us, human. Give it up.

Mark: Huh? What bill? There's a bill?

Alan: What? And Mark, no, there isn't. I think he's trying to mess with you.

Huh, I did put a "change username" functionality into the forum. What do you know. (Wait, can't you access that yourself, though? Edit Options?)

Would you ever consider doing a backstory fic like 'Scyther's Story' for Gyarados and/or Spirit?

Funny you should ask. I actually started writing something like that for Spirit the other day (primarily explaining why she developed her Ghost-type powers). It would never be anywhere near as long as Scyther's Story, though; it would just be a one-shot.

Gyarados, eh, I kind of doubt it, since there isn't that much to his backstory that you don't already know, really. :/

I'm not really planning to write more backstory one-shots for the moment - the point of writing one for Spirit is that she actually had relevant stuff happening in her past that I don't really foresee coming up in the story because it's not that important. The other Pokémon with relevant backstories all pretty much had them explained in chapter 27. If I feel the urge I might do one for Letaligon or something, but don't count on it.

User tagging would work basically the way you suggested, Rose - there would be Butterfree-tags and user tags, but kept separate both in the post display and the tag searching (so that you could search only for posts I tagged with whatever).

So here it is, that Spirit spin-off one-shot. Nothing spectacular; it's just a brief account of baby Spirit's testing, plus a little bit of seven-year-old May and her father.

I've also finished tagging all my relevant posts in the Quest for the Legends forum as well as some of the Quest Blog forum. I'm thinking about organizing the tags somehow, maybe splitting them into character tags, other fic-related tags and unrelated tags or something like that, to make the searching easier to do.

Finally, you may or may not have noticed, but I randomly decided that in addition to how far into the next chapter I am, I'm going to have a quote from what I've written so far in my signature. With this, I also decided that it's about time I allowed blog browsers to see that stuff without finding my posts at the forums, so my signature is now displayed on Quest Blog posts.

EDIT: On second thought, I put the signature on the main blog page at the top instead. Seemed kind of redundant to have the same signature showing below every post on the page.

Mark to Rose: Well, I guess I'm starting to stick up for myself a bit more, maybe, and taking more responsibility? It's kind of hard to judge these things yourself.

Old lady to Rose: Lots of things! I love knitting. My grandchildren just can't get enough of my sweaters.

Chaletwo to Brock: Physically, we're genderless. We're immortal and don't reproduce, and therefore we don't have genitalia. Some have a grammatical gender preference.

Carl to Brock: The town is gone, but the former inhabitants still keep in touch. We hope to establish a new community somewhere else.

Spirit to Brock: I feel nothing while in spirit form.

Mark to Kevin: Well, technically they don't think I'm dead, per se, but they'd remember it if I walked in front of them or something. Anyway, I'm guessing… or hoping… that Chaletwo and Molzapart can fix that somehow when they're back at full power, so…

Spirit's basically talking out of her ass; she's decided her necklace is a mark of Entei's ultimate approval because she likes to think she's special and approved of.

Gyarados was one of several potential Pokémon that Suicune had given a portion of his power to and tested for suitability. Actually making the soul gem and properly choosing him was an ad-hoc decision as he was being attacked; he knew this attack would probably knock him out and that whatever these kids and Chaletwo were up to exactly, he'd rather get in the soul gem now than risk it. So ultimately Suicune ended up with Gyarados by necessity: he was simply the only potential present at the time Suicune made the gem. Given he's not exactly predisposed to trying very hard to get Suicune resurrected, it's probably safe to say he wouldn't have been Suicune's first choice otherwise.

(That does mean yeah, Gyarados's Dragon Beam probably wouldn't have actually killed Suicune on its own. Pokémon are very resilient, and legendaries especially so. Nobody was quite sure what was going on with Suicune's power going into Gyarados and powering up the beam and all that, so it wasn't obvious that this shouldn't have been able to kill him, but yeah. Gyarados was pretty much as surprised as everyone else when Suicune was actually dead.)

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.

Keeping Spirit's powers but toning down the chosen one stuff? Not sure how you got the impression that was something I wanted to do; that's kind of the opposite of what I'd like to do with Spirit. Being chosen by Entei, in this way where she feels very self-important about it but is obviously simply being used, is actually interesting and relevant, whereas her powers are kind of OP, arbitrary and kind of tenuously justified. The Ghost moves are probably fine, the spirit form is OP but used for narrative convenience a couple of times and I'm somewhat nostalgic about it so ehhh, but I know I mentioned in the commentary that I'd definitely like to get rid of the speaking literal human bit because that's poorly justified and also never relevant to anything whatsoever.