beetmint | Fic Writing Process/Ideas Repost

I couldn't find a spot to put this onto Neocities so I dumped it here instead....

Today’s writing mood is: what do I hate more, framing dialogue or writing fight scenes?

Writing dialogue is easy as hell when all your characters sound like weirdoes saying whacky stuff. It’s just the overuse of the word “said” that makes me want to pull my hair out because I default use it and have to keep coming up with new things but also making sure the characters are doing things instead of just standing or sitting around— pain. It’s a pain.

Doing some observations on my Pokemon fic drafts. I’ve noted now that in my works that I’ve published or nearly completed that I tend to avoid actually writing out the Pokemon fights, which is something I should work on. The nature of battles do tend to follow a structure of “trainer tells pokemon to do something” in the fics I’ve read, which makes sense, the nature of writing a fic means that they aren’t turn based anymore, but I also just recall most battle attempts I’ve written to be “dodge! Do this instead.” I guess that’s why I tended to focus more on the human relationships.

Battles feel like the kind of thing where they should be either flying or flashy or maybe like puzzle solving but the action of turning an RPG battle into a shonen fight and then thinking about mechanics psychs my brain out. Which is why I’m probably going to make a story centric on fighting so I can force myself to learn efficiently.

The problem is with having so many fics centric on canon divergences and also alternative names for canon characters it gets like. Incredibly hard to keep track of everyone and also toe the line between keeping them in character even though the very reasonable easy solution would just be labeling everyone as OCs based on the characters. Then again, writing out a fic summary with the premise of “I gave this guy ghost powers and shit mentors” is a pretty funny way to justify why things are so bizarre.

Midori’s gotta be the greatest case of this because the guy’s a roleswap and mentor swap of Pokespe Green (rival) where his mentors are the characters he was most antagonized by, and inexplicably his actual rival role was shoved onto Daisy who also has a different name.

Things I've been learning while trying to sort through my notes and focus more on writing fight scenes instead of just human oriented Pokemon stories: Every single trainer is actually 7 different characters in a trainer shaped trenchcoat depending on how the pokemon are written. Maybe even more if they rotate out the party members.
(Using my Aqua OC who has a full team of 6 water mons)
Using one of my characters who I happened to make a pokecharms card for in an attempt to explain this phenomena: it's between the human character who already gets to be easier to describe through dialogue and body behavior but also needing to describe the pokemon as individuals with their own distinct personalities through their behaviors which would be more animalistic and their interactions with each other in the party (unless you just make them talk). Plus add in the dynamic of pokemon training and preferences, living capabilities (how would all the water pokemon be in a land situation or a battle against magma since she's an aqua member), accounting for dex entry info, and I have reached the conclusion of "the pokemon trainer character shaped trenchcoat." Doing research for the dex entries on these mons were enlightening because basically the entire team is hostile to each other because all of them are on different levels of the food chain so now this trainer needs to ensure that they don’t all eat each other.

(In reference to my magma OC)
Unlike aqua sticking with water, I’ve decided to diversify by giving out more rock and ground types since those are also a part of land. You know what, I could make up some sort of plant equivalent but I guess team grass or flower isn’t as intimidating.

Thinking on one of my WIPs centered on Isekai and Pokémon. It’s not really a self insert power fantasy as much as “every single Isekai person here is a complete weirdo and Cynthia is baffled at how much chaos they’re causing.” I don’t like writing for things I might get inaccurate because of my inability to access it, which is why I steer away from most of the switch games and a lot of the Pokémon anime outside of a few light references to what I’ve seen or can find online. Writing a game fic without having ever played it and only having info secondhand through a stream feels kind of… weird for me. So chances are I'd never truly write a PLA story but that one Samurai Kanto story is still on the menu if I ever wanted to expand that.

Random fic idea of the day (maybe I should start a collection of these): a fanfic poking at the structure of the Pokémon universe and the typical game story beats but written in the form of an academic essay.

This idea would be following the basic plot of a game and just finding a bunch of citations based on things that happened, probably interviews and various other pieces of media to follow up on.
So far the imagined version in my mind would start off with explaining the Pokémon journey, possibly the structure of the league as a whole, then moving onto teams and why they keep getting created and then onto legendaries as a whole. Then maybe a lean on the fourth wall with the author going “why is most of this centered on like one particular child in these events. Are you guys noticing this or what”. That seems decent enough.

(In reference to what I think was a shitpost on Larry being a lawyer and Foongy (an Foongus) memorizing the Japanese Legal System which is in itself a JJK meme)
How in the world does the legal system in Pokémon work in a sustainable way? Like the first thing I immediately thought of was the mass breeding and releasing done in previous generations for either shinies or a good competitive nature. Certainly that sort of thing must be illegal, right? A lot of commonplace game mechanics must be under some amount of scrunity like shiny collectors. A few supplementary works do mention that carrying 6 Pokémon is recommended and automatically transfer other mons out but how did that work before the PC system? Would Giovanni be a tax dodger if taxes exist in the world?

If I had the brain cell capacity and attention span and time I could be here writing out entire essays worth on thoughts I have that are Pokemon centered but I do not so I can only work with snippets of concepts and put them together in a fanfic package even if it takes forever.

Before I sleep and my words become incoherent, I also want to say: I love you unfinished rom hacks, I love you unfinished fanfiction, I love you fanart of scrapped Pokémon, I love you fan regions and fakemon, I love you unfinished nuzlocke comics, I love that people had enough love for the concept to make their own take on the franchise.
Even if some are questionable.
Enter your cut contents here.