The Quest for the Legends

Chapter 40: In the Dark (commentary)

In this flawed but fun chapter, some actual Pokémon training happens, May seems actually competent for once, Alan vanishes mysteriously a couple of pages in when I forget he is there, Diana is the most teenage rebellion gym leader, Mark and May solve a gym puzzle that I thought up when I was twelve, Letal’s arc kicks off, we set up some stuff with Victor that I had zero idea about at the time I wrote the chapter, and there is a puzzling amount of people not reacting properly to things.

I really loved this battle when I first read it! I honestly never noticed it had TWENTY Pokemon in it–it didn't overstay its welcome even close to something like the Mark/Alan 6v6. The tag battle made for a lot of thoroughly entertaining interactions (and no, that's not just me being biased because I shove multi battles into every inch of my fic), and it also removed the awkwardness of the back-to-back gym battles we had previously. While I can certainly understand why you'd want to cut it down to twelve, it didn't suffer too much for it here.

Somebody commented at some point finding it weird that the fic both features a Pokémon who fails to evolve because she doesn't have enough energy (Letal here) and a Pokémon who fails to stop himself from evolving because he doesn't have enough energy (Charlie in Alan's backstory).

Huh. This never really seemed weird to me. After all, pushing a boulder up a hill and stopping a boulder from rolling down a hill both take a lot of effort. She wasn't quite at the evolution level and he was well beyond it.

I'm pretty sure what I meant here was that Diana's dress has POCKETS oh my god.

so you're saying it's not victoria's secret compartment

I'm sure we'll all get plenty familiar with the NaNo draft when I get to those chapters in the commentary

omg I can't wait for this ahaha. Also, this prompted me to go make sure I still have my original NaNo15 draft (thank god Gdocs has save states, otherwise I definitely would not because of course I've been making all the edits in the same document.)

Definitely agreed that it was really nice to do this as a tag battle so we don't have to have May battle separately. This is a much faster-paced battle than Mark vs. Alan, I think, and that probably helps. I think I would still cut it down, though; it is quite long objectively, and in particular, even the games never have tag battles where four trainers with full or near-full teams face off - double battle opponents have three Pokémon each max.

The NaNo draft is probably not as interesting as you may hope, alas; it's mostly just tedious and has pointless filler in it and a bunch of characters I never had time to figure out what to do with until editing. But I will certainly enjoy explaining chapter by chapter all the ways in which it was bad and how I went on to fix it, by God.

Idk, hearing about how bad the NaNo draft was and getting a play-by-play of how it got fixed sounds pretty fun. :P