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-UE
Pokemon Special (Unmarked spoilers ahead, and not just for the manga!)
Ugh, where do I even begin on this thing?
HOW IT HANDLES POKEMON
The first and foremost issue I have with Pokespe is its treatment of Pokemon. The plot (since it's a freaking POKEMON story) naturally centers around treating Pokemon as equals and stuff. So why is it that they're treated like glorified weapons, anyways? Isn't that what Team Rocket thought they were? I mean seriously, aside from Mewtwo no Pokemon gets fleshed out as significantly as the human protagonists. And while the trainers' personalities are equally important to the plot, this by no means excuses treating the Pokemon the way the narrative does. Really, while the narrative takes great pains to tell the viewer that "Pokemon are our equals in battle!" it never says why.
HOW IT HANDLES CHARACTERS
The second thing I'd like to tackle is that the Pokespe protagonists rarely develop further than your average shonen hero. I mean yeah Red and Gary are badasses. If I needed to know that I'd go to Pixiv or /vp/. This is perfectly excusable in the games themselves (as gameplay is the point of the Pokemon games) but in a comic that has the characters as its main draw? Not so much.
Not to mention the whole Yellow arc, which was basically a Sue being Sueish. The first half kind of read like this:
Yellow: I'm Yellow and I am a super-special trainer with super-special powers!
Person: Gee Yellow, it is readily observable that you are incredibly bad at Pokemon training! Maybe you should improve on this weakness?
Yellow: lolnope, I'm going to completely ignore that and continue doing what I'm doing and it'll magically resolve itself in the end!
Contrast with N, who is a borderline Sue at best:
N: I'm N and I am a super-special trainer with super-special powers! (Note: N's powers are extremely identical to Yellow's)
Person: Gee N,it is a secret plot-twist that everything you were raised with as a child was a lie that a crazy dude made up to rule the world! Maybe you should improve on this weakness?
N: Gee, you're right! I should definitely undergo some character development!
Note the last two words. N might be a borderline Mary Sue, but he at least experiences character development which saves him from the fires of absolute Suedom. Even if N were a total "i'm so awesome and always right" Sue, B/W would at least have its gameplay as a fallback. Pokespe has no such fallback, and Yellow undergoes no such development. She just goes on being a sucky trainer and she STILL manages to fight Lance (who, along with being one of the goddamn ELITE FOUR, has the exact same powers as Yellow and should by all rights be thrashing Yellow) to a standstill in the very end.
Speaking of the very end, is it me or does everything devolve into an utter clusterfuck? It just introduces all these new plot-points and reuses so many old ones that everything eventually turns into something utterly incomprehensible. I mean YELLOW'S FIGHTING LANCE! And RED, GARY AND LEAF ARE THERE TOO! SO ARE BLAINE AND MEWTWO! And LANCE CAN ROBOTECH HYPER BEAMS? And...WHOA GIOVANNI'S A TRAINER OF THE VIRIDIAN FOREST? And everything...just...congests...and...bleeeauuuuurrrggghhhhh
The Yellow arc's kind of like Homestuck when the pacing issues catch up and everything just becomes really needlessly (and oftentimes hilariously) complex. That means Homestuck at its worst, by the way.
RELATIONSHIP STUFF
This only began to become apparent to me in the B/W arc. I was already fairly sure that Pokespe was partially a -Male Protagonist/Female Protagonist shipping name here- fic, but the B/W arc confirmed it beyond reasonable doubt. The infamous Ferris Wheel sequence was portrayed so disgustingly (in my opinion, though it should be obvious that everything here is my opinion) and so out-of-character for N.
N might be poorly-executed as a character, but he at least has a logical pattern as to how he acts. N acts like N because he IS N, essentially. And what he did to White on the Ferris Wheel was just completely outside of that logical pattern. N might be misguided and foolish and probably distant, but N is never intentionally cruel. And as far as I've read the N in Pokespe shares the same characterization as his game counterpart, so unlike Silver his actions cannot be construed as a "reimagining of the character".
Really, the N thing was all just to set up the sequence afterwards where Black shows that he truly does care about White. It's a superficially touching moment, but it comes at the expense of a romantic rival's original characterization. And that sure sounds like a shitty shipfic to me.
Overall, my problem with Pokespe is that it reads too much like a glorified Pokemon fanfic. For all the repetitive plots and boring dialogue of the anime, I'd take it over Pokespe anyday.
Comments
So right did you make yourself suffer through hundreds of chapters and have come to hate it, or at some point did you just give up and start reading summaries to rage?
Yep.
I binged from Red to Crystal.
>:?
Extremely identical opinion, I assume.
And I've never read this thing. Despite people raving about it, I always found the premise too silly for my liking.
Extremely identical is just a very silly thing to say it it stuck in my head and (thankfully) drowned out the rest of the rant. The whole time a voice in the back of my head was going "You don't need the extremely! When two things are identical they are identical! It's like deadness, there aren't levels to how identical things are. They either are identical or differ to varying degrees"
I like it a lot. Because I like almost all things Pokemon.
Elect and I have very different tastes.
Well I'll admit that it appealed to me on a superficial level, as it made battles play out extremely entertainingly. The pseudoscience was something that I found really fun.
Unfortunately even that couldn't mask its flaws forever. Hell, upon rereading the first few chapters they were already pretty flawed.
Even ReBURST?
...If you didn't want to read the thread in the first place, why did you comment?
I do like how the artist draws Bulbasaur, though. Very cute, I think.
I like how you yell at me for doing this (and you have), and then you do it.
Good on you, Alk.
Also there are totally degrees of dead. There's "dead", "very dead", and "dead enough to make Nunally go blind".
In series with revival systems, there's usually "dead", "can't be revived" and "soul was destroyed".